Bayview Greenwaste provides fertile ground for San Francisco’s urban agriculture revolution

Sanjay Bhas and his mulch at Bayview Greenwaste.

Bayview mulch has been a boon for private backyard gardens, too.

By Matt Baume
Grist
22 Feb. 2011

Excerpt:

Sanjay Bhas founded Bayview Greenwaste in 1998. The company, located on the city’s southern waterfront, collects plant waste — for a fee — and then grinds the organic matter into mulch that it gives away for free to anyone who wants it. Nonprofits, municipalities, private citizens, schools, and power plants (which burn organic matter instead of coal) count themselves among the company’s beneficiaries.

At Hayes Valley Farm, Bayview’s raw material was essential. Volunteers began by laying down a layer of cardboard, followed by ground-up organic matter, a process known as sheet-mulching. “As far as I know, it’s the largest sheet-mulching project ever done,” said David Cody, one of the Hayes Valley Farm’s founders. “It takes a forest hundreds of years to make an inch of topsoil. Hayes Valley Farm will make two feet of topsoil in less than five years.”

Read the complete article here.