Jean’s Farm

When I moved back to the family homestead in 1991, Tideman Johnson park, across from our family homestead, was overrun by motorcycles, gangs and vandals. Good people didn’t use the park. Evil had won.   On our side, there was meth house at the east end.  When I begin to fight back my life was threatened. When I left in the morning for work I would find the road blocked by intentionally place logs.  One day someone cut a perfect ally round hole in a window, avoiding the recently installed security system, and removed a pair of binoculars from on top of the antique radio my uncle won in the 1930s for selling the most Oregonian subscriptions.  One day I was almost the victim of a gang who later that week tortured and murdered Ulysses, our beloved neighborhood gardener known for his beautiful elephant garlic.  He was 107, I think the oldest person ever murdered in Oregon.  They came to my house 15 minutes after I had left.  For several months I hired a security guard and wondered how long I live in this state.  What is now known as Jean’s garden was over-run with 20 foot high blackberries and abandoned cars.  I would find bags with women’s undergarments, pornographic magazines and drug paraphernalia.  There was a dying horse, whose exposed bones made me shutter and cry, who would escape to get food from our garden.

Then I turned the farm site over to Marc Boucher-Colbert and Beth Rasgorshek who started up Urban Bounty, one of Portland’s first CSAs.  Marc moved on to manager Zenger Farm.  Then Laura Mastersen used the site for the 47th Street Farm CSA until she also moved to Zenger.  Then the site became the farming and place-based education facility for Portland State University’s PIIECL (International Initiative for Leadership in Ecology, Culture and Learning( program, in partnership with Sunnyside Environmental School.

The Farm, and the surrounding 100 acre urban wilderness, is so transformed since I moved here it is hard for me, and even more so for others to imagine the darker reality. People that come there (there have been 5000 visitors to my place since 1991) usually comment on the tranquility and sense of calm.  A green oasis in the city.

To know what is currently happening at Jean’s Farm