How to Grow More Vegetables

high quality.
In 1971, Larry White, Director of the Nature and
Science Department for the City of Palo Alto, invited
Stephen Kafka, Senior Apprentice at the university’s
garden, to give a four-hour class on the
biodynamic/French intensive method gardening.
Members from a local, young nonproEt environmental
research and education organization, Ecology Action,
attended the class and recognized that the time was ripe:
the city had made land available to the public for
gardening two years before, citizens were interested in
learning how to grow food and garden, and they were
inspired by the local Eden that had been created at the
university. Aside from a two-year apprentice program at
Santa Cruz and periodic classes given by Alan Chadwick
or Stephen Kafka, training in Biointensive was not
available to the public. Neither detailed public classes
nor yield research were being conducted regularly
anywhere. In January 1972, the board of directors
approved a project that would include a research garden
(the Common Ground Garden) to teach regular classes;
collect data on the reportedly high yields by the
environmentally sound Biointensive method; make land
available for gardening to additional Midpeninsula
residents; and publish information on the method’s
techniques.
Instructed by Alan Chadwick and Stephen Kafka,
Ecology Action members began teaching their own
classes in the spring of 1972 on a 3¾-acre plot belonging