Winnowing fava beans in July from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.

Many of you know that I have been haunting Tierra Vegetables for over a year now, beginning with the handoff of my ten Peruvian bean seeds and continuing through harvest, planting, harvest again… Within the larger project of a movie about fava beans are contained a number of farm life vignettes, including this one about winnowing. Winnowing is the process of removing the bean husk from the dry beans (a process I read about as a kid scouring novels about life in the Old Days, but had never seen).

The amount of effort it takes small farmers to get their food to market is often greater than the effort expended by larger farmers, because of economies of scale. However, what is sacrificed in convenience is more than made up for by local expertise in growing, knowledge of human-sized time and energy saving techniques (compared with industrial-sized ones) and extensive variety of crops. The more time I spend around Tierra Vegetables the more I am impressed with the size of their vegetables, the flavor and quality, and their ability to feed all of us in a sustainable manner. Even the fan used in this vertical winnower is powered by solar panels on the farm stand roof.

I look forward to every trip I make to Santa Rosa to really see where my food is from, who is getting it to me, and how they do it.

Tierra Farms greenhouse, Healdsburg, Ca.

Last weekend I had the great pleasure of attending the Tierra Vegetables greenhouse-warming. All my favorite Tierra characters were there—Lee and the dogs, Zeni, Erica, Wayne and Evie (and their dogs), and a bunch of Tierra regulars I’d seen before. I also met Montana Hartley, greenhouse builder extraordinaire, and his two lovely daughters. I filmed Montana waxing poetic about the making-of and captured him quoting a line from a Kurosawa film he’d seen when he was a kid. While I was there I went down to look at the smoker, where all the delicious Chipotle peppers are cured (I ate some tonight in the form of Chipotle Hot Sauce No.2), and I saw a huge hummingbird-feeding operation and got some fabulous footage of the hummers at the troughs.

Lee's Shetland sheep—second oldest flock in the country.

As for the greenhouse itself, it is a wonderful piece of low-budget craftsmanship. The Tierra greenhouse has the look of a conservatory, or a church, but it is quite modern and was built on a shoestring. There are several great innovations, some very typical for greenhouses, like rolling tables you can push out of your way while watering that make great use of every warm inch of space. Then there are the rainwater caches that collect water coming from the roof and drain into big fifty-gallon drums connected by pipes. Rainwater is free, it’s superior to mineral-rich well water, and in the big barrels below the tables it serves as a thermal mass to keep young seedlings warm at night. The greenhouse also looks as though it were made out of glass, but it’s actually polycarbonate sheets, which withstand impact, insulate and are somewhat flexible. There’s also a wood stove (yet to have a chimney) and a water heater that runs hot water under the seed tables for some extra warmth when it’s time to coax little cotyledons out of their shells. To top it all off (ha, ha), there’s a spire on the top of the building! It’s a little thing, but that small detail is what  brings to mind grander buildings (and reminds me of the Agia Sophia, my favorite-ever house of worship).

Greenhouse built by Montana Hartley; dad, sculptor, builder, flower-seller.

After my Tierra tour, Erica led me down Chalk Hill Road to Pleasant Avenue to see Montana’s flower-stand operation and Tierra’s sister greenhouse. As a builder, Montana is really top notch in the imagination department. Where Tierra’s greenhouse is a conservatory, the Hartley greenhouse is more like a mosque. He writes, “I try and save all of the odd shaped pieces that pile up behind the band saw.. I often fret over what is firewood and what is precious fodder for our next project. The girls and I have endless fun with these pieces. The arched doors on the greenhouse are a example of what can be made from end cuts.”

Arched greenhouse doors by Montana Hartley

Steve Sando at his place surrounded by 50 lb. bags of beans.

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo beans and poking around in his bean packing plant. A lovelier industrial space is hard to be found—natural light, music, and a gorgeous collection of Mexican movie posters from the Cold War era all contribute to a warm place to be. We talked about many aspects of beans, but my favorite (and the reason I was there) was to talk about heirloom beans and why seed diversity is such an interesting topic. I’ve yet to assemble the video, though I have at least got it into the computer and I am greatly looking forward to poring over it all. One tidbit I remember well is that Tepary beans (small, hearty beans, drought-tolerant plants) are the only beans that are originally from the contiguous U.S.

