Transcript:

Hi there.

It’s Courtney Brook here coming to you from my office and sanctuary the forest.

Happy to be in here, as always.

And I wanted to share a little bit with y’all about an upcoming offering that I’ll be sharing at Earthaven EcoVillage in the fall.

So it’s called Deep Ecology and Yoga Retreat, and the body of work of Deep Ecology was founded and initially shared by Joanna Macy and some of her colleagues.

And it was developed in response to her noticing in herself and her own energy in her own body that she is tiring of of trying to make things better on planet Earth, tiring of activism and wanting to be able to keep on going with her efforts and seeing a lot of folks around her doing various, you know, all the different kinds of activism that we do, whether it’s being a school teacher or being a parent or being on the front lines in the forest or, you know, all the other 10,000 things that that we do to try to make life beautiful and good.

And she was noticing that she was needing to find ways to reconnect to herself and reconnect to the source of life and to her calling.

And so she developed this body of work called the Work That Reconnects or Deep Ecology.

And I remember the first time that I participated in Work That Reconnect Deep Ecology offering.

I left there feeling so much more connected to my sense of purpose and to my life and to the Earth that I’m working for.

So in the fall, I’m excited to be offering Deep Ecology and Yoga Retreat with my dear friend and amazing yoga teacher Garrell Bevirt, who is going to be facilitating the yoga portion of the retreat.

So we’ll be nourishing our bodies and nourishing our connection to ourselves and to each other and to all of life, to our ecological identities and to the reason why we do the things that we do.

So whether or not you are considering yourself an activist or wanting to consider yourself an activist or just really needing to deeply connect with your sense of purpose and your path, I really hope to see you there.

And, Yeah, may we find the things in our lives that really re energize us and refuel us and look to each other into the source of life itself when we tire.

So thank you very much, Joanna Macy for this inspiring body of work and hope to see you there.

The post About the Deep Ecology & Yoga Retreat 2021 appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

We hope to see you in the forest at Earthaven EcoVillage in the fall for Deep ecology and Yoga retreat to reconnect to ourselves, reconnect to each other, and reconnect to the source of our lives.

The post Deep Ecology & Yoga Retreat 2021 appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Transcript of Hut Hamlet Work Project: Ferrocement Cistern Tank Gets an Upgrade

Good morning on the cusp of spring and summer.

Today is an exciting day. Not only is it my favorite little person’s first birthday, but also we’re having a neighborhood work party to continue building this ferrocement cistern which is where all of our beautiful water comes from so.

We all drink the spring water from this land which is just such a honor and a blessing and I really feel how you know to to bathe in clean water to like wash my body and wash my thoughts and you know drink and cook with clean water is like what a gift and what a privilege and so we’ve had to learn over the years how to take good care of that, you know.

There’s got to have be some systems it’s not like we just get to automatically turn on our faucet and then there’s water so.

This here this big tank which is burmed into the earth is a ferrocement cistern tank. So this tank was built um in the style of ferrocement like 20 years ago and then it didn’t get any maintenance other than just you know checking the water level and so on until about two years ago.

So it was 18 years old didn’t need any maintenance and had been feeding our entire neighborhood which was about 20 people for all that time and then we last or two years ago we got down in there and we cleaned it out and filled in some cracks and we drained the whole thing and like pressure washed it and took care of it but then now we have more people in our neighborhood and legally we can’t have more than 24 people on one one water source so we had to get creative and what we’ve done is come together to build a new cistern so that we can have that’s going to get filled from a different water source so that we can be you know following all the proper rules.

So today is us continuing to work on this new beautiful cistern so what happens with a lot of things in our neighborhood is that we have a sign up sheet we have a work party someone volunteers to cook lunch people volunteer for shifts and then we get together and make it happen so here we are this is the construction site we left some offerings here back in the fall before we started to dig this hole and now we’re building this new cement cistern how many gallons that is a cistern hold…

Hey Paul! Paul. Paul how many gallons is the cistern how many gallons is the cistern?

10 000 more or less.

10 000 gallons that’s a lot of gallons so now we’re going to have about 20 000 gallons of capacity in our neighborhood.

