Yesterday saw EBPI’s urban farms crew pay a visit to SOL in Fruitvale, Oakland. Near the corner of 23rd and International, right by the rumblings of Bart, SOL (Sustaining Ourselves Locally) is a co-op of 9 people and their awesome backyard garden. An old storefront opens up to a large living room with a rope swing and a ping-pong table, with rooms upstairs and the garden in the back.

At 5,000 square feet, the backyard is slightly smaller than Jim Montgomery’s but actually feels somewhat bigger. There are fruits, vegetables, bees, and a chicken coop, a small greenhouse, and various ornamental bicycle wheels and statuettes. Schoolkids come often on field trips to learn about gardening and sustainability, and there is an intern program, run by Deepa Iyer, consisting of seven teenagers from local high schools who come to water, dig, harvest, plant, care for the chickens, run the compost, and learn other aspects of running a small farm.

We interviewed Deepa to start out and she enlightened us about her views on food, sustainability, living communally, and the role of gardening and nutrition in education. At SOL, she and her housemates vow to live a life that is not destructive - they ride bikes, recycle their water, compost, grow food, and buy local and organic. She was inspired to start SOL for various reasons, including the fact that she believes kids need to be raised knowing where their food comes from, how to grow it, and how to form a connection with the production of food. “People have less chances to change without a connection to nature,” she says.

When she and two friends initially got the idea for SOL five years ago, they were excited about starting a rooftop garden. But as their research was revealing that most rooftops are not structurally capable of supporting a garden, they came upon this spot in Fruitvale that had a huge backyard. Back then, it was mostly an overgrown lot where people threw their trash, but now it’s a fully functioning urban garden that sustains food, animals, and provides education - and employment and job skills - for local kids.

The interns arrived at 2, and we scrambled around through tight spaces with cameras and wires and boom mics causing untold logistical troubles, following them as they picked carrots and then turned them into a carrot cake with the help of Rachel, another SOL resident and co-head of the intern program. They tried to bake the cake in the solar oven, but soon realized there wasn’t enough direct sunlight, and transferred it to the gas oven indoors.

We later headed over to the Fruitvale Farmer’s Market by the Bart station, where Deepa and two interns were selling herbs and answering peoples’ questions about SOL. We lucked into a nice shot of a woman coming up and saying all the right things - “I want to garden, but I don’t know anything about it!” - and the SOL folk explaining how to care for the herbs. Money! We got a bit hassled by a security guard, but Natalie the Intern took swift care of it.

A good day of shooting, to be sure. Where this fits into the larger scene, and to our film, remains to be seen, but this is as good an example as any of folks living their ideals and who seem to have a rational and level-headed view of their place in the world. Deepa feels they are part of a transformative food movement, in a very slow, grassroots way. She personally is not too “into policy,” as she says; “I’d rather play with kids in the garden.” But she believes big movements get their fuel from smaller ones, and as long as we raise kids knowing about food and health and sustainability, giving them a connection to the earth and a sense of responsibility about their place on it, later some of those kids will grow up to be policy-makers who can actually affect the world in larger and more meaningful ways.

She knows there are shady dealings going on in the higher levels of environmental policy, but you have to take the bad with the good, she says. At least there are governmental positions that are there to deal with this stuff. And in the end, she admitted, she doesn’t know if the US will ever be able to transition to a more sustainable food-producing model. But she can attack the problem at a local level, and that’s what she’s doing.

Deepa and Adam laugh over the 47th Bart train to pass by, causing her to stop and repeat the last line. Perhaps we should be making a movie about suburban farms.