About
We are a one acre urban farm specializing in fruit and flower production for our community. In addition we offer educational sessions on orchard care, honey for sale via Portland Bee Works, and preserves made with fruit from the farm. We also provide fruit for Christopher’s father’s pie business when in season.
We have been practicing and studying organic agriculture for over 20 years. We are committed to growing food in a way that supports the health and wellbeing of our human community as well as the natural world.
Jessie Spain, Orchardist
Since 2002, Jessie has been farming and teaching small-scale sustainable agriculture. She is a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, and has an A.S degree in Horticulture. She has taught orcharding classes at Portland Nursery and gardening workshops at the Esalen Institute, where she worked as the Farm Supervisor. Jessie is passionate about sharing her knowledge and skills for fruit growing with backyard orchardists and urban homesteaders through Tree and Ladder.
Christopher LaRose, Orchardist
Christopher has been working in the fields of urban agriculture, holistic orchard management and education for the past decade. He has worked and taught with Grow Portland, Oregon State University, University of California Santa Cruz, The Oregon Food Bank and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA. Christopher is a graduate of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, as well as the UC Master Gardener Program.
Image Copyright Gordon Ashby 1970About our Logo: (As told by Jessie)
*Background: In 1970, Artist Gordon Ashby produced a set of mandalas for the Whole Earth Catalog. Comprising a special insert titled “Finding Your Place in Space,” they were some of the first widely available mandalas to present an ecological perspective. Grounded in the experiences and discoveries of Northern California’s unique counterculture, they not only described humanity’s place in space, but proposed a radical vision for global and personal transformation as a way towards social and environmental harmony; a vision for a new human-centered ecology.
Fast forward to 2009 when digging through the Goodwill bins (a favorite past-time) in Santa Cruz, CA Christopher finds the “transformer”image in a Whole Earth Catalogue. At the time we were studying organic agriculture at the UCSC farm. He rescues it from the fate of being discarded, and carries it around with only a few earthly possessions (mostly vinyl records) from Santa Cruz, to Big Sur, to Portland in 2013. Fast forward to 2018 after almost 10 years of farming and gardening together we move onto our own 1acre family compound and decide to start an urban farm. Christopher names the farm Oracle Orchard after the black cat who lived here when we moved in. A fitting name for a bio-dynamically managed little orchard in the city, a respite from the urban elements which can connect us more to the ethereal.
Months pass as we attempt to design what could be a logo for the farm. Then one day Christopher digs out the ancient Whole Earth Catalogue, and says hmmm “What about something like this? It’s kind of perfect.” We decide to go out on a limb and see if Gordon can be reached. After digging though the internet we come up with a possible address for him in Northern California. Since he has no internet presence we decide to hand write him a letter asking for permission to use his amazing artwork for our farm.
About a month goes by and we nearly forget about the letter when a package arrives in the mail. . . It is large. We open it and to our surprise it is an original print of the poster, sent to us by Gordon himself with a hand written blessing to use the image as we like and wishing us well in our farming venture! We are so fortunate and grateful to him for his generosity. We hope you enjoy the logo as much as we do and are equally touched as to how in a digital age, sometimes the best way to make a connection is to go back to the more personal, old-school way of doing things, just like we do here at our little farm.
*from https://critical-sustainabilities.ucsc.edu/mandalas/, original source Greg Castillo, “Hippie Modernism,” Places Journal, October 26, 2015
Thank you to our good friend Jordan for generously putting his skills to task refining the image for us. You’re the best!
“Graduation photo of Gordon R. Ashby, 1956. Photographer unknown. Copyright ArtCenter College of Design. Courtesy ArtCenter Archives & Special Collections”
