Fairy-Tale Farm » farm

Happy New Year from Fairy-Tale Farm

debbie — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 05:42:17 +0000

2011 at Fairy-Tale Farm was hard. In Spring, I had to take some time off of hosting events in order to tend to my health. Here I contemplate what to plant next.

Spring Diva

Months later, the fava beans behind the rocking chair grow into 6 foot towers. The triple compost system that Karsten built out of old wood pallets against the back fence slowly rots. Sweet peas bloom on the left next to the chicken coop. Giant red mustard continues to grow, and red lettuces snuggle in with baby carrots.

The migrating birds don't eat the red lettuces and they look pretty with the slowly growing carrots.

By early summer, sweet peas blossom on the left while red mustards bolt and shoot up yellow flowers in the background. Poppies line the path. The garden is glorious.

I grew some exotic poppies this year. I call the red and white one “poppy from outerspace”. The pink peony-like one was a volunteer. Red pom-pom type from Annie’s Annuals. Can’t wait to see what combo I get wildly this year.

I had so many sweet peas and fava beans I sold them at the Corralitos Farmer’s Market:

Fava beans and sweet pea flowers. The scent of the sweet peas is so delicious.

We also sold edible flowers. Nasturtium, borage, calendula, pansies, oxalis.

Then, I unfortunately ended up in the hospital with my sweet peas.

Trying to make the best of it at UCSF as I am here for 3 long weeks.

But in the summer I am free, and I spend hours sleeping on the porch as the garden slowly grows around me.

Fairy-Tale Farm is quiet with only the cat for company.

We get a farm dog named “Kia”. The purple, yellow, and red potatoes are dug up. Rainbow tomatoes are harvested. Pears.

The winter comes to a close and we harvest pumpkins and peas. I slowly mend, and contemplate what to do for 2012. Happy gardening, all. Stay tuned for upcoming events.

Sometimes you have to get out of the urban farm and visit cornfields up the coast for inspiration.

Fairy-Tale Farm is In the News!

debbie — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:37:57 +0000

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel article found at: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_16109132

Living a Fairy-Tale: Santa Cruz family ‘grows’ community at their downtown area farm

By Justine DaCosta

Posted: 09/18/2010 01:30:39 AM PDT

Saskia Wade will help set the tables at her family’s Harvest Festival. (Shmuel Thaler/Sentinel)

Nestled among multiplexes not far from downtown Santa Cruz is a garden where 10-foot-high sunflowers overlook the winding vines of pumpkins and the soft ferns of overgrown asparagus. A few chickens wander through the aisles full of tomatoes and tomatillos, part of the 50-by-50-foot garden, which is shaped like a star, a red, circular wooden platform positioned in the center.

“It’s a magical garden,” said owner Debora Wade, pointing to a giant sunflower whose head has begun splitting into two sections. “It grows weird things.”

This is Fairy-Tale Farm, a community gathering spot where monthly dinners promise plates full of fresh, locally grown food. Debora and her husband Karsten began hosting dinners in the garden a couple of years ago as a way to bring the community together. With live music and dancing, and several courses and dessert, people can come and get a real taste of what’s local. Karsten, a community organizer for a software company, was a professional chef in another life, and whips up gourmet meals that include Thai, Mediterranean and French cuisine. He enjoys cooking for people, and seeing them gather together for a meal.

“It gives us a lot to look forward to,” Karsten said. “There’s a lot more feeling of connectedness.”

The Wades have lived in their modest, yellow home, adjacent to the garden, for about eight years, but the land that’s now the garden became theirs two years ago. They had long admired the large, un-manicured backyard next door, and cringed at the idea of a multi-unit building filling the land, which had already happened to some other lots in the area across the river from downtown. When new neighbors moved in, the couple decided to take a chance. They asked if they could purchase a portion of the yard, and the answer was yes.

The Wades sold their car to help pay for the property, which was several hundred thousand dollars. It was a blank canvas, and Debora, an artist with very little gardening experience, began planting the seeds to their future. Initially, the couple thought they would grow vegetables to sell, but quickly learned that wasn’t a profitable option for them. Instead, they thought, let’s enjoy this beautiful space and share it with others.

“I almost feel guilty owning all this property in a place where so many people have nothing,” Debora said. “I don’t deserve to have so much.”

