Transcript from Video:

Courtney Brooke:  Who have we got here? Sweet potatoes. Hello different kind of sweet potatoes!
Hello another kind of sweet potatoes. We must love sweet potatoes! Oh and what is this? sweet potatoes. What is this?

Saawwwwheat potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato, sweet potato all the way to the end.

And over here this is the promise of turmeric and ginger.

Just cut off a little piece of the root, plant it in the tray, and it’ll grow.

These are all that turmeric and ginger. It’s quite a special thing Appalachian turmeric and ginger grown in the greenhouse.

And who do we have over here? Some kind of cucurbit maybe a cucumber.

And who do we have over here? Baby tomatoes hello.

More cucurbits. Some basil and a stand of peppers.

This is our greenhouse walking towards summer. These are all the summer starts and summer plants. We still have this celery growing here. We still have some of these brassicas growing here that we’re still getting some broccoli off of and some leaves off of.

And we got a little green bean patch going over there.

So that’s what our greenhouse at Full Circle Farm is looking like on the cusp of spring and summer.

The post Sweet Potatoes, Turmeric, Ginger, and more in the Spring Greenhouse at 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 am grating this incredible black turmeric grown by Leon with his mad, passionate devotion to beautiful food and medicine plants at Full Circle Far next to Earthaven Ecovillage.

Courtney Brooke: Look at that color of the grated root.

Zev:  This is after Courtney Brooke dug it up with Leon, harvested it. Then I had this vision that doing a steam inhalation with it would heal my nasal passages. So I’m working on that and I’m gonna tincture some and make an elixir with some, like Rachel taught us to do. Really excited about this plant.

Courtney Brooke: This plant was dug maybe like a few days ago. On Thursday? Like last week. Just from our neighbor.
I have a motto that I live by that I eat purple things every chance I get because you are what you eat.

Zev: And she wants to be purple.

Courtney Brooke: Yeah.

Zev: Wow.

Courtney Brooke: The smell is intoxicating. It’s not like regular Turmeric, is it?

Zev: No!

Courtney Brooke: The smell is like, what is that? Some people say it’s kind of like….cardamon?

Zev: Camphor? But I don’t know. What do you think, Mom?

Courtney Brooke: What’s Camphor?

Jodi: Hmmm. Camphor usually drives me crazy when people have it in their cedar closets. I would like, oh my gosh.  I just accidentally broke open this little Orange one.

Courtney Brooke: Let’s see it.

Jodi: Or maybe this is called yellow.

Courtney Brooke: Wow!!

Zev: Yeah, that’s the one that we call carrot turmeric…

Courtney Brooke: Because we just eat it.  It’s so crunchy and sweet and mild. That’s also from just next door at Full Circle Farm. They’ve got that turmeric,  the normal turmeric. They’ve also got what they call a red turmeric. And then they grow this also black turmeric.

Zev: Which is actually purple

Courtney Brooke: Which is actually purple. Blessed are we. There’s a saying,….all these, come from the place we call India….And there’s a saying there that says, if you have the black turmeric in your home, you’ll have good fortune and abundance of finances.

Zev: Finances.

Courtney Brooke:  So maybe…

Wealthy are we.

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Part 1

(Transcript from video)

Courtney Brooke: Here we are in the greenhouse at Full Circle Farm. It’s raining and it’s cold; it’s early spring and here we are planting this brassica bed. Me and Jonathan.
Hey Jonathan!
We’re putting in cabbages and cauliflower and lettuce and broccoli. Jonathan, are you willing to tell us what the plan is here?

Jonathan: Well, this is precious space here that’s protected, and so the soil is a lot warmer. We’ve dug out the turmeric in the middle here and it’s a perfect time to plant these brassicas. They are not quite as hardy as kale so could have done it a little bit earlier but they’re just gonna hit the ground running because the soils all ready and warmed up for them. If you planted them outside they’d probably survive but they go a lot slower. They may get hit by a hard freeze and it stunt their growth.

Courtney Brooke: So we’re going to plant like 120 brassica plants in this space right?

