West Oakland renters applying for a Backyard Garden got a boost this year thanks to the Neighborhood Food Act. The new law makes it illegal for landlords to prohibit their tenants from growing edible fruits and vegetables for their own consumption. Backyard Garden Program Coordinator Alison Fischman said the new law will be a positive change for the City Slicker Farms community. 

Today is the day we say goodbye to 2014 and welcome in a new year!  At City Slicker Farms, we’re proud to be celebrating all of the accomplishments we made over the past four growing seasons, and all of the relationships we’ve built with our donors, program participants, allies, and volunteers.

Dear Friends of City Slicker Farms,

My name is Ariel Guidry and I am writing to tell you about how much City Slicker Farms has changed my life since I became an “ally” (a long-term volunteer) through the Urban Farming Education program.

Dear Friends of City Slicker Farms,

My name is Karen Williams and I live in West Oakland. Like a lot of our neighbors, my husband Robert and I come from a long tradition of tending a garden at home. For us, growing food is a practice that’s rooted in our family’s history. We do it so that our children can have a strong sense of where they come from.

In early October, Childcare Garden Program Coordinator Sarah Karlson and a very enthusiastic group of staff, children, and parents worked together to build a garden for Helen Turner Children's Center in Hayward. This garden was specifically designed to be accessible by children in wheelchairs. In just four hours, the group assembled boxes, strung trellises, shoveled soil, planted seedlings and installed irrigation. At the end of the day this beautiful garden was finished!

City Slicker Farms is partnering with StopWaste, a public agency that encourages recycling in Alameda County, to promote the use of your green bin at home.  

Backyard Garden Program Coordinator Alison Fischman was on maternity leave for four months this year, but she's not letting that stop her from reaching her goal of thirty Backyard Garden builds. 

Every year, we aim to build at least thirty new backyard gardens for West Oakland residents. 

Thanksgiving arrives this week! But with this annual ritual often comes a swell of food waste in our community. Every day residents of Alameda County generate tons of food scraps and food-soiled paper, and the holidays can contribute a disproportionate amount of this. In fact, food scraps and food-soiled paper represent 35% of the stuff that’s going to our landfills.

But it doesn't have to be that way! Unlike many cities in the U.S., here in Oakland we can divert food waste from becoming waste at all – by putting food scraps and food-soiled paper back into the nutrient loop in the form of compost - through the municipal green bin system. That compost comes back to City Slicker Farms, a nutrient-rich soil amendment we add to all our urban farms and backyard gardens.

At the West Oakland Grown Harvest Festival this past weekend, we celebrated harvest time and the Rebuild of the Community Market Farm at Union Plaza Park with a community art workshop led by Attitudinal Healing Connection, an West Oakland-based organization that is breaking cycles of violence by providing platforms for creative expression and communication for children, youth, adults and families.

The goal of the workshop was to create art with our friends and neighbors that will have a permanent place at the farm at Union. We chose concepts for the art panels that represent the values of City Slicker Farms and what we strive to embody at our farms: Growth, Community and Sharing. 

After the August vandalism incident at Union, many asked me if we should install additional security or cameras at our farm site. I think it is natural to respond to a crisis like this with fear and trepidation that it might happen again – I know I did.

But as that fear subsided, and our resolve increased, we knew that our response must be to build community, not take punitive action. So we asked Attitudinal Healing Connection to help us in a first step of creating permanent art for the space that communicates what the Community Market Farm is all about.