We are saddened to report that Earthaven Member Brian Love passed away in March of 2015. Brian contributed enormously to the agricultural and technological development of our community, contributed countless hours of creative design, planning, management and physical labor to land-based and building projects across the village, and was an active leader in numerous committees and Council. Among his many notable achievements at Earthaven, he leaves behind the beautiful farm and home created in the Gateway neighborhood. His official obituary is available here.

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NikiAnne was out touring when Mana’s mom Dorien came strolling by and they posed for the camera. Happy Spring, y’all!

Gardeners have begun their outdoor planting—some by the moon and some not! Most seeds and starts can go right in, but others will remain safe inside until around the 10th of May.

Plant starts are now available on Tuesday mornings.  Coffee & Trade is about to move outdoors again; these might be the last pictures of the winter location inside Council Hall.

Outside in the fields, another lambing season has proceeded under Caroline’s care.

Below, she leads the flock in Gateway field.

Up in Bellavia, mushroom logs have been inoculated and lay about waiting for stacking. Life is pulsing through every farmer and gardener’s fingers. Birdwatchers (and listeners) are delighted once again.

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Culture’s Edge was founded in 1995 to help catalyze healthy, sustainable, and regenerative culture at Earthaven and in the bioregion. In the past, Culture’s Edge has organized public classes and workshops at Earthaven in permaculture design, natural building, and other topics to teach and demonstrate a more sustainable way of life. Encouraged by Tracy, a nonprofit administrator who joined Earthaven in 2006, Culture’s Edge began seeking grant and donation money last November to undertake a different strategy, and they decided to focus at the heart of any region’s culture: its food.

“This is seed money, like a ‘flint spark’ to get our programs going and develop our ability to seek more funding in the near future, thanks to the Resourceful Communities Program,” says Tracy. “They wanted to help us build our capacity as an organization, because they see we meet their ‘triple bottom line’ for environmental stewardship, social justice, and sustainable community economic development.

“Both Rutherford County, the county in which most of Earthaven’s property lies, and neighboring McDowell County, are economically depressed. Families and younger workers in these counties often have to commute outside the area for work or leave the area entirely if they want to have decent livelihood. Small family farmers are especially hard hit. Paradoxically, there’s a huge demand for locally grown organic produce, dairy products, meat products, and biofuels in our region–more than local farmers can supply right now. We want to help them, and our own farmers at Earthaven, such as the Gateway integrated agricultural project, to build sustainable farms and connect to these markets. There’s a lot of connecting-up we can help facilitate!”

Culture’s Edge would like to offer local organic farmers and growers meeting space, office and administration services, and staff time to research how local farmers can develop their entrepreneurial–and ecologically sustainable–plans. Part of the grant money will be used for Culture’s Edge to rent office space at Earthaven for several months and pay for staff time to develop a database of potential funders and donors, potential workshop participants, and local organic farmers. The grant will also support board development, to find and train more Culture’s Edge board members. (Current board members are Paul Caron, Arjuna da Silva, and Suchi Lathrop, as well as Channing Ayers, a neighbor from nearby One Stone intentional community.)

Grant money will also pay for staff time to establish relationships with and promote other local organizations engaged in similar work: to make connections with Foothill Family Farms, a co-op of farmers and growers practicing sustainable agriculture in McDowell County; the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA); Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP); McDowell County Cooperative Extension Service (Tracy recently gave its director a tour of Earthaven); and the Alternative Technologies Program at Appalachian State University.

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Yellowroot Farm in the Hut Hamlet is up and running again, with seedings for what will become lush and vibrant biodynamic vegetables. (See “Yellowroot CSA Begins Second Year”)

In late April, Cailen Campbell’s goats, April and Luna, had their kids, and now moms and kids are sharing a pen in front of the Tribal Condo in the Hut Hamlet. Cailen, Lee, and Mihaly rotate the grazing of their animals at various sites around Earthaven, including the Village Green, the fallow side of Yellowroot Farm, and the “New Lumberyard” site near Gateway Field.

Recently a crew of loggers and farmers, including Brian Love, Mike Odel, Chris Farmer, Mihaly, Cailen, and work exchangers Galen Ballantine, Drew Hoffman, and Bruce Johnston, further cleared the New Lumberyard site and prepared it for grazing. The logs from the trees that were felled were milled as lumber for the Pokeberry Hill duplex at Village Terraces (see “New Buildings”), and the stumps were left in the ground. The pasture was fertilized with organic fertilizers and planted in perennial grasses and clovers. This one-acre site (called the “New Lumberyard” because it once was going to be a lumberyard), is ideal for grazing rather than crop cultivation because it’s on a slope and too steep for a tractor, has stumps, and is north-facing.

