Photograph by Andrew Doench
Every day, Ande “the Elf” Schewe looks for what he calls “phenoms” on his 16-acre homestead near Versailles, Indiana. One day, it might be a perfectly ripe pawpaw. Another, a newly opened flower. Or how his greenhouse, which is connected to his home, can hold a temperature around 60 degrees when it’s nearly freezing outside.
“Phenoms are things that call to you to look at them a little closer,” says Schewe, who is entering the 16th growing season on his “Elfstead,” with his two border collies, Othello and Sheba; 22 chickens; and a small maintenance team of goats. His homestead follows a textbook permaculture design, organized in a series of zones that begin inside the house and radiate out to the property’s furthest points.
A fusion of the words “permanent” and “agriculture,” permaculture is a method of land management and a way of life that can allow humans to live in a place permanently, he says, without destroying the Earth and ourselves in the process. Through the years, he’s learned to nurture the plants and animals that live in countless microclimates throughout his property, arranging each zone based on the amount of human energy necessary to manage it and his own needs for survival.
“Take my chicken coop, for example. I’m going to tend to it every day, so I want to put it near the house,” explains Schewe, who’s been an instructor at the Cincinnati Permaculture Institute in Price Hill since 2008. “Knowing that I’m going to the chicken coop every day, I’m going to plant things along that route that I’ll want to observe every day.”
Growing up in Greenhills, Schewe spent much of his childhood in Winton Woods, and his father, a meteorologist and air quality expert, kept him up on the environmental issues of the day. He was about 10 years old when a large section of forest became Forest Fair Mall in the late 1980s. “That really affected me as a kid,” he says. “Not a very fair thing to do to the forest.”
He was studying natural resources at Hocking College and commercial art at Antonelli College when he took a summer trip to Australia and found himself in front of a bulletin board in Brisbane announcing a three-day course on permaculture. He enrolled. “My world shifted, because it gave me a lot of things to say yes to,” he says. “There’s a certain draining energy when you’re always seeing the problems of the world but not addressing them.”
An artist and creative thinker, Schewe says an early draw to the permaculture lifestyle was his desire to never be a starving artist. He continues living this way because “it feels right.” What he can’t grow or produce, he trades. Venison in exchange for American hazelnuts, Tulsi holy basil, or dried nettles. A willow tree to supply materials for his current weaving obsession in exchange for a hand with some physical labor.
And Schewe says he’s producing a surplus, an important principle of permaculture. What he doesn’t need, he shares. “I get to help people understand what the land wants to do and communicate what people want to do with the land, to figure out a way forward that merges the two.”
Photograph by Andrew Doench
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