Common Threads Farm

Laura Plaut, founder and director of Common Threads Farm, is a passionate life-long learner. Laura holds a master’s degree in nonprofit administration from the University of San Francisco and a bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and culture from Amherst College.

High on a hilltop, overlooking the Strait of Rosario, sits a six-acre parcel known as Common Threads Farm. Save for the view, which is exceptional, the place isn’t much to look at. Piles of salvaged lumber lie here and there waiting to be called into service by the next building project. The chicken coop — an old travel trailer — tilts noticeably to the north, pummeled by a long winter of south-westerlies.

The loose and slanted script on the side of an old horse-trailer-turned-garden-shed reminds us, in the words of Barbara Kingsolver, to “recall that whatever lofty things you might accomplish today, you will do them only because you first ate something that grew out of dirt.”

To the rear of the property, sparkling in their own right, but especially in contrast to the rustic surroundings, stand three pole-mounted solar arrays that generate all of the power used on the property. Behind them stands a clearly homegrown eight-by-twelve foot shed in chronically “almost finished” condition.

The faded blue paint on most of the exposed lumber tells the story of the shed’s last incarnation as a neighbor’s greenhouse. Its stucco siding undulates waves of blue on the bottom with an earthy brown on top. On sunny days, the wine bottle windows held together with rough cob cast a rainbow of dappled light.

The current condition of Common Threads Farm, as a piece of property is — to be generous — unpolished. But visitors rarely fail to look through the disarray to discern the hopeful vision toward which Common Threads Farm is actively evolving.

This vision comes most readily alive during the summer months when the property buzzes with children busily learning and playing as they first dig, plant, and tend, then harvest, prepare and eat delicious foods fresh from the farm.

In the summer, it’s apparent that Common Threads Farm is not so much a “farm” as it is a dynamic outdoor classroom where the young and the young at heart can come to reconnect with some traditional, but for many of us, long-forgotten competencies and also to reflect on how we might each begin to do our small part toward creating a more sustainable future.

As the founder and director of Common Threads Farm, I am often asked where the idea and the motivation to start this place came from. This is a fair question coming from any camp, but it is all the more justified coming from those who have known me long enough and well enough to recognize that it was less than three years ago that I planted my first carrot.

The birth of Common Threads Farm has been, in many ways, my response to what I have come to view as outrageous deficiencies in my own education. From where I stand now, I can only view it as a societal failing that a smart, curious person like me made it through 20 years of schooling and 42 years of living without anyone ever having held me accountable for the most basic skills of self and planet care.

Shouldn’t basic survival skills like growing food and building shelter fit somewhere into our standard curriculum — if not because they’re such important skills in their own right, then perhaps because they inherently offer such a compelling real-world context for inquiry into math, social studies and science?

Shouldn’t we, as adults, be helping kids to connect the dots between our own daily consumption patterns and the health of our bodies, our communities and our environment? Why have I, and so many others like me, been allowed to think that food is and always will be cheap and fast and abundant rather than something that requires hard work, forethought and environmental stewardship?

In many respects, the creation of Common Threads Farm has been my adult gift to my own inner child. It offers the learning environment and the curriculum that I dearly wish someone had offered me when I was eight years old. It’s good to know that this is a place where kids can come to read and write, get dirty, experiment, build, compost everything from vegetables to human waste and grow and care for living things.

I like it that kids here get put to work, and that they experience the pleasure of being viewed as resources — of being entrusted with meaningful real-world tasks with meaningful real-world outcomes. I like it that my four-year-old son can identify most common vegetables in their natural state (on the vine, the leaf or underground).

He knows where eggs come from and understands that death is a part of life. For him, it’s not strange that all of the power for the things that light up or turn on in his life comes from the sun, nor is it strange to add peat moss and turn after a visit to the toilet rather than flushing yet another few gallons of our hard-earned potable water into the septic system.

So as much as Common Threads Farm has been a gift to my own inner child, it has been even more so for my son, and for every other kid like him who deserves to know that the way most people currently do things in the mainstream is neither the only way to do them, nor the only right way to do them, nor, in the future, will it even necessarily be among our choices.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” His words inspired the name Common Threads Farm, as it is indeed this sense of mutuality, of the intricacy of the threads that bind us each to the other, that I am attempting to bring to the surface.