So how’s this go,,,,,Yeah so there we are so what you do is you put you put up some structure you pour it we poured a cement slab then we put up some structure of rebar and wire and then we just used cement to travel over that to make it the shape that we want so you could make I mean you can make really anything out of fear of cement at any shape sometimes people use cans like squashed cans to fill that in and so yeah yay for collaboration cooperation and learning what it takes to be able to take care of the water you know meeting us in the middle of where we where we are and where we’re going and yeah so this is the midway strategy so in a lot of gratitude also for the like intergenerational aspect of it like this brother Paul we wouldn’t be able to do without him he’s been here since the dawn of time helping us figure out how to make these things happen and you know and then all these laborers and you know all that has to come from somewhere and the children have been up here and it’s just been really sweet we’ve all been learning and having a really joyful time .

So celebrating that happy birthday to my favorite little person.

The post Hut Hamlet Work Project: Ferrocement Cistern Tank Gets an Upgrade appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Hey Uncle Zev. What are you doing?

Zev: Oh, hey! I’m  emptying out this liquid duck gold.

Courtney Brooke: Duck gold?

Zev: Yes.

Courtney Brooke: What does that mean?

Zev: An unspoken treasure. This is our duck water from the sweet ducks. The ancona ducks have been swimming in here the last week About once a week we empty this out and spread this water around to different plants that need it, with its beautiful phosphorus and all the nitrogen and nutrients in there and the duck oils which make this cool rainbow colored oily skim on the top and feed all the plants with it. It’s one of the amazing yields of the ducks. Along with the eggs, and their manure, and their beauty and companionship, and bug eating, we get fertigation water. So that’s what I’m doing. Fertigation…. fertilize your irrigation. It’s like saying wave irrigating in ways that are also fertilizing the plants because of everything i just said.

Courtney Brooke: So do you recommend having ducks?

Zev: Definitely yeah

Courtney Brooke: Who do you recommend having ducks? Why? who should have ducks?

Zev: Well probably people who have a few other companions, a few other crew to do it with. Once I had ducks by myself, when I lived in someone’s backyard in a salvaged metal and earthen building I built. That meant that if I ever went away for the night or was just really tired or something then it was always like “oh god, I gotta go deal with the ducks” or get someone to duck sit the ducks. But if you got a few compadres and comadres then somebody can take care of them when somebody else goes.

So, people who have a little crew, and who have a little diversified landscape. Especially where you can rotate them through different areas. Different paddocks, kind of mini paddocks and rotate them through the garden at the right time when they’re not going to trample teensy plants. Rotate them through the forest garden and around the mushroom logs when the mushrooms are coming out so that they eat the slugs before they damage the mushrooms and around the house to eat the termites. So a diversified landscape, home scale is one of the ways ducks fit really good.

Also, people in traditional Asian cultures use them in big large scale rice paddies. So they’re all manner of things. The trick is, that we didn’t do here yet, is to have the water they swim and be high in the landscape so you can use gravity to get fertigation water to other points. So, this is currently down here for convenience and that’s a little inconvenient.

Courtney Brooke: Hey ducks!

Zev: There’s six of them but there’s only five here because one of them’s in there right now sitting on eggs breeding. They’re hopefully going to hatch out into a new round little ducklings.

The post Fertigation at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Why have a lawn when you can have this….?

There are so many pollinators out here. Honeybees and I see three different kinds of butterflies. I mean I’m just seeing hundreds of pollinators around me right now.

I’m sitting in this patch of these little ….what is this this is veronica? No this is ground ivy

I think it’s ground ivy.

This beautiful purple little flower, which I’m pretty sure it’s ground ivy, it’s just making food for so many bees. It’s probably only like 30 foot by 30 foot section not even right here.

Anyway, I highly recommend.

The post Why have a lawn? When you can have this? Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

(Transcript from video):

Courtney Brooke: Good morning Zev.

Zev: Good morning.

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Zev: I just took the cover off our solar hot water panel. It was covered for the winter and now the sun is hitting it. I let water in and that’s going to be heating water up so that we have nice piping hot water in our sink throughout the warm season.

Courtney Brooke: So that water gets hot in there and then where does the water go?

Zev: Then it gets pushed by the gravity from our high spring cistern which is about 60 vertical feet above the house pipe down here. It gets pushed by that pressure back through that cover pipe and into our hot water tank which is on the second floor of the house . Then it just is stored there by gravity to feed down into our sink in the kitchen and the sink in the in the other bedroom

Courtney Brooke: So there’s no pump?

