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A Garden as Nature Intended: Washington Orchard Thrives Despite No Watering, No Tilling

Arborist and master gardener Paul Gautschi at his orchard on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

Paul Gautschi would be the first to tell you that the food from his garden is the best in the world.

To prove it, he’d point to his apple trees. Unlike upright trees grown in commercial orchards, the branches of Mr. Gautschi’s trees bend so low they seem to scrape the earth in a submissive bow.

“When you buy an apple in the store, they’re featherweight. When I hand you an apple from one of my trees, your hand drops. They’re so heavy with water and minerals,” said Mr. Gautschi. “The weight of the fruit bent those trees like that. I had nothing to do with it.”

While Mr. Gautschi’s natural humility compels him to downplay his involvement in the quality of his garden, the fact is that the remarkable soil beneath his feet is the result of decades of dedication, observation, and faith.

And it all began with a lousy well.

Sacred Cover

Mr. Gautschi has always been a gardener. Growing up in Los Angeles during the 1950s, he and his brothers wore out shovels breaking up the heavy desert clay in their yard. This grunt work yielded plenty of vegetables and fruit for the family—and created a mindset in Mr. Gautschi that proper gardening meant lots of backbreaking labor.

In the late 1970s, Mr. Gautschi moved his young family to Sequim, a small city on the Olympic Peninsula in northwestern Washington state, with the goal of growing a garden large enough to feed the whole family. An arborist by trade, Mr. Gautschi found work pruning the region’s tree-filled neighborhoods and woodlots.

Mr. Gautschi’s apple orchard. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

While building his home during the rainless summer of 1979, Mr. Gautschi discovered that his new, 213-foot deep well posed a problem. It produced only half a gallon of water per minute. That wasn’t enough water to irrigate a garden, let alone water his newly planted fruit trees. So, he turned to God.

He asked: “God, how am I going to grow anything without water?”

According to Mr. Gautschi, God instructed him to look around his property. He noticed that while his lawn was parched and yellow, the surrounding cedar trees were bright green.

“I went out to look at how everything in the forest was growing with no water. I realized it was all about covering,” said Mr. Gautschi.

The ground cover he saw on the forest floor was composed of the leaves and needles that had fallen from the trees during the fall. As the material settled into layers as the seasons passed, the lower tiers broke down into nutrient-dense compost. When it rained, water was retained in the compost and became inoculated with nutrients to feed the trees. Just as humans have skin, fish scales, and animals fur, so too does the earth have a protective and nourishing covering.

“By having cover on the ground, you have a constant source of [plant] food,” said Mr. Gautschi. “It turns out that poor well was one of the greatest gifts I ever got, because it opened me up to how nature works.”

With his trees landscaped low to the ground and the ground cover being so soft, Mr. Gautschi can collect the ripened apples after they fall from the tree naturally. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

Changing Habits

Inspired by this divine guidance, Mr. Gautschi mimicked the forest covering by shoveling a thick coating of wood chips around his fruit trees. He didn’t yet think to apply the same principle to his garden.

As he had done in Los Angeles, Mr. Gautschi spent the next 17 years breaking his back to maintain his garden. Thick beds of weeds appeared days after tilling in organic fertilizer, and the compacted dirt quickly turned to mud in the rainy season. He wondered how he was going to keep up.

The orchard, meanwhile, was thriving. This frustrated Mr. Gautschi, since he only pruned the branches and laid down a new bed of wood chips every year. One day, he knelt down and moved the wood chips around with his hand. He was soon up to his elbow in beautifully moist, weed-free soil.

Enraged, Mr. Gautschi again cried out to God. Why had he been killing himself for years just to get a mediocre garden, while the orchard was thriving on no input?

He heard a voice say: “It works in your garden the same way. You just didn’t ask.”

Mr. Gautschi threw away his rototiller and immediately covered his garden with wood chips. In very little time, he began to see that the covering had the same effect on his garden as it had in his orchard. The once hard and compacted soil was now soft and buoyant.

“When I came here, my soil was really deficient, and the wood chips broke down really quickly. I had to keep adding them. Now, after so many years of being here, I’m not adding wood chips anymore because the soil is just beautiful and it’s not breaking down that fast,” he said. “It’s just amazing how nature works. When it’s satisfied, it’s not hungry. It’s really awesome.”

