Algarden Cafe Dinner

We had our first Algarden Cafe "Candlelight Dinner" at the Zomicile and it was beautiful!

I'm really delighted with the outcome, it was delicious and charming. And overall I believe everybody had a really good time.

I want to start by thanking the team that made this possible. Starting from the left Pei-Yee working on the awesome desserts, Chef Stephanie did and outstanding job converting my veggies into delicious culinary combinations and the amazing Rob Bell, who made the tables, the Algarden cafe sign, helped me set up and bar-tended.Thank you so much! I also want to thank Giancarlo Muscardini, our head farmer, who was not able to make it to the dinner, but he is a huge part of making all this food a reality.

And here is the spread

Grilled favas

Lettuces, strawberries, blue cheese, edible flowers

Red beets, beet greens, chard, chives

Dinosaur and russian kale, lemon, borage

Daikon radish, radish greens, preserved lemons, arugula

Parsnips, chipotle aioli, parsley, lemon

French lentils, fava greens, onions, roasted potatoes, eggs

The flower arrangements came from the garden too, cilantro and carrot flowers.

The desserts were equally impressive

Strawberry and lemon curd pastries

Honey and pistachio caramels

Meyer lemon and lavender bars

It was really delicious and people were happy and excited to be participating in this true farm to table experience

The setting was lovely and I was amazed at the incredible combination of flavors and the amount of food that we got from the garden. We served dinner for 20.

This is how the veggies looked before, freshly harvested the night before the dinner

We talked about our mission for doing this work and bringing people closer to their food source. In this case the produce traveled 13 miles, a mere one percent of the national average for any food item on the grocery store!

I was very happy to see every body enjoying themselves and I'm looking forward to planning another one later this summer

Keep your eyes open for the next Algarden dinner, you do not want to miss it!

Thank you very much!

Algarden Candle Light Dinner

Algarden Candle Light Dinner

I'm joining forces with Chef Stephanie for this special farm to table candle light dinner 

What: An abundant buffet dinner

When: Thursday, June 9th at 7:00pm. Limited Space, RSVP through your spot here:

http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1609282407

Where: The Zomicile 2149 Harrison St. (At 18th St. Mission District, SF)

How Much: Dinner is $30 + cash bar (non alcoholic mint iced tea included)

For those of you who have not experienced the Algarden because it was in the East Bay, you now get to enjoy it in the Mission, as a 4 course candle lit dinner at the Zomicile, Foodscaping's new home.

If you are unfamiliar with the Algarden cafe history and Mission here is a little bit of background.

In the winter of 2010, after two years of working the soils at the Algarden, we had a bounty of food, way more than what I and the neighbors could eat. I teamed up with Julia Abbassi creator of the community supported bread box "Pandora's box" to collectively advance our passions for urban agriculture and local food production through the establishment of the Algarden Café. We prepared meals that celebrate local agriculture, fresh ingredients harvested at the peak of ripeness, and strengthened of the relationship between producers and consumers.

For this event I'm joining forces with Chef Stephanie. Chef Stephanie's cuisine honors the organic, local and seasonal ingredients abundant in the bay area. Her approach to cooking is with a balance of positive intention and playful ingenuity.

The meals for the Algarden cafe are composed nearly entirely of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms, honey and eggs from the garden, and each course is intended to showcase the ingredients so customers can fully appreciate the flavor, texture and experience of eating farm-fresh food. 

The Algarden Cafe’s goal is to build community and increase awareness and value for locally produced, organic fare through the common medium of food. 

Join us fot the Algarden cafe dinner in San Francisco on Thursday June 9th.

RSVP at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/1609282407

Irrigation work Party

Thank you so much to everyone who made it out to our work party on May 7th. We had a great day and got a lot done.

Special Thanks to Jose de Jesus Leal, who arrived with a huge amount of irrigation materials which he donated to the Algarden and he helped us get started with the irrigation process.

The water for the Algarden, as I have mentioned before, comes from Giancarlo's house next door. One of the first projects at the Algarden was rerouting the water line and installing 3 hose-bibs. We used one of those to set the irrigation line.

