Back to the land for a fresh start

Sunset, Nov, 1994 by Christianne Selig

A San Francisco lot produces salad greens for restaurants and helps the homeless

A VACANT LOT IS familiar in the urban landscape. So the one at Divisadero and Ellis streets in San Francisco never seemed unusual. Unoccupied for 25 years, it was surrounded by a dilapidated chain-link fence, littered with garbage and broken glass, and invaded by weeds--not exactly eye-catching.

But now, behind a rebuilt fence, dozens of beds of rich brown soil produce gourmet lettuces, mustards, and spinach. In its new incarnation as an organic vegetable garden, the lot is receiving attention, and its new beginning extends well beyond the quarter-acre lot.

Seven homeless adults, each with children, are learning to plant, harvest, wash, and market the crops grown there. Fresh Start Farms is a year-old project that trains and employs homeless people to produce crops to sell to local restaurants.

Ruth Brinker, the project's founder, has been developing programs for people in need for more than a decade. One successful program, Project Open Hand, provides meals to people with AIDS in the San Francisco Bay Area. At Fresh Start, Brinker offers the participants wages and skills to help them make a smooth transition to permanent housing and employment.

The vacant lot turned microfarm is leased for $1 a month from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. Finding the lot and wading through city bureaucracy to get permits took Brinker a year and a half. But once she secured the property and word got out about the project, donations of topsoil and labor to clear and grade the lot came quickly.

The project is the first step in what Brinker hopes will be a proliferation of such farms. "It's part of our genetic memory to work in the soil," Brinker says. "Connect people with nature, and they are home again."

The farm grows and sells fresh organic produce year-round to city restaurants. Twenty-five salad ingredients are grown in a 44-bed garden; two beds are harvested each day to create a salad mix that may include 'Merveille de Quatre Saisons' and 'Rouge d'Hiver' lettuces, mizuna (a type of mustard), 'Tyee' spinach, and Joi Choi, an Asian cabbage.

Before one sprout had peeked through the soil, Brinker had secured orders for the salad mix from such well-known San Francisco restaurants as Aqua, Stars, Fleur de Lys, and Oritalia. Bruce Hill, executive chef at Oritalia, uses the mix in his appropriately titled Fresh Start Farms Garden Salad. Hill, one of the biggest fans of the project, says, "The quality is amazing. The mix is so fresh--it travels only seven or eight blocks to get to my restaurant." Freshness is key to the enthusiasm for the mix. Brinker is proud to make a delivery and be able to say, "This was harvested a half-hour ago."

The project has not been without challenges on gardening and staffing fronts. True to its microclimate, the site is windy and water evaporates quickly. And child-care problems caused three of the initial participants to drop out. But for the seven gardening pioneers who remain, the program is working.

Teresa Mullen heard about Fresh Start Farms through Homeward Bound, the agency that secured housing for all of the participants. Before she entered the program, Mullen was on welfare and looking for work to support herself and her children. "This seemed like a good spot to get into the work force," she says. Now she's putting her skills to work growing vegetables for her table at home, too.

For more information, write to Fresh Start Farms, 1095 Market St., Suite 302, San Francisco, Calif. 94103, or call (415) 695-9670.