In Cully, a garden and school grow

Couple’s permaculture dream takes root on neighborhood farm

By Nevill Eschen

LocalNewsDaily.com, Oct 10, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

JIM CLARK / LOcalNewsDaily.com

Pam and Joe Leitch gave up corporate and professional jobs to become farmers and teachers, and they haven’t looked back.

People do plenty of things that Joe and Pam Leitch would like them not to do: let rainwater get away, let tap water run down the drain, cover a lawn with fertilizers and weedkillers, and throw away the clippings.

But instead of just complaining about what other people do, the couple has made it their mission to teach and model good behavior.

They run the Portland Permaculture Institute, a 1.6-acre farm in the Cully neighborhood that they have converted into a living classroom and demonstration project. People turn to the Leitches to learn about conserving water, not using pesticides and maybe growing something besides a lawn.

“We want to be a demonstration site for those people in Portland who want to take their sustainability beyond just recycling and don’t know quite where to get started or what it should look like,” Pam Leitch says, noting that permaculture doesn’t mean solely organic gardening. “It’s a whole system of looking at how to live sustainably.”

The Leitches grow apple, apricot, plum and pear trees without fungicides and without mold, raise bees that stay healthy without antibiotics and cultivate bamboo for a continual supply of garden stakes.

A shady spot is a good place for a log structure that grows edible mushrooms, while direct sunshine in another section produces a formidable array of berries and vegetables. Chickens help clear weeds, and bins hold earthworms aerating soil.

Rainwater captured in extra-large tanks handles much of the irrigation.

Class content is geared toward urban dwellers who can “pick and choose” what lessons they want to take home with them, she says.

“We start in the house,” with food-scrap composting and water-conservation methods, Joe Leitch says. “We encourage people to do very simple gray-water methods, such as putting a two-gallon bucket in your shower and catching the water and flushing the toilet with it.”

More advanced water-savers can consider installing a rainwater catchment system. Each black, high-density polyethylene tank is the size of a large closet; one holds 1,550 gallons, the other almost twice as much. Both are placed next to the house where they catch runoff from the roof.

Some people might be reluctant to put such a large plastic container in their yard, but Joe Leitch points out enthusiastically that it can be camouflaged easily by tall shrubbery; a large camellia bush conceals theirs.

The Leitches, or the guest lecturers they bring in for their regular seminars, also teach about crop covers, mulching and “food forests” – a cluster of trees and low crops that complement one another by providing nutrients or repelling pests.

Blackberry bushes be gone

They’ve kept busy for the two years they’ve owned the property conducting a massive overhaul: clearing thickets of blackberry bushes gone amok, planting crops and nitrogen fixers, grafting trees and renovating a 1912 house that had been a rental for 20 years. They continually add to an extensive to-do list.

The work has yielded discoveries. Joe Leitch recalls Pam tunneling through a house-high jumble of thorny vines and exclaiming, “Look, Joe, this blackberry bush has pears!” It was just one of many fruit trees so engulfed.

The Leitches weren’t the first to rehabilitate the lot. A collective had owned the property for two years, holding work parties to try to make headway clearing invasive plants and putting in crops. But the Cully Collective’s plan fell apart when the couple who were its visionaries and driving force split up.

Former Cully Collective organizer Tracy Matfin recalls learning that a developer also wanted the property.

“We entered into a bidding competition,” Matfin wrote in an e-mail. “Finally we offered the same as the developer and attached a long letter describing how much we loved the house and land and what we wanted to do with it.”

The sellers, descendants of the original owners, Swedish immigrants Magnus and Emma Ek, went with the collective that envisioned growing food, teaching gardening and living in harmony.

The Eks’ great-granddaughter, Karen Lawrence, recalls that it was painful to sell the property, but none of the descendants wanted to take on the upkeep.

“We were just glad when we found someone to buy (it) who loved the home” and wanted to keep it as a farm, Lawrence said of the Cully Collective.

The Leitches stepped up when the collective’s eventual disarray led to the selling of the property in 2004. At that time, the Leitches had a similar but smaller operation in Tigard but were troubled that the location required most of their seminar students to commute across the metro area.

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