Mr. Gautschi is proud of his orchard, which continues to thrive although he hasn’t watered it for 44 years. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

Thanks to the increased oxygen, nitrogen, and water retention, Mr. Gautschi’s soil had a perfect pH balance of 7, meaning it was neither too acidic nor too alkaline. Plants that traditionally can’t grow together—like lavender, which loves alkaline, and blueberries, which love acid—thrive side by side in Mr. Gautschi’s garden.

“It doesn’t matter what the pH requirement is,” he said. “Root development improves, too, because there is no resistance in the soil. I have dwarf trees with roots that come out in a 35-foot radius from the trunk, which is unheard of.”

Finding Eden

Though his garden’s growth was unprecedented, Mr. Gautschi made no efforts to advertise his success. The plot was, and remains, his personal garden. However, things began to change after his orchard appeared in a short article in a 1990 edition of Sunset Magazine.

From that piece, word of mouth began to spread about this man in Washington State growing enormous, abundantly productive fruit trees, all with no watering, fertilizer, or weeding. Soon, Mr. Gautschi found his property teeming with visitors, all eager to learn what he was doing.

“I was surprised, because it was nothing that I was hoping to do or planning to do. It just happened,” he said.

One of those visitors was a man named Michael Barrett, who had met Mr. Gautschi at a Bible study. Having grown up in a family of farmers, Mr. Barrett was curious to see Mr. Gautschi’s garden for himself. When he returned home and told his family of the amazing abundance he had seen, they encouraged him to preserve it on film. So, Mr. Barrett hired two young college graduates, Dana Richardson and Sarah Zentz, to make the picture. After 11 months of filming and editing, “Back to Eden,” was released for free online. It had an impact Mr. Gautschi never imagined.

To date, the film has been seen by more than 50 million people across 155 countries. Many of those viewers have traveled to Sequim as a kind of pilgrimage. To meet the increased interest, Mr. Gautschi began giving formal guided tours of his garden and orchard on Sunday afternoons.

“It’s incredible to me how far this has reached,” said Mr. Gautschi. He’s received phone calls and written testimonials from viewers in Europe and Asia, many of whom changed their diets and improved their health just by implementing his methods in their own gardens. For Mr. Gautschi, this success is nothing short of God’s favor.

Mr. Gautschi also raises farm animals on his property. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

One early adopter of Mr. Gautschi’s method was Josh Thomas, co-founder of the popular blog and YouTube channel Homesteading Family.

“We came across the Back to Eden film not long after it came out. We became familiar with that quickly and employed the methods within a year of watching it. It was the best garden we ever had,” said Mr. Thomas.

His application isn’t exactly the same, due to the different climate and resources he has available near his homestead in northern Idaho. Mr. Thomas uses wood chips, but also adds animal manure for more nutrients and to recycle the waste from his livestock herds.

Though the lack of input is counterintuitive to everything gardeners are taught, Mr. Thomas’s success speaks to the efficacy of Mr. Gautschi’s methods.

“It really is as simple as he says,” Mr. Thomas said.

In 2021, Mr. Gautschi agreed to be filmed for a Back to Eden gardening class for The School of Traditional Skills, an online learning academy Mr. Thomas co-founded. When he arrived in Sequim, Mr. Gautschi greeted him as an old friend.

“Paul is Paul. You’re not getting one face for the camera and one for the side. We appreciate his heart for working with nature through a Biblical perspective,” said Mr. Thomas.

Easy Yoke, Light Burden

The simplicity of Mr. Gautschi’s garden has served him in ways he couldn’t have foreseen when he set down that first pile of wood chips. For several decades now, he has been losing his ability to walk.

Mr. Gautschi served in the Vietnam War as a soldier from 1968 to 1970. During his service, he was exposed to Agent Orange, a tactical herbicide the Army used to kill vegetation. Though he didn’t know it when he returned home, the chemicals were eating away at the nerves in Mr. Gautschi’s legs.

He can’t remember the exact date he realized. But he recalls he was out in his garden when a neighbor kid fell off his motorbike in front of his house.

“As I’m running across my field to go check on him, my legs start buckling. I’m thinking, ‘What’s this? This has never happened before.’ I realized that something was amiss. It’s just continued ever since,” Mr. Gautschi said.

