This is a family of winter squash, including jack be little pumpkins, delicata and sweet dumplings, carnival, kuri, baby bear pumpkins, butternut, spaghetti squash and a cinderella pumpkin.
Photo by Julia Wiley of Mariquita Farm

Just in case you're wondering: no, you can't recycle last night's only-slightly-scorched jack o' lantern into this morning's pumpkin muffins. Sorry, greenies, into the compost bin it goes.

Why? Well, for starters, it wouldn't taste very good. Pumpkins bred to be big, beautiful, and able to sit on the porch without rotting for weeks on end are not going to be yummy, too. There are only so many characteristics that you can highlight on a gene string, and as far as it goes with pumpkins, you can find a fabulously chunky orange canvas, or you can have one that's dainty and edible. But not both. If it's big enough to carve a vampire face on, it's probably also going to be bland, stringy, and watery. Roast the seeds, yes, but put the rest to rest in your big green bin.

The baker's secret, however, is that even those cute little pumpkins, often sold under the names Sugar Pie or Sugar Pumpkin, are just not all that delicious. Compared to that supermarket workhorse, the beige-skinned butternut, even the cutest pumpkin is all bark, no bite. The butternut is dense and rich-fleshed, wonderful roasted and pureed into soups with apple and sage or a little curry powder and coconut milk. Mashed butternut is what I use for homemade pumpkin pies, pumpkin bread, and pumpkin cookies, and the only difference is how much better it tastes than actual pumpkin.

All these hard-shelled winter squashes are in the same family of cucurbits, anyway, under the same umbrella that shelters melons, cucumbers, summer squash and zucchini. Winter squash get their name not from their growing season (they need 100+ days of warm weather, ripening just at the tail end of summer and then curing on the vines for a few more weeks into early fall) but from their usefulness as a winter staple. Once cured--that is, left in the field or in a cool, airy place for a few weeks--their skin hardens, their curvy stem (a peduncle, for those botantically inclined) dries to almost wood-like firmness, and they can be stored in a cool, dry place with little loss of flavor or texture for months on end. Their only real enemies are warmth and moisture.

But good as butternuts are, there's no reason to stop there. Right now the markets are lavishly stocked with every size and crazy streaked-and-spotted shape of winter squash. There's the delicate delicata, ivory-skinned with green stripes and orange flecks over a pale yellow-peach flesh. You can slice it into narrow half-moons, massage lightly with olive oil and bake until tender. The thin skin is edible to all but the most fastidious. For those folks, cut the squash in half lengthwise, scrape out the seeds and strings, and fill with an autumnal bread or wild-rice stuffing. Bake until squash is fork-tender and filling has browned and crisped.

There are other variations on the delicata, like the dumpling squash, shaped like an oversized popover and perfect for stuffing.

The squarish, dark green buttercup squash is for those who like their squash dry and nutty, tasting like a cross between roasted chestnuts and baked sweet potato. In their Ladybug newsletters, Andy and Julia of Mariquita Farm have sung the praises of two big beige squash, the plump, round-cheeked Long Island cheese pumpkin and the deeply grooved, deep-orange fleshed Musquee de Provence squash, also called the Fairytale pumpkin for its Cinderella-coach shape.

Although, if I were a mouse looking for glamor, I'd hitch myself to a Rouge Vif d'Etampes pumpkin and wait for the fairy godmother to descend. This is the most glamorous squash of all, vivid orange-red, huge and elegantly grooved. If you've ever wanted to make a pumpkin soup and serve it in a pumpkin, this is the one you want. Not surprisingly, given its shape and its tongue-twisting French name, it's often called the Cinderella pumpkin. Carved out, it also makes a striking ice bucket for an autumn brunch.

But my favorite remains a tricky-to-find recent hybrid, the Sunshine kabocha. Bright orange skinned, it's easy to confuse with the Red Kuri, but once tasted, it can't be mistaken for anything but its amazingly delectable self. Oh, all right, I'll admit it: roasted, it tastes like chicken. Or, even better, like the incredibly savory drippings left at the bottom of the pan after you roast a chicken. Trust me: if you think you don't like squash because you've only ever eaten those bland and pasty little baked acorn squash, you owe it your tastebuds to seek out--or grow--a Sunshine kabocha. A plain old kabocha is pretty good, too, sweet and nutty, but the Sunshine variety is just nubbly orange heaven.

Once you've done something virtuously savory with your roasted squash--soup, a suave puree--then it's time for a few treats. Squash, like applesauce, adds moisture without fat to baked goods, and it seems everyone turns out a loaf or two of low-fat pumpkin bread this time of year.