At Rancho Gordo I also got advised on where to get a burrito for lunch and I have been craving that burrito ever since. However, eating it while driving was rather foolish.

Peruvian bean descendants.

Last week I met with the Director of Filmmaker Services for the SF Film Society, Michele Turnure-Saleo, to talk a bit about the rough draft of the fiscal sponsorship application that I cobbled together.

A rough draft is a really good exercise, and serves as a starting point from which discussion and suggestions can branch from. As I put together the draft I was pulled in a million different directions—I so much want to go back to Perú and wanted to fit that into the grant. However after much consideration I am going to focus on a movie I can make near me in northern California, which is the movie that I have been filming for over a year about ten fava beans I brought back from the Andes. Because of the rough draft exercise I now have a working title for the bean film: Habas. Habas is what the beans are called in Perú, and is the only name I knew them by until farmers here confirmed they were fava beans.

As for the critique of my rough draft:

My logline was voted ‘too dry’. For those of you who might not know, a logline is the subtitle of a film. Currently it is “ten fava beans and their genetic significance”. We’re supposed to go for more ‘ten fava beans’ and less ‘genetic significance’.

The background section was a little rocky, though there are nuggets of good stuff. The important thing in this film seems to be to keep it contemporary—history is all well and good but ‘what does it mean for us now’ should be more of the focus. In the new version I will talk more about crop diversity, seed banks, what is growing now (12 crops account for 80% of the world’s crop tonnage—name the crops), farmer’s markets, seed companies—that kind of thing.

My synopsis was just Okay. I am to rewrite it after I tackle the Treatment, which I admit I left totally blank. I don’t know what a treatment looks like, not coming from a film background. Michele says, “Beginning, Middle, End.” I’m to balance the whimsy of my ten bean crusade with the weight of our loss of crop diversity and other more serious subjects.

Target audience—I thought it wasn’t specific enough, but it turns out I need something in there about the broader appeal of the subject. Yeah! Distribution and marketing, my funding plan, current status and timeline should all be prose rather than lists. Go for specialty niche film fests and audiences, use words like “we will, we intend to, we will apply to…” For the timeline write a sentence or two about the status and then a list of dates and action items. This I’m very much looking forward to. Lists! They are the way to go.

In the key personnel category, I am underselling myself. Gah. I have to be the Head of something and nothing need be chronological. And all the people who are working on this with me—however far in the future that may seem—I’m hitting you all up for equally awesome bios.

In Search of Soil preview from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.

This is somewhat outdated—not that I don’t love it, but it’s a bit on the old side (June ’07? where does the time go?). When I started making this documentary I promised myself to stick with it. I said, “This project may take ten years!” So far it’s been five, and I’m slowly but surely acquiring the skills I’ll need to make something worth watching. If you have any thoughts after seeing the preview I’m all ears, and very much grateful for the feedback. Trudging onward!

I recently attended the SFFS Fiscal Sponsorship Orientation, and of all the SF Film Society classes I’ve attended, this one left me feeling the most energized and hopeful by far. The classes are taught by Michele Turnure-Saleo, who is the Director of Filmmaker Services and simultaneously all-business and approachable. At the Fiscal Sponsorship Orientation we covered what it takes to receive sponsorship, which will allow donors to receive tax credit through the SFFS 501(c)3 nonprofit status. The application is vast and we learned almost immediately that it will likely be rejected for our first 1-4 attempts. In a way, I find this oddly comforting—if I am bound to be rejected it also means that I am bound to be cajoled/assisted in improving my application and I know that I can use all the cajoling I can get.

Since taking the class, my next step is to apply for sponsorship. To begin that process I’ve scored a meeting with Michele herself at the end of this month. I’m trying now to prepare ahead of time. What I need to gather in less than a week are very solid first drafts of my logline (a short and sweet summary); some background info (should be academic); a synopsis that leaves you wanting more and includes briefly information like: it’s a documentary/ arc of story/ stakes/ characters/ issues; a treatment (gulp—this is supposed to be 2-5 pages long), thoughts on my target audience (specific as possible); distribution strategy (including social media, education use, etc); my funding plan; my current status; timeline for completion; key personnel; and last but not least, my budget summary and detailed breakdown, which should be a road map that is easy to read and a sort of $ narrative all of its own.

Okay, deep breath, this is just a first draft…

Cattle Branding Ceremony, Pampachiri, Peru from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.

