Seeds Of Abundance -- The Do-Gooder Types At Abundant Life Sow Their Vision Of Healthy Horticulture

PORT TOWNSEND - What the Pacific Northwest always has offered is little havens for do-gooder types, the often idiosyncratic ones who actually try to do something about saving the environment, or make something that's healthy.

I could try to list reasons why we accommodate such individuals: our pioneer history, our appreciation of the natural beauty so readily within our reach, our rainy days that force us inside our homes to perhaps ponder bigger questions than what's on HBO tonight.

But I suppose the main reason I'd give is that in the Pacific Northwest, we accommodate idiosyncratic do-gooder types because . . . what would be the harm?

And so I'm here, walking around Will Gariss' couple of acres, because I read about him in the 1996 catalog put out by the Abundant Life Seed Foundation, one of those do-gooder groups. It sells several hundred kinds of organic, open-pollinated seeds, like your grandmother used to sow, instead of the commercial hybrids that cannot naturally reproduce themselves.

"We have farmed his land for so long now, we hardly remember when our relationship began," the catalog says. "We have grown to love land, as Will must, and continue to send goodwill his way."

From weapons to chickens

Gariss is retired now. For a couple of decades, however, he was a weapons systems design engineer at Boeing. Then, in 1969, partly because he didn't like how the Vietnam War was being handled, he quit.

After that, he worked on projects to help the poor, and, with his first wife, now deceased, bought an egg farm on the outskirts of Port Townsend. The farm came with 4,500 chickens that they raised with nary a chemical.

Going from a weapons systems engineer to 4,500 chickens is admittedly unusual. The thing about the Northwest is that it's full of such admittedly unusual individuals.

In 1974, while the Garisses were raising chickens, Forest Shomer was asking various neighbors in the Wallingford District if he could use their gardens. What he wanted to do, Shomer explained, was raise open-pollinated vegetables and flowers.

Sure, what's the harm, the neighbors said.

Shomer, who was raised in Chicago and then bounced around the country, had found his home in the Northwest. Working out of his apartment, he began selling the seeds, eventually putting out one-page catalogs. They were definitely unique mailings, folded up in the shape of a sunflower or a tree.

By the 1980s, the Abundant Life Seed Foundation had acquired a sizable following, selling $250,000 worth of seeds. By then, too, Shomer, now married and with a daughter, had moved to Port Townsend, a community of 8,000 on the Olympic Peninsula.

The foundation had a small staff, and Shomer figures he earned maybe $15,000 a year. He remembers, during a routine IRS audit of the nonprofit, being asked, "Surely you're not living on this little bit?"

A staffer at the foundation knew Will Gariss, who was happy to have his land put to use. The foundation pays Gariss a nominal $75 a month, which actually is rent on a barn.

Forest Shomer is 49 now, and four years ago he left Abundant Life. He had given the foundation much of his adult years. Now it had a board of directors, and there were the inevitable disputes about money and direction.

"I guess you could say the foundation reached maturity. It was 18 years old. Just like a child, at a certain age, it has to go its own way," Shomer says.

Searching for seeds

He decided to start Inside Passage, a wholesale seed company specializing in native plants. Shomer got the seeds literally by walking through forests, by the beach. For the first time in years, he took long vacations, going to Hawaii, Europe. He sounds happy.

The foundation, meanwhile, sometimes seemed about to disintegrate. Staffers and volunteers left. The acreage at Will Gariss' needed care, and didn't get it.

But you know about the Pacific Northwest, always a haven for do-gooder types. The older do-gooders were just replaced by a new generation.

There is, for example, Tricia Paffendorf, 25, who grew up on Long Island and majored in plant and soil science at the University of Vermont. Every day, she drives to Will Gariss' acreage to tend the plants.

"I'm obsessed with plants," she says. In the 1996 catalog, she writes about "gardening for the body, mind and spirit." She's found a home in Port Townsend as the farm manager.

There is, for example, Aleta Anderson, 30, who grew up in Forks, went to college and then traveled widely, finally spending 2 1/2 years with the Peace Corps in Africa.

In the catalog, she writes about those Peace Corps years: "I learned firsthand about sustainable agriculture and the problems of hybrid seeds. Many development projects (from wealthier nations) came into poorer countries with miracle hybrids, created for drought resistance, chronic flooding, pest resistance, or a multitude of other problems. The people in these projects promised super plants with amazing yields. Yet more often than not these turned out to be false promises. The seeds were dependent on expensive chemicals, or, primarily, the seeds themselves were simply too expensive for the subsistence farmer to purchase. The projects interrupted the age-old cycle of growing, collecting and replanting seed that farmers have practiced for generations. Since hybrid seeds are sterile, or don't reproduce true to type, a farmer has no choice but to continually purchase seed."

Anderson, too, found a home in Port Townsend.

A total of five women now staff Abundant Life. Guys do help out, the women say. But sometimes, Paffendorf says, "it seems the men want to do the vision stuff, not necessarily fill seed packets."

The women believe the foundation has gone through the worst. Fifty thousand catalogs are expected to be mailed this year, the orders are coming in, there seems to be some order.

I sit in Will Gariss' kitchen and we look out onto the acreage, full of plants ready to begin their spring growth. Gariss says the farm is in the best condition he's seen it in years.

He tells me that legally, he's got it set up so the land can't be used for anything but gardening. That does seem a bit unusual, but not really. Not in the Pacific Northwest. Here, we're used to it.

Erik Lacitis' column runs Sunday, Tuesday and Friday. His phone number is 464-2237. His e-mail address is: elac-new@seatimes.com