The Houses · H-08

Yamhill County, Oregon · Established 2002 · Open to visitors

Orchard House grows about nine tons of food a year and gives most of it away, which is less impressive than it sounds and more work than it looks.

Region

North America

Residential places

17

Residence

Seventeen places, in periods of three to twelve days; harvest periods are longer and are hard work.

Recurring form

The house keeps the Open Table, and a pressing day in the autumn.

Fabric

The house, kitchen, and packing shed are step-free. The orchard rows are grass and are rough in places; a mown route runs the length of the north block.

This is a register entry. No address, telephone line, or arrangement to visit is published here, and none can be taken up through this website.

The house

The land was bought in 2002 from a family leaving the valley, with the orchard already forty years old and about a third of it past saving. Replanting took nine seasons and is documented, tree by tree, in a ledger that residents find tedious and stewards find indispensable.

The mentorship scheme began in 2007 with two students from the county high school and grew to eleven a year. It is a paid apprenticeship, not a volunteering programme, and the house is firm about the distinction.

Watershed work is done as a member of the local council rather than as an initiative of the house.

The work

• Food cultivation: orchard, market garden, and a press. Produce goes to the county food bank and to school meal programmes.
• Youth mentorship: paid apprenticeships in horticulture, small-engine repair, and food handling.
• Watershed work with the local council: riparian planting, culvert survey, and stream temperature monitoring.

Observance kept here

The shared forms, here

The Repair Table

Agricultural equipment. Ladders and picking crates are inspected before the harvest period and again after it.

The Boundary Walk

The established walk: the rows are walked and every tree is looked at, whether or not anything is wrong with it.

The house year

Kept in use

• The kitchen bell

  Timekeeping. It is rung for the meal, and at most houses to mark the end of the twelve minutes.

The house, day to day

Seasonal to a fault. From August the kitchen is essentially a preserving operation and the house eats standing between batches; in February it is soup and a good deal of apology.

A working orchard with a 1950s packing shed converted in 1997. Wet winters, dry summers, and a wooden building that moves: doors that shut in July do not shut in January and the house has stopped planing them.

Rooms

The top rows, The press room, The lane, and the usual others (11 in all).

In the kitchen

The pressing-day cake. A heavy apple cake in a roasting tin, cut into thirty. Made four times on pressing day and never at any other time of year, which is a rule nobody wrote.

Outstanding

The press — Stripped and food-safe every August. Certificated, because the juice is sold at the gate. Shed doors — Seasonal movement. Accepted. Planing them in summer makes January worse and this has been learned twice. Wasp nests, packing shed eaves — Removed by trade before pressing day. On the schedule for August, not September.

Said here

“That's a vinegar year.” — It has gone wrong, we knew it might, and we will bottle it anyway.

Local custom

The ladder rule. A written safety rule that is obeyed in September and disregarded in June, and a house that has decided to keep it anyway.

The life of a house

Local participation

• Gleaning, in the fortnight the fruit comes in.
• The tool inventory, checked at the end of each working morning.

Separation

Notice to the steward or the convener of the nearest circle. Either is sufficient.

A life in the practice
The term a steward holds, and its limits

The steward

Records

• Annual public work report

Other houses

• Lantern House — Socorro County, New Mexico
• River House — Ramsey County, Minnesota

Entry H-08 · reviewed 18 February 2026