My mother recalls an incident when as a toddler I picked up my chair and threw it across the room. I was born this way—and now I live with a lot of folks I’ll bet threw their chairs around!

After many adventures since leaving my suburban upbringing, I’m amazed to have landed in this vibrant, life-supporting place—the closest Home I have ever experienced feeling. The learning, growth and healing opportunities are unimaginable! Earthaven is also a sort of graduate school for me, where I can pursue forgotten intelligences within heart and body through creative, intuitive, feminine means. Bolad’s Kitchen, Tantra, Goddess culture, dance, plant medicine—it’s all bringing me deeper into the mysteries of intelligence.

One thing that sometimes challenges me is my inability as a “non-member” to be more politically active within Earthaven, but I’ve found purpose here in other ways: being a leader in the Hut Hamlet Kitchen, working at Imani farm, working/mentoring with Corinna [Wood], offering yoga, dance, and massage; gardening projects and loving friendships feed so many of my needs. I hope I can give back even a fraction of the gifts I’ve received here.

Jenna Rose Payne brings gifts of beauty, dance, yoga, food and friendship to her beloved Hut Hamlet neighborhood and to many members throughout the community.

The post Thank You, Earthaven! appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

Chicken and songbird eggs alike are safe wherever Martha may roam. Martha relocates the snakes without harming them.

Martha with a snake as tall as she is.

Look at the wing-span of that snake!

Rubber gloves in case she gets bit.

Introducing baby Oakley to a recently-caught black snake.

Lest potential visitors are scared away by visions of black snakes, never fear. Black snakes are non-venomous hunters of both rodents and poisonous snakes. We enjoy having them around….except when they eat our eggs.

Thanks to Tessa Hovan-Bartalos & Lee Warren for the photos.

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Group of celebrants at Imani Farm to bless the animals.

Kaitlin hangs the Brigid cross on the Imani barn.

Standing around after the blessing.

The children pet Sassy Mae, the Jersey calf.

Dylan holds the tomte (swedish troll dolls) to be placed around the farm.

Corinna displays the tiny tomte doll hanging in the barn. These were traditionally used as protection for the farm family and animals.

The post Celebrating Imbolc appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

2010 was a year of delicious bounty.  Natural factors such as the intensity of last winter along with the mildness and wetness of the following spring gave us fruit galore. In personal orchards, on farms, and in the wild, we had our pick of tasty fruits from May until even now in late October. Strawberries, juneberries, Nanking cherries, blueberries, jostaberries, blackberries, wineberries, currants, gooseberries, figs, muscadines and scuppernongs, apples, persimmons!  Yummmmm!!!

Many folks supplemented their own garden produce with a share in Yellowroot Farm’s CSA.  The CSA provided 15 shares a week for 22 weeks.  Shares included beets, carrots, lettuce, escarole, turnips and cucumbers in the early season and later included tomatoes, okra, peppers, potatoes, garlic, more greens, and plenty of sauerkraut and kimchee (spicy, fermented, Asian sauerkraut).

Bee Happy Farm, run by Marjorie Vestal in the Bellavia neighborhood has been very busy establishing a large  thornless blackberry orchard which produced enough fruit this year for mead-making. In addition, Marjorie has been implementing a sizeable garden on her homesite including mushroom logs, herbs galore, more fruit, and a small pond.

Gateway Farm’s sheep flock produced 30 fleeces, 8 pelts, and 300-350 pounds of lamb. Unseen to customers, but another high value crop, Gateway also produced 1500, 50-pound bales of hay from an off-land lease nearby.  Fall is the annual stock-up-on-squash time. Gateway raised 2000 pounds of a variety of squash and 100 pounds of onions. We’re looking forward to fresh and as-local-as-it-gets turkeys for the holidays.

Many villagers got their pasture-raised and free-range eggs from Imani Farm this year. Pictured to the right are new chicks (came in the mail but being raised by a momma hen who adopted them upon arrival.) Imani also grazed their upper pasture with their second year steers. In the lower field Imani grew plenty of blueberries and about 1000 pounds of tomatoes (see our blog entry).

Jonathan Swiftcreek is an avid food producer, preserver and forager, always open to learning new forms of reverence towards food. He is a new member of Earthaven as well as the Village Terraces Cohousing Neighborhood and a participant in many of Earthaven’s farms. He and his partner, eli will be first-time parents in April.

