My firewood shed and firewood

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(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.

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Here’s our new ride, the club car. It’s a golf cart for cruising around Earthaven, but the news about it is that it’s got a solar panel on top so you can charge it with electricity.   But that’s pretty challenging to do when you live off the grid. So, Brandon, who’s over there digging around in the cover crop seeds, rigged up this solar panel to the top of it.  Let’s try to see the solar panel …. There, it’s like that!

So does that mean that means that you can basically drive it around and you don’t have to charge it at all?

Brandon: We’re hoping that it’ll just charge itself off of the it solar panel off the top. I got a charge controller hooked up. It’s is specially made for the golf cart. It’s is down there in the back seat box. Yeah, working it out.

Courtney Brooke: The toolbox? That’s not the charge controller.  Oh, that box. There it is. That’s the charge controller.
So you just got a solar panel. You got the charge controller. You need to hook it up.

Brandon: I got a fuse in my pocket. I just need a few more wires.

Courtney Brooke: Got a fuse in your pocket…

Brandon: Yeah. Then we just got to put the golf cart where it’ll be in the Sun, and then it’ll charge it, hopefully keep itself charged all the time.

Courtney Brooke: Awesome.

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Transcription from video:

NikiAnne: Oh my gosh, I love my firewood. Thanks to my partner Chris Farmer who built this!

This is under a plastic like greenhouse roofing corrugated that allows a lot of sun to get through. Keeps it dry and we have cut it to really short lengths so that it fits in our small stove.

I like to say that we judge our wealth by our firewood. How many years ahead have we seasoned the wood? So that it’s dry and not green. This is probably two years old and we have enough to have it be supplying for years obviously. Or just the little, teeny snow we have.

Bless the firewood, the ancient ones. Ancient sunlight, thank you, thank you.

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Dr. Monique Mazza: Hey y’all! This is Dr. Monique Mazza from Earthaven Ecovillage with part two of our vermiculture video. In the first part we already went over how to feed our worms and set them up so they’re going to be happy critters and producing worm castings for you in the first two levels.

Today I’m going to show you the finished layered level three, as all the castings have been processed through the worms body, and what to do with the castings.

So here we go…We’re going to take off these first two layers and be careful with your back because it’s pretty heavy and voila!

Usually this finished layer has no visible worms in it. There’s probably going to be some down below, it kind of looks like a dehydrated version. There should be no leaf matter or no real visible evidence of food and if we just start going through here we could see it’s a real fluffy kind of material. Usually little circular, little pebbles looking. So we’re just gonna scratch it a bit and the best way there are likely to be worms down at the bottom of this. But really because you’ve been feeding the two upper trays there’s perforations in the trays when the food is gone from this level they will naturally start to crawl up into the layers where there’s active feeding happening.

So, typically to harvest this we create a pyramid because there’s likely to be worms in here that we don’t want to get stuck in our casting buckets.  See, here’s one that’s still eating something. So we create a bit of a pyramid and as natural nature has it bugs the worms do not like to be in the sun. So what we do is by creating this pyramid we make them a little bit uncomfortable and then the worms will dive down to the bottom of this. Then leaving this for about 10 minutes like that and then we can come back as the worms will now dive down.

They’ll have evicted this top layer and then we can take this and put this in a bucket and it’s ready to be applied to the plants. There are some egg shells in here because I think that that just helps aerate it but that’s fine if they’re part of it.

Storing this is best in a bucket with a closed lid. This is alive with lots of probiotics and so using this as soon as possible is best. If you have to store it, store it with a lid so it retains its moisture.

Basically what I do is take one handful of this per plant. If I’ve just transplanted some seedlings, some small plants, I would just take a handful of this and scratch it around the base of the plant. Then let nature do the rest.

These are our worm castings one of nature’s free best composting that I could find and help our plants be more medicinal for us. So use your worms, use your kitchen compost, and enjoy!

Thanks for watching the video!

Courtney Brooke: What’s going on with that spout down?

Dr. Monique Mazza: There? Oh, the spout is basically the leachate. This is the water that comes down and this is not really supposed to be used.

It’s keeping drainage happening. So this is always open. If it gets too wet it’s a problem. So we want to have it the right level of moisture. So we wet our leaves before we put them in there but we don’t put them in dripping. We actually squeeze the water out before we make the bedding.

Then this leachate typical it said not to put this directly on plants. What I do with this is I dilute it and then I put this in my main compost pile. So I think there’s benefits to it but I think that it’s too strong. It could burn the plants. So diluting it and then I throw it in my big compost pile for further breakdown.

That’s it. It’s really fun and it’s so rewarding. Your worms will love you. So enjoy the worm castings and have vibrant plants!

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(transcript from video)

Hi! This is Monique Mazza. I’m a Naturopathic physician and I live at Earthaven Ecovillage.

