A River Runs By It
Written and illustrated for UO Science Story
Zeph Mullins’ dirt-caked fist created a muted thud as he knocked his hand against the plastic wall of a cistern.
“You can hear the water inside,” he said.
The cistern is one of 20 giant, round, forest-green tanks taller than an adult, each holding 5,000 gallons of water, that are linked together across the 38-acre garden Mullins manages for the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians near Newport in the Coast Range of western Oregon.
Connected to the barn’s rain-catching gutters by a network of plastic pipes, the tanks look like an oversized science experiment. Once rainwater collects inside pipes draining the roof, a series of screens filter dirt and debris from the water before it flows into the first storage tank. Even if dirt and debris pass through the screen, it eventually settles to the bottom of the tank. As this first tank fills, it overflows into other linked tanks down the row. By the time filtered rainwater water flows into the last tank, it is nearly free of sediments and ready for pumping onto the garden.
The tanks and the garden sit across a road from the Siletz River, but the Siletz Tribe cannot use the water in the river that carries their name. While there is a small well on the property, only collected rainwater can provide enough water to grow the garden.
Ample water supplies can feel like a given in rainy western Oregon. But a changing climate, with its rising temperatures and increasingly variable precipitation, combined with an archaic water rights system, offers hints that maybe water isn’t as reliable a resource as it once was.
The Siletz River flows west from the Coast Range, through the towns of Logsden and Siletz on its way to the Pacific Ocean. Even though Tribal members have lived on the land surrounding the Siletz River for millennia, and the river water is just a stone’s throw away from the garden rows, the property has no permitted water rights. This makes physically accessible water sources bureaucratically inaccessible.
So Mullins, a lanky and smiley hazel-eyed man, has fabricated an innovative rainwater capture, storage, and irrigation system inspired by his previous work at a Texas farm, as well as information from agriculture extension publications.
In a way, the tanks really are a science experiment, and a critical one for the success of the garden. With the network of 20 linked tanks connected to the barn’s 30 by 100-foot roof, the Tribe can store up to 100,000 gallons of rainwater – every gallon needed to water the garden through the dry Oregon summer months.
In 2019, the Tribe’s health clinic program bought the garden property, just a few miles from the Siletz Reservation and about 13 miles from the coastal town of Newport, Oregon.
Tracy Lancaster, a member of the Tribe’s health clinic committee, said that in 2019 members visited another tribe’s garden in Northern California, and that tribe’s gardening success inspired the Siletz to create their own garden space.
Lancaster also said the rural location of the Siletz Reservation makes it hard for tribal members to access fresh vegetables. Noel’s Market in nearby Siletz works “in a pinch,” but it’s a small store with little variety. “If you want to go and get nice fresh good produce, you have to go into the Farmers Market on Saturdays” in Newport, Lancaster said.
She added that people often also drive an hour or so east to the university town of Corvallis for U-Pick farms or other fresh produce.
“That’s what my family always did. We would go to the valley and find U-Picks so we could pick fresh vegetables and fruit. A lot of us are excited about being able to go and get all those fresh vegetables and fruit just right down the road,” Lancaster said. She also explained that clinic members knew this garden land by the river did not have water rights when they considered buying it.
“The vision was big, right? And so when you’re sitting there in these meetings, you’re like, ‘How are they going to be able to water this?’” Lancaster said.
Western Oregon’s historically ample and reliable rains – reaching 60 inches or more along the coast – aren’t as reliable as they used to be. As temperatures rise, Oregon’s dry years become common. Records show state precipitation has been below average for 17 of the past 23 years.
However, it isn’t just climate change that impacts water availability. Water rights laws are complex, often vaguely written and inequitable.
Oregon water rights are primarily based on the Prior Appropriation Doctrine of 1909, which in essence means that the first people to obtain water rights are always ahead of latecomers, no matter what happens to our culture, economy and agricultural practices. Oregon Water Resources Department documents state: “In water-short times, the water right holder with the oldest date of priority can demand the water specified in his or her water right without regard for the needs of junior users.”
These laws do not recognize that Native communities, who have lived on this land since long before European settlers arrived, could claim water seniority. But the laws were written to protect the ability of European immigrants to mine, farm and settle in the West. So, the Siletz people cannot access the nearby Siletz River to irrigate their garden.
The property sat mostly untouched for a few years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but in 2022 the tribe hired Mullins to create and manage the garden.
Mullins is not a tribal member, nor did he study horticulture. After he lost his corporate job in 2016, Mullin’s partner convinced him to travel around the United States. He found work on several organic farms with the assistance of the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) organization.
