Bio
Christopher Shein has been a Permaculture designer and gardener in the East Bay since 1993, starting many gardens for schools, homeless centers, backyards, markets and community gardens. He spent two years in British Colombia at Linnaea Farm on Cortes Island. He’s been teaching at Merritt’s Landscape Horticulture Department (look for Permaculture Design, LH 028) for 5+ years. He’s now self-employed with Wildheart Gardens (see Wildheart Gardens) with some current projects in Oakland including St. Mary’s, a homeless senior edible and native garden and Friendship House, a Native American women’s drug and alcohol recovery edible and native healing garden. His latest interest is in building a strawbale design studio and guest room in his backyard. He also has a lot of native plants, bamboo, greywater, vegetables, fruits, and chickens.
Oakland Permaculture Institute
By Christopher Shein 8-28-05
I started the Oakland Permaculture Institute (OPI) four and a half years ago after living in Oakland since 1993 and being a very active community garden builder. From 1993-2003 before OPI I set up over 12 community gardens, started a red worm composting worker-student co-op at UCB, designed and built school gardens, and also a few homeless gardens. The Cesar Chavez Community Garden is one of the latter, serving 50 homeless seniors, where they are now raising some of their fruits and vegetables for their soup kitchen. They also have a quiet zone for resting and reflection, landscaped in native plants, a small piece of beauty in the bleak downtown of Oakland.
For my first three years I worked for free or almost free, setting up Spiral Gardens where many community gardens were built on vacant land in Oakland and Berkeley. I also worked part-time setting up Berkeley Worms, where we set up composting systems for the waste stream at UCB. As I was trying to fill a niche of being an urban gardening teacher without enough experience, I decided after those first few years to do an apprenticeship at Linnaea Farm on Cortes Island in British Colombia, Canada. There I earned a Permaculture Design Certificate from Liz Richardson and Brent Howe over an 8-month period. It was an amazing experience to be doing an ecological gardening and farming apprenticeship with organic farmer David Buckner. Linnaea Farm is on a 300 acre pioneering land trust (the first one in B.C.), with about 30 acres in pasture, several small orchards (one dating back to the 1930s), a one acre production garden for the farm residents and for a market stand, plus a large student garden. On a quarter acre, raspberries are grown as a fundraiser for the apprentices to go on a weeklong field trip around B.C. visiting worthwhile farms and orchards. There are beehives, beef cattle, dairy cows, sheep, turkey, pigs and chickens. We got to help build a cob workshop space, which took three years to make, learned basic blacksmithing skills and general homesteading skills. Linnaea Farm is a wonderful way to earn a PDC over a whole growing season, as well as a very affordable apprenticeship and a great community. Check out Linnaea Farm
So I came back to Oakland and gathered some core of friends together to start our own farm and wilderness school, which we called CRAFTS. We searched all over for some free land to start out on and ended up in Woodside, CA, a wealthy suburb of Palo Alto at OUR Farm. This 60 family CSA was on 3 separate acres spread out over 5 miles. The 6 of us worked for Dave Blume for 3 months, taking over the entire operation of the CSA. The deal was to run the farm for 6 months and then we would assume the leases and CSA and Dave would get out of the business. Unfortunately it all came to a sudden end, as Dave was trying to set up an enormous Permaculture class in Half Moon Bay with Bill Mollison, CRAFTS folded under fire from Dave and our own group’s internal politics. So going from a great apprenticeship to a shitty one, we came to our end without pay. Three of us moved back up to Cortes Island to live on a friend’s homestead for 6 months.
That landed me back to Oakland after a short trip to Mexico and Guatemala. Then I started working with another landscaper and quickly started my own edible and native landscaping business, Wildheart Gardens. Right away an opportunity arose to start farming on an acre in Albany, next to Berkeley on UCB’s Gill Tract, a historic 5-acre urban farm that is now sadly being sold off for more housing and shopping. But for two years I did get to be the farm manager for a one-acre parcel through an organic farming research class through UCB. We grew a lot of food and seed and donated a lot of produce to East Bay Food Not Bombs (homeless public/political soup kitchens) and for ourselves.
So for many years I kept up my design and build (with some maintenance) landscaping business and saved up enough money and bought this big fixer-upper in East Oakland in the San Antonio District east of Lake Merritt. (Wildheart Gardens) It’s on a 6,800 sq ft. lot with large native trees in the back and apartment buildings looking into the yard. After replacing the foundation and removing 20 yards of garbage and a rotten deck, and removing an entire yard full of ivy, sour grass, acacias and dead trees, things were starting to look like it had potential. I really lucked out with the neighbors. Three houses in a row have backyards that are connected and after asking permission, we took down a rotting redwood fence and sheet mulched it right in place. This connected all three yards.