I’m going to show y’all today working with my friends the worms to help us make really nutritious fertilizer for the soil which helps us have more medicinal foods. Part of my passion is helping people understand how foods can be medicinal and my worms are a big part of that.

Introduction and Benefits

So we’re working with a worm vermiculture system that I inherited and it’s a three-stage system that uses our common kitchen scraps which are mostly vegetables. Here I have some chopped up carrots brussels sprouts and a little bit of leftover tofu that we’re going to feed them.

This is a three-stage system that will first show you how to feed the worms so that they proliferate, they will ingest the food, and then basically process it into what are called castings. Those are one of the most nutritious things that I found that helped boost my little baby plants. So they create a casting which is a fertilizer that’s filled with nutrition that’s readily available for the plants.

I’ll show that at the end but in my history of working with gardening I haven’t found anything that gives a small seedling a rapid boost of growth and green compared to the worm casting. So I’m really passionate about it. It also helps us keep our kitchen waste out of the landfill.

And it’s a really doesn’t have any smell so we keep it in a warm place in our home during the winter and then in the summer we put it usually in a shady spot on the north side of our house.

Another benefit of worm castings besides nourishing our plants is it’s actually can be made a foliar spray. So you can take the castings…I won’t demonstrate this but maybe in another video… taking the castings soaking it in water and using that water as a foliar spray diluted. It’s the actual pesticide so it helps give the plants defense, sort of like a microbiotic a probiotic boost so they defend themselves from the bugs that are around.

So many benefits, but let’s open this up and see our worms how they’re doing today.

Feeding

So we create a bedding for the worms out of simple soil and some shredded leaves you can also do this with any other clean material like newspaper.

I like to keep it as natural as possible so I like to use shredded leaves that are wet and we create about a two inch thickness of that. Then we have some soil and we’ll find our veggies in here and then normally we’ll find a spot where our worms are working and… Excuse me, little guys and gals here…

We have our nice blob of worms eating eating and producing their poop which are their castings.

So they’re busy at work here. I pretty much always keep them covered. Some people feed on the surface. I found that putting the food the scraps a little bit below definitely below this layer of leaves, because that’ll keep the bugs away. I just find a little hole and I try to work in a clockwise position but really it’s so simple there aren’t many rules to this. The simpler the better.

I don’t have a weight ratio that I feed the worms I just kind of keep an eye on it. If you’re feeding them too much, the food’s going to be sitting there and it’ll cause lots of fly so that’ll be your signal that it’s too much. Just wait a few days let them eat that down come back.

I’m creating a hole. I’m burying the scraps that are chopped up in small pieces and then I’m just gonna cover it with the soil first and then go back and cover it with the leaves.

Again moisture is really important because without that the worms will dry up and they won’t be happy. They’ll actually start crawling out of this. So giving them a little bit of darkness we put the lid back on.

I’m feeding this first tray; this is my working tray and it has holes at the bottom.

So there’s another tray here. I’ll show you that they’ve been working on that tray for a little bit so if we lift this one off see this is our intermediate tray, you can see that there’s still some worms in here working and this is not yet processed. This is still unprocessed, this is not yet castings. It’s on its way but you can see there’s still large leaf material, there’s pieces of root here.

Continued in Part 2…

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Transcript of Making Bamboo Charcoal in a Kon-Tiki Kiln

Courtney Brooke: So I was coming to park in my driveway at my house and then it’s like well there’s a fire in my driveway. So now we’re going to see what’s happening with a driveway fire. Something is happening here. It’s Dimitri in his natural habitat.

Dimitri: (Natural Habitat Monkey Noises)

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing Dimitri?

Dimitri: I’m making charcoal. Biochar with bamboo and with this little metal cone-like structure which is some people call a kontiki kontiki.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah okay so you cut the bamboo down is that bamboo dry?

Dimitri: It’s six, it was cut six weeks ago, so it’s not fully dry because we’re in winter time. Once We’re going into spring, but you could see that it’s duller than usual.

Courtney Brooke: Okay so you cut the bamboo, now you’re over here, and you’re making it into charcoal.

Dimitri: Yeah and like as you see ashes here you see like the ashes here, that’s when you want to add more bamboo to it.

Courtney Brooke: And then you’re squirting with the water hose?

Dimitri: Not yet. At the end.

Courtney Brooke: At the end. yeah okay. And then, and then, this is something that you already made?

Dimitri: This is some of this is the first batch we made in there.

Courtney Brooke: there so that was that’s how much came out of this contiki kiln.

Dimitri: yep

Courtney Brooke: Okay what are you using this for?