Then again, we are moving into hibernation weather and a holiday mood. At least once this month, follow the lead of Alameda home baker Steven Mounce and get every Peter Pumpkin Eater at your table moaning with pleasure over this lush pumpkin bread pudding. Trust Mounce: a man with the word "homemade" tattooed on his knuckles knows what you want.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding
Serves 6-8
Did you know that canned pumpkin is rarely actual pumpkin, but rather butternut or other winter squash? Whatever you call it, plain canned pumpkin is always a handy staple, since it can be used in both sweet and savory dishes. Of course, you can also roast and mash your own for this gorgeously warming centerpiece for brunch or dessert.

Ingredients:
4 eggs
2 cups half and half
15 oz can pumpkin (not pumpkin pie filling) , or 1 3/4 cups roasted, mashed butternut or kabocha squash
¾ cup brown sugar
3 tablespoons dark molasses
¼ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
1 large loaf of French bread, cut into 2" cubes
½ cup walnuts, roughly chopped
¼ cup raisins or dried cranberries
3 tablespoons butter, softened
3 tablespoons brown sugar

Preparation:
1. In a large bowl, whisk eggs, half and half, pumpkin, brown sugar, molasses, salt, and spices together. Add bread cubes to bowl in batches, stirring well between each batch. Add only enough bread to soak up liquid mixture; you may not need all the bread. Let mixture rest for 15 minutes.

2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Fill a kettle or pitcher with hot water, and set aside. Lightly grease an 8"x8" glass baking dish. Stir nuts and raisins into bread mixture. Spoon mixtures loosely into baking dish. Do not pack bread mixture into dish. Mound lightly above edge of the dish if necessary.

3. Place glass baking dish into a 13"x9" baking pan. Place both dishes on the center rack of the oven. Pour hot water into larger baking pan to come up halfway on the glass pan. Bake for 30 minutes, until top is golden brown and center is set. While bread pudding is baking, stir together butter and 3 tablespoons brown sugar, and set aside.

4. When pudding is baked, remove glass pan from oven and set on a rack. (Wait to remove water-filled pan until oven has cooled.) Dot with brown sugar mixture, which will melt into a gooey caramel sauce, mmm. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Got a fabulous pumpkin recipe to share? Enter Omnivore Books' pumpkin cooking contest. Everything from soup to muffins considered, as long as the main ingredient is pumpkin. Sat. Nov. 21, 4-5pm.

Last weekend's fat harvest moon flipped a switch, and all of a sudden, it's fall. Tomatoes still shine in the garden, but now's the time to gorge on (or can) what's ripe, and accept that what's green now will still be green at Thanksgiving. At the farmers' market, grapes, figs, pomegranates, and winter squash are muscling out the last peaches and melons of the season.

If you're a Northeast transplant like me, you can't cross off the first week in October without craving the first bite of a snappy fresh apple, all crunch and tang. And any apple is better when you've picked it yourself right off the tree, blue sky painted between the branches and the promise of hot cider and fresh cider doughnuts to come.

As a kid, every autumn held a sunny October weekend where my mom would toss my sisters and I into the back of the Volvo (ah, the jouncing-around, sister-jabbing joys of the pre-carseat era!) and head out to the country to go apple picking. This was the Garden State in the 70s, and there was still a lot of working farmland around. Even my hometown, an otherwise drab suburb whose last exciting moment happened in 1780, had a small farm smack in the middle of it, right across the street from my elementary school.

It didn't take long to shake loose from the strip malls and find a place where we could run through the trees, getting stung by yellowjackets drunk on fermenting fallen fruit and hauling back bags bulging with Winesaps and Macouns. Always next to the dusty parking lot was a little farm market selling cloudy, fresh-pressed apple cider, boxed apple pies and cider doughnuts, popped fresh from a greasy, batter-spattered contraption that moved rings of batter along a conveyor belt of bubbling oil, flipping, frying, and finally spitting them down a chute to be sugared and sold.

What's a cider doughnut, you ask? Oh, you poor deprived child, you. Yes, here in California you had sunshine and skateboarding, while we had slush and mittens, but the doughnuts, and the snow days, were worth it. Cider doughnuts are nothing more than cake doughnuts made with apple cider in the dough, usually rolled in cinnamon sugar and best served minutes from the fryer, but they have a mythical connection to autumn, part of deep blue skies and the crunch of leaves underfoot, geese flying in V's overhead and the first smell of woodsmoke after dinner.