Last spring, Brian Love and Chris Farmer (known as “Farmer”) started their four-acre integrated-agriculture project, Gateway Field, by clearing four acres of forest, adding organic soil amendments, and growing and tilling under two “green manure” cover crops. Their next step is a grass rotational pasturage system with Icelandic sheep, and probably endangered heirloom breed turkeys and chickens. This requires a sturdy fence to protect livestock and provide a fixed point for attaching lightweight moveable fencing for when the animals are sequentially moved around the field in the rotational grazing system. This spring, with the help of Mike, Bruce, Galen, and others, Brian and Farmer built a 2220 ft fence around their field, using woven wire fencing attached to charred locust posts every 15 feet. They’ll soon add two electrified wires around the perimeter to complete the fence, and, perhaps as early as November, will bring in their small herd of sheep.

Last fall, Michaeljon Drouin and Andy Bosley converted an existing pond along Rosy Branch Road, just uphill from the hydro station, into a trout pond. They built up the dam so the pond would hold more water, and ran more water into it from nearby Rosy Branch Creek. “Trout need cool, aerated water to survive,” Andy says, “and raising the water level and increasing the pond size meant we could grow more trout in the pond.” In late March of this year Michaeljon and Andy stocked the pond with 200 3-to-5-inch rainbow trout purchased from a regional trout breeder. “By April some of the largest trout sited were already 7 to 8 inches long!” Andy reports. The plan is to begin harvesting the trout when the biggest ones are about 12 inches long, perhaps by mid-July. The trout will be sold to Earthaven members and neighbors, and Michaeljon and Andy will experiment with making smoked fish for longer-term preservation.

Michaeljon and Andy are currently arranging with the Forestry and Agriculture committee to create a second larger pond downhill from the first, in order to expand their aquaculture operation.

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As we approach the holiday known as Thanksgiving, it seems fitting to acknowledge the gratefulness so many of us feel to have been eating vegetables grown by Juan Jo Qualia Farm in the Hut Hamlet this year. It is so important to the success of our ecovillage that we keep moving toward producing as much of our own food as possible. We know that the Gateway project and Imani Farm will someday provide much food for us, but for now Juan Jo holds the one highly visible role of vegetable grower.

Many things have gone into making this possible. Thanks go to all the people who sat in committee meetings and created policy to allow farmers the energetic, mental and physical space to grow! We also owe thanks to Greg Clark and Katrina Highland for pasturing a cow, two goats, and numerous chickens on the Hamlet field. Thanks to past lessons learned, there was wisdom enough to put a fence around the field that is tall enough to keep out the deer.

No small thanks now go to Julie MacMahon, Andy Bosley and Joe Dofflemyer for the hard work of learning how best to grow food: for making time in their lives to do it, for finding ways to subsidize their farming so that they could be on site when needed on the farm. Thanks also to all the biodynamic-based knowledge these farmers were able to draw on. And lastly thanks to all those who supported their farm by buying CSA subscriptions and making by-the-item purchases.

Juan Jo Qualia is certainly an unusual name. Here is the official explanation from the farmers themselves. “Juan Jo is the first two letters of our names (Julie, Andy, Joe). Qualia is a biodynamic term that means aspects of perception. Aside from sounding cool, it applies to the different ways to perceive the garden. One way to perceive it is the physical layout of rows, plants, irrigation system, compost pile, etc. Then there’s the realm of the devas (plant and animal spirits) to whom we give thanks and ask guidance from as we go about our work. Then there’s the science perception. With the scientific perspective everything is about nutrient uptake, mineral composition, beneficial insect species and x gallons of water at x pressure to irrigate for one hour. There are infinite levels of perception that we can come up with. The point we focus on is that they are all here, all present. We may spend more time focusing on one or the other, but we recognize the importance of all beings and all viewpoints.”

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Over the years Earthaven has tried to prioritize agriculture, and to provide ways for skilled folks to be able to be at Earthaven even if they hadn’t amassed savings. First site option 3 was created. It allowed a few people to be here, but it just delayed their inevitable need to pay for their site. They were also busy trying to get ahead in order to pay those delayed fees, while still doing the huge work of being here. It was very much like running on a conveyor belt going in one direction, while trying to move forward an actual mile in the opposite direction. Most people were making progress, but at a dauntingly slow rate.

Then council made it possible for a farmer to pay for the equivalent of one site with leaps accepted for food farmed on the land. Sadly, almost none of that exchange was acted upon. Their was only one field cleared, and no one really had the time to farm. They were still busy running in place. We needed a way for people to get their livelihood from making agriculture happen here. It had to happen in a specific order, that was the key to the riddle we had yet to solve. So, we made logging trade-able for a site payment. But, the riddle still had folks running in place.