Alex and Megan were amazing helpers in digging the irrigation trench

At one point Alex, in his usual inquisitive skeptical self, asked if adding all that plastic tubbing for the irrigation was congruent with permaculture principles. Giancarlo who was walking by and heard the question jumped in to answer with a big YES, because having that irrigation was going to free us from having to spend 3 hours everyday watering the garden, and that is a huge energy saving. I also added that drip irrigation is a lot more water efficient and we do not loose any water to evaporation. I think he was satisfied with the answer.

We also worked on building another raised planter bed. We are doing this because we have a pretty bad slug infestation which makes it impossible for us to get plants started from seed, the slugs just eat them away. So Giancarlo's brilliant solution to this is having a cooper edge on the wood and that way the slugs can not enter the planting beds and eat our starts.

Almudena and Lisa did a great job at pruning the fruit trees

Jaime was the sheet mulching star! 

The garden is looking great and it is thanks to all of your help. Thank you so much for helping us keep this garden going!

You never leave empty handed when you visit the Algarden.

Varroa mites

 

Bees have been a wonderful addition to my life. I can say that I have been forever change because of them, my perception of the world, the environment and relations has been altered in a way that can not be undone. I continue to learn and bee amazed by them. However, this no simple hobby. I jumped into becoming a bee keeper without much thought and with the understanding that bees are easy, you just get the boxes going, they do their thing, and then you just take the honey. WRONG!

Perhaps, there was a time when it was that simple but, Veroa mites have really changed everything in bee keeping. There are chemical ways to treat the mites but the mites have become resistant and are now a huge problem affecting our bees. I had a mite problem last year and a tried the powder sugar method and it kind off work keeping the mite levels down but they were not gone. however I got away with it. But this year the problem can not be avoided any more, I have a serious mite infestation. I knew this because I could see many bees with deformed wings. 

As you can see in this images, the mites get into the larva cells to lay their eggs. And they cal lay up to 4 or 5 eggs per cell, they especially like to do it on the drone cells because they have the same incubation period. The mites attach to the pupa and feed from it which cause the bees to hatch with deformed wings.

This are drone cells which were completely infested with mites.

 

I tried to remove all the drone cells from the hive and then fed them to the chickens

 The chickens love it!

 

So that takes care of some of the mites, but there are still a lot of them in the hive, and lots of them attached to the bees. I was resistant to using any chemicals to treat the mites, I have read and heard all kinds of information, everybody has a different opinion. It is hard to know what to trust, so I'm going with my intuition and with the comfort of knowing that this is the process of learning and some mistakes can be made on that process. All I knew for sure was that I had to do something with those mites. I went to a lecture by Randy Oliver from Scientific bee keeper and he pointed out that although mites themselves won't kill your hive, their presence will debilitate your hive and can be a factor to cause its death. He suggested a few natural miticides made out of  acids and oils. You can read all about them here.  

http://scientificbeekeeping.com/varroa-management/

I decided to use Apilife VAR mostly because of all of his suggestions this seemed like the easiest to apply and after some research it seemed to be a safe option. It is a tablet made out of concentrated Tymol oil. The bees are resistant to the amount of oil but the mites are not so they leave the hive. I used half of the recommended amount and repeated the treatment after 10 days. Here is a research paper I found on this product used in Switzerland.

http://www.culturaapicola.com.ar/apuntes/sanidad/varroa/timol_varroa_i.pdf

 

I broke the tablets into small pieces and placed it on top of the brood. I did noticed that the bees moved away, the smell is strong and the bees did not like it. 

I'm very happy to report that after the treatment, I have not seen any mites. Lets hope it stays like that.

 

After I finished dealing with the mite problem on Stella, I checked on Gloria (the new captured swarm) and noticed that there was no queen, not sure how that happened but I could not find a queen and there were no eggs so I knew there was no queen. I immediately got on the phone to try an order a queen and everybody in California and Hawaii was sold out till mid June. I could not wait that long so I needed to have the bees make a new queen. Any fertilized egg can be made into a queen, the bees feed that egg royal jelly and make a bigger cell for a queen and Voilà you got a queen. The problem is getting that queen to survive her nuptial flight and get fertilized. And then not knowing who she's mating so you do not have any guarantees on the type of bees that you will have, the queen can mate with up to 10 different drones. 

