Guest: Adam Weisberg

Our guest Adam Weisberg is Executive Director of Urban Adamah, located on the west side of Berkeley on 6th Street. It’s located in a neighborhood that contains a Whole Foods, car mechanics, a skate park, a Kosher winery, and UC Berkeley’s family housing all within three blocks of Urban Adamah and its welcoming gates and well-tended paths that lead through edible plantings, chickens, goats, and beehives. It is a fitting location for the intersectional approach of Urban Adamah’s function as a farm and community center that does outreach in myriad ways to support and sustain the world. 

I also have to say it is one of the most beautiful urban farms I’ve ever visited, one filled with peace and a feeling of balance. As one of their missions, Urban Adamah produces and donates over two hundred fifty pounds of produce each month for those who are food insecure. They put on educational programming now available online. And more to the point, Urban Adamah is being thoughtful about how to better the world in the midst of a pandemic. 

In this episode, Adam and I discuss Urban Adamah’s values and missions surrounding Jewish traditions, social action, sustainable agriculture, and mindfulness. We segued, too, into Biblical stories pertaining to gardens and new beginnings in the context of COVID, and the ways in which the responsibility of nurturing plants sustains both the world and our own bodies. I could have talked with Adam for hours--and I learned so much about the forms of agency urban farms and gardening provide. We’re also both literature majors, so you get to see us geeking out on metaphors, too, as we discussed slowing down and the archetype of new beginnings that gardens provide.

I hope you enjoy his story and if and when you do, go check out Urban Adamah. 

Adam Weisberg is the Executive Director at Urban Adamah. Prior to this Adam was the Diller Teen Initiatives Director and served as Camp Tawonga’s Executive Director from 2008-2011 and as Berkeley Hillel’s Executive Director from 2000-2008. Additionally, Adam has worked in a variety of roles in the Jewish community including work with the Council of Jewish Federations in New York, the Jewish Agency in Israel, and two years working with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Bulgaria. Adam has served as a coach/mentor for young professionals through Hillel, Repair the World, the iCenter, BBYO, and the REALITY Check program, a project of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Philanthropic Network.

Guest: Anna Mudd
I met Anna Mudd via Instagram and forged a friendship before I realized she was grafting the very queens that end up in my hive. Eventually, I got to meet her in real life at the apiary where she works, from where I bought my hive. 

Anna Mudd is a queen bee grafter. 

The queen bee of a hive is essentially the mother. And there can only be one mother. If two queen bees hatch simultaneously, they will fight to the death until one remains. 

Every bee colony is as dependent on the queen as much as the queen is dependent on the colony. But if she fails, the colony becomes fragile. And sometimes, a beekeeper finds themselves needing a new queen. Or not able to wait until the colony raises a new one.

And here is where people like Anna Mudd step in--people whose job it is to raise queen bees. Multiple queen bees. Hundreds of queen bees, in a process that manipulates the colony into raising more queen bees than they would otherwise make. 

Using special frames--and I’ll segue here. A frame is a reproduction of a natural bee colony structure where under natural circumstances they draw out honeycomb and beekeepers use this natural process and map it onto a structural element made out of wood or plastic that can can fit into a man-made hive box. This is called a frame and bees draw out honeycomb on it. The frame can then be removed for inspection or honey extraction. 

These special frames have multiple pre-manufactured cells that resemble the shape of a queen cell. When they are filled with young larvae and moved into a hive, the shape of the cells signal to the worker bees that the larvae within are meant to be queens. And the workers, in turn, will feed the larvae royal jelly throughout development so that they mature into queen bees instead of worker bees. And then they cap the cells with beeswax. About one week later, the queen bees will emerge. 

Raising queen bees requires not only a steady hand but an acute awareness of time, making sure to remove the frame of multiple queen cells before hatching so that they can then be nurtured separately for sale. 

Anna works for Golden West Bees, run by Eric Oliver. Their queen bees are sold all over California and beyond.

Her work is, to say the least, detailed. She identifies and then moves tiny 3-day old larvae, smaller than a grain of rice by hand and, as you’ll learn, by mouth, into these manufactured queen cups. Her job too, is seasonal--queen bees are not raised year-round, they’re raised mostly during Spring due to the limits of what constitutes good mating weather: temperatures in the 70s and 80s. And we talk a little about what it means to be a seasonal worker and why Anna chooses to do what she calls “gig work.”

You’ll also hear Anna mention Randy Oliver--Eric’s father, who founded the business and now does full-time bee research. Randy Oliver is a respected bee researcher who publishes monthly articles in American Bee Journaland is a popular speaker when it comes to bee biology and how to help bee colonies fight varroa mites. 

Read more show notes at christinehlee.com/frontyardpolitics. 

Bio:
Anna Mudd (she/her) lives on unceded Nisenan land, known as Grass Valley, CA. She is pursuing licensure as an electrician and filling her pantry with local and foraged home-canned foods, herbs, and spices. Find her art and anti-capitalist living on Instagram @muddhands.