Recreating this experience on the West Coast can take a little doing. For the full sticky-fingered, apple-and-doughnut experience, you need to hit the road and head up to the gold country northeast of Sacramento, near Placerville. To Apple Hill, to be exact, where the foothills of the Sierras offer the warm days, chilly nights, and colder winters that apples like. Apple fritters, hayrides, cider and u-picks abound, although the varieties of apples lean more towards Galas and Fujis-- sweeter, milder apples that don't need as many below-freezing winter chill hours as their hardier East Coast cousins. Most likely to scratch that East-Coast itch is the charming Rainbow Orchards, in Camino, which offers excellent fresh-pressed cider and hot cider doughnuts in their barn, along with sprawling acres of apple trees, live bluegrass music, and lots of room for picnicking.

Closer to home, you can take a meandering drive on the back roads west of Petaluma to the Chileno Valley Ranch. Here, between folded hills still lion-colored from summer's long dry days, are sprig-headed quail skittering across the road while hawks ride the rising air currents overhead. Herds of black Holsteins and buff Jerseys drowse beneath the oak trees.

You can see the small organic orchard as you drive up, planted on a gentle slope running down to the barn. Nearby are chicken coops, some vigorously baah-ing goats and sheep, and a lavish flower garden brimming with roses. Sally Gale, who owns the ranch with her husband Mike (the ranch property has been in her family since 1856), is usually on hand to walk pickers through the trees, pointing out green, grapefruit-sized Mutsus (great for baking) and dainty lunchbox-sized Pink Ladies and Pinovas, along with Molly's Delicious and fat, late-ripening Arkansas Black Twigs. In the barn, where you go to pay for your haul ($2/lb) is a small table with some of the ranch's other products, which might include eggs, tomatoes, red pears, dried beans, and the ranch's own grass-fed local beef.

If the scene at Chileno Valley is a little low-key for your taste, then don't miss the signs for the Peter Pumpkin Patch on your way back. Follow the (naturally) pumpkin-shaped signs to Spring Hill Road, where the otherwise cow-centric Spring Hill Cheese Company dairy is decked out in full haybale-and-pumpkin drag through the end of October. There is an acres-wide field dotted with fat orange jack-o-lanterns on the vine, each more carve-worthy than the last, stacks of edible winter squash in all sizes and shapes (carnival, acorn, rouge vif d'etampes, munchkin, banana, and more), pyramids of hay to climb and jump from, a tractor-pulled wagon, even a very patient cow to milk. The air, it's true, is tangy with the smell of cow pat (a scent that always made a rancher pal of mine breathe deep, exhaling with satisfaction, "Ah, the smell of money!"), but there are plenty of picnic tables nonetheless.

What's actually the most fun, though, is the dig-your-own-potato patch. The appeal isn't immediately apparent--walk across the road from the pumpkins, and you'll find yourself in a field of scrubby weeds. Pick up one of the long gardening forks provided, however, and look for a dried-out stalk, remnants of what was once a green and growing potato plant. Jab the fork in about 8 inches from the stalk, dig, wiggle, and lift, and voila! Buried treasure, in the shape of silky-skinned Yukon Golds. It is oddly satisfying and hard to stop, not quite this kind of gold, but a lot easier to find, and only $1/lb.

Just a mile from the skyscrapers of downtown Pasadena lies a tiny plot of land that has become the heart of an urban homesteading movement. The raised beds of the Dervaes family farm cover 1/10 of an acre. Imagine the area from a football field's goal line to the very first 10-yard mark, or if you're an average suburban homeowner, scan your backyard. Now, imagine harvesting 3 tons of organic food from this short span of soil every year.

Robert McFall's documentary, Homegrown, is an intimate family portrait that reveals both the visionary inspiration and the resolute dedication required to grow one's own food. For Jules and his adult children, Justin, Anais, and Jordanne, the Dervaes farm began as an experiment to see how much of their own food they could grow. A natural extension of the father's experience during the back-to-the-land heyday of the 60s and 70s, their gardens soon led to living off-the-grid. They catch rainwater and recycle grey water, keep animals for manure and collect oil from nearby restaurants to produce their own biofuel. They order hand-cranked appliances from Amish catalogs. They put up their own green beans and illuminate their home with a self-reliant mix of olive oil lamps, biodiesel lamps, homemade candles, daylighting and the occasional fluorescent bulb.

Jules speaks of how we can save the world by taking care of our six inches of topsoil. Like farming, living off the grid began as a political statement and personal challenge. It has since grown into an integral part of their working farm. His children have absorbed his lessons and, like him, have chosen to make it a way of life.

The film includes the usual scenes of the family picking and eating ripe tomatoes from their garden--a trope of any story remotely related to sustainable agriculture. What distinguishes the kitchen and dining room scenes in Homegrown is the image of the Dervaes repeating this meal day in, day out. In a country where one's teen years are simply an extended, fight-filled countdown to the freedom of flight, it's astonishing to see all three grown children living and working so closely, so contentedly alongside their father. Organic, locally based, and ecologically sound agriculture requires huge amounts of labor. We often forget the "family" half of the equation in family farming. Watching older and younger generations working together is a reminder that there are still deeper cultural changes required for a truly sustainable society.

