"jams and produce" by kthread (CC BY 2.0)

We tried another new idea, a distilled idea.  We’ve done underground restaurants, pie parties, figure drawing, one-day cafes, and workshops.  We’ve long dreamed of house concerts.  We want to be a venue where people bring their goods, extra produce, music, art, and especially sense of community.

So was born the Summer Salons and Urban Farm Market.

Yesterday, coincident with the salon and market was a post on Love and Trash, “Building Genuine Community”.  It’s a flattering review of the Big Picture of what we are trying to do here on our little urban farm. I’ve known the author, Father Mayhem, for many a year, he knows what he’s talking about.

This morning I woke to a wonderful blog post by Kristen Taylor (@kthread), who came with Margaret Rosas (@mrosas), Quiddities chief and fellow Santa Cruz open source geek.

Kristen did a great job of capturing how a Fairy-Tale Farm event goes. It’s the kind of story telling that we’d like to be able to do, if we weren’t so busy living the story.  My heart did a leap when she said, “This has to be documented,” camera in hand.  To have such an avid and piercing community person and food enthusiast show up is the kind of serendipity we keep having at each event.  (I’d stopped into NextSpace for business and ran into Margaret, and at the tail end of “public media” and “the open source way” and “opensource.com” geekiness, I made sure she got one of our flyers and a reminder about the event, and she said she’d bring her friend Kristen.)  This past eighteen months we’ve had the whole spectrum from new best friends to new great business relationships, all circled by the simple human love of communal effort.

We had art, glass jewelry (Saskia LOVES her new earrings), lip-smacking confections (chocolate dipped and sea salted gooey caramels! lavender cookies! flavored marshmallows! fresh strawberry lemonade!), perfect cauliflower and jasmine rice ready to eat, basil and kale and chard and peas and such freshness from an organic garden, and two square feet of homemade jams.  Yeah, I’m sure I forgot something.

I was very stoked with Vishnu’s Secret playing, for so many reasons. I was at their debut in 1992, and with all the passing of years I’m still struck by the brass audacity, beauty of sound, and tearing of story.  Aimee’s ethereal vocals (yeah, words lose me here) and Bob’s string virtuosity (oh, the cello!), joined these years by Trey’s equally deft hands.  That’s the first time anyone has played for us in this house concert format, something we’ve long dreamed of.  The fact that it came on the eighth anniversary of our moving in to this house we are dreaming in to a home … that was just a cherry on a very well iced cake.

So, what are you doing next Thursday?

• Music over here  (bring your instrument, and just play with whoever shows up)
• Art/figure drawing over there (to make this free, I need free models! Sign up now for summer.  You don’t have to be nude, come in costume if you’d like.  I have a few easels, but bring your own art supplies and extra easel if you have one.)
• Collage on that table (bring your own supplies, especially magazines to cut!)
• Games on this table (bring a game you want to play)
• Kids craft table (anything from feather hair clips to nosegays.  Craft from the garden.)
• Or just chase the chickens

You don’t have to RSVP to come play.  Please let us know if you’d like to sell at the market, though, or if you’re interested in becoming a figure model.  Tell all your friends, and come hang out into the night with us and dust off your talents!  May your community, artistic, and creative dreams come true.

Held 16 May at Joze’ new restaurant location, the scene I saw at the Flower Festival was the evolved artistic food expression I’ve come to know from Master Chef Jozseph Schultz.  You can look at their pictures (Facebook pictures and event page) via the India Joze Facebook page.  What I captured here are shots of our flower delivery.  (These pictures are available under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 Unported.)

Nasturtiums, rose petals, borage, lemon petals, and edible pea flowers.

The bags all hold nasturtiums, which are prolific two times per year in Santa Cruz. They have a nice spicy/sweet bite and stand up well in salads or stuffed. For our events, we like to stuff them with homemade hung yougurt, honey, and pistachios.

The main box of rose petals holds a striped pink on light-ping, small white climbers in the green tub, and the red-maroon wild climbers that only have five petals a flower.

Nasturtiums are thankfully fairly easy and rewarding to pick, giving an easy field effect.

In the center of the streaked roses is a whole rose to show it's glory. The blue borage flowers are the most time consuming and difficult to pick, but they are very rewarding. They can be laid out flat and dusted with sugar to make crystalized borage flowers for desserts.

This video shows the latest location Sparrow has been laying, the most difficult one she has devised.  I’m afraid there are other locations she can reach that are more unpleasant to crawl to than this one was.  One lesson learned – do the crawl with thick gloves on.

The summer I was eight years old, we lived in a cabin in the woods of Minnesota for a month or so.  The nearby general market was run by an elderly couple in a building on the edge of their farm by the side of a main road.  When we visited, I got to hunt for eggs in the barn where the chickens roamed and made nests.  It was quite a fun challenge to find the cozy little nests these chickens had bundled together.  Here on the urban farm, the places Sparrow and the other hens can find outside of their built-for-them nests are fewer than on a larger farm, but equally well hid and protected from, at least, human predators.

We usually clip the feathers of the birds so they don’t get out of the coop, but now we have our main property gate complete and it’s less likely that the chickens will wander in to the street.  So we’re tolerant of Sparrow.  She is persistent, and seems to be a bit of a loaner.  The other birds like to flock, and when we let them out to peck in the yard, they follow each other around.  Sparrow is more of an introvert, and I can relate to that.  It’s hard to begrudge her the sanity she must get from doing what she needs in being alone and free, and as long as we can keep finding her eggs, we don’t have too much incentive to get her laying back in the hen house.

Looking around for other pictures of Araucana eggs, I found this blog post where the bird and eggs look very similar to our Sparrow.

When I come back with a rental car, if there is time I like to run a few errands before returning it to the agency. The below videos are a quick view of how I fit three rice straw bales in the back of a Toyota Corolla:

I put a tarp down to cover the rear seat. This is a lesson learned from past experience.  One time I brought back a mini-van that I had filled with seven bales of straw, then did a fair but not perfect sweeping job on it. When I returned it, the rental folks were bent out of shape. I was kind but firm; I didn’t do anything wrong, really, and I offered to clean the car further, especially if they’d lend me the shop vac, but I wasn’t paying any fees.  In the end, it turned out they thought I had laid down a bed of straw to transport farm animals. Sheese!  It’s just some straw, folks.

While I was checking the videos, I found Nancy Day, a woman in Ontario(?), who last year who got thirteen straw bales on her Toyota Corolla. Wow!  However, when I watched how she loaded and strapped them in, I realized I could never get that load home across my city.  She mentions at the end of the second video that she has to drive home via back roads.  There aren’t back roads between my straw sources and Fairy-Tale Farm.  I could get lucky and not be spotted with a huge load, but I’m more likely to get a citation for an unsafe or too-large load.

Next time, though, I’m going to shoot for five straw ebales using some borrowed techniques.