- Author: Betty Homer
Published on: July 7, 2015
Over the next few months, I will feature one location of an urban farm tour that I attended in June 2015. Unfortunately, these tours only occur once a year, so you will have to wait until June 2016 for the next round of tours (the tour is organized by the Institute of Urban Homesteading located in Oakland, California, and the sites change annually so there is always something new to see and explore. Just Google Institute of Urban Homesteading to see their calendar of events). Last year, in 2014, some of the tours were in Solano County, but not this year. Because the sites are private residences, addresses for them will not be disclosed to preserve and protect the privacy interests of the urban farmer-homeowners.
The first urban farm that I will feature in this series, is Camacho Family Farms, located in East Oakland, California. Camacho Family Farms is considered a "medium" size site in that the lot size consists of 6,000 square feet, and of that square footage, 2,000 square feet is used for urban farming (i.e., 33% of the total lot size).
Camacho Family Farms is a property owned by a pair of siblings, a brother and sister, whose family hails from the Caribbean. The primary features of this location are the incorporation of biodynamic principles in the garden, traditional Caribbean farming techniques, sheet mulching, food preservation, and art.
The main part of the garden, receives full sun. Instead of using raised planters, the owners have created terraced beds for their biodynamic garden, similar to the hillside farms found in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. They heavily mulch these terraced beds with bark obtained from a local arborist (for free—the owners confirmed that because they have no choice in the matter, they are none too picky about what type of bark shows up on their doorstep) and straw. The owners densely plant their terraced beds with cover crops each year. One such ingenious crop that they utilize, is the pigeon pea (this is what their Caribbean grandparents had taught them), which I have never heard of up until this time. Apparently, the pigeon pea produces an edible pea similar to a black-eyed pea. The owners have interplanted pigeon pea among other plants, and the pigeon pea plant sends out long roots which help fix nitrogen for these neighboring plants. This is a great tip that I will incorporate this year (I found out that Baker Seeds in Petaluma carries pigeon pea seeds).
Other fun tips the owners shared from their Caribbean grandparents, include: (1) replacing cilantro with culantro in their Caribbean cuisine, because culantro does not bolt the way cilantro does; and (2) interplanting succulents with herbs. Their grandmother taught them that this enhances and intensifies the flavor of the neighboring herbs. I will experiment with these techniques in the coming year and will see how well they work for me.
The owners said that they do very little work in the garden, and instead, allow nature to re-sow itself (great for busy people). Consistent with biodynamic principles, I love the owners' philosophy of feeding the soil and doing their best to minimize outside inputs. Their garden is a living organism which they love and tend to, and which in turn, feeds and nurtures them.
No Comments Posted.
Leave a Reply: