The movement toward local, urban farming

The amount of work people around the Bay area are taking on in terms of helping neighbors create gardens with food to feed themselves and their communities, foraging fruit trees to share and redistribute unused food, offering meals and prepared foods as fund raisers to create operating funds for organizations and so on is amazingly powerful.

Here in Oakland, we have a set of community gardens and food justice/community empowerment programs--City Slickers, People's Grocery, Oakland Roots Garden--among them. There's also the amazing and wonderful Forage Oakland, which is dedicated to locating and redistributing local, unused fruit, and the fascinating and knowledgeable permaculture community, not to mention many people with their own gardens.

There's also lots of equivalent activity going on in San Francisco, which I am less aware of, but equally eager to learn about.  18th and Potrero is a local group in SF that is creating a garden and will grow and share food there; sfglean is redistributing fruit; the free farmstand is a blog--and gardener--driving much of this great activity.

For me,  who works with the bits and bits that ultimate connect people, issues around food, neighborhood and commuity are very compelling, that's why I started this blog.