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About Street roots. (Portland, OR) 1998-current | View Entire Issue (April 3, 2015)
Page 8 News Street Roots • April 3-9, 2015 TOM LICHATOWICH Grateful for the gift of gardening BY ROBIN SCHAUFFLER ■ CONTRIBUTING WRITER « 7 " think my favorite plant to grow is lettuce. Lettuce is very energetic, germinates quickly, and adds so much to the jl harvest with very few inputs,f Tom Lichatowich muses. This is how Lichatowich talks: garden vegetables have character, like people do, and his language is sprinkled with terms he learned in decades o f a career in fisheries management. He is a slim man of modest, good- humored demeanor, with a serious round face and graying hair. His voice is measured, low key. He’s not making speeches. He often lets his sentences trail off, once he’s launched the main idea. The listener gets where it’s going, so why keep talking? He husbands his words the way he husbands the materials he uses N O T H I N G in his garden. No waste. No fancy inputs. His words, makes me though, throw out bold challenges to many of our society’s assumptions. “My thinking is that organic produce is than discovering really overpriced. I another human being to admire. look at what I can --------------- A LIC E W A L K E R --------- -------- grow, and just in my little plots here, we could feed two more families of four.” He aims this comment at the health food stores, the purveyors of organic produce, the whole fresh-local- sustainable movement. u Then he apologizes. Amid all the shouting and arm-waving of our times, he is steadily polite, balanced: “Maybe I don’t quite understand. I’m not a commercial organic farmer, haven’t done the large-scale farming, marketing .... but is organic produce so high-priced,’’ he wonders, “because they can get that much?” HOPEFUL ichatowich can go on. Google Earth and see the fish farms in Fiji where he worked as a Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s. He sounds wistful, like he misses P H O T O S B Y R O B IN . S C H A U F F L E R those long-ago hardworking days. More than Tom Lichatowich years growing up in Indiana and his time with the Peace Corps in Fiji 50 years later, it remains fresh in his mind. brought him to the pensive, deep-rooted gardening philosophy he embraces today in Portland. Although he grew up in a gardening family, Fiji may have been where he became he says. “They were poor people. They a gardener-for-life. He absorbed the Fijian what he described as “a relationship with didn’t use a lot of inputs.” He uses the word gardening ethic. The fish farms used no the soil.” Growing up in South Bend, Ind., “inputs” to mean equipment and materials pumps, no pellet feeding, no chemicals; he he was one of nine children, and his parents you have to spend money to bring in, things learned to use tidal flows and organic kept a huge garden. All the kids worked, you add to the natural garden to make it fertilizer. He admired the way Fijians and cousins and neighbors would come by produce more: irrigation systems, wood farmed the land, too: “The people there for produce: strawberries, tomatoes^ frames, structures. gardened not for the pleasure. In the village pumpkins, whatever was in season. The But long before Fiji, Lichatowich had you have to have a garden, for subsistence,” garden, he says, “seemed crucial to what B The N O T H IN G M O R E H O P E F U L series that begins this issue originates from a workshop taught by M artha Gies. “L ast fall, as I tired o f hearing the IS IL Hour, interrupted only occasionally by a w arning about Ebola's im m inent arrival in Europe or the U.S., it occurred to me that the media was deaf to good news, ” Gies says. “I remembered my friend Sr. Rosarii Metzgar once telling me she believed all the terrible news with which we are daily battered m ust surely be offset by sm all a n d unseen acts o f good.” Gies resolved to enlist some writers who would h u n t down an d write those stories.
