Why Am I Like This
Plant Anarchy & composting toilets
I have been remembering my gardening origin story - the very first farm I WWOOFed on about a dozen years ago or so, which really broke open the borders in my brain about what kind of lives I believed to be possible and even desireable. I realized that the effects of that experience are still unfolding in the way I garden and live and dream.
Rahane Farm1 is outside Hood River, Oregon, a drive into the forested middle of nowhere until you see the postcard-perfect view of Mount Hood and a couple acres of fields carved out of the woods. A house sits built into the side of the hill. Dan and Aera live in the lower level, whose outer walls are composed of giant windows to receive the maximum heat of the sun. Smaller treehouses and lean-tos are scattered in the trees, some lived in and some empty. We saw about a dozen or so folks other people staying on the property, who all seemed to be going about their own tasks for the most part.
The farm is completely off the grid - a hydraulic pump captures the movement of a spring uphill from the house and provides some energy, along with solar (I imagine there is more of this now than when I was there). There is a single shared outhouse with a composting toilet - something I, luckily, felt well prepared for because of the way my family vacations (similarly off-grid).
What I remember most is that Dan and Aera were very, very kind. They started off our time there by giving us a tour of the grounds and I wish so badly that I could see it again knowing what I know now. At that time in my life I’d never heard of permaculture or knew much of anything about growing plants besides a few kitchen herbs in the yard - so everything we saw was new to me.
Most of the beds seemed to be growing in a kind of Plant Anarchy - no rows, no lines, dozens of different vegetables growing with nothing to differentiate between them. Aera told us that often unpicked produce dropped off the plant at the end of one season and popped up there at the beginning of the next, and that that’s how the garden continued itself. I would love to ask them about field rotation, and whether they were doing a milpa style of farming, which leaves plots of land fallow for many years after growing a very dense and diverse group of food plants intensively for a couple years.
We pitched our tent on a flat spot a way from the main house. As for work: we cut the heavy heads off of giant sunflowers and rubbed our hands over their faces until all the seeds came off, leaving them to dry on a big tarp in the sun. We braided garlic stalks together so they could be hung up to dry in the barn. We popped open poppy pods to extract the seeds. These last two tasks were accomplished while sitting in Adirondack chairs looking at the setting sun casting its changing colors and shadows on Mount Hood.
We harvested greens from another field the next day and Aera showed us how to strategically start with the good-looking leaves lower down on the stem of the plant, the oldest leaves, and to work your way up from there. We ate a delicious vegetable stew for dinner both nights with glossy green lemon verbena leaves giving it a bright, citrus-y kick that was new to me. The stew kept on a picnic table in the shade without the need of refrigeration and tasted just as good the second night.
Dan and Aera taught us how to sprout seeds for some crunchy and delicious nutrition, which is something I still do in the winters while the garden is sleeping. They gave me the scoby that made kombucha for me for the next five years, moving from Oregon to Iowa until it was killed by the midwestern winter and the draftiness of our apartment’s kitchen.
Someone who lived there taught a months-long “primitive skills” immersion class that some of the people we met were doing. “Deep healing work,” one woman described it. There had been a fiber sale at the nearby farmers’ market and some folks brought back bags of gorgeous raw wool that they let us touch. What was this place?
It was all completely new to me at the time but the lingering imprint that it left on me has been profound. I had heard of communes and the back-to-the-land movement in the 60s and 70s - the fantasy of which had fascinated me in my undergrad years - but these folks were actually doing it. It looked like hard work, but it was a kind of life more completely integrated into the rhythms of the land than anything I’ve seen since. And they chose to live this way every day, having the option, presumably, to get a job in the city and live in a house with an AC unit.
A life like the ones lived at Rahane wouldn’t be a sustainable or desireable way to live for a lot of people. If you’ve never seen a functioning compost system, for example, why would you ever start when it sounds, frankly, kind of gross? But for me, to be able to see another way of living in action changed the way I saw my own life and my goals for what that could look like. Beyond any specific practice or type of growing, it expanded my conception of what is possible.
For one, it makes me ask myself what I can do without. It is both a shift in mindset and in concrete actions. I’m probably not going to install a composting toilet anytime soon but I am glad to know without a doubt that I do not require a flushing toilet in order to be comfortable.
My garden these days is slightly more orderly than the absolute Plant Anarchy we saw at Rahane, but when the kale comes up in the beds where it wants to I say Thank You and plant around it.
In the Garden
Garlic scapes and lightning bugs are here!!! Adventures in rabbit exclusion continue! I reached peak batshit levels last week when I sprinted out the back door and into the garden beds with my toothbrush hanging out of my mouth yelling at a baby bunny I saw sitting next to a tomato plant. My hoops and fabric arrived and so far, so good for the lettuce and arugula since I installed them.
I’ve been seeing tons of small wolf spiders crawling around in the mulch, which overjoys me. Please feast upon all of the garden pests you can catch! I want my spiders to be exceedingly well-fed. I’ve also been seeing tons of different kinds of pollinators on my rosa rugosas, buzzing happily.
In lawn-murdering news: just finished putting in a new bed of pollinators that are native to this bioregion, including a rare kind of milkweed called Poke Milkweed that they were giving away for free at the native plant sale. I hope the monarchs and other bugs love them.
An Offering
Did you know: my work and my calling is designing gardens for people! I design gardens to fit people’s actual lives and available time, budgets, and space. I want to help people create and grow the gardens that are theirs to tend. I am deeply invested in helping to shift people’s yards and balconies of every size towards ecologically sound practices, through a wide variety of food-producing and native plants that are both beneficial for the local pollinators and beautiful to look at, tailored to the site requirements, and using as little water and outside store-bought amendments as possible.
The results have been amazing to see - one client has taken what was an unkempt and overgrown space and turned it into a fertile home garden using my design for perennial fruit bushes, a plot for cannabis, raised beds full of vegetables and kitchen herbs, vining perennials with gorgeous flowers that will screen out the neighbors - and it’s just the first year. My design proposal came with an hour-long presentation and a resource guide with information on installation, plant sourcing and care, tools, maintenance, and helpful local resources.
I am offering a free 30-minute consultation to anyone who subscribes to this newsletter. We can talk about anything you like - brainstorming about adding more native plants to your space, water and/or soil management issues, what vegetables grow well in containers (hint: a lot more than you might think!). Just respond to this email with the topics, questions, or concerns you want to go over and some general times for availability and we will work out a time to meet over Zoom.
Thanks for being here. See ya next time.
Very sparse internet presence for this farm to be found, but two interns who lived there for the summer in 2018 kept this blog, which gives you a good sense of the place: https://rahanefarm.home.blog/