After a meal at their table, we're invited to sit in on one of the family's operational meetings. Here, the reality of business collides with the purity of the Dervaes' ideals. An extended discussion about accepting advertisements on their website highlights the challenges of making real-world decisions while pursuing deeply philosophical and political goals. With over 4,000 visitors each day, PathToFreedom.com could bring in significant income. The opportunity to make an additional $10,000 a month on a farm that grosses under $40,000 a year cannot be dismissed, and the debate marks a milestone for the family.

Jules fears that once they walk the path of easy money, they'll never return to the hard work of farming. His children, the ones who design, code and maintain the website, believe ads are a minor concession: why shouldn't they benefit financially from the enormous amount of experience gained through their own hard work and offered so long for free? The thought of ads, even for supportive seed companies they favor, visibly pains Jules. The younger generation is respectful enough to allow their father to override, for now, their willingness to take on a bit more of capitalism's gloss as their homestead matures into a profitable business.

It's obvious that there will be many more meetings and delicately balanced debates about the future of the farm. Building their client list, gathering a strong community of supporters, making wise choices, growing their business as purely and sustainably as the delicate lettuces they harvest, and establishing new homesteads in turn for each of the children--it will be a lifetime of growing and learning for the Devaes family. Homegrown is a privileged gaze onto that rare, difficult journey.

UPCOMING SCREENINGS

Mill Valley Film Festival

Sunday, October 11, 1:00 PM
CinéArts at Sequoia
25 Throckmorton Ave.
Mill Valley, CA 94941
Map

Tuesday, October 13, 6:45 PM
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth Street
San Rafael, CA 94901
Map

San Francisco Documentary Film Festival

Saturday, October 17, 7:00 PM
Thursday, October 22, 9:15 PM
The Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
(415)-863-1087
Map

Being a writer, I've worked a lot of retail over the years. I've sold flown-from-Switzerland chocolates to San Francisco socialites who spent more on three boxes of truffles than I made in a week. I've peddled Pez and Camel Lights from a tray slung around my neck, squeezed ladies (and gents) into latex dresses and leather corsets, frothed lattes for bond traders, boxed up cookies and talked tourists into overpriced art on Union Square.

In my personal life, I'm not a shopper, but I can see what people get out of good service, besides just new shoes and credit-card debt. You tell a dumpy guy with a thing for latex that he looks great in that $500 catsuit and you mean it, because he's so happy wearing it that just for that moment, he's Jon Hamm. You know you've made his day, along with a little bit of commission.

But what I realized last Sunday is how much more fun it is when you can just give the stuff away. Especially when the goods in question are beautiful organic fruits and vegetables, things everyone needs: yellow tomatoes and Japanese eggplants, kale and collards, curvy neon-bright summer squash, sticky green figs and late-season peaches.

Set up every Sunday from 1-3pm at the Parque Niños Unidos at 23rd and Treat Streets in the Mission, the Free Farm Stand is a joyful place. Anyone can come, and all different people do: determined grandmothers and families pushing strollers, clusters of groovy, effusively grateful British girls in tiny halter tops and oversized sunglasses, eco-hipster Mission couples in vintage dresses and ironic t-shirts, gray hair and glasses meeting bedhead and glasses.

By 2 o'clock, a steady stream of people has been flowing past the table for an hour. Jeremy, a frequent volunteer, starts tootling away on a wooden flute. Inspired by the giveaway, a man named Steve has set up a agua fresca stand nearby, quenching the sunny Sunday afternoon thirsts with free glasses of melony coolness. There's a separate table stacked with loaves of bread donated by Acme Bread, another full of free thumb-sized lettuce plants for home gardeners.

Only one guy grumbles about the line not moving fast enough for his taste. No one can take him seriously, though; it's a sunny Sunday in the park and the tomatoes are free. If you can't chill out here, you're way too tense, man.

It's set up like any farmers' market stand: a white tent overhead for shade, colorful tablecloths stacked with bowls and baskets overflowing with vegetables, herbs, and fruit. Volunteers pull out more tomatoes, more artichokes from boxes stacked beneath the tables, answer questions and offer recipes. There are plastic and paper bags on hand, but never enough; smart shoppers bring not only their own totes but their own recycled plastic bags for separating out the basil from the peppers, or the bean sprouts from the squashy figs.