This is another one of those controversial issues in bee keeping. Ideally you want to have a mated queen that is hygienic, mite resistant, and docile. But then, there is the other argument you want to develop genetic diversity in your hive and have bees that can adapt to your local environment. Yes, I want both, I do not have an answer on this issue. As I was dealing with the mites on the other hive, I could see the benefit of having a mite resistant breed, but at this moment  I had no choice, I had to take the risk and try to get a queen made by my bees.

To do this I had to transfer a frame with fertile eggs from Stella (who has a queen) to Gloria (Queen-less)

As I checked the brood on Stella I found a few queen cells already made. This was good news for Gloria, I queen was already being made so I transfered those frames.

  But it was bad news for me, having queen cells is an indication that the hive is ready to swarm.

Ideally you want to prevent your hive from swarming, so I took a few brood frames and moved them over to Gloria and placed empty frames in Stella giving her more room to grow and hopefully preventing it from swarming.

Queen cells, as you can see in this picture, are much bigger than a regular bee pupa cell

I love the reflection of the sun on the nectar in this images

There were two queen cells in this frame and a some fertilized eggs, I hope Gloria gets a queen soon. 

Spring is a very busy time for a bee keeper, if you are thinking of becoming a bee keeper allow yourself plenty of bee time in the spring. 

Thank you very much to Aimee Goggins who took the mite close up pictures and the picture of me in action. 

Urban Homesteading- The book

My friend Ruby Blume from the Institute of Urban Homesteading along with Rachel Kaplan wrote this beautiful book on urban homesteading

http://urban-homesteading.org/

The book is awesome, full of colorful pictures and great description on how to do things and why to do them, they have a good explanation on the politics of why to do this type of work, join this movement and remove your self as much as you can from the established system.

The most exciting part of this book, for me, is that there is a write up about me and the work that I have been doing at the Algarden with Giancarlo

Here is what they wrote about me, Giancarlo and our project at the Algarden. Enjoy.

"Patricia Algara is a landscape architect who practices urban agriculture on a double lot in Berkeley, CA that she borrows from a neighbor. Having come from a family of farmers in Mexico, working the land is instinctive to Patricia, but when she came to this country, she felt overwhelmed by the difficulties of finding a place to farm. During a winter storm a fence got blown away revealing an empty lot with perfect sun exposure two blocks from where she works. She met Giancarlo Muscardini the neighbor to the right of the unused lot, she asked him about the empty space that was a huge contrast to his own  lush garden, edible garden and orchard. He knew the neighbors and had dreamed of doing something on the next-door site for a long time.


"It drove him crazy to see the neighbors mowing the weeds every other week. So together we wrote a formal proposal for the use of the land," Patricia recalls. “We met with the neighbors. They were excited but had some issues. I had a lawyer draft an agreement so they aren’t liable if anyone gets hurt. They didn’t want an open community garden, so they fenced the property in a way to keep it private for them and usable for us. I have keys and can bring people and we have work parties and events, but always in collaboration with the owners’ needs.”

      

Together, Patricia and Giancarlo designed and built the garden. During the first work was done on setting up infrastructure—putting in a greenhouse, and garden beds, but mostly amending the soil which was really hard clay so that things could grow. Water was piped into the garden from Giancarlo’s place next door. “When we first started, it was all grass so we had a lot of work to do," Patricia says. "It’s been two years and it’s finally a working garden. We sheet mulched, and did compost and used a chicken tractor and did what we could to build the soil. Everything here is done through permaculture principles and the soils are much better now. They can still improve, but now they are productive and there’s a lot of food.” 


Patricia and Giancarlo get food from the garden, as do the owners and people who live in the units below Giancarlo’s house. To share the excess produce, Patricia hosts an informal Friday lunch where all the food is prepared using the fruits and vegetables from the garden. The food gets harvested the night before to assure the freshest and most ripe flavors. The menu changes every week depending on what's in season. The lunch is also an opportunity to show people how the vegetables plants look while they are growing, their benefits to the garden and their nutritional properties, is mostly a way to expose people to local, organic, fresh flavors and get them excited to grow their own food.

