Leilani Clark
-
True Blue
Indigo crop colors hopes for local soil-to-skin clothing. On a balmy June morning off Westside Road in Healdsburg, I get my first look at the bright green pointy-leafed shrub that’s creating a stir in the northern California Fibershed community. Polygonum tintorium— otherwise known as Japanese indigo—grows in clumps at the entrance to the fiber and…
-
Slice of Eden
A food forest grows at Chickweed Patch in Petaluma. Suzanne Mackey leads the way through a berry bush-lined path of her backyard, next to a greenhouse made entirely of recycled materials. The berries aren’t yet ripe, but the scene is like something out of a fairytale—especially for me, a born-and-bred Los Angeles kid who fell…
-
Metamorphic Magic
From green bin to black gold at Sonoma Compost. Halfway through a tour of Sonoma Compost, on a hill above the green rolling valleys of Petaluma, I stick my hand into a freshly turned pile of decaying organic material. It’s steaming hot. So hot, you could stick a turkey into the middle and it would…
-
Utile Textile
How hardy, primitive sheep can weed and clothe you. Two years ago, Leslie Adkins and her husband Alden drove their Prius from Massachusetts to California with unexpected hitchhikers in the back: Two cross-bred Ouessant lambs. A primitive sheep breed originally propagated for fiber by peasant women on the rugged and grassy island for which they’re…
-
Learning to Eat
The school garden movement could end diabetes and does provide Common Core curriculum. So why is it still viewed as a hippie’s daydream? On a sunny Friday morning in the Wright Charter School garden, first graders bustle about between rows of lettuce, dried sunflowers, corn, scarlet runner beans, and cabbage. The students tease and jostle,…
-
Grain Gain
Will our local heritage grain movement save us from ourselves? When Peter and Mimi Buckley started Front Porch Farm, east of Healdsburg in a valley near the Russian River, they did the unthinkable in grape-growing country—they planted grain. On a recent blisteringly hot day in late July, sun-baked winnows of straw cover two long fields…