The questions I ask myself and challenge participants at Common Threads Farm to ask have to do with how we can best make choices whose long-term impacts on our personal and planetary health are ones we can feel proud of.

Some days I wonder if I’m the right person to be doing this work. If it is true, as Mark Twain once said, “all you need in this life is ignorance and confidence — success is sure to follow,” then my credentials are perfect.

My career as a grower of food and producer of (solar) energy began only four years ago. Since then, I’ve read voraciously, taken classes, talked to lots of people who are more experienced than I am and — most importantly — learned from my own daily successes and failures. That said, if a veteran farmer is what you’re looking for, I’m not it.

I’ve had an on-going debate with a teacher friend of mine about whether teachers need to be the masters of their content areas, or whether a willingness to act as a “model learner” and partner in a voyage of discovery isn’t perhaps an equally important qualification.

It’s always great to learn from an expert, no doubt, but at this point in our planetary evolution, I don’t figure there are enough “experts” in permaculture, organic agriculture, green building, renewable energy and responsible water use to go around. Our best teachers will be the folks who, even if they don’t have it all figured out, are willing to roll up their sleeves and get started — the folks who just love learning and helping others learn how to be better earth stewards. I aspire to be such a person.

Having spent the last 20 years teaching in environments that have ranged from international travel programs to inner-city job training programs to the wilderness, to the college classroom; I have very few qualms about my skills as an educator. I trust that I know how to meaningfully engage kids.

I agree with educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound, among other schools) who once said, “I regard it as the foremost task of education to insure the survival of these qualities: an enterprising curiosity, an undefeatable spirit, tenacity in pursuit, readiness for sensible self denial and above all, compassion.” If, at the end of a day, I can point to manifestations of tenacity, curiosity and compassion in the kids who spend time at Common Threads Farm, I know I’ve done something right.

Someday, Common Threads Farm will be a place where people come to see sophisticated and thoughtful rainwater catchment systems, state of the art greywater re-use, and a melodious melding of all that the various schools of organic agriculture and permaculture have to offer. Our buildings will be models of green and sustainable construction, and we’ll inspire others with compelling, affordable examples of renewable energy.

Right now, we’re on our way toward realizing this vision, and the welcome mat is out for learners young and old who want to come and learn with us. We offer a variety of educational programs, and our summer programs are currently in full swing, so send us your children, participate in a volunteer work party, attend one of our adult workshops or, at the very least, visit our Web site: http://www.commonthreadsfarm.org. We’d love to see you! §

Whether you’re teaching grade school or high school, there is no need to reinvent the wheel in terms of compelling curricular resources. As a starting place, I recommend some of these:

• Food$ense C.H.A.N.G.E. (Cultivating Health and Nutrition through Gardening Education) — this curriculum, which can be downloaded free of charge online (http://king.wsu.edu/nutrition/change.htm) offers some wonderful, step by step lessons for engaging youth in both garden and kitchen learning environments.

• Getting Started: a guide for creating school gardens as outdoor classrooms. This curricular resource is available free of charge from the Center for Ecoliteracy: http://www.ecoliteracy.org.

• Facing the Future (based in Seattle) offers a wide variety of sustainability focused curricular resources: http://www.facingthefuture.org/Curriculum/CurriculumHome/tabid/113/Default.aspx.

• Coblyn, S. French Fries and the Food System. Lincoln and Roxbury, Mass. The Food Project.

• Koch, P., Calabrese Barton, A., Contento, I.R. (2007). Growing Food. South Burlington, Vt.: Teachers College Columbia University and National Gardening Association.

• Kiefer, J.A & Kemple, M. (1998). Digging Deeper. Montpelier, Vt.: FoodWorks.

• And just about anything at the National Gardening Association Kids Gardening Store: http://www.kidsgardeningstore.com.

Good Reads for Grown-Ups on Food and Food Systems

This is a blossoming genre, to say the least. Some of my current favorites include:

• Kingsolver, B., Hopp, S., Kingsolver, C. (2007). “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins Publishers.

• Nabhan, G. (2002). “Coming Home to Eat.” New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

• Pollan, M. (2006). “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” New York, N.Y. The Penguin Press.

• Pollan, M. (2008). “In Defense of Food.” New York, N.Y. The Penguin Press.

• Winne, M. (2008). “Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty.” Boston, Mass. Beacon Press.