Now that all the ivy has been pulled out; the truck loads of beer cans, bottles, plastic have been recycled; and rotten couches are gone, we’ve been able to layer in two dozen fruit trees, raspberries, blackberries, annual vegetables, cooking herbs, medicinals, local natives, etc… Starting in the side yard, which was just white pebble mulch and crabgrass and has the most sun, and then moving to the front yard that had more rock and sour grass and ivy, and the curb strip, I’ve been developing a Permaculture.
The chain link fence is now covered with tree tomatoes, tree collards, Perennial Buckwheat (a buckwheat family unknown Asian green), a native elderberry, a plum tree and chayote (a perennial squash vine that is climbing up a young acacia (N-fixer) into a hawthorn berry tree (bee fodder in the spring, and robin bird feeder in the fall)). This edible hedge blocks the ugly view of the apartment building across the street, but also acts as an interface with the local neighborhood’s diverse cultures.
Oakland has over 55 languages spoken, a lot for 450,000 people to get along together. So I give the African American kids collards and Swiss chard for their parents to cook in the housing projects on the corner and many passers-by also get free greens. Now the kids ask me for free tomato and squash seedlings (after I did a giveaway of a whole truckload of plants during a community block party last year). The kids also ask me for the licorice (fennel). The Salvadoran neighbors are also starting to garden so they’ve asked me for starts and abono (compost). The Southeast Asians (Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Cambodian and Mien) take the Chinese spinach, chayote, and tree tomatoes. There’s this amazing Mien grandmother that climbs the spiny hawthorn berry tree barefoot to harvest our chayote every week.
Behind the fence I’ve got really good fruit tree guilds including multi-graft Asian and European pears, plums, figs, strawberry guava, bananas, grapes (I just started the first gallon of homemade wine yesterday) Maximillian sunflowers, sour orange, Baer’s lime, pomegranates, all of which I’ve shared with housemates and neighbors. There are also blackberries, raspberries, bottle gourds, comfrey, lovage, French sorrel, lettuce, beans, tomatoes, arugula, white, red and blue sages, etc, most of these under-story plants will eventually be shaded out by the fruit trees in the summer, but for now we’re using the edge. After getting a good foothold on my yard and after planting the curb strip in drought tolerant natives, I’ve started on my neighbor’s front yards. Last year I put in perennial flowers for one neighbor who didn’t want to attract the kids to her yard with food, but did with the sunflowers anyway. And also fruit trees, natives, and grapes for the other neighbor. Land use in exchange for gardening, and they water and maintain the plantings. This year we’re growing our zone 2 annuals in our neighbor Bari’s yard, which gets the most sunlight. I started this garden last year by dumping extra organic potting mix I got from a local nursery on top of Bari’s lawn. Then I put more compost down and after making swales and mulching it all with straw, I planted fava beans, vetch, and rye in time with the fall rains, so by this spring we had a 6’ fava and cover crop forest.
We had a Bay Friendly Garden Tour, which opened the garden to the public and 100s came by to see our joint yards, mulch, fruit tree guilds, greywater, ducks, chickens for eggs, meat, insect control and fertilizer. So to make it all look good and to keep weeds down and build soil everywhere, I ended up putting 30 yards of fresh tree trimmings over all three of our yards. I’d put about that much down the first year in my yard. After the tour I knocked down the cover crops and covered them with straw. A few weeks later we planted tomatoes, squash, corn, beans, and peppers amidst the apples, plums, raspberries and orange tree. The corn is now 12’ and there are 9 people eating out of it (3 neighbors and 6 housemates). See Stop Waste
This part of the garden project happened because of a long-standing conflict between the two neighbors. Stanley and Rene had a huge 40’ black acacia tree growing at a 45-degree angle under a 150-year-old live oak tree and went into Bari’s yard for sun. Bari was worried it would fall on her deck so I found an arborist to come and cut it down, so there is suddenly a lot of sun in her yard. With the Merritt class, we made a teaching circle out of the stumps beneath the oak tree. I bordered vegetables beds with smaller logs, the folks that donated the soil came for firewood, and mulch was spread. The problem is the solution.
Some of the other OPI features are that we have the upstairs bathroom and sink going to water Black Bamboo as a building material and screen, the kitchen sink is watering some clumping bamboo that is filtering views and sounds from the apartment building, the laundry is watering more screening and building bamboo (Bambusa nigra, “Henon”.) We compost our humanure J.C. Jenks style. I’ve been doing it for years and brought it in from a previous rental and the compost really revived a lemon tree that had been covered in ivy and is now producing like mad. On our most recent remodeling, we’ve put in natural plasters (sand, clay, and rice flour) for the casita (old garage) and sunroom. We now have a fire circle for outdoor parties. Some hammocks have finally been put up so we can do more observing. Permaculture is about permanent culture so it’s great to be finally in one place after moving around for so long. And landlords generally don’t let you get away with all of this kind of stuff. For two years my housemate was making biodiesel in the garage, but she moved away and we haven’t restarted that project yet, but are buying biodiesel from her. We plan on putting in a solar heated hot tub and also a woodstove. All of these projects happened much faster with many friends and volunteers making this vision a reality. Community is our best resource.
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