One table is stocked with farmers' market giveaways, donated produce left over at the end of the day from Ferry Plaza and other top-notch Saturday markets. I recognize bundles of herbs from Marin Roots Farm, fat red tomatoes from Phil Foster's 200-acre organic ranch in Hollister, perfect-looking Brussels sprouts and box after box of red Russian kale and yellow-flowering Chinese broccoli.

Another table is the super-local table, filled with urban produce grown or gleaned all around the city, shared from backyards, parks, and community gardens. Regulars show up with baggies of lemon verbena, boxes of apples, bags of zucchini and butternut squash.

This is how the Free Farm Stand started, when Tree, a community gardener and longtime social-justice activist who works at the St Martin de Porres soup kitchen, decided that his gardens' extra communal produce shouldn't go to waste.

The goal was to make locally grown, organic produce available to all, especially those with low incomes or limited budgets, creating garden-to-table food security right on the street. With this in mind, Tree set up a card table inside the Treat Commons garden at 23rd and Treat Sts in April of last year, offering a little bit of whatever was growing around the Mission and Potrero Hill.

Slowly, word of mouth (and blog) spread about this sweet neighborhood thing happening on Sunday afternoons. Other gardeners started sharing their bounty. Tree formed connections with growers selling at local farmers markets and began picking up their extras after the markets ended. The farmstand moved out in front of the garden, into the park, and turned into two tables, then three, with a line that could stretch out of the park and down the block when the harvest was in full swing and there were sweet treats like peaches and figs on offer.

But the crowds don't come just for the free lettuce, or even the free tomatoes. Everyone has a question:

What are these? Baby artichokes--clip off the pointy leaf tips and steam or boil them whole.

Is this salad mix? No, it's braising mix, a little too tough for eating raw, better for sauteing.

Is this cilantro? No, smell it, it's parsley; cilantro's over there.

What is this? This is red mustard, very good for you, strong-tasting and good sauteed, stir-fried or put in soup.

Can I eat the leaves? Yes, beet greens are delicious, cook them like spinach. You can cook radish greens too, if they're green and not yellowed or wilted. And this is curly kale, this is lacinato kale, what the Italians call cavalo nero and what American supermarkets call dino kale, because it's so bumpy and puckered, see, like dinosaur skin, and these are collards, this is chard. They're all in the brassica family along with cauliflower and broccoli, what used to be called the crucifers because of their cross-shaped stems.

OK, so maybe I get a little carried away giving out information. But I'm not the only one. Gloria, who works at a detox center in the city, is sharing her recipe for roasted kale (rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, bake at 375F for 20 minutes, better than potato chips, leave them in the turned-off oven under the pilot light for a day if you want them really crispy). Lisa's got a new favorite salad, radishes dressed with mustard, olive oil, fresh ginger, a little sucanat, garlic, salt and pepper, orange juice and chopped parsley. People are chatting with tote bags full of leeks and beets over their arms, eating burritos on the grass, talking compost and chayote squash in the garden while their kids splash the strawberries with a hose.

That it's all free seems to bring out the best in the crowd. No one grabs, no one hoards. Take what you can use or share, we say from behind the tables, and people carefully separate out a few sprigs of cilantro if that's all they want, pour half a box of cherry tomatoes into their bags and replace the rest. The feeling is one of abundance shared, not charity bestowed. Everyone takes home a slightly different mix, an urban stone soup cooked up by a community of growers from the Bay Area and beyond.

By 3 o'clock, the boxes are flattened and Christina, a regular volunteer, is sweeping up crumpled leaves and squashed tomatoes with a broom. The day's bounty has been reduced to some mixed greens and a few bundles of thyme and oregano. The baskets are stacked, the tent pulled down. We share chunks of homemade apple cake baked by Clara, another volunteer who gardens nearby.

I pick up my own box of veggies, thank Tree and head home over the hill, slurping a cold watermelon agua fresca from La Taqueria on the way. I've promised a friend in Oakland that I'll hang out with her two young boys today. The figs and tomatoes will come with me, I decide. There's always enough to share.

No, I don't have a back 40. Maybe I have a back four like you, a 4x4x4 chunk of concrete back patio in Bernal Heights, ancient cactus in one corner, Wizard-of-Oz cyclone cellar door in the other, a few beat-up chairs, windchimes, and ashtrays filling in the rest. Perfect for a garden! Last summer, my gardening lust didn't get tripped until July, when I came home with high hopes and a couple of leggy tomato plants, only to find myself running a soup kitchen for a hungry neighborhood of whiteflies and aphids. Embarassing for someone with a certificate in ecological horticulture, to say the least.

