[Pollinator] Pollinator Partnership's Gregory Kellet in SF Chronicle Article

[Sunny Boyd]

Check out the Pollinator Partnership's Gregory Kellet and the city
pollinator garden featured in the S.F. Chronicle article.


 


Crops dot fallow S.F. spots until backhoes come



Read more:
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/DDSQ1DTLOD.DTL#
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http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/DDSQ1DTLOD.DTL#i
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<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/DDSQ1DTLOD.D
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  _____  

There's a bumper crop of fava beans this year in San Francisco's Hayes
Valley.

The vegetable's thick stalks fill planter beds on one side of Octavia
Boulevard, and cloak a steep slope between abandoned freeway ramps on the
other. Plenty else is popping up - tomatoes, squash, peas - but 40 pounds of
the soil-replenishing favas already have been harvested.

They also prove there's a way to revive empty city lots - even ones where
buildings are scheduled to rise.

I first wrote about the need for such interim landscapes last summer, as the
development boom-turned-bust left several San Francisco neighborhoods with a
gap-toothed terrain where buildings once stood, replaced by chain-link
fences that enclose asphalt or dirt.

Most are still there, looking tattered as ever, but the scene along Octavia
Boulevard shows blight can be turned to bounty. All you need is open-minded
neighbors, wise owners and creative people willing to try something
different.

In other words, nothing happens by chance. 

The Octavia lots exist because the elevated Central Freeway was replaced by
a tree-lined boulevard, with sites alongside it reserved for
neighborhood-scaled housing. Developers were selected, and then the
recession rolled in.

Other neighborhoods would respond with cynical I-told-you-sos; Hayes Valley
leaders encouraged the city staff to put some of the parcels to short-term
use. And because the city owned the land, it was happy to play the odds.

The large site where you can still glimpse ramps has been rechristened Hayes
Valley Farm. Three committed urban gardeners oversee it, and the city has
OKd its presence for at least the next two years. Most of the grunt work is
done by volunteers on Thursday and Sunday afternoons.

Across the way at Growing Home Community Garden, things are more polished,
with raised beds along central paths on two lots that each are just 16 feet
wide. Trees that once buffered the freeway shade a bench, and there's a
picnic table.

The instigators include Project Homeless Connect and the Hayes Valley
Neighborhood Association. Theoretically, half the work is done by neighbors
and half by homeless people.

"Has this been worth the effort? Absolutely," says Rich Hillis of the city's
Office of Economic and Workforce Development. "It has helped us maintain the
vacant sites, and it energizes the neighbors." 

The efforts are more tentative on Rincon Hill, where empty lots outnumber
completed towers. But there are frail signs of hope.

One is on the fenced-off lot at 45 Lansing St., where, amid thickets of
browning weeds, circular planting beds are flecked by hints of lupine and
poppies. The idea is a "temporary garden and art installation," a year-round
way station for butterflies and birds. It's designed by Rebar and the
Pollinator Partnership, funded by landowner Turnberry Lansing - and put in
place, again, largely by volunteers.

Right now things are ragged; this is a work in progress where such extras as
information boards will go in over the next few weeks. Some weeds will be
cleared. Others won't.

"We're going to keep a certain number, because that's habitat, too," says
Gregory Kellett of Pollinator Partnership. Nor does he mind that,
theoretically, the garden will be replaced by a 40-story tower when (if?)
boom times return: "Even if it's only temporary, this is a way to show the
neighborhood we're connected to something larger."

Is there a danger that enthusiasm will wane or, conversely, fans will decide
that cropland is the highest and best use? Of course. But the participants
seem comfortable knowing they're experimenting with a sort of ad hoc
urbanity - and shaping models that, if successful, can be replicated
elsewhere.

"Some of this stuff seems a little far-out, but some of it might catch on,"
says Ron Miguel, the president of the city's Planning Commission. "As a San
Franciscan, it's important to me that the city not look as ragtag as it does
in spots. If we encourage efforts like these, they become part of the
culture."

I wish more were happening, and happening faster. But when lupines bloom or
fava beans ripen, it's a start.

For information on Hayes Valley Farm, go to bit.ly/9QZSCg. 

For other pieces on interim urbanity, go to sfgate.com/ZIBD.


Read more:
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/DDSQ1DTLOD.DTL#
ixzz0qwlv1a5K>
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/15/DDSQ1DTLOD.DTL#i
xzz0qwlv1a5K

 

Sunny Boyd

Pollinator Partnership

423 Washington St., 5th Floor

San Francisco, CA  94111

t.  415.362.1137

f.  415.362.3070

 <mailto:sun at pollinator.org> sun at pollinator.org

 

Our future flies on the wings of pollinators. 

 

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