Debora and Karsten met about 12 years ago, at a time when Debora’s Crohn’s disease had forced her onto a liquid diet. Karsten, who then worked at India Joze, would make her meals. While her health has improved, there have been struggles, and the garden has always been a place of hope and healing.

“I went for so many years without being able to eat in restaurants,” Debora said. “I’m so spoiled because we eat the best of most things.”

She has to smile when she sees her daughters Malakai, 12, and Saskia, 9, helping in the garden or chasing the chickens at an event. Their chores include tending to the garden, and the youngest has even found that picking potatoes is actually great fun, telling her mother, “This is better than Disneyland!”

Michele Swanson is a regular at Fairy-Tale Farm. She said the Wades are dedicated to bringing their community closer together.

“I went to their first dinner and quickly became a fan,” Swanson said.

The dinners are a way to meet new people, and are an alternative setting to restaurants or bars.

“Everybody comes together with a sense of curiosity,” she said.

During the summer, the farm hosts soirees, where people contribute to the event by bringing art, or food, or, in the case of last summer, a goat for the children to milk. There’s also figure drawing in the garden. Fairy-Tale Farm brings together a cross-section of people who may never have otherwise met but who enjoy the same experiences.

Community support can start right at the dinner table, and for Swanson, eating outside with the people who live in her town is a way to embrace old ideals that have been lost over time. Add to that the ambiance and food, and one’s belly and soul will be well-fed.

“Being outside, with the stars above your head and a great meal under your nose,” she said. “What could be better?”

Pulling together a dinner for 30 to 40 people requires a lot of work; Fairy-Tale Farm hosted weekly dinners this summer, and Debora said she’s looking forward to being exhausted just once a month for while. But it’s all worth it, because the Wades see that they planted a seed, and from that grew a community.

“There’s magic to the Fairy-Tale Farm,” she said.

Salon and market review

quaid — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 23:00:30 +0000

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

We tried another new idea, a distilled idea. We’ve done pop-up restaurants, pie parties, figure drawing, and workshops. We’ve long dreamed of house concerts, dance parties. 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?

Summertime Salon and Urban Farm Market

quaid — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 19:45:39 +0000

This Summer, beginning July 1st, we have our Summertime Salon! Every Thursday evening, from 5-9 PM, we have a wonderful dinner from the garden, figure drawing with a live model, Music jams, a nap corner, and various kid-friendly activities! You can figure draw for an hour, then join in with the musicians and sing a few songs. Or just eat pie.

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

We have coffee, tea, a delicious vegetarian dish from the garden, and pie for sale. Menu is dependent on what’s fresh from the garden. Pie is seasonal fruit. Sometimes we have biscuits and fresh jam.

Urban Farm Market: Now every Thursday of the month bring your excess produce, flowers, honey, homemade cheese, art, jewelry, sweet treats, etc. to our Urban Farm Market tables to sell or trade with the other vendors. Our intention is to grow a farmer’s market for the DIY community who don’t make enough to sell at the Farmer’s Market. This could also be a great time to barter. Just bring your goods and a fair price for them, and we can begin the underground market! If this is popular, we could do it every week, and into the Fall. It’s proving popular, so we’re extending the Urban Farm Market to every week.

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.

Flowers for India Joze

quaid — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:13:36 +0000

Recently we had the great pleasure of supplying flowers for India Joze’ flower festival. Pictures of these flowers are below.

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.

Year round egg hunt

quaid — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 05:11:29 +0000

One of our Araucana chickens, Sparrow, likes her privacy when she’s laying her eggs. She’s also the strongest flyer, and flies the coop each day to lay her egg out in the greater homestead. She keeps her secret spots to an area that is not much more than 5000 square feet (464.5 square meters), but the combination of her low height, clever camouflage, and willingness to find somewhere new keeps us active. Whenever we find her latest clutch and start collecting the eggs, she soon gives up on that location and starts over with a new one. Because Araucanas lay blue-green-grey eggs, the experience reminds me of an Easter egg hunt.

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.

How we get straw for the farm

quaid — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 12:48:16 +0000

Even a small working urban farm such as ours needs a way to get essential farm materials brought here. Currently we are a bicycle-only house, although we car share with our neighbors and rent cars whenever we need to go out of town.

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.