Dimitri: Well what inspired it was to maybe use it as infill like insulation in my walls of this new um extension of my hut i’m making for to have a kitchen basically and so we’re thinking about this being insulative because it has all these tiny holes in it and let’s check it out and um yeah and there’s so much surface area and little tiny  holes and we thought that it could act as a nice insulation also being great for the earth because  now we’re like storing carbon in my walls for probably decades or centuries

Courtney Brooke: That’s so exciting.

Dimitri: Yeah, um but then there’s just like so many other ideas around using this like we can you can make also adobe bricks you can like have it for agricultural use like we could make we’re thinking about maybe like what if we got a um a blacksmith to like weld a six-foot version of this so yeah like we can cut these into like six foot lengths and put in way bigger chunks and like make way more biochar for like the community for all the different uses and like have them in our bamboo grove so like like utilizing them bamboo that we’re basically just cutting because they’re just spreading into the roads and just leaving the carbons up going back into the atmosphere but now we could actually utilize it so we could have  charcoal we can like put in our gardens our farms um you know so many like keep it in room spaces to help with mold and smells

Courtney Brook: Hooray for charcoal. Okay well stay tuned for for how it all works out with Dimitri’s building project.

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Simultaneously this year, three new members in three different neighborhoods are working on setting up their own unique versions of the tiny house. Near the front of the property, in the Forest Garden neighborhood, Liz Diaz and Joseph Rasband have just moved into their creation. Joseph built the house on the trailer bed liberated when a tree fell on their trailer in 2016. In addition to a separate utility shed for their solar components and other equipment, a detachable mud room has been joined to the front door. Both Joseph and Liz are dedicated farmers, whose cows, chicken co-op and other gifts to the community continue to thrive while the construction project heads towards completion.

Donna Ireland recently relocated the magical little house to the Bellavia Gardens neighborhood that her son, Richard, built her for the purpose of living at Earthaven. An unstoppable gardener, her neighbors can look forward to her myriad contributions to the beauty, nutrition and all-over fertility of the Bellavia experience. Donna is a professional bodyworker and health educator whose Beneficial Way program will be presented at Earthaven in the near future.

above: Donna and Richard stop a moment for a snapshot during his recent visit.

Also, up at Hawk Holler, Sam Del Vecchio is fulfilling his long held dreams about living lightly on the land. His tiny house project has various Earthaven experts chipping in their experience and expertise for this slightly less than tiny moveable living space. The approximately 32’x10′ (interior) space will be built with natural, non-toxic Thermacork walls that are 100% cork and completely breathable. Sam and his family (wife, Julia, and young ones Luca and Meira) came to Earthaven several years ago, finally winding up in our Eastern-most neighborhood, where Julia plans to build her little house on the very next site. An acupuncturist, Sam has several other healing modalities under his belt, but is devoting most of his time these days to his new home.       

 above: Sam and the Thermacork.

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While it’s hard to be encouraged by the way humans are utilizing planetary resources and influences, to some extent it just makes us hunker down even more, to mine those inner resources that will help us go the distance—get another project done, another plan designed, even explore another conflict…and keep creating what means most to us, including collaborating on celebrations and community traditions.

One way to share some of these developments with us is by staying subscribed to this newsletter and becoming a Supporting Member.

I hear visitors sometimes wonder how such a cool place could be so…messy! It’s understandable that the vision we have of where we’ll be in another decade might be the same one visitors are looking for now. But Earthaven is not a Planned Community! We’re a community in various stages of planning, still dreaming ourselves into existence, in many ways more a process than an accomplishment—one that needs more time and capital to unfold in the organic way we’ve learned to trust.

So we invite you to visit with an eye for what stands out as beautiful to you, whether in the landscape, the built environment, or the lives of the people and animals you meet. Please feel welcome to join us (as Supporting Members, students, work exchangers, and for a community tour), and to feel the possibilities. Come grow with us!

Earthaven, by the way, is growing! As our new structure takes shape, eight people have lined up so far to take the jump into Full Membership as soon as we’re ready to make that official. Here’s what one wrote in a recent membership interview:

Question: What are your deepest dreams and aspirations for living in community?

I see a thriving community where people know the land intimately, they know the food and medicine all around them, they know how to make fibers and tools from the land, and they do this in a sacred way. We create so much food, the wildlife begin to thrive and populations surge. Ceremony is weaved throughout: honoring the land and its inhabitants, individuals going through rites of passage, and important annual events. There are tools that address conflict, bringing peace to people’s hearts. …. I see a deepening in spirituality as different backgrounds come together. I see dancing and singing weaved into everyday events, [with] children heavily honored and actions looked at with an eye for future generations…. I see a place that people get excited to visit and feel sad to leave. This is the place I want to call home. (It is interesting, as I write this, to see how some of this is present already, and so maybe what I’m imagining is a deepening of it all.)

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