Radio Acres Farm Alternative Gift Sale

Vendor FAQs

What kind of vendors are you looking for?

Vendors who make and sell their own original, handmade craft products or artisan food items are invited to apply. You must be present at your booth on the day of the sale. We are not looking for Tupperware-type products or of the mass-produced nature.

How can I apply?

Fill out the form below and send an email with pictures of your products to radioacresfarm@gmail.com. We will respond within a week.

General Info

Booths will be set up outside throughout the farm, and will consist of a 4x8 size table. Smaller or larger tables available on request. No splitting booths please. 

Vendor Fee

The fee for a booth is 10% of your total revenue from the event. 

Farmers Market and workshop

Come visit us at the Southeast Farmers Market tonight at its new location!  Market St., JUST WEST of Euclid on the south side of the street.  Can't miss us!  We will be hosting a winter seed planting workshop from 3:30-5:30, you get to go home with your very own seeds, ready to grow!  We'd love to see you there.

Coastal Clean-up!

There's nothing like getting up early, breathing in the fresh morning air, and sitting in a lawn chair in front of a huge dumpster. That's what we here at Radio Acres like to do to keep our canyons (and thus, our oceans) clean. Kim and Groundworks SD are hosting sites in Shelltown and at the Earth Lab where the neighborhood can drop off any trash they have.
We at Radio know nothing of miscellaneous yard waste, building supplies, old appliances, and junk that builds up in the small hiding places around the farm. (*that is a lie.) No, we are NOT hoarders. I promise. Free garbage dumping is a pretty awesome thing, especially when it can free up extra space around the farm, and keep it out of the canyons (where we often have to maneuver around mattress, seats out of old cars, furniture,  and God only knows what else wrapped in garbage bags and smelling like death.)
So, if you live in the area and have some trash to unload, come and hang out with us!
Dump spots are at:
Boston and 40th
38th and Z St.
Alpha St and 38th
Alpha St. And 41st
and at the Earth Lab

Victory Workshop!

Just an FYI to anyone interested, RADIO ACRES FARM will officially be collaborating with Victory Gardens San Diego  to offer a mini-workshop on how-to backyard chicken =)  It will be at 5:00, this friday at the farmers market.  The People's Produce Project Farmers Market runs from 2:00 to 7:00 pm every friday on Euclid, just north of Market.  Follow the signage...

Southeast San Diego Farmers Market

check out this link to take you to the website!  

The peoples produce project seems pretty cool.

We took the kiddos to the local farmers market this past friday.  I hate to admit that it was the FIRST time I'd been there!  Jeremy took the kids once before, and he said that unfortunately this go-around was even smaller than the last time.  We did go toward the end of the time-frame (2-7 officially,we showed up at 6:30) but there were only a handful of vendors and the few that were there were starting to pack up.  We met a lovely woman from Somalia who had some awesome fusion-African food that incorporated tastes from a few different regions.  She and her daughter recently started this food business and they were incredibly kind-hearted folks with some delicious sambussas and alicha.

Jeremy had apparently done some research and told me that this is not the first market they have attempted in the Southeast region of San Diego.  Unfortunately none of the past markets has succeeded.  It's not hard to see this one teetering on the verge of oblivion, but I hope that we can rally our neighbors enough to show some support and stoke the embers.  A thriving outdoor market in this part of the city could be such a blessing to a blighted community.  It would be a fantastic way for neighbors to meet each other and build community, as well as supporting local businesses and farmers.  It could change the health of the community and people, from the inside out.  It's no secret that lower income parts of town also tend to struggle the most with health issues and healthy eating habits, so it would be the perfect way to reach out to this demographic and educate people.

Some other really exciting potential is that many people in this area have a good amount of land.  We were fortunate enough to meet the market manager, Diane, and she was mentioning that they are trying to educate the people in the community in growing their own food and bringing it into the market to sell.  With something like this, it could bring money directly back into our immediate community and help people from so many different directions.  It feels like a regression back to the old world, where people would (and still do, in some parts of the world) walk their goods to the market to barter and sell within their immediate community.  It's something we've been lacking in our society since our grandparents era, maybe we've never even had it.  Something of romanticism that reminds us of foreign countries or a scene out of a movie.

This Friday we will again be picking up some delicious African food from this market.  It would be awesome to see some of you there, picking up some produce or sharing dinner with us.  I promise that it won't have all of the fancy booths that the Hillcrest market has, but you will know that you are doing something good to contribute to a community that could really use your support.  Who knows, you may even catch a glimpse of that spark and know that over time the flames will grow because of you.

Fossils!

