Don Hankins

Haven't you always wanted to do this?

​Last July, the volunteers at Hayes Valley Farm discovered that someone -- probably an irate neighbor -- had broken into the farm overnight and sprayed insecticide into three beehives on the site. A quarter of a million bees died, several thousand dollars' worth of honey was ruined, and the young urban farm suffered its biggest shock to date. When SFoodie spoke to beekeeper Karen Peteros the day after the discovery, she told us she wasn't sure she was going to install new colonies.

Less than a year later, though, Peteros hasn't just tripled the amount of hives on the farm -- she's about to start offering biweekly beekeeping classes.

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Rachael & Zane Ross/Flickr

​First Annual Spring Fling Hydroponic and Organic Gardening Fair

Where: Technical Institute for Indoor Gardening, 681 Fourth St. (at Castro), Oakland, 510-891-1557

When: Sat. and Sun., Mar. 5-6, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.

Cost: Free

The rundown: Just like those "tobacco filtration" devices you can purchase at head shops around the country, this weekend's hydroponic gardening fair is not about weed. With advertising that boasts a full line of renewable energy products, sales on bulk soil, and lighting workshops at 11 and 2 each day, this exhibition is trying its darndest to show that hydro gardening isn't just for stoners. So come to Oakland for some great instructional information on how to grow, like, parsley in your closet. There will also be free organic snacks from "Chef Lamundo" (who?), which may be better than the Cheese Whiz and Bacon Bits you were planning to munch on the couch.

New York refugee Jesse Hirsch tweets at @Jesse_Hirsch. Follow SFoodie at @sfoodie, and like us on Facebook.

Keoki Seu/Flickr

One of the happiest little co-ops in the Bay Area.

​BioFuel Oasis may sound like opaque corporate doublespeak (see: Deepwater Horizon), but it's actually one of the happiest little co-ops in the Bay Area. Founded in 2003, this five-person Berkeley operation specializes in making ever-useful biodiesel fuel from recycled vegetable oil. More important for you, oh aspiring DIY-er, is the host of affordable classes BioFuel Oasis is hosting in 2011.

With offerings ranging from Backyard Goats to Sourdough Cultivation, these classes are a hot commodity for anyone interested in city farming and food cultivation. So hot, in fact, that they've been filling up in a Berkeley minute. This weekend's offerings, Backyard Beekeeping and Urban Fruit Trees, are already at capacity* but here is your chance to sign up for future classes before it's too late. Still available:

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Joseph Schell

Pickles from Happy Girl Kitchen Co. at the Eat Real Fest, which drew 110,000 to Oakland for street food and urban homesteading demos.

​Twelve months, ten storylines: It's SFoodie's annual look back at the year in food.

At the far end of the spectrum from street food and fine dining, another trend exploded in the Bay Area in 2010: DIY food and urban homesteading.

One of the biggest evidences of the DIY food movement played out in blogs on a global scale: Tigress' Can Jam encouraged food bloggers everywhere to can a different ingredient every month, and hundreds took the bait, including San Franciscans Cam and Anita at Married ...with Dinner, Paige of Canning with Kids in the South Bay, and Marin-based award-winning jam maker Shae of Hitchhiking to Heaven.

FARMcurious sprang up to outfit DIY enthusiasts.

​Inspired by the likes of Oakland's Novella Carpenter (whose book, Farm City, came out in paperback in May 2010), scads of Bay Area residents took up animal husbandry in their homes. Chickens became all the rage; I can personally think of several friends who added coops to their backyards, including Gudrun of Kitchen Girl Cooks.

Of course this newfound interest created its own little economic bubble, and cottage industries popped up all around the bay. Nicole Kramer launched FARMcurious, a one-stop shop for all things homesteady, and Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper briefly brought beekeeping supplies to the heart of the Mission. Classes in everything from chutney to cheese making became abundant, at venues like 18 Reasons, Urban Kitchen SF, the Institute of Urban Homesteading, BioFuel Oasis, and Happy Girl Kitchen. There was a bumper crop of books from Bay Area writers: Rachel Saunders of Blue Chair Fruit released a hefty tome of jams and preserves; Vanessa Barrington taught us how to make everything D.I.Y. Delicious; and Karen Solomon got picked up for a sequel to her 2008 book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It, due out in early 2011. Oh, and I launched Punk Domestics in July, with an aim to build a curated space for DIY-driven self-publishers everywhere.

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edibleoffice/Flickr

Little City Gardens' Brooke Budner.

​Our favorite morsel from the Web.