When the Sweat Equity proposals were passed, we were made aware that all the pieces of the puzzle must be present at once and in large enough quantity to accomplish a truly progressive and substantial difference. Also, a large part of the riddle was getting facilitators to ensure that each agricultural project was taken to completion, so that part of it wouldn’t get cleared only to start growing back toward forest in a few years. Praise be, Farmer and Brian took on the Gateway project. They brought all the pieces through council. Their hard work and brilliant minds seem to have gone a long way to solving the riddle of how to make Sweat Equity at Earthaven translate skilled people without savings, into the members and agriculture that we need.

But they did not do it by themselves. In fact, isn’t that the point? It takes all the pieces present at the same time and in large enough quantity. Again we get to acknowledge that our community is developing, and limited by that development very much like a child. We wanted to walk long before we could. Then we took our first steps and fell down quite a few times, acquiring a few bruises and scratches. Now we are finally able to run some.

You may ask, but who are the people actually doing the Sweat Equity, aren’t we talking about new members? Yes we are! One of the people working on the Gateway project to pay his membership, is Joe Dofflemyer, pictured here in the act of Sweat while making it look zen. Also working on the project to pay off their membership fees are Dan Penny and Cailen Campbell. Andy Bosley and Robert Carran are working toward paying off their site fees along with Farmer and Brian. And soon maybe we will be able to buy our food with leaps!

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In Oriental metaphoric tradition, Spring’s direction is East, its color yellow (or green-yellow), its quality innocence. The time of day is sunrise, and it corresponds to the Wood element. Its animal image is an eagle, flying high over the landscape. Spring is a time of many possibilities, and springtime energy brings openness.

Spring begins with the Equinox, a few days’ relative balance of Sun and Moon power, the days once again as long as the nights. Here in Western North Carolina, there is the likelihood of warm temperatures and the potential for snow (of which we’ve had very little this year).

By this year’s Spring Equinox, Lenten Rose, Crocus and Daffodil had already flowered. When I knelt down to smell the Hyacinths (swooning), I saw the Irises already fanning out their broad, flat green leaves. Robins were everywhere, nests and birdsong appearing literally out of the blue.

On days like these, the heart leaps up to see the trees and bushes budding, while the mind sends a flash of fear for them and the weather they may yet have to survive. However, at press time, we can say that Spring temperatures stuck around and all the buds were saved.

In general, the last frost date for the Asheville area is May 10th, but Earthaven is tucked into the edge of a iso-thermal belt that runs through Rutherford County, so we often have frost-free nights several weeks ahead of Asheville and Black Mountain.

This Spring at Earthaven is definitely a time of new beginnings! Just come up to the end of Camp Elliott Road and see the cleared, graded, soon-to-be-seeded “big sky” reality at Gateway Ag Field. Major food production planned here for years to come, with several of our young men earning “sweat equity” during the establishment of the farm. (See “Sweat and Ye Shall Receive” in this issue. Gateway Farm will be featured in the Summer newsletter.)

Continuing along Another Way to Rosy Branch Creek (second crossing), you’ll soon be driving over our second bridge. On the far side, turn right to Imani Farm and meet new residents Carla and Hijo, a ewe and her lamb. (Don’t forget to say hello to Bridgit the cow, now almost a year old.)

More surprises: arrive in the Hut Hamlet and discover that ag field in its new incarnation as “Finally Farming CSA.”

And those are just the obvious things. Interiorly, Earthaven members are creating and recreating our community with every conversation, meeting, decision, and with a revitalized Strategic Planning Committee that has begun actualizing visions that have been nurtured for more than a decade.

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Farmer and Brian’s amazing truck is a moveable tool shed. Its shelves house tools, building supplies, desk, file cabinet, vice hose and cord reels. It contains a collapsable chop saw and a table saw (these are super moveable, rolling in and out of the truck). Eliminating the need to build a tool shed for every site, the truck provides for super efficiency, adaptability and on-site organization.

They also chose to increase their investment by installing photo-voltaics in (and on) the truck, as a way of modeling sustainability while building our “green” homes. Their inverter produces pure sine wave/high quality AC power feeding a huge 800 lb (12 volt) battery array. Choosing a diesel truck gave them biodiesel options. They replaced the original alternator with a 200 amp model that has an excellent “bottom end,” (meaning it can produce a lot of power at idle), the kind normally used for fire trucks and ambulances.

Farmer and Brian employ permaculture principles with this redundant system: they can charge their battery by idling the truck on biodiesel, or by powering their battery with solar panels. The solar panels are under warranty for 10 years, with a life expectancy beyond that. The batteries are under warranty for 25 years. Up to now, solar has been their primary source of power, and running the truck is saved for special cases, such as blowing in cellulose or running a grinder.

How does all this translate into benefits for these Gateway neighborhood developers themselves? As they see it, the benefits include the fact that they and their customers don’t have to listen to a generator all day. Their high level of efficiency and organization also equals considerable job security. They will be able to build whatever they want for themselves. And, most important to them, they can remain within the limits of sustainable right livelihood.

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