No-till and no-toil, Mr. Gautschi’s regenerative gardening method has allowed his orchard to become easier to manage as he gets older. (Jennifer Schneider for American Essence)

Today, Mr. Gautschi requires a wheelchair to access his garden and is no longer able to give his long Sunday garden tours—though visitors are still welcome. He can still walk, but his movements are slow, and he requires a staff or cane for support.

From appearances, though, you’d never guess there was anything out of the ordinary with Paul Gautschi.

“You do not see frustration. You don’t see pain. He’s not even wincing when I think there is genuine pain there,” said Mr. Thomas. “I think that’s just a reflection of his attitude and his heart. He can still get out there and run a row with his rake and get some seeds in.”

Those seeds become the “living food” Mr. Gautschi credits with playing a vital role in his good health.

“I haven’t been sick for 35 years. No cold, no flu, nothing,” he said.

He pointed out that vegetables start to lose nutrients as soon as they’re picked. “To go out, pick, and eat, as everything in nature does, is the ideal way to consume food.”

However, what truly amazes Mr. Gautschi is the stories of healing he hears from others. He was recently contacted by a man who had contemplated suicide. After watching the “Back to Eden” film, the man changed his mind. He implemented Mr. Gautschi’s gardening gospel and saved his family’s health.

“It’s amazing,” Mr. Gautschi said. “Gospel is just good news. And this is all good news.”

For more information about Paul Gautschi, and to watch “Back to Eden,” visit BacktoEdenFilm.com

From Sept. Issue, Volume IV

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Features Lifestyle

This Family-Owned Seed Company Is Telling—and Saving—the Stories of Heirloom Seeds

Clockwise from L: Ella, Jere, Emilee, Malia, Cyan, and Sasha Gettle. (Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co./RareSeeds.com)

The Persian melon, a honey-sweet, orange-fleshed variety dating back to its namesake empire and the progenitor of all American cantaloupes, was a standard in American gardens for two centuries, but it is now virtually unseen and in need of rescue. Montana lavender clay corn, with its striking, deep purple kernels, was blended by a Montanan corn breeder who used a Mandan tribe variety that once passed through the hands of Lewis and Clark and Thomas Jefferson. The buena mulata pepper, a chameleon variety that fruits violet and pink, then ripens through orange and brown to a final red, was extremely rare but rescued from obscurity in the 1940s by Horace Pippen, a black veteran and folk artist who traded his seed collection for therapeutic bee stings.

All of them heirlooms; all of them now safely kept and made available to gardeners around the country to grow for a few dollars. This is the world of Jere Gettle.

Heirlooms: The word itself has an emotive effect, something meaningful, something passed down, something belonging to the family. And indeed, many of these are generational family treasures, fruits and vegetables that have been around and passed down for years. For Gettle, they appeal to his “passion of always finding something new and unique, and telling the story about a family, a region, or country where [it] came from,” he said. In 1998, when he was 17 years old, he founded Baker Creek Seed Company as a tiny, one-man purveyor dedicated to finding and sustaining these myriad varieties. Today, with his wife, Emilee, and a staff of more than 100, Gettle manages the largest catalog of heirloom seeds in North America.

The seed company, named for a creek not 1,000 feet off the back door of its public store, occupies 17 acres 5 miles north of Mansfield, Missouri, a town of about 1,200. Yet this year, Baker Creek is mailing out 1.5 million full-color seed catalogs filled with more than 1,000 heirloom plants.

(Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co./RareSeeds.com)

Humble Roots

Gettle grew up in the Boise Valley, but on the Oregon side of the border—an area of great soil, he pointed out. “Everyone pretty much farmed or gardened at least on some scale,” he said. His paternal grandmother, born in Mexico, lived on the same property, growing the crops she remembered from her childhood; his other grandmother lived 15 miles down the road and raised many varieties of squash. His parents grew and preserved much of their own food. They’d visit cousins “and everyone was basically talking about what they were growing, what was ripe.”

His earliest memories are of the garden, of spending time there with his grandmother, and of sitting nearby as she cooked tamales and other homegrown foods over an old wood stove, while he, curiously, paged through seed catalogs—the way other kids might flip through comics or story books. “It’s kind of how I almost learned to read,” he said. …

…

(Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co./RareSeeds.com)

(This is a short preview of a story from the January Issue, Volume 3.)

