HVF Harvest Festival

This weekend I attended the Hayes Valley Farm Harvest Festival. It was a beautiful day and the event was very successful. Many people came to visit the farm. There were activities set up for children and adults, from face-painting to a puppet show. There were also farm tours available and a pumpkin patch where there were pumpkins sold to raise money for the farm.

It was such a great event and the energy level was high. There was live music and DJ music which could be heard all through the Hayes Valley neighborhood.

It was a perfect opportunity for me to walk around, talk to people in attendance and take some photos of the event and the farm.

I talked extensively with Ron Stanford, the architect involved in the New Buchanan Commons (NBC) project. He is on my panel of experts and though I'd exchanged many emails with him and attended a skype meeting with him, I had not yet met him in person.

I also met Zoey Kroll, another member of the NBC team, and chatted a bit with Margaretha, who I had met before and who is also on my panel of experts.

I got a lot of great information from Ron on the next steps, in addition to our first steps on the ground at NBC. It is projected that physical work will begin at NBC around the first of the year (2012). I also spoke to him about strategies for interviewing residents. He strongly discourages door-to-door interviews for a variety of reasons, so we discussed attending neighborhood association meetings and other strategies.

Overall, it was a lovely day at the farm and I am very much looking forward to increasing my involvement in the NBC project.