For your viewing pleasure I have put a very simple video of a cattle branding ceremony up on vimeo. This is very much an anthropological experiment—there are so many records of events that Hannah and I filmed when we were in Peru that don’t really fit into any specific narrative arc but are enlightening simply in how different they are from life in the U.S. I also feel that this kind of minimal editing fulfills some of the promise of the original Seedling Project proposal, which was to record methods of Andean farming before they are lost. When I wrote that proposal I thought I’d come back with a tidy list of how-to advice on terrace farming like the Incas did it. Once I was in Peru I could see that individual tips and tricks of farming (start your plowing on the outside of the terrace and work your way in, for example) are really quite useless unless taken as only a part of the whole. How different life is there! I could not expect us here in California to elect three water mayors per town (every year) and for them to run along the canals every August to see that they are in good condition. Would you dig up a bottle of homemade hooch from last year and drink it down though it has a little dirt in it, and bury a new bottle along with a few coca leaves and a prayer for a good harvest? I suppose if you are reading this blog you just might.

Bare root now and reap the benefit later... apples.

This is the month for pruning and for reading seed catalogs—armchair gardening. My current favorite catalog is The Natural Gardening Company‘s comparatively thin but well-curated missive from Petaluma, California (it’s local for me, that’s part of why I love it). I also subscribe to Johnny’s Selected Seeds because my dad always did, and Seeds of Change because it’s gorgeous and it’s a powerful good idea.

But really what I want to recommend is that you buy a book about your local gardening, and for Northern California I love Katherine Grace Endicott’s Northern California Gardening; a month-by-month guide. Whenever I look out my window and I’m not sure of what I should be doing next (and I can’t remember which chores Sara Winge, my gardening mentor, would give me this time of year) I turn here. This is where I first learned of bare root plants and I love the idea so much I think about it all year. Winter is when plants are dug up that are dormant and they are sold without soil—they’re easier to handle and therefore less expensive. Think of apples, pears, roses, vines, shade trees, berries, rhubarb, artichokes! And if you plant them now they will be in a good position to make the most of the slowly shifting temperatures and transition strongly toward big bushy joyous bounty come spring and summer.

Danzante from The Seedling Project on Vimeo.

This is a video I made for a post that my good friend Meara O’Reilly wrote for the SF MoMA blog a while ago. I’ve partially edited a longer cut with more dancing, but I’m having a hard time deciding how long each cut should be, and what to do about jumps when I cut between scissor dancer clips. There isn’t really enough of a story about any of the dancers. When we were in Peru we were thinking mostly of agriculture and not dancing so we just kind of blindly (though enthusiastically) archived this. Looking back at it, this is one of the easiest indicators of how different and isolated the Andes are from western culture. Though there’s clearly break dancing moves sometimes! And you can watch loads of it on youtube (search: danzante)!

For example:

And because I’m starting to reminisce, here is ONE more. This is a song. I’d never heard these ladies before, but I’ve been to Puquio and when I go back to Peru I will most certainly be passing through Puquio on my way to Andamarca. And eating Peruvian porridge in the market. And having one last slice of pizza. This type of music is de rigeur in the highlands—playing in every combi van, bus, and restaurant.

Fields planted in the Systema Laymi, a system of farming in the highlands of Peru.

This was a page hidden like an easter egg on our first website. It’s always been one of my favorite images.

About our logo. We took the shape from a photo of a mountainside in production of vegetables using the Laymi system. Sistema Laymi dictates that land be used two years in a row followed by a rest of at least seven years (customarily a rest of 8-20 years). Potato is planted the first year, and then any number of other tubers are grown. It was recently discovered by agronomists that potato pests do not live in the soil longer than seven years, an example of the innate logic of local custom. Anyway, the shapes on the side of the mountains seem to us a bit like modern art—oh so Rothko.

Nuestro logo es la forma del cerro que producen verduras utilizando sistema Laymi. El sistema Laymi estipula que la tierra debe ser usada por dos años, seguidos por siete años de descanso (usualmente se la deja descansar por 8 a 20 años). Se siembra papa el primer año y luego se sigue con otros tubérculos. Los agronomos han discubierto recientemente que las plagas de la papa no viven en el suelo por más de siete años, un ejemplo de la lógica innata de las costumbres locales. Las formas al lado de los cerros nos parecen como arte moderna—tanto Rothko.