Last week Tom and I went to the very first meeting to establish the East Bay Urban Agriculture Alliance. Our friend Esperanza from Pluck and Feather Farm along with Dana Perls from Pesticide Watch put the meeting together. Other attendees included Gavin from Planting Justice, Zaigham Kabir from the Center of Progressive Action, author Novella Carpenter,…
Last night Tom and I with several of our other urban farming friends including Kitty from Havenscourt Homestead, Heidi from Itty Bitty Farm in the City and Shelby who is still in need of her own urban farm, got to see Joel Salatin speak in Berkeley. For those that don’t know who he is, he…
OK, it’s not released yet but I just have to plug it because Dog Island Farm is in it! It’s Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Blume. Get it on presale now and check it out! I can’t wait to read it!
Our beds have always been a little wonky. We don’t have raised beds because it would be cost prohibitive to put them in. Over time they’ve slowly changed shape and narrowed. The middle ones don’t even run in a straight line anymore. Needless to say we had to do something about them. We just didn’t…
Sorry Mom, you’re not going to like this, but don’t worry we are totally OK and can handle it. This isn’t really a farm update, but just a home update really. Apparently our neighborhood has been deemed a richer part of town. I find that absolutely hilarious because we absolutely are not a rich part…
We have been considering teaching classes for awhile. We really enjoy having people over and teaching them about what we’re doing so why not make it a little more formal? You may remember my rant about class costs back in September so if we did offer classes they would definitely be affordable. While we had…
I posted over a year ago about seed resources and the varieties we plant. Well over time things have changed. We’ve learned more about our property and weather patterns here and have been able to adjust it. Of course it will always be a moving target over time, but for now these are what we’ve…
I hope everyone has a wonderful New Year! I did a post earlier this month about our goals and accomplishments so I’m not going to rehash it. I do want to give a run down of how our garden did this year. Maybe you’ve seen our running total on the sidebar. Well, that will soon…
Hoping to find scions for Arkansas Black Apples What’s a scion you ask? A scion (not the car company) is a plant shoot, bud or small branch that you graft onto rootstock of another plant. The California Rare Fruit Growers have an event every year during bareroot season where people can go and exchange…
Back in July I wrote about our plans to change our front yard into vegetable beds for our neighbors. Since then we haven’t done much of anything to the front yard and that gave me a lot of time to think about our plans. While I really want to share our food with our neighbors…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