This year, I put that hard-won CASFS knowledge to use. To wit: pests prey on weak plants, plants growing out of season, deprived of the nutrients they need. A healthy eco-system is one that supports beneficial bugs and pollinators, with a mixed palette of plants and bugs that can overwhelm destructive pests. Food not lawns, sure, but flowers can be just as hard-working as veggies, pumping out the nectar that feeds the bees and wasps, and in the process both enabling plant sex and elbowing out less desirable insects. Bachelor's buttons, borage, sweet alyssum, morning glory, cosmos, sunflowers: they all bloomed and did their part, along with the stunning salpiglossis that was just there to look gorgeous.

So, what was growing in the back four by four? Tomatoes, of course, which no summer gardener can be without, even in too-chilly, too-foggy San Francisco. Not having the willpower of the Zen gardeners at Green Gulch, who bow to the powers of their surrounding cool marine winds and don't even try, I compromised with a couple of cherry tomato plants, a Chadwick Cherry (named after Alan Chadwick, mad genius and founding UCSC gardener) and a Golden Nugget, both birthed from thumb-sized starts from the Free Farmstand. The rest of the veggies came from seeds, thanks to my conviction that unless it's grown from seed, you didn't really earn it and it's not really yours.

Now, I'm not a spiritual person. Planting seeds is the closest thing I get to an expression of faith: you hold these tiny specks, all shapes and colors, and trust that they contain everything to rise into life. You slip them into the dirt, water them every morning, and the day after you've skeptically succumbed to doubt, they pop up, all fresh and new, eager to spin the whole wheel again. Samsara, sure, only it all tastes really, really good.

What I grew, all in containers using just potting soil, encouraging words, and (no, I'm not proud, but I'm honest) the occasional dose of Miracle-Gro, along with size-10 sneakers unashamed to stomp on lettuce-munching caterpillars: French Baby Nantes carrots, which stayed pinkie-sized but were amazingly sweet and crunchy; sugar snap peas, prolific and delicious, despite a leaf-devouring case of fog-borne powdery mildew; the aforementioned Golden Nugget and Chadwick Cherry tomatoes; African blue basil, skimpy-leaved but prolific in pretty mauve flower spikes; tiny whorls of green and red container lettuce, mostly eaten by those effing caterpillars; and of course, early summer's fingerling potatoes.

My old pals Sally and Christina, who came over to photograph, then eat, that first potato crop, came by again to dine on the fruits of the Summer Salad Project, augmented by a variety of local items. There was some crusty sourdough flatbread I'd made from locally grown and milled grains: whole-wheat flour from Eatwell Farm and cornmeal from Erin at Ridgecut Gristmills, glossed with olive oil from McEvoy Ranch near Petaluma and flavored with summer savory from a Marquita Farm mystery box.

With it went garden antipasti: the five ripe cherry tomatoes we could pick, a handful of sugar-snap peas and baby carrots, sheep's milk ricotta from West Marin's Bellwether Farms and a bowl of homemade mayonnaise. And Julia Child's advice aside, you don't even need to warm the bowl; as long as you go slow whisking in the oil in the beginning, making mayonnaise is a snap. All it takes is olive oil, lemon juice, salt, egg yolks, a little mustard, a whisk and three or four minutes' worth of patience.

There were also deviled eggs made using more of that mayonnaise, because who doesn't love a deviled egg? For dinner, garlicked-and-lemoned greens, made from a mixture of erbette chard, radish and beet greens, all pulled from the mystery box, and the piece de resistance: a succotash of Brentwood corn mixed with roasted serrano chiles, heirloom tomatoes, basil and savory from Mariquita, plus roasted torpedo onions and fresh flageolet beans grown by Annabelle at La Tercera Farm. In our glasses went pink vin gris from Bonny Doon, bought on sale at Good Life Grocery up the street.

Now, I'm name-checking for a reason. This isn't brand-naming just for some kind of locavore dirt cred. The dinner was local on purpose, but it also wasn't particularly hard to put together, thanks to the agricultural abundance surrounding us. What was on our plates was also community through commerce; all these vegetables were the livelihoods of people I've gotten to know, even just a little, through buying their vegetables week after week, visiting their farms, walking through their fields or orchards. It doesn't take much time to put a face on your food, and to make it part of a larger web of interlocking stories and histories, a personal geography marked by olives and zucchini, the taste of a milky green wheat kernel or the sight of two tiny leaves poking up out of the dirt.

And that night, looking around the table, Christina said grace to thank the earth, the farmers, the cook, and friendship, for making it all worth it.

Listen Live to Novella Carpenter on KQED 88.5FM Fri, Aug 7, 2009 -- 10:00 AM.