Zev: No pumps.

Courtney Brooke: no electricity?

Zev: Yeah that’s right. It’s not quite passive because water is moving but yeah it’s a solar panel called a pt50 which has these four inch diameter metal  tubes inside that have enough water that they can resist some freezing in the spring and fall  but also have enough surface area that they can get enough surface area to volume ratio from the sun to heat the water up to like 140 degrees or something.

Courtney Brooke: And is the water like hot all the time?

Zev: Not when the sun’s not shining.

Courtney Brooke:  Ohhh.

Zev: Yeah, but it’s there. Our hot water tank stores the hot water for a good 12 or 18 hours hot enough for washing dishes. So, it’s only if we run into two or three days of rain that we have to worry about having enough hot water. Yay!

Courtney Brooke: Happy spring.

Zev:  Happy spring.

The post Solar Hot Water at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning! Happy Beltane!

Remember all that rye? It was like taller than my head. This is all it there in the background. It got mowed down.

The awesome thing about this rye is that it’ a cover crop. So the cover crop here is rye and vetch and they grow together. And the rye is you know making a lot of biomass. You can see there’s just tons and tons and tons of this mulch. Now here this is enough mulch to not have to buy any mulch or import it from somewhere else.

So, it’s growing all the mulch that is needed for this garden and it’s feeding the soil. We’re composting and these other ways that we feed the soil, but also the plants that are growing in the soil are making sugars on their roots. The more that there are plants growing that are making a lot of sugars the more it feeds the soil food web that’s alive in the soil. That’s also another thing that’s happening with the rye and the vetch.

This this kind of rye you have to wait until it’s flowering. If you were to cut it down before it was flowering it would just grow back kind of like your lawn. But, when it puts all of its energy into making this seed head you cut it down then it won’t come back. Now you just have all this beautiful mulch laid right in place. Been feeding the soil all winter, preventing the weeds from growing. This man who grows this rye, Leon, he says something like “you just have to take up all the parking spaces with cover crop.” In other words, you plant the cover crop so thickly that the weeds don’t have anywhere to be and they don’t have any access to the light.

It’s Beltane right now, officially getting into the heat of summer. This cover crop was planted in the fall, after the winter or fall crops came out of the garden. It’s a sight to behold. When I look at it, it just feels so good in my eyeballs.
So, thank you, rye.
Thank you, vetch.
Thank you, Leon, for taking good care of it like that.

The post Take up all the parking spaces with Cover Crop: Rye & Vetch at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: Hi Steve.

Steve: Hi.

Courtney Brooke:  I was just noticing you know in my life the longing for more mentorship and elders. So I’ve been asking some people in my life who are who are more experienced and farther along the journey. If you could give yourself some advice when you were 20 years old, what would it be?

Feelings and Needs

Steve: Wow I like the question. Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is the concept of feelings and needs.

It’s the amazing realization that everything that I do is an attempt to meet a need. All of my feelings are this amazing elegant feedback system that my body mind has to guide me. So I would encourage my 20 year old self to get more in touch with my feelings and learn what the basic needs are. You know that I think that would have been incredibly powerful.

Pain Can Inform Life

I think maybe the other thing would be that when painful things happen, it doesn’t mean necessarily that there’s something wrong or that I’ve done anything wrong or anyone else has done anything wrong. When you look out in nature you see death and destruction all the time that leads to life. So I would tell my 20 year old self: yes, feel the uncomfortable painful feelings. Don’t deny those and don’t repress that. But also don’t jump to conclusions that just because this thing is painful that is necessarily bad for me. I have a lot in my own life, I had a lot of stories about that, that made everything much more difficult. That pain is a way for life, to get information about life.

Failure = Living Systems Educating Themselves

The third one is kind of similar. It is around the concept of failure. I had a dear friend who years ago told me this: “there’s no such thing as failure, there’s only feedback and learning.”  If I could have had that wisdom when I was 20; I used to beat myself up so much about having failed at this and failed at that. Then eventually adopted a more evolutionary and nature perspective of reality. Like the quote “failure things happen all the time but they’re just part of living systems educating themselves.”  That would have given me a lot of relief.  I had much more energy in my life if I had less of that failure thought and more of just realizing that “oh, this is just a living system, I’m a living system learning.”

