Christopher's Bio

I have been a gardener in the East Bay since 1993. I have started dozens of community gardens, school gardens, market gardens and gardens in backyards and in centers serving the homeless. I have a reputation as one of the best gardeners and farmers in the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve been teaching at Merritt Community College’s Landscape Horticulture Department for nine years, and the Student Farm we are developing has won numerous awards, such as San Francisco Bay Guardian’s “Best School for the Urban Ecologist” in 2005 and the “Local Hero Award for Best Non-Profit Organization” from the Edible East Bay Magazine in 2010. My students range in age from high school students to retired people. What they have in common is the desire to grow food in an ecologically sound and economically smart manner.

When I was a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I was exposed to the Alan Chadwick Garden and Farm, which has been a leading teaching farm for organic farmers for over 40 years. I spent four years as a work-study student supplying the farm with kitchen scraps from the dining halls, a project I started from scratch and appropriately starting with compost. And Santa Cruz was the first place I had my own vegetable garden. After college I spent three years starting over a dozen community gardens in Oakland and Berkeley, California, and Detroit, Michigan. I later did a year-long apprenticeship in British Colombia at Linnaea Farm on Cortes Island, where I earned a Permaculture Design Certificate and received the Compost Meister Award, given to the hardest working farm student.

Besides teaching, I operate Wildheart Gardens, a permaculture landscape business that designs and builds sustainable garden softscapes (plants not pavement). I have six interns who help with Wildheart Gardens and many volunteers at the community gardens I manage. Current projects include St. Mary’s Center in Oakland, which is a homeless senior citizen’s soup kitchen garden, and the Eco-house in Berkeley, an urban sustainability demonstration center.

At home I grow a lot of vegetables, fruits, native plants, bamboo, medicinal plants and chickens using greywater and rainwater. This year I am introducing more chickens, ducks, and bees into my yard. I have built a hybrid straw-bale design studio that features salvaged windows and wood, locally hand-dug clay, sand, broken concrete, recycled gravel, bamboo and local hardwoods such as coastal live oak, madrone and manzanita. I am married to Dr. Runa Basu, DO, an integrative medicine internist, osteopath, homeopath, and certified yoga instructor. My main preoccupation is our 2 ½ year old daughter, Gitanjali Victoria Basu Shein. We live on a 6,500 square foot lot in urban South Berkeley. I garden and farm wherever and whenever I can.

Local Oakland urban farmer and writer Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, had this to say about me, “He’s probably single handedly taught more people to garden (and farm) in the Bay Area [than anyone].”

Christina Bertea of Greywater Action said, “Thank you, Christopher, for not only creating community but then nurturing and nourishing it as well! How fortunate we all are to have you in our midst!”