Listen to the audio archive of Novella Carpenter on KQED's Forum. (archive posts 8/07 late eve)

Farm City
Novella Carpenter took over an empty lot next to her apartment in Oakland's gritty Ghost Town neighborhood, and over the years turned it into a lush garden and farm complete with bees, chickens, rabbits and even pigs. Urban farms are popping up in even the most cramped corners of densely populated cities, fueled by a desire for good food and a closer relationship with what we eat. Carpenter joins Forum to talk about her new book, "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer."

Host: Dave Iverson

Guest: Novella Carpenter, journalist, urban farmer and author of "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer"

Explore and buy the book "Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer" at Amazon.com

Farm City News: Novella Carpenter's blog

Listen to story and view a slideshow of Oakland's Ghost Town Farm on The California Report: Urban Farming in Oakland

Farms...in Berkeley? Well, dairy cows may not be drinking lattes on Shattuck Avenue, but there are working urban farms in the Bay Area. So if you're garden-deprived or just longing to get dirty without leaving town, here are a few opportunities to dig in, learn, and taste what's growing in your city's backyards.

On Tuesday, Oakland's City Slicker Farms is hosting a BBQ and a showing of the movie "Fresh" at Fitzgerald and Union Plaza Parks (34th and Peralta in West Oakland). Come on down, meet your neighbors, and find out how City Slickers is going to turn part of the park into a new community farm. Can't make it on Tuesday? Check their website for volunteer hours at one of their half-dozen community farms, all dedicated to growing affordable produce for West Oakland.

Graze the Roof is Glide Memorial Church's innovative community-gardening project. The church's rooftop garden focuses on hydroponic and container gardening, and hosts community workdays every weekend and workshops throughout the month.

What could be a better mitzvah, or good deed, than growing food for those in need? That's the philosophy between Congregation Emanu-el's The Pe'ah Garden in Colma. This garden in, yes, a cemetery (hey, it's Colma. What did you expect?) is planted, maintained, and harvested by congregation members and volunteers, with the bulk of the harvest going to the San Francisco Food Bank. Jonathan Silverman, who coordinates the garden volunteers, also teaches ongoing gardening workshops throughout the year.

The nice folks at the Garden for the Environment in the Inner Sunset are compost evangelists. Put your soggy leftovers into the green bin, sure, but carrot peels, wilty lettuce leaves, grass clippings and more --anything that's strictly plant matter--can get turned into a fabulous soil booster right there in your own backyard. (Or even under the sink, if you get a wormbox working). Composting workshops are always on the class roster, or you can come to one of the twice-weekly workdays (Wed 10am-2pm; Sat 10am-4pm) and get a more impromptu lesson as you fork, turn, and rebuild the garden's three ever-evolving piles. Since this is an educational demonstration garden, not a farm, the amount of fruit and veggies produced here is small, but depending on the season, helpful workers should go home with at least a salad's worth of greens. Plus, there's often Arizmendi pizza to share after the morning's work.

Play hooky Monday afternoon and join the Marin Organic Glean Team, a new project from Marin Organic. Every Monday from 4-6pm, volunteers gather at a different local organic farm to "glean," or pick what's left over after the day's commercial harvest is done. This second harvest is then donated to local school lunch programs. And of course, volunteers get some too. This Monday, the gleaners are converging on Paradise Valley Produce in Bolinas.

If you've ever buzzed down 280 to the airport, you've passed what's probably San Francisco's largest urban farm. It's very easy to miss, but it's there: the Alemany Farm, at the southern edge of Bernal Heights. Like most urban farms, it's also an educational non-profit, working with kids and teens from the surrounding public housing along with energetic volunteers. There's a lot growing here, from strawberries, carrots, and collards to green beans, broccoli, kale, lettuce, tomatoes, flowers, fruit trees, squash, wild blackberries, and more. Workdays (alternate Saturday and Sundays, plus Monday afternoons) end with a harvest, and the haul is divided up between workers.

How are we celebrating the Fourth of July up in Bernal? We're harvesting the tater bucket! You might recall, back in the early, chilly days of spring, right around St Patrick's Day, a handful of ugly sprouting potatoes were thrown face-down in a bucket of dirt, given their chance for producing the next generation. And now, the resulting crop of new potatoes has been dug up, rinsed, steamed, browned in butter and chives, and eaten.

To be true red-white-and-blue homesteaders, we could have whisked up some homemade mayonnaise and made all-American potato salad. But the patio potatoes were too few, and too precious, for that. They needed to be appreciated just for their dainty little selves.

You might be saying to yourself, wow, those sure are some small potatoes. And it's true. The original potatoes planted were fingerlings, which are naturally small, but these are rather petite even for those.