“What got me into gardening was that experience,” Mullins said. “That year-long experience of seeing the world through a different lens.
We started to realize how important food was not only to ourselves but to the planet and our culture as a whole.”
The garden produced its first crop harvests the summer of 2022. Mullins and others planted a small quarter-acre plot in front of the remnants of the property’s run-down house.
“We tried to grow everything,” Mullins said. He counts down the varieties – potatoes, squash, tomatoes, onions, strawberries, beans, cucumbers, varieties of squash, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, beets, Swiss Chard, and leeks – that they jammed into the small plot of land.
The property has a well, which Oregon water laws let Mullins irrigate the quarter-acre garden with because it is not a commercial business. Additionally, Mullins had access to one 5,000-gallon cistern holding rainwater from the winter months.
In the middle of June 2022, Mullins and others planted seeds and transplants, and Mullin’s experiment began to see if plants could survive on this plot of land. Just a few hundred feet away, according to data from the United States Geological Survey, 1,500 cubic feet per second of water flows through the Siletz River.
“We started to realize really quickly that that little bit of water that we had was not going to be enough for the whole season– which we knew from the start. But it was one of those things, do we keep watering? Or do we trust the process?” Mullins said.
Mullins was forced to trust the process and by using water sparingly he assured the well and cistern water didn’t run dry. Using all his water supply from the well and his single cistern to irrigate the garden could be a costly decision. The same water that irrigated the garden in 2022 was the same water that farm hands needed for washing, and was the same limited water supply needed for fires and emergencies.
But it worked.
“By the end of the year, we had 750 pounds of food that we documented, categorized and weighed, and distributed — off of a quarter acre on irrigated crops,” Mullins said.
The garden’s harvest of potatoes, onions, and squash was distributed to tribal members though the health clinic.
This year, ample rainwater has been captured into the 20 cisterns, and the garden has flourished, expanding in size and capability. Now, a new greenhouse provides a place to start young tomatoes, tobacco, peppers, and potatoes.
Outside the greenhouse, rows of strawberries grow in the backfields. When summer comes, Mullins hopes tribal members can come out to pick the strawberries and wild blackberries growing on the property.
In the dips of the land, where extra rainwater pools and naturally restores groundwater, Mullins recently planted varieties of willow trees. When the trees grow, they’ll provide basket-weaving materials for use by Tribal members.
“We’ve been able to observe and adapt to the landscape,” Mullins said. “We’re working with patterns that are already there.”
This growing season marks the expanded garden’s first full crop year as Mullins continues breaking ground for more crops.
“We’re doing this year to prepare for the future years, establishing trials to see what grows, what enjoys the conditions at which we grow – with the weather, the soil conditions and things like that,” he said.
The garden now grows 13 varieties of potatoes, 25 varieties of squash, 24 varieties of onions and five varieties of garlic.
“We can see what is the most effective use of our time, what kind of flavors our community enjoys, what grows the best with these changing conditions that we have moving forward, and climate resiliency,” he said. “This year, it’s about observing and playing with all the possibilities.”
Native people have grown food in Western Oregon for millennia, and their crops relied only on rainwater to grow. Early Euro-American farmers and gardeners also relied on the natural patterns of the land and climate. With the coming of dams and irrigation canals came water rights laws that now function in a world with less and less water during growing periods, which means that water rights issues will only increase in intensity.
But Native people have been adapting to adverse conditions their whole existence, and this new Siletz garden shows that once again the Native people are trying to make the most of their relationship to the land.
The garden is still in its early stages. On spring weekends of 2023, Mullins hosted multiple open-houses and tours to get people out to the property. One March Saturday, tribal health clinic committee member Lancaster came out to see the garden in full-swing for the first time. Mullins walked her and a few others through the different sections of the garden, and in the greenhouse urged the guests to pull a few radishes from the ground. The rest of the tour, Lancaster’s hot pink and sparkly purple nails held the fresh vegetables, and she talked about how excited she was to use the garden’s gift in her salad for the evening.
At the end of the tour, guests circled up in the gravel parking lot between the greenhouse and the barn. Mullins had set out a table of baby vegetable plant starts, and he encouraged people to take them home as gifts to start their own gardens.
Mullins said that as the garden continues to grow, he hopes more and more community members can begin to use it as a resource.
“We [could] facilitate and steward other gardening projects, we could facilitate community-wide orchard eating and gleaning and food processing and just developing those skills as a whole,” he said. “It’s not just us as a garden program, saying, ‘do this and do that.’ It’s about the community, being part of it, and sharing skills, sharing knowledge, and facilitating relationships.”
This story was a part of the 2023 Science Story publication. To view the story in the publication, click here: