LiveSmart BC Community Hero
LiveSmart BC Community Hero: Gary Swann
For organic farmer Gary Swann, ‘sustainability’ has been a guiding concept for decades.
He and his wife Jacqueline bought their 80-acre Cherry Creek property, now known as Leda Organic Farm, in the early 1970s.
“Mostly it’s an eco-forest, and we have about seven acres in pasture, orchard and gardens,” he says. “We acquired the property in 1974, and it had been heavily logged in 1970. We’ve left it largely on its own, and plant about 300 trees a year, following a technique called natural selection forestry – the trees tell you when it’s the natural time to harvest them.”
You’ve heard of the 100-Mile Diet? The Swanns practiced Quarter-Mile Lumber when they built their house, using fir, cedar, maple and alder (it makes great hardwood flooring) harvested on their property and cut with a chainsaw-based mini-mill.
As for their agriculture, Swann is a disciple of Sir Albert Howard, the prophet of organic gardening and the creator of the Indora technique of composting.
“What we’re talking about is humus-based agriculture,” Swann says. “Humus is a by-product of the end of life – the decay is what ends up in humus, and it contains all the materials needed for rebuilding life. This year, I’ll bet we made nine tons of compost, and we have another one and a half tons ripening.”
In the Indora method, the compostable materials – leaves, grass, garden and kitchen waste – are laid out in fairly shallow windrows.
“Over the years, we’ve had a source of horse manure and cow manure – recently, we also had access to llama manure,” Swann says. The windrows are gradually gathered up as the process accelerates.
“It does heat up – especially if you have the llama manure and horse manure. The heat will kill off pathogens and weed seeds,” Swann says. “We have a compost thermometer that we keep in there. When the temperature gets above 150 degrees (Fahrenheit), we turn it.”
With all that great compost, Swann is able to grow vegetables year-round, with the aid of row covers and a greenhouse, for the winter months. On Dec. 1, he plucked fresh Bolero carrots, planted in August, from the soil, and showed off a wide variety of lettuce varieties in the 1,500 square-foot greenhouse.
“We’ll eat kale all winter long, without protection,” he says.
Swann believes passionately that we need to produce more of our food close to home. It cuts down the emissions from transporting it thousands of kilometers, and we end up with better food. The Swanns buy their meat from Valley producers.
“About all we buy from outside is our grains.”
“We have to get back to where we’re feeding ourselves here in the Alberni Valley,” he says, adding that city residents can produce a surprising amount of food in even the smallest of garden plots. And with growing environmental consciousness, spiked with an economic recession, more and more people are catching the idea, he says.
Swann has been teaching organic gardening workshops annually for 15 years, and interest is growing exponentially.
“When we started, we’d get five or six people. For the last few years, 25 to 40,” he says.