Reclaim the Sacred…Earth, Feminine, and Relationship to Our Bodies

Let’s see the fourth one I think would be around the concept of the sacred. What does it mean for things to be sacred? What things are sacred and what things have lost their sacredness in our culture that would be really helpful if I could reclaim? The three that come to mind is something that I think I heard from Starhawk. I’m not sure exactly where I heard it.  The three aspects of life that got most damaged in the patriarchy has been our relationship to the earth, our relationship to the feminine, and our relationship to our bodies. I would I really encourage my 20 year old self to reflect on and pray and read and whatever would help to reclaim my the sense of the sacredness of earth and feminine in my body.

Courtney Brooke:  Wow thanks so much Steve. Thank you.

The post Life Advice for Your 20 Year Old Self with Steve Torma at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

(Transcript from video)

Elderberry Mother Plant and Rootings

Lyndon: Hello everyone. This is a rooting that we did from a plant called the Magnolia Elderberry. It has nothing to do with magnolia plant. It’s just a variety name. We keep them in water for a while and change out the water two or three times a week. It’s the easy way to germinate roots and then we change up the water three times a week. Keep them in a bucket then they grow roots. You see the amazing little white thingies? Those are the roots… then go back in the bucket. After they get roots we put them in pots and we grow them up.

We sell the plants. The thing about elderberries is they make these amazing berries that are really good for medicinal purposes, especially colds and stuff like that. You have to have two different kinds of elderberries. We have this very vigorous growing Magnolia Elderberry and we have the Nova. Somewhere around here we have a Medicine Wheel which comes from Earthaven but we don’t have it in this group.

I can take you over here and show you the actual mother plant those Magnolia Elderberries came from. This is the Magnolia Elderberry it was planted out of a pot around 2018.. it was about the spring of 2018. It was about this tall coming out of the pot. We planted it here in the ground and it’s to thicken off. I was like is this an unusual elderberry. Kind of a lot of them grow to this height but most are a little taller this. I measured it one day we got up here with a ladder. It’s got up to 11 and a half feet, I think it’s that was last fall,  I think maybe it’s even taller but it is an elderberry that came from the Piedmont. Either Chuck Marsh or Debbie Lienhart brought from the Piedmont probably a similar way.

Elderberry at Useful Plants Nursery

Courtney Brooke: Where can we get some elderberries like this?

Lyndon: At Useful Plants Nursery. We sell them Useful Plant Nursery in fact, which is where we are. But we take our plants on the road. We’re gonna take them to the herb fest, which is going to be May 1^st and 2^nd this year at the Ag center. If you’re going to the airport (Asheville airport) you go down the road a little farther and the Ag center is on the right.

Courtney Brooke: Okay get your elderberries… make elderberry syrup…  UPN (Useful Plants Nursery)

Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)

The post Elderberries with Lyndon at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke:  Good Morning Leon. What are you doing?

Leon: We are mulching. You take the cover crop and we’re spreading it out so no weeds will grow through. And no sun will hit the ground. And we’re gonna move this greenhouse onto it. Then plant some ginger.

Courtney Brooke:  Wow.

Leon: It will get nice and hot in there and it will get watered everyday by a little spray system. Hopefully grow pretty fast.

Courtney Brooke:  Wow that’s really thick mulch, huh?

Leon: Yeah, it’s thick mulch and it grew right in this spot. Take a closeup. Here’s where it grew. Take a closup!

Courtney Brooke:  You know what, hold on a sec. Yeah, this is amazing. It’s such a feeling in the body of wealth.

Leon: Of which?

Courtney Brooke:  Wealth?

Leon: Wealth.

Courtney Brooke:  When there’s this much mulch. It’s just so clear that we are rich. What’s he doing? What’s he doing?

Leon: Oh.I think you’re just feeling the diverse life that is here.

Courtney Brooke:  That’s the wealth feeling?

Leon: Maybe that’s what you mean when you are wealthy. Ok, perfect. This is the soil. Get a closeup.

The post Mulching with Leon from Full Circle Farm at Earthaven Ecovillage appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.