December 4th, 2007

By John DeFore

Two compelling eco-themes combine in a recent San Francisco project hoping to foster a citywide epidemic of green thumbs. The Victory Gardens project is a joint effort of organic advocates Garden for the Environment, the city’s Department of the Environment, and Future Farmers, an art/design group with a progressive bent.

The two-year pilot effort, currently around its midpoint, has distributed “starter garden” kits around San Francisco (spreading them across three different microclimate zones), providing brief training in their use, and building up a seed bank “to reflect the diverse food crops that can be grown in the our city.” The plan addresses two problems at once: Yard space where city dwellers might otherwise waste water simply to keep grass green now becomes productive land; produce that would otherwise be trucked in from elsewhere can be grown on the doorstep of the households consuming it.

Amy Franceschini, the “Lead Artist” of Future Farmers who is maintaining the seed bank, assures us that during these slow-gardening months the project is indeed alive and well, “and will be more alive January 2008,” as they “just received funding from the city for one year to develop the project.” At the end of February, a call will go up on the program’s web site to recruit new participants; “for now,” she adds, “Garden for the Environment has free workshops on Saturdays.”

For readers not lucky enough to live in the Golden Gate’s shadow, Franceschini says they “would love the project to spread far and wide,” and are designing its online component in the hopes that “people can copy our model.”