Portland for Easter Weekend

We visited Portland last week to deliver broadforks to Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply and take a break, and got a preview of summer with warm, sunny weather all weekend. Naomi's bustles with activity, plants, and baby chicks.

We were thrilled to meet Binga (pictured) and Oona the goats, who help out in the store and go home with Naomi at night.

We brought more forks for the energetic gardeners of Portland. 

We bought Eric Toensmeier’s new book Paradise Lot, a delightful introduction to permaculture  through the down-to-earth story of building a diverse garden ecosystem in the backyard of his shared house in Holyoke, Mass. (It got a great review in the NY Times, with a cute slideshow of Eric and his gardening partner, their families, and the amazing garden they built.)

I totally dug staying at the Kennedy School. Especially the art.

 

Olympia Artesian Well

When I first moved to Olympia in 1981, there were several artesian wells in town, and learning about them helped me tune into the local environment. 

The Olympia brewery in Tumwater was running an advertising campaign that ascribed the beer’s quality to “the artesians,” portrayed as helpful gnomes or devas.

One artesian well was in front of the old Mark & Pak grocery store; it was paved over when the store was remodeled for BayView. The drinking fountain at the corner of 4th and Washington was artesian, and may be still. The Spar advertised its pure artesian drinking water. 

But the pipe that jutted from the asphalt in the middle of the parking lot near 4th and Jefferson was the best one to catch drinking water. With several gallon or five-gallon jugs, you could get a day’s supply for a communal household in a few minutes.

The access in the parking lot was contested for years; water advocates wanted to see the whole site made into a park, while the owners had no interest in parting with a valuable piece of real estate. Urged on by advocates, the city eventually came to a deal with the parking lot owners and acquired a portion of the lot for the Olympia Artesian Well. 

  

This beautiful mosaic art was added recently. The water flows at 10 gallons a minute, and it’s free. When I stopped by to take pictures on a brilliant, cold January day, the dude filling his jar saw me with my camera and asked, “Have you TASTED it?”  

It’s delicious.