My colleague Jonathan Kauffman grilled Off the Grid's Matt Cohen recently about the hard-to-scale barriers for mobile food vendors to get permits in San Francisco.

Things are little better for urban farmers. In the New York Times today, Zusha Elinson tells the tale of Brooke Budner and Caitlyn Galloway, the Little City Gardens farmers who raised 20K on Kickstarter so they could find a bigger patch of land than the Inner Mission backyard they were cultivating. Budner and Galloway now have three-quarters of an acre in the Outer Mission, but here's where things start to stink worse than a decomposing rat in a compost bin: The city's creaky old zoning laws require them to spend thousands to obtain a conditional-use permit before they can sell anything they raise.

As it turns out, San Francisco was sympathetic. The city is rolling out new rules this fall, rules that will let small urban market gardens operate more easily. But while urban farming is a sort of centerpiece of the locavore movement, there are arguments to be made against use of city lots for food production. Elinson:

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Hayes Valley Farm/Flickr

More than 2,500 volunteers have gotten dirty at Hayes Valley Farm.

​To those of us who lived in Hayes Valley while Octavia was transforming from prostitution alley to boulevard, the chained-off lot between Oak and Fell held a peculiar romance. After a decade of neglect, the old Embarcadero Freeway on- and off-ramps had become a thicket of green, a place where you'd hear birdsong and spot wild fennel thrusting through the wires. No matter what kind of nonsense you suspected was taking place out of view, the lot was a welcome spot of wilderness in the heart of the city.

So the transformation of the block from postapocalyptic forest to farm ― Hayes Valley Farm ― made sense. But that didn't prepare those of us who loved the green hills to see them filled with people, with cardboard everywhere, browning ivy on the trees, and no sign of planters, raised beds, or tiny greens.

SFoodie has read about classes and movie nights at the farm, but hasn't read anything about actual vegetables. It took the news of the recent bee slaughter to remind us it was time to check: What exactly was going on here? So, on the six-month anniversary of what the Hayes Valley Farm's organizers call "the cutting of the locks," we took one of its public tours.

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Jonathan K.

Playing farmer, six feet off the ground.

​It doesn't take very long to pick ten pounds of nectarines. In fact, it takes more effort ― self-control, really ― to pick less.

I'd been meaning to go peach and nectarine picking in Brentwood again ever since a scalding afternoon in 2005 that culminated in one perfect nectarine, plucked from the tree and still warm from the sun. I ate the fruit with a vampirish abandon, bent slightly over the ground, my lips and chin and hand and forearm soon sticky with juice. 

So, on Saturday, some friends and I drove east again, using the Harvest Time in Brentwood map to hunt for open U-pick farms. We were fortunate ― the season should be almost over by now, one of the farmers told me, but the cold spring pushed it back.

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Hayes Valley Farm

Just a few of the hundreds of thousands of bees killed Monday night.

​ SFoodie spoke to Peteros this morning about the slaughter and the future of bees at Hayes Valley Farm:

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The apocalypse is coming ― stock up on chickens.

​Feed a family of four on a quarter- acre plot! Earn thousands in half the time a normal job would require!

But wait ― there's more, as the late Billy Mays might have said. Never farmed before? Don't know an udder from a ukulele? Can't tell compost from a camera? Fear not! Just buy a copy of Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre, the brand-new book by Brett L. Markham, self-described advocate of a holistic approach to farming on a small, sustainable scale.

Pitchman tone aside, this book could be a brilliant resource for San Francisco's ever-swelling ranks of newbies hopping on the bale-strewn urban farming bandwagon. Even if your only prior experience is a field trip you took as an environmental science major at some leafy liberal arts institution back East, Markham's volume covers such key aspects of food production as starting seedlings, soil fertility practices, chicken-rearing, and canning.

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Urban Edibles

Say you had a hankering for loquats: You'd know exactly where to score.

​We long for a user-friendly online database to conveniently catalogue everything we like ― pick-up basketball runs, fishing holes, and soda fountains, to list a few ― and we're pleased to learn that, increasingly, what we want actually exists. Here's a food-world example San Franciscans might feel: When they're hard up for fresh figs, eager foragers in Portland, Ore., hop online and zip over to Urban Edibles, a Web project focused on collecting, mapping, and organizing the city's best sources for foraged edibles. From dandelion greens to patches of wild berries to plum trees with untapped bounties, the site reveals the lush array of produce a large city can provide its frugal and resourceful cooks. Along the way, it also reveals and enriches the community of foragers who enthusiastically write in to share their sources. Here in the Bay Area, "wild" dinners and foraging tours are becoming as common as cioppino, and this sounds like a concept in need of expansion. Any takers?