Winter is here and so is the mistletoe at the stand!

Most of the leaves that nicely shaded the tree are gone but some winter time produce is appearing like lemons and permissions.

I added some mistletoe that I collected over the weekend in the Sierras to the stand today.  Last night I attended the Santa Clara Valley Bee Guild annual holiday dinner where we had concerning discussions about the new issues of bees and their declining health due to an assortment of newer pesticides, and systemic changes  to the plants and landscaping and agriculture.  The bees are like the canaries and tell us that we need to be developing safer and more natural approaches to agriculture and landscaping and we are poisoning our selves in many ways we have yet to understand, mostly in the name of business profits.

Persimmons Overload! –

This morning I volunteered with Village Harvest in Mountain View, CA, and we harvested about 1000 lbs of permissions from about 5 houses in about 4 hours.   This produce will be distributed directly starting the next day for Mountain View Community Service Agency for people who are on various food assistance programs.   I brought back some of the less than perfect fruit and put it at our local farm stand for distribution.

Each time I volunteer at one of these events, I realize that if each homeowner were to have just a single produce tree, we could share the excess bounty that a single homeowner could not possibly begin to consume.

The Farm stand on Sunday 11/17/2013.   We need help distributing the persimmons harvest!  Please come by and do you part!

Part of the LAH farm stand is a free lending library.. take book, leave a book.  While doing my daily check in at the farm stand I discovered this interesting book that I brought home called It’s Okay to Miss the Bed on the First Jump by John O’Hurley.  I wasn’t impressed with the cover and title, but once I started reading, this book had some wonderful analogies to make between dogs and humans  that were inspirational.

I’ve also started some initial graphic for the urban farm stands logo that we can use for some site marketing and various materials.

Persimmons Karma!

There is a mystery persimmons donator besides Melanie that is filling up the FREE bin area each morning.. Excellent karma for the neighborhood to secretly shared your yard’s produce and not to expect anyone to know who did it!  THANKS!

Today I dropped off some tomatoes, kale, basil and parsley.  I was surprised again that someone had dropped free pomengranates to share with the community!

It’s Halloween, and already the farm stand have started a new tradition of sharing the bounty of our neighborhood.

Here’s a list of mostly free items that have been available from the farm stand in the first 6 weeks of operation:

• Tomatoes
• lemons
• basil
• pumpkins
• apples
• permissions
• honey
• cucumbers
• pomegranates
• Free take a book, leave a book lending library

The farm stand is now on some local neighborhood bulletin boards announcing new produce has arrived.  I was there one evening after a batch of free pomegranates arrive and people raced up and jumped out of their cars to grab some!

Here is the blog posting page

10/22/2013 – The Los Altos Hills farm stands has many new items for free or for donation! Check it out!