MANZANITA – The Lower Nehalem Community Trust is exactly what one would expect from a land preserve.

At 3 p.m. on a Friday there are crickets singing, a gentle breeze is rustling the leaves on the trees and it is quiet on the trust land, at the end of a short gravel road that feels as though it has taken you 100 miles from U.S. Highway 101 instead of a few hundred yards.

This 55-acre area is dedicated to land protection, stewardship, adult and youth education, community events and a Coastal Food Ecology Center. Numerous efforts have been made to return the property to its natural state, including the replanting of native species and the protection of an elk herd that grazes through the area. Thus it is small wonder that the Community Trust has set aside five acres on the front side of the property for gardens that survive and thrive with sustainable farming practices.

“It’s the traditional homestead garden,” said Vivi Tallman, a community trust board member. The homestead garden features an unusual planting that has been surviving on the property for years – Baldwin apples, a variety best known on the East Coast. To protect the heritage apples and other plantings, a fence has been built around the plot to keep the elk out. The garden also features pumpkins planted by local children, plantings of corn, cabbage, berries, tomatoes and myriad other items all tended by the community each Wednesday morning.

“The community garden is communal and we follow sustainable practices,” said Tallman. “The rule is anyone who works in the garden can take enough to feed themselves.”

The garden also features native plants and some unusual fruit tree varieties like fig, guava and pineapple. The fruit trees were donated by One Green World Nursery to see if they would fruit in the North Coast climate.

A permaculture garden is also part of the five-acre plot. Permaculture explores the maintenance of a garden by omitting the applications of pesticides in order to include insects in the growth process.

“The permaculture garden is in its infancy right now,” said Tallman. As the garden continues to grow and create a balance for itself, the soil, insects and plants will begin to thrive with a little help from a green thumb. Permaculture gardens take into account soil stewardship, the application of chicken manure as a nitrogen source, worm farms, composting, water and protective habitats for prey and predators on an insect level.

For educational purposes, the Lower Nehalem Community Trust holds eight workshops a year. Half are geared toward sustainable farming – fruit tree pruning and chicken raising are just two examples – and the other half of the workshops are aimed at nature conservation and education.

A Friday night party

Those workshops, and other efforts by the community trust, have helped spark the first year of the Manzanita Farmers’ Market.

The market runs every Friday from 5 to 8 p.m. in the Windermere parking lot through Sept. 21.

Sherri Raschio, one of the market coordinators and member of the Lower Nehalem Community Trust board, helped set up a market in Portland. She says the market features 24 local vendors selling everything from cut flowers to gourmet burgers.

“I’m pretty happy with the set up,” said Raschio. “We know a lot of the growers and they’re mostly sustainable.”

Vendors begin to arrive at 4 p.m. to prepare their wares for the 5 p.m. opening of the market each Friday. The atmosphere is a welcoming one, even through the set up, during which the vendors happily greet each other and warn would-be customers that the market does not open until 5 p.m.

“We had fun creating the market,” said Raschio. “We have bands play, sometimes some locals come and belly dance, and last week some people just showed up and played fiddles during the market. The aim was to have a Friday-night party and really build around the community.”

Local grower Jeff Trenary, owner of Kingfisher Farms in the Nehalem Valley, has been providing organically-grown produce to restaurants on the North Coast and in Portland for many years. For the last 15 years, Trenary has been selling his produce at farmers’ markets and says that his produce is “100 percent organic.”

“I always wanted to be a farmer and I started eating natural foods about 30 years ago,” said Trenary. “Then I lived in Europe for a few years and saw what they were doing and thought ‘I could do that too.'”

Seaside-based vendors Teresa Retzlaff and Packy Coleman, who sell a variety of plant starts, herbs and cut flowers on Ostman Farm, say they don’t worry about being certified organic because at farmers’ markets they are able to have conversations with customers about their growing practices which are sustainable.

“I liked growing things and we wanted to live somewhere small,” said Retzlaff. She and Coleman were given the opportunity to begin running Ostman Farm thanks to a friend who owns the plot they rent and cultivate. The two sell their products at the market in Manzanita, the Astoria Sunday Market and, when time allows, go to the Tillamook market.

For producers like Retzlaff and Coleman, the markets provide a connection to the community that would otherwise be missing and have helped to fulfill their desire to live “somewhere small.”

“It’s good to feel like part of the community,” said Retzlaff. “I enjoy the social aspects of it.”