TACOMA — Out by the driveway, a man named Greg is carefully shoveling rich compost from a wheelbarrow into a machine that noisily sifts the organic material.
In a nearby greenhouse, a woman named Debbie is placing soil and plants into small pots. Like Greg, she is going about her task with the utmost care.
In another greenhouse, a man named Les sprays water from a hose onto lushly growing plants. Carefully, like the others.
These folks are fastidious workers. They’re hard workers. They’re developmentally disabled workers.
They’re part of a group of people called core members of the L’Arche Farm &Gardens agricultural complex in rural Pierce County.
Located about 12 miles southeast of Tacoma on Vickery Avenue E., it’s a small farm — eight acres with a farmhouse, a barn and four greenhouses on the property. But it has a large mission, one that goes far beyond the growing and harvesting of foodstuffs.
“L’Arche is dedicated to the marginalized and those who have always been cast out. We were founded on the Gospel values of the New Testament and the Beatitudes,” said Patrick Toohey, the farm’s manager.
Much of the food the residents eat in the homes comes from the farm. As originally conceived, the farm was intended to produce enough food to feed Tacoma-area core members in the adult homes with a little left over to sell at farmers markets. Shoppers at the Tacoma, Sixth Avenue and Proctor Street farmers markets may recognize the farm name. L’Arche workers sell fresh produce and nursery starts weekly at those markets.
It’s a community where people with developmental disabilities learn life skills by working alongside people without handicaps. A privately run nonprofit organization, L’Arche receives partial funding from Pierce County Human Services as well as area charitable organizations.
The Tacoma-area farm is part of a worldwide network of L’Arche communities. The term is French for “the ark,” referring to Noah’s ark, and the organization was founded in 1964 in Trosly-Breuil, a village in northern France, by Jean Vanier, a spiritually inclined French-Canadian layman who dedicated himself to sharing his life with and helping people with developmental disabilities.
There are now more than 120 communities in more than 30 countries. Many are adult family homes. The first L’Arche community in the Tacoma area, founded in the city in 1977 and called L’Arche Tahoma Hope, was such a home. There are now three others, including one on the farm and another a few miles down the road from it. Eighteen core members live in those four homes, but not all of them work at the farm.
Those accepted into the program have shown a desire to socialize with others like themselves.
“It’s a family setting,” Toohey said, and residents are told “you’re going to have to learn to share and be responsible not just to yourself, but to all your roommates, sharing the responsibility of being in life together.”
Also, the idea was that the farm be run as a sustainable agricultural operation. That means “all our nutrients that we use for our plants come from our compost,” said Toohey. “We’re not trucking in stuff.”
Weeds and grass clippings are recycled into compost. The farm raises chickens, and the droppings are used as fertilizer.
There are no horses on the property, so Toohey and his people collect manure from the stalls of nearby farms. It’s a neighborly thing to do. The arrangement is deliberately limited to close neighbors. “We stay within a three-mile radius,” he said. Sustainable means local.
And local means that they only sell their produce on the farm itself and at farmers markets in Tacoma. “We do the Sixth Avenue Farmers Market, the Broadway Farmers Market and the Proctor Farmers Market,” Toohey said.
Each market has a distinct personality, he added. People who patronize the Broadway market are generally office workers looking for houseplants to decorate their cubicles.
“Proctor customers are more likely to buy plants that are little more difficult to grow,” he said. Many have gardens and stock up what he calls “veggie starts: your broccoli, your greens. They love basil.”
The Sixth Avenue market, being relatively new, has not yet found a distinctive identity, he said.
Much of the farm’s produce is greenhouse grown. One greenhouse is given over to herbs, with rosemary, thyme, mint, basil, chives, pineapple sage and fragrant lavender bursting up out of crowds of pots. Another is full of vegetables: tomatoes, kale, spinach, lettuce and cabbage. Still another, the largest on the property, is the flowers greenhouse: geraniums, mums, asters and calla lilies grow in colorful profusion.
In the fourth greenhouse the prime nutrient for all the vegetables, heaped-up compost, sits and simmers, making this the warmest greenhouse on the property.
During the winter when the farm work slows, core members work on craft projects. One of those is paper-making, and it, too, is carried out in accordance with the farm’s sustainable philosophy.
The raw materials are shredded documents from the farm’s office and flowers — mostly marigolds and sunflowers and some lavender — from the farm’s garden. The mixture is soaked in water in a big plastic trash bin, ground to pulp by a big hand-held grinder and poured into plastic trays. The trays are taken out to one of the greenhouses and if a day is sunny, the mixture can be dried to paper within 24 hours. The texture is coarse, but the product is certainly distinctive, and couples often use the sheets, which measure approximately 6 by 10 inches, for wedding invitations.
At the moment, seven core members are employed at the farm. Their ages range from the 20s to the 50s, Toohey said. Several have been there for years. Debbie Wilson, the woman transplanting plants in the greenhouse, has worked for L’Arche for 16 years. Since the farm was founded in 1983, 25 core members have been on the payroll. They put in a 20-hour week and are paid at about the minimum-wage rate.
Their disabilities vary in type and severity, with autism, Down syndrome and Williams syndrome being some of the most common conditions among the core workers, Toohey said.
Many more people with disabilities have done volunteer work there over the years. The number of volunteers has numbered in the thousands.
“Last year, in three months, we had over 500 school-age volunteers,” said Toohey, 37, who has worked on the farm for the past 11 years. They came from Clover Park and Franklin Pierce high schools, from Charles Wright Academy and St. Charles Borromeo School. Fourth-graders come. So do college students and college graduates.
“We have college kids from the University of Montana and Gonzaga. They’ll spend their spring break here in volunteer work with the folks,” Toohey said.
Religious organizations affiliated with the Jesuit order and Lutheran churches have been longtime supporters of the farm, recruiting students committed to doing social service work for a year after graduation.
Businesses send volunteers as well. Employees from stores such as Target, which have disabled people on the payroll, come out to learn how to work with people with disabilities.
In some cases, they wind up working for a disabled person, at least for a while.
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