Harvesting community
Years ago, ours was an agricultural county. It attracted immigrants from Italy with their beautiful gardens and orchards; later came hippies, staggering “back to the land” from their psychedelic urban explosion; and pot crept into apple country.
The children of those hippies, many of them, grew up to become farmers. From them sprang the organic farm movement and the official California organic label.
Largely uninterested in political protest, not drawn to psychedelics or communes, these young people wanted to do something clean and positive to foster the good life, now, on God’s little acre in Occidental or Sonoma Valley.
The new agriculture spawned an emerging culture based on sound ecological principles, and a growing local economy of farmer’s markets, community-supported agriculture, and DIY crafts.
And then came wine
It’s an easy generalization but not a false one, that wine and its companion, tourism, have changed Sonoma County, driving up property values, spreading wider use of pesticides and attracting distant corporations to reap the profits from artful new labels, restaurants, hotels.
But they also have a connection with local food.
Family farms are part of the landscape that attracts the tourists who dine in the restaurants that feature those local foods, a happy partnership that managed to survive the shutdown of the pandemic.
Farmers helped to feed the swelling ranks of the hungry, inviting people to glean what was not profitable to sell and donating harvest leftovers to groups like Food for All (“Comidas para Todos”) here in the Valley. One of the unseen links in the grassroots food chain was the Springs Community Hall and its inspired director Seth Dolinsky.
With his boundless energy and his love and respect for farmers, Seth and Springs Hall filled in some of the gaps in the link from the farm to the hungry.
Some of the provisioners are familiar to all who visit the Friday Farmers’ Market: Paul’s Produce, Cannard Family Farm, Oak Hill Farm, Two Moon Family Farm, and Chris Gertz’ fabulous fruit orchards.
And guess what? Whole Foods helped too, contributing, among other things, hundreds of paper bags.
On the Springs’ Hall web page (springshall.org) are photos of rows of those bags lined up at Verano School and the Hall, filled by Comidas por Todos with fresh, healthy, organic food, and other supplies for pandemic survival, like soap.
The Hall has also become a center for the homeless (and anyone else in need) to pick up complete meals prepared in the Hall kitchen by volunteers from SOS – Sonoma Overnight Support.
It’s been a vibrant, organic grassroots network of foods and providers that sprang into action during the crisis; and now Seth wants to extend that web of community farming and feeding into other open spaces in our verdant valley.
The first of those is starting to bear fruit. Under the guiding hand of Ariel Osborn, Springs Hall has contracted with C, Larson Park is growing a garden. It has been open to visitors since July 16 every Fridays from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Come pick up a bag of fresh produce or some veggie starts, learn from experienced gardeners and even have lunch. There are many ways to help, to learn, and to meet people from your community. “We’ll see what the community needs,” says Seth. The more volunteers, the more the garden can become. You can sponsor a planter box…or fill one with plants. You can help build a greenhouse! How the community uses the space will determine how it will grow. Go to Springsgarden.org for more information and to sign up.
“It’s great to see people out there, provide education with the message that you can grow your own food, and it’s fun!”
For Seth, this is only the beginning of his vision of cooperative community agriculture. “Why not have a city farm, 20 acres or so, and hire a farmer to run it for the community? Wineries too can grow food in the vineyards to feed the workers. Good food, good wine go together.”
And good people! It takes a community to grow a farm.
