COQUILLE

Alon Zeev Ish Shalom bent down and held a tiny sprig of green leaves in his hand.

“It’s a Chilean nut tree,” he said of the seedling on the hillside in the Walker Creek Valley.

The tree is one of 28 nut tree species planted recently under the guidance of members of the Mountain Homestead Intentional Community.

The community, reached by driving about a half-mile through the forest along a fern-lined gravel road, is a “center of education and development for American rural skills, such as building, homesteading and forestry,” Ish Shalom, the group’s food forester, said.

The nut trees are suited for Southern Oregon climate since it mirrors the weather in the Chilean South American coastal rain forest, he said.

“What we’re doing here is experimental,” he explained. “ I don’t know anyone else who’s grown these. The idea is we’ll yield both nuts and knowledge.”

This is just one of the projects the residents work on and it will be featured during a Nut Forest Tour and open house on Saturday, April 11.

The 10 to 20 homesteaders live cooperatively as trained or apprentice land stewards on 365 acres, which comprises about two-thirds of the Walker Creek watershed, owned by Chip and Clara Boggs since 1989. The land has been protected under a conservation easement with the Southern Oregon Land Conservancy since 2003.

“No matter who owns it, it would have to remain a forest,”  Ish Shalom said.

Since 1999, between 100 and 200 residents of all ages, races, countries and religions have participated in a work trade program in which they gain hands-on experience in sustainable living. They learn gardening, renewable energy, natural building and eco-forestry in exchange for room and board. Project crews work 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, with a maintenance task to perform Saturday mornings.

“We are able to provide for our needs from the land, hand-in-hand with forest restoration and conservation,”  Ish Shalom said.

Jerry Becker, of Port Orford’s Ecoforestry Management Associates, has served as their consulting forester since 2002.

The group has an ongoing eco-forestry plan that is forest stewardship certified. Members mapped out the acreage and over a span of several years thinned the forest surrounding the homestead, then inter-planted with mixed species to open up the canopy, making it fire safe. They’ve completed 21 acres and have 300 to go.

The homestead has been selling forest products since 2005 and this year began selling custom milled lumber.

The community is funded privately, through forest product sales or fees participants pay when they attend workshops.

Mike D’Spacio, who has lived at in the community for about three months, said he joined the work trade program because he’s interested in farming.

“What inspired me about the Mountain Homestead was the active attitude about forest care,” D’Spacio said.

When 27-year-old Ish Shalom moved to the homestead three and a half years ago he helped build his studio apartment of wood harvested from the land, straw and clay in a method used by the Cob Cottage Company that established a natural building research center in 2001 on the Boggs’ land.

With other residents, Ish Shalom built two studio apartments, a bathhouse with solar and wood-energy heated water, a greenhouse using salvaged cedar and windows, and a courtyard structure. The community is sustained through a gravity flow water system. All electricity comes from a hydroelectric and solar power systems. Residents have built terraces across the landscape for drainage. Much of their food, such as onions, leeks, chard, kale, peppers and tomatoes, is grown organically in gardens. That which is store-bought is either organic or grown locally.

Ish Shalom said the community has become a research model for people around the world. A Danish woman spent six months there in 2005, doing research for her master’s thesis on the American back to the land movement.

“In recent decades there’s been a strong movement toward doing things in a more natural way,” Ish Shalom said.

Since 1999, Tom Ward, a permaculture consultant from the Applegate Valley, has overseen the community.

Permaculture, a combining of the words and concepts of permanent agriculture and permanent culture, was a theory conceived by Australians Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the 1970s.

The group offers seminars to help people learn about permaculture, whether in their own backyards or on a larger scale. Some go on to be certified and teach.

“We create these paradises that meet our food needs and at the same time get more out of them. It doesn’t need to be in a primitive way,” Ish Shalom said.