Who knew that Encanto is a rich bank of Pliocene fossils?  Yep, according to the San Diego Natural History Museum, San Diego has many layers of deposits from different epochs, ranging from the Pleistocene Linda Vista and Bay Point Deposits (you can get information here) to the  Santiago Peak Volcanics which, according to the SDSU Geology website linked above, contain fossils from the late Jurassic period!  By and large, most of the fossils that are in abundance are from the late Pliocene era through the Pleistocene age.  Here is a map of the San Diego Formation, alà the SDSU website:

For those with limited knowledge, (ahem, mostly everyone, unless you happen to stumble across fossils in your yard and take an interest...) Pleistocene fossils range from 2.5 million to 12,000 years old or so and encompass things that were around along with humans, such as saber toothed cats and mammoths.  Those are found throughout San Diego County.  I won't get into the names of all the places or deposits, but you can find good information at the Natural History Museum and their website (click the "research" tab), along with a map at the SDSU website linked above.  The Pliocene epoch contains fossils that are 5.3 million years old to about 2.5 million or so (pre-man).  This is the formation that runs through our backyard, and being in such close proximity to the ocean it makes sense that the formation that San Diego has is a marine deposit.  As random luck would have it, Jeremy was digging a hole to plant a shrub when he stumbled upon this:

Next thing you know, we have a group of tiny paleontologists excavating through our yard and tediously trying to free their treasures from the sandstone-cement.  We found a serious bed of shells and sand dollars, and when we took them to the Natural History Museum the on-site paleontologist told us that we could possibly find sharks teeth, whale bones, and ancient walrus bones!  Apparently what we found is from the more recent Pliocene, roughly 2.5 to 3 million years old.  Pretty cool!

It made me realize that we are, all in all, sitting on top of a huge bed of our ancient past.  Things like this exist everywhere and random luck sometimes makes it more obvious.  All of the soil we sit upon or till is the same soil that has been here since before the dinosaurs and by tectonic upheavals the earth sometimes jumbles up the nice, neat layers of natural sedimentation.  It makes you realize how small you really are, what a tiny blip we are on the radar of geologic time.  I know this is all stuff we learned in grade school, and so is life.  People can tell us something a million times.  We can hear it and memorize it and repeat it by heart, but sometimes it is a small thing thrown in your face that really gives you that "aha!" moment, that epiphany.  Keep on digging!

(And a few books that look pretty interesting, I've been searching for a good on on local fossils and geology)

Canyonlands

I love our canyons. You may not know that San Diego is full of secret canyons that allows one to go on a bona fide hike in the middle of the city... but it is!

We love to take early (ish) morning walks, afternoon strolls, weekend adventures, whatever. There are rambling trails, grasslands, palm trees, chollas, and often, a lot of trash. Our canyon is right in-between Market Street and 60th. It's lined on both sides by houses, and busy roads, but in the middle it's a quiet (relatively) paradise.

Our dogs love it too. They are sheep dogs through and through, and at their best when they're bounding through the tall grass. Here's are two videos to illustrate.

We get the best of many worlds here in San Diego. The hills, the sun, the beach. Mountains if you go out east far enough. The border a few exits down. It's a meeting of many wonderful worlds.

However, if you find a surfer that has lost their dogs' leash, this is what you get... wandering the canyons of North Encanto.

location, location, location!

People are often confused about where exactly we live.  The assumption is often made that since we have a little bit of land, we must be way out east and they tend to be thrown off a little when I tell them we are only about 5 miles from downtown.  One of the biggest reasons that we all kind of made a jump for it and picked up this property was because of its proximity to everything.  We are definitely within San Diego City limits.  As said before, it's about 5 miles from downtown and about a 10 minute drive to the beach.  As the crow flies, I reckon we are about 12 miles north of the Mexican border, which is crazy to think about!  Here is a map, I circled Encanto with a red oval.

Now, another interesting point to make about this property that we chose is that it is in Southeast San Diego.  This is interesting because, according the the gang series on NPR, this is the part of San Diego with the highest amount of gang activity in the region.  Here is a link to that map.
http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/oct/06/north-county-comes-grips-gang-problems/
I know that a lot of people may not have chosen, necessarily, to live in this part of town.  Another big part of our hope and dream is that we can really be a place in the community where people can convene, where we can come together for dialogue and be a very fruitful place in THIS community.  Hopefully, one day, people will see this as a shiny spot in an awesome community with a hugely diverse range of people.  We have already met a wide range of amazing people that we can call our neighbors, and it seems - so far - like just the right fit.

A wet fall in San Diego

this last picture is a small creek that developed in the backyard after one of the heavier rainstorms.