On Peaks Island, Jenny Yasi plants a campaign sign in her front yard, scratching at the ground with the sign’s measly metal posts, only to have it immediately fall over on the dirt.
“See that? Peaks Island soil right there,” she jokes.
Pebbles scatter the ground leading to Jenny’s house and a hand-constructed stone wall separates the end of her driveway from her neighbor’s property. But while the earth is shaped by boulders rather than fertile topsoil, even on Peaks Island, sustainable food growing is possible. All one needs is a little creativity and a scrappy attitude, of which Yasi has both.
Jenny and her husband, Albert, grow about 75 percent of the food they eat including vegetables, fruits, and herbs. They use the space in the backyard of their 2,000 square foot home for “permanent agriculture,” a design system that aims to create sustainable habitats by following nature’s patterns. They are not farmers, nor do they claim to be. In fact, the whole front portion of their house is dedicated to Jenny’s dog-training business, Whole Dog Camp, complete with plastic hoops, brightly colored balance beams, and playground-style wood chips covering the ground.
Throughout her years on Peaks Island, Yasi has had a variety of jobs. She first moved to the island to nanny, then turned house cleaner, then got into herbal healing, wrote a column for the Maine Times, edited and published the newspaper Harbor Voices: Fact, Fiction and Rumor. Now she runs her dog-training center, and is in the process of opening up Whole Dog Club, a Portland-base for her island clients at the Portland Company on Fore Street. Earning a living on the island requires flexibility and creativity, as does growing food.
Jenny walked around the 30-foot by 50-foot gardens, where plots of squash revealed bright orange and green gourds and patches of cranberries poked vivid red from beneath their thorny branches. Spaces of cram-packed growth are everywhere, and just as she steps over the sections of kohlrabi, kale, Swiss chard, and Brussels sprouts, she immediately stumbles upon mustard, garlic, and even strawberries.
“When we first started planting we had really bad soil,” Yasi says. “It was all lead and ledge, but we just scooped it out, covered the earth with clay and recycled woodchips, and composted seaweed and manure all over the place.”
Last year, Jenny and her husband harvested 30 pounds of black raspberries, enough cranberries to last through Thanksgiving and Christmas, and even managed, in August, to make their last peach pie from the previous year’s peaches, right as the new season’s peaches were coming out. The “lazy method,” as Yasi calls it, of storing food, involves “washing, cutting, bagging, and freezing,” and every year they get better at making the food last year-round.
“Freezing and permaculture,” Yasi says. “We don’t worry about planting the same thing all the time. We might pull up lettuce and put down beans.”
While Yasi may see permaculture, as “lazy” due to the low amount of human input necessary to keep growth sustainable, it’s exactly the kind of synergetic system a yard needs to produce a high density of food that will continue to evolve over time. There is no need to have rows upon rows of a single crop when one can almost literally throw all kinds of plants into the earth and let nature take its course, providing food for the family kitchen.
Albert’s job as an environmental engineer also allows him to live alternatively, and twenty-five years ago, he and Jenny designed and built their own home.
The couple’s house is full of materials salvaged from their property: stones stacked one on top of the other shape the first quarter of their chimney and recycled logs from fallen trees form supports in the basement and ceilings. Jenny, pregnant at the time of construction, did all the painting and tiling herself, and even installed a floor heating system with a friend.
“There was no internet back then,” Yasi says. “We learned as we went.”
Being able to design the house themselves also meant that everything was designed with a purpose. The wood floors make for easy cleaning, and the piece of sill laid above the foundation creates pressure-heat. The majority of the windows in the house face south, making it possible to heat the entire home on a mere cord and a half of wood per year.
“During a sunny day in the dead of winter the house can get up to 85 degrees,” Yasi says “People always ask me what I do when it gets too warm, but that’s easy. I just open the windows!”
Light streamed softly in through the kitchen as Jenny poured a cup of steaming hot green tea, settling into the cushy, but broken, black couch, her dog Charlie resting his head on her lap.
“We grow food because, in our old age, we’ll be able to eat no matter what,” she says contentedly. “And when we’re dead and gone we’ll actually have food to leave to people. More people should be doing it. They just don’t realize they can.”
Rachel Hurn is a student at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Portland.