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	The Forest Garden Learning Center has a new patio on the north side of the greenhouse. The new space is designed to serve multiple functions, such as a fruit stand, rest area, and welcome space for courses. Melissa Thurmond led the project, with help from friends.
	The OFF the GRIDdle Eco-Café is taking shape near the Council Hall with the arrival of a pair of shipping containers that will form the kitchen and dining area. The café is being developed as a private venture by Suchi Lathrup, Lance Penley, Liz Diaz, and redmoonsong. The café team plans to have the kitchen ready for a New Year’s party. Follow them on their Facebook page:
	In farm news, on September 15, Imani Farm’s cow, LC (Large Cow), gave birth to a heifer calf named Sassy Mae, and on October 8, Yellowroot Farm’s sow, LaFonda, gave birth to 11 healthy, red-headed piglets.

The post News from the Village appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

When we finished the first building at Village Terraces Cohousing Neighborhood in 2004, we had $50 in our collective checking account. As one of our intentions as a group was to grow food together, we began to think of it more as a long-term goal than a current one. Aside from the fact that clearing forest to make agriculture land was expensive, building homes, relationships, income-generating activities and contributing to Earthaven’s governance and development were ambitious undertakings, leaving little time for agricultural activities.

          Along the same time, two new members joined Earthaven and decided to build the second building in our neighborhood. What a dream come true. It meant more people to share resources and contribute to our “common pot” of funds that paid for shared systems such as heat, water, electricity, etc. These new folks also felt passionate about food growing. Being from the city, they didn’t have skills themselves, but were well versed in the looming economic crisis, peak oil, and the “long emergency” soon to be facing us. A distinct advantage of them “being from the city” was that they had life-long professional careers, unlike many of us who dropped out of the rat race early on, which meant they had some funds to make their dreams happen. Luckily their dreams coincided with ours and the Imani Ag Coop was born.

          The challenge facing our dream of food production was, as always at Earthaven, turning a fairly dense, immature, degraded forest into open agriculture land. This translates to $10,000 per acre in cost and weeks, if not months, of toiling on the part of many people. But we had a once-in-a-lifetime match born out of shared vision, skill, and passion. Mihaly and Lee, the farming couple, had the experience and desire to coordinate and offer labor to the clearing and Martha and Finch, the city couple, had the money to give to the project.

In January 2008, the three-acre clearing began. Two years and nearly $75,000 later (including clearing, fence, investment in lumber, firewood, amendments, etc.), we have an amazing example of cooperation and the best investment money can buy – the ability to feed ourselves. All with no debt!  Our neighborhood is beautiful in a different way than was the forest and our cleared land is fenced with a durable, handsome woven wire fence (to keep animals in and out of the area of homes and gardens as well as to keep predators out.) We’re focusing on a pasture rotation system for animals with resulting products such as eggs, duck and chicken meat, and small-scale dairy for family consumption.

          As most food growing enterprises go, the Ag Coop doesn’t make a profit, yet the value to our lives is immeasurable. We eat the best food in the world, gain skill and confidence as food producers, and provide nourishment for the people we love. What could be more rich and rewarding? Recently two new exploring members, who share our passion for food, are joining the Ag Coop to share in both the responsibilities and the bounty. As we take these risks to join forces, we create more opportunities for new folks to step in and find a place here. Blessed be, the community grows.

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Bruce, Rudy, Alice, Eva, Julie, Johnny, and Mana have become full members!

Culture’s Edge hosted a wonderful Village Harvest Festival last fall and are looking forward to the second annual festival on October 12, 2009.

Arjuna’s beautiful Leela house is nearing completion and is getting its final coat of interior plaster this summer.

Ivy and Michael celebrated their wedding at Earthaven!

Useful Plants Nursery cleared an area in the old campground for a nursery expansion. The fruit trees have moved in, with many more plants to come.

The Forest Children took their spring play, Fantasia, on the road this spring, performing at the Lake Eden Arts Festival (LEAF).

The Pokeberry building at Village Terraces is complete, with Bob, Debbie, and their two fuzzy house cats in residence. (see article)

Geoff and Debbie cleared a site for an orchard near the new campground and are busy planting apple trees and ground cover crops.

Imani farm has a new Jersey cow named LC (Large Cow), who produces most of the milk for Earthaven. Imani and Yellowroot farms are raising pigs, and three neighborhoods have new bee hives.

At Gateway farm, the five Shetland ewes had nine new lambs, and after completing the Pokeberry building, Brian and Farmer are building new homes for themselves in the Gateway neighborhood.

The post News notes – Spring 2009 appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

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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