Guest: Jeffrey Hickey
Jeffrey Hickey is a medical cannabis grower and cannabis educator whose blog My 2020 Isolation Grow is featured on Oaksterdam University’s website. Jeffrey is also a terrific gardener. In this episode, we talk about medical cannabis, the horror of chronic illness, the health system, and overcoming helplessness. Because in the end, growing medical cannabis not only helped Jeffrey’s wife but helped him overcome helplessness.

This is Jeffrey’s story.

Learn more:
Jeffrey Hickey’s My 2020 Isolation Grow Blog
Oaksterdam University

Dustin Schell and Alexander Chee were longtime residents of New York City who recently found an opportunity to fulfill their dreams of full-scale gardening. Dustin previously had a community garden plot the size of a grave in New York City. It was located in the Clinton Community Garden in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, where he gardened for over twenty years.   

Then they moved to rural Vermont in 2016 and bought a home there in the fall of 2019. Dustin and Alex started their new garden in the midst of a pandemic in their first year as homeowners. They talk about starting with what they had--and around obstacles, which include getting sick in the early weeks of the COVID pandemic. Let's take a listen to hear about how they're enjoying their new space.

Dustin Schell studied Theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Circle in the Square Theater School In New York City. His varied career includes work as an actor, filmmaker, screenwriter, and most recently, a ski instructor at the Dartmouth Skiway. He splits his time between NYC and Vermont.

Alexander Chee is the author of the novels Edinburgh and The Queen of the Night, and the essay collection How To Write An Autobiographical Novel. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and an editor at large at VQR. His essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Out, among others. He is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

Learn more and follow:
Still Queer Instagram
Still Queer Tiny Letter
Dustin Schell's Instagram
Alexander Chee's Instagram and Twitter

Kanchan Dawn Hunter is co-director of the Spiral Gardens Community Food Security Project, which operates as a nursery, a community garden, a foodshed, and an education resource that welcomes anyone and all in the community to participate. 

As a single Black mother and farmer, she has learned about legacy and the importance of nurturing that connection to land early on in life. She shares with us her own relationship history with the land, notably “making room where she could” to grow what she could and the journey she has taken--which ultimately took the form of building a ladder behind her in the form of Spiral Gardens, which she helped found in the late 1990s.

Learn more:
Spiral Gardens

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Guest: Doug Jones
Doug Jones is one of my mentors–he’s my grandmaster at his dojo, DJ’s Martial Arts, located on MacArthur Boulevard in Oakland’s Laurel District. He is also a horseman and rancher.

With the onset of the pandemic, he has transformed his roles as kung-fu master, teacher, and cowboy into a symposium and sanctuary in the Oakland hills.

I asked him how his identities intersect. His response is a story that illustrates why I am so glad he is in my life and why I am so privileged to have him as a guide.

Learn more about Doug Jones:
DJ’s Martial Arts and Fitness
Doug Jones Kungfu Cowboy

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Guest: Kristyn Leach
Kristyn Leach is a small commercial farmer located in Winters, California. At Namu Farm, she specializes in Korean and Asian produce and produces seeds for Kitazawa seeds. We talk about her journey through farming and seed keeping and how it informs her life–and how her life has informed her work.

Learn more:
Namu Gaji Restaurant

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Instagram

Guest Yolanda Burrell is/was the owner of Pollinate Farm and Garden in Oakland. It has been one of my happy places, not the least of which is due to Yolanda’s positive and warm energy. She built Pollinate to create a community and to recreate the memory of her childhood feed store, where people assembled not only to purchase goods but to share knowledge. Pollinate is the culmination of her dream. But then the pandemic happened. 

Find out what happened and what happens next.

Learn more:
Pollinate Farm and Garden

Follow Pollinate Farm:
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At my urban farm, I have gathered tomatoes and beans alongside guavas and pluerries. I’ve learned about permaculture and Korean natural farming and the ways in which farming is about more than gardening, but about an understanding about the ecosystem and maximizing production. I’ve also gathered many lessons along the way, some of which I’ve documented in my Backyard Politics column; my garden has helped me build a framework for understanding my divorce, for rebuilding my life, and for collaboration. 

Along the way, I also found myself asking more and more questions, ones that I couldn’t answer as I began to question more and more the larger ecosystem of farming and community. So I began asking my community for advice and insights. And then I realized–why not share this with others? Why not reveal my learning process to the general public? And dear friends, that is how Frontyard Politics was born.

In this podcast, I hope you learn alongside me as I ask questions of our guests. We will tackle topics from seed keeping and what it is we select in what we grow to matriarchy and beekeeping. We will investigate identity politics in our actions and our relationship to the land as stewards. 

In turn, too–I hope you enjoy our guests and the wisdom they offer. 

If you’d like a little more background on the springboard for this podcast, check out my column at Catapult called Backyard Politics.