     As this demonstration urban farm project keeps growing, Giancarlo is inspired to deepen the permaculture design of the garden, as well as his own garden on the other side of the fence. He’s looking toward planting more fruit trees, trees which can be coppiced (cut back to encourage the growth of straight suckers which can be used for building and garden projects), a more evolved food forest, and planting biomass-producing trees which add further nutrients to the soil. 


Patricia’s success with this garden leads her to work on food security projects in Richmond, one of the most impoverished communities in the Bay Area. “The more I learn, the more I see how this needs to happen everywhere" she says. "It is so daunting at an environmental level to understand what is going on, and sometimes it feels like a huge thing I can’t do anything about. But growing food is something I CAN do."


"The more research I do, the more I see what a big impact food production has on so many aspects of the environment. We can have an impact every time we eat, breaking away from industrial agriculture, the fuel to transport the food, and the toxins that are used to grow it. If everyone grew something, one little small thing, it would matter. Food is basic. We need it 3 times a day. At least! Even if you just have a little window, you can grow mint. And that’s one less thing to buy at the store.

“Food is the gateway drug to a more sustainable lifestyle. You start to become aware of the cycles of nature, the cycle of the moon, what’s happening with the seasons and the climate, and you start to pay attention to the world. And it has a trickle down effect—just doing this changes your behavior. It happened to me. Seeing this garden and the changes it’s brought me makes me want to work so that more people can see this and do this. And it’s not that hard. It’s a basic human thing. It’s easy and we should all be doing it."

Here is a scanned version of how the page looks on the book. I highly recommend you buy the book, it is a great resource.

Capturing a swarm

It is not every day that a swarm of bees finds you.

Last Tuesday as I was walking to work, Luis, one of the day laborers on the Algarden street, who sometimes helps us out at the garden, ran to me and asked me if I wanted I swarm of bees. It was early and I was still waking up so I was trying to understand. what, where, when how?

So he explained that a swarm had landed at the base of an avocado tree on the yard of his friend and that he could take me over if I wanted to go capture it.

One of my hives died over the winter so I was down to one hive. I had been thinking of getting a second one but had not had the time and mental bandwidth to coordinate it. I think it is always good to have at least two hives, that way if you loose one you can always make a split and continue being a bee keeper. In my case, my hives are named after my grandmothers, Stella and Gloria, and I would not want to be without either of them. 

This event was very serendipitous.

I had an extra small box at the garden so I went to grab it along with my suit and smoker and off I went with Luis and Maria (who took all this pictures and videos - Many thanks!) to find the bees. 

So exciting, there were about 10,000 to 20,000 bees hanging on to the leg of a plastic chair, the owner of the house put this wood box over them to protect them and his kids from being stung.

I grabbed first a piece of wood that had a good bunch of them and moved them to the box, I could tell the queen was not there because they were not staying they were flying back to the chair leg.

So I pulled the chair out carefully and placed the leg on top of the box and jerked it so that most bees fell into the box. 

I could tell the queen was there because the bees were staying on the box this time. 

However there were still a lot of bees on the other box that needed to be moved to my box.

I used a piece of cardboard to carefully pick up the bees and move them to my box.

And there is most of them

Hard to tell exactly how many but a lot!

So I covered the box and Luis helped me to tie it up and take it back to the Algarden.

Luis was pretty excited to be a part of the action, his son-in-law is a beekeeper in Guatemala so he is used to being around bees and I think this brought back some good memories for him.

I left the 5 frame box with only two frames for two days. I had to build new frames so it took me a while, but after two days I came back to transfer the bees from the small box to a full 10 frame box and I had all the frames ready to go. This video shows what we found when I opened the box, the bees had already built a beautiful comb on the empty space of the box and it already had some nectar and pollen. Very hard working bees.

It's good to have Stella and Gloria back together at the Algarden. Welcome!

Many thanks to Maria for taking pictures and video and to Luis for his help and for connecting me with the bees.