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Your Stories Features Lifestyle

Home Grown

(Courtesy of Karen Brazas)

Of all my 10 uncles, Uncle Bob was my favorite. Not only was he the family historian and a talented writer, he was the quintessential family man who involved his family in every aspect of his life, including his life’s work—operating a very successful greenhouse that has remained in his family for almost 50 years.

Upon his death in 2014, my Uncle Bob’s granddaughter Amanda memorialized him perfectly. She offered her hand and said, “Shake my hand. For when you do, you’ll have shaken the hand that shook the hand of the man who planted many seeds, watered and cared for them, and watched with eager eyes as they spread throughout the world. Take my hand and you’ll have grasped the hand of the man who cultivated a beautiful garden of life.”

My uncle was born in Minnesota, one of eight children. Most families were close back then, and his was no exception. This deep sense of family loyalty and service proved to be a guiding light throughout his life. As a young man, Bob helped an uncle who owned a small greenhouse in North Dakota, and his charismatic personality and strong work ethic undoubtedly served him well even at a young age.

Years later, he would refer to his life’s work as “people business.”

Bob took basic science courses in college and later served in both World War II and the Korean War. He married Clare, the love of his life, and together they had nine children. Working in a greenhouse was in his blood, and after the war, he advertised in a national florist magazine for a business. After receiving almost 100 replies to his ad, his dream of owning his own business soon came to fruition. In 1972, he purchased a small greenhouse in Centerville, Iowa, that would become his life’s work and his family’s legacy.

The property needed cleaning and repairing, and he engaged the help of his older children. Together, they hauled away 52 truckloads of junk to a landfill. From the start, the greenhouse was a family endeavor.

“A lot of the family could get involved with it,” he said. “Even an 8- or 10-year-old boy or girl can do something productive in a greenhouse. It’s strictly a family business with all members of the family helping out.”

He got into the business initially because he saw people wanting to improve their yards and homes, and “they needed someone to help.” Years later, he told his son David that the business also afforded his children “the pursuit of higher learning through college, and subsequently allowed each to pursue his/her journey in life.”

(Courtesy of Karen Brazas)

Operating a greenhouse isn’t for the faint of heart. “But,” my uncle said, “it’s one of the most satisfying jobs anyone could have … watching your work literally grow and become healthy right before your eyes.” And grow it did! Over the years, he and his sons renovated older buildings and added new ones. New lighting was installed and generators were frequently updated. What had once been a local retail business turned into a large wholesale operation serving several states.

As Uncle Bob said, “It’s like farming. You have to make hay when the sun shines.” During the busy spring season, the family worked from sunrise to sunset—13 to 14 hours a day. Success depended on the rain and the sun. Ice storms could knock out power, insects could ruin plants, and molds could kill flowers and trees. At times, things were hectic.

But “Centerville Greenhouses” survived, and over the past 49 years, three generations of the Bob Lind family have worked hard together. Some might call it a labor of love.

When Bob retired, his son Rob and his family took over. And these days, Rob’s sons Pete and Alex run the business with help from other family members. The family believes that “there is no better worker than a ‘home grown’ one.”

(Courtesy of Karen Brazas)

Grandson Pete says the greenhouse industry is “competitive, but everyone is friendly. There is a tradition of honesty and pride in the business. Everyone works toward helping the industry survive. They take pride in what they sell.” He and his brother Alex have hired several other workers now that the business has expanded with new buildings, renovated spaces, and more inventory.

“The biggest challenge these days,” he says, “is keeping up with marketing concepts and the demands of the consumer.” But they enjoy their jobs and are proud to maintain the work ethic and the family traditions passed along to them.

Their Uncle David said his father’s legacy was, “Always strive to do your best, but initiate a deep faith to provide the necessary guidance.”

I have no doubt they would echo their cousin Amanda’s final message to her beloved grandfather: “Love is the seed from which your tree has grown. It is the water and the sun. It is the care and the tenderness. It is all that is necessary. And I am so grateful, so moved, so happy to be one of its many leaves, forever connected to it, regardless of which way the wind blows.”

Karen Brazas is a retired high school English teacher and creative writing instructor who taught in California, China, and Lithuania. She worked and studied in 35 countries with the Semester at Sea program. Karen is a wife, mother, and grandmother, and now lives in Nevada City, California, and Channel Islands, California.