What happened was, alas, a fungal infection of some kind. Might have been early blight, might have been a wilt like fusarium. All of a sudden, about a month ago, the lovely healthy leaves got brown-spotted one by one. The brown turned to yellow, and eventually the whole stem got limp and died. The brown turned to yellow, and eventually each cluster of leaves faded and died while the stem below the soil line rotted. And once the leaves were gone, the pizza delivery to the potatoes stopped, so to speak, and so did their growth.

These, then, were my teenage potatoes, kicked out of the nest a little young. I think it was partly my fault, due to some overwatering that probably spurred the blight's progression, since fungal diseases are spread and exacerbated by moisture.

Luckily, though, this happened pretty far along in the tater-growing process, meaning we still got a few good handfuls. And there is something pretty wonderful about harvesting your own dinner--not just picking a few tomatoes or plucking a little basil but plunging your whole arm past the elbow into a bucket of warm dirt, fishing around for what slender gold treasures might be hiding in there. These were true new potatoes, fresh and moist, their skins tattered off merely by washing. Not to mention really, really delicious, if I say so myself.

And just in case you were wondering what a potato looks like when it's still growing, well, it looks like this, only deep in the dirt. You can see that the potato itself isn't a root, like carrots or beets, but rather a stolen, or swollen stem, branching off from the main stem above the roots.

Since most potatoes take about 100 days from sprouting to harvest, there's still time for another crop before the winter wet weather comes on. Will tater bucket #2 be more successful? Stay tuned!

Photos by Sally Carter

If eating is an agricultural act, as Wendell Berry so famously said, then what better way to celebrate the connection between food and farming than at Dirt to Dining?

Jesse Cool, the down-to-earth owner-cook (don't call her a chef!) of Menlo Park's Flea Street Cafe is hosting this benefit for the Ecological Farming Association right in her own backyard--which just happens to be a bountiful edible garden on the edge of the Stanford campus.

Cool, well known for her longtime dedication to seasonal, locally-sourced and sustainable cuisine, is opening up her address book, too. On hand to nosh and chat will be dozens of organic farmers and winemakers, including those from Full Belly Farm, Frog's Leap Winery, Green Gulch Farm, Live Earth Farm, Swanton Berry Farm, Robert Sinskey Vineyards, Frey Vineyards, and more.

And of course, going along with the garden tours will be plenty of delectable food and wine. That fava-bean canapé? Probably made from beans grown by the guy sipping sauvignon blanc right next you. Never seen a fava bean in its natural habitat? It's over there, hanging on vines right next to the carrots. Dining doesn't get any dirtier than that.

Dirt to Dining: A Day in Jesse Cool's Kitchen Garden
Sunday, June 7, 2009
2pm-5pm
2150 Amhearst Street
Palo Alto, CA
Tickets: $75

How do you grow a farmer? You start with dirt and seeds and water, of course. But just like good vegetables also need mulch and worms and pollinators and beneficial bugs to chase off the pests, a farmer learns not just through her own experience but through the hard-won experiences of other farmers, a whole long bloodline of observation through years of harvests and springtimes, of rain slicing down into mud and hot sun swelling the tomatoes sweet, of aphids clumping up inside the broccoli and leaf miners boring wiggle tracks across the chard.

That's great if you come from a heritage of family farmers. But what if the closest you have to a back forty is a pot of basil on steps? Or what if your family's farm is corn and soybeans, and you want to grow organic lettuce? If you're young and hardy, you can rent yourself out as an unpaid intern or WOOFer, and hope you get to do more than just water and weed.

Or you can dig into a hands-on, intensive program like the one at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at UC Santa Cruz. For a six-month growing season, you'll live, learn, eat, sleep, and farm on a beautiful 30-acre spread of organic educational farmland.

Graduates of this program, which has been running for over 40 years, are the farmers feeding you now. They're the ones building school gardens and working on food justice and sustainability issues all around California and beyond. For a program that graduates just 35 to 40 farmers a year, its impact on the organic movement has been both broad and deep. As a graduate myself, I've met countless farmers and food people over the past couple of years, only to find out that they, too, are former "farmies."

And now it's time to help the farm grow its farmers. What the program needs is housing. After several decades of letting apprentices live rent-free in tents (and before that, teepees) while in the program, UCSC is now demanding that proper temporary housing be built on the farm. The result? Some $250,000 needs to be raised by mid-summer, or the program will have to go on hiatus next year.

Hence, the campaign to Grow a Farmer Campaign. Throughout May, participating restaurants and businesses around the Bay Area are donating 10% or more of their sales on a particular day to the campaign. If you're a chef or restauranteur, you can sign up here. If you're a happy eater, check out the list of events for this month.

Because who will grow your food if you don't help grow your farmers?