Jonathan: Yeah, actually it might be a little less but, yeah. You can see already the ones that were planted …the kind of spacing… these are squeezed in a little bit more than maybe it’s optimal for a maximum size. But I have extra plants and so you might get smaller individual yields but hopefully the total yield will be great. They’re spaced 18 inches apart but the rows are a little tighter. I’m squeezing in seven, six, or five rows. They would grow a lot bigger…

Courtney Brooke: So the idea is that first the lettuce will come out …and then the cabbage and cauliflower will come out …and then the broccoli will be the last one standing.

Jonathan: Yes.

Part 2

Courtney Brooke: So here we are after it’s planted out. That was just bare soil this morning. We turned it with the forks and then got all these plants in the ground. May they grow.

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Transcription of The Spring Greenhouse at Earthaven Ecovillage: Our Hope for the Summer

Courtney Brooke:

Here we are in the greenhouse at Full Circle Farm at Earthaven Ecovillage in the early spring. Here it’s raining, it’s kind of cold outside and here is what we’ve got growing…..
We’ve got all this broccoli and celery that’s been growing here all winter….

And here we have all the hopefulness for the season… all the baby plants reaching their roots down and starting to come out of their shells longing to go in the earth

We’ve got beans and what else do we have here who else…

We’ve got some kind of cucurbit some kind of melon, tomatoes over here

We’ve got onions started from seed, broccoli, some cabbage and cauliflower here…
Some more brassicas all the way down that’s basically all brassicas there and then down here…we have… what’s this more brassicas

Got some more cauliflower here and some chard there and lettuce, celery peppers more onions more lettuce, more celery more peppers….

Yeah there’s a lot going on in here some that’s mysterious…it looks like some potatoes there and seed trees curious what’s going on there…

That’s what we’ve got going on in here some more chard, more kale, kohlrabi

Stay tuned to see how the greenhouse evolves over the seasons!

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When they decided that community living, complete with meetings, long processes, conflicts, and joint land ownership was not quite their style, they decided to buy into our neighbor community to create their own vision of permaculture. And did they ever!

Full Circle Family Farm is a permaculture site that’s got to be seen to be believed! Alive with experiments, it hosts bees (now up to 30 hives), Nigerian dwarf goats (three milking nannies, a buck, four others who will someday be milked), fruit trees galore, lotus flowers floating atop greywater ponds, and gardens abounding with everything from heritage corn and rows of greens to alfalfa hay for the livestock.

Their projects are a seedbed of ideas and inspiration, and they themselves are a wealth of information to many of us whenever we visit, purchase food, and seek knowledge about life lived close to the earth. On a recent visit, we were introduced to their weeping mulberry tree, whose branches grow “down,” allowing the harvester to “step inside” and pick the fruit without having to use a ladder.

Geni, Leon, and their ten-year-old daughter Kayla, who is homeschooled in this mountain paradise, have created a home-based life that many would envy. Once an electrician, plumber, and all around engineering type, Leon uses his skill and intelligence to develop their homestead and continue perfecting his husbandry skills. Geni, a potter, mom, gardener and cheese maker, sells their abundance at the Black Mountain Farmers Market and “puts up” food for the family. They supplement their income from three rental apartments on their site, which often house Earthaven members and residents.

Both practitioners of Zen meditation, Geni and Leon have built a Zendo, a quiet, elegant edifice used for sitting meditation and contemplation. In the final stages of completion, the Zendo looks out over a small but lovely pasture edged with multiple varieties of bamboo (another of Leon’s passions), and will serve as a retreat center for local meditators who want to practice the art of being present. Geni and Leon meditate daily with occasional visits from neighbors who hear the meditation bell and walk over.

During the years we’ve been building Earthaven, it’s been painful for us when folks we know and love leave the community, whatever the reason. We inevitably go through a process of grief, guilt, and loss. Was it us? Was it them? What could we have done differently? Although these changes are natural parts of the process of our becoming, there’s always some regret when people decide not to stay. Yet, we’ve come to look at our community through a new lens that shows how this whole valley is part of our ecovillage: not only the intentional community called Earthaven, but members who have left and now live nearby, new folks who move into the area, and folks that were here before we came. As we learn what being neighbors is about, we find we need to draw less distinctions between “members” and “non-members.”

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