Tenacious Sprout

Steve and I took a couple days off this weekend to go up to San Francisco. We rented bikes and toured around some of our old haunts. One of the places we wanted to go was to the Argonne Community Garden. This is the sweet little garden plot in the Richmond district where Steve and I had our first garden together. We didn’t know what to expect, since it’s been 20 years since we were there, but we found that very little had changed in the community garden. We were even able to find the garden box that used to be ours. It was encouraging that the community garden seems to be so timeless. The people tending it may come and go, but there are always more city dwellers longing for a plot of earth to tend.

While we were living in San Francisco in the early nineties, we were planning our escape to the farm with a group of friends who we called Tenacious Sprout. With this group of 6 or 7 friends, we discussed how we would buy, organize, and live on our not-yet-existent farm. We pooled money into a $10,000 CD, we researched bylaws of Intentional Communities, and we went to a conference on ways to afford farmland put on by the group Equity Trust. We bicycled to the Russian River for a retreat at which we had long discussions of what sort of lifestyles we would find acceptable within our community, how we would earn and share our money, how many people and which ones we would include in our farm, what sort of housing we would have. Looking back, it is easy to see that we were missing any real understanding of a key part of our plan—farming. But I’m also impressed by how much effort, heart, and energy we put into our planning.

I don’t think we ever consciously disbanded Tenacious Sprout. Steve came down to work on his uncle’s farm and take classes in agroecology at UCSC. I moved to Oakland for a job in energy conservation. Other members moved, got interesting jobs, or pursued teaching credentials. After a couple years, Steve’s uncle Jerry helped us launch our own farm on a few acres of leased land, I moved down to Watsonville with Steve, and our farm was born. Amid the craziness of actually farming (and having children), San Francisco grew further and further away. But as I think back on it now, I feel that our farm is still wrapped in the tendrils of the tenacious sprout that sprung from a seed planted by that idealistic group of friends long ago.