For the living, food is a master course in survival and well-being. Our community members strive to learn how to grow and prepare soil to cultivate vibrant, nourishing plants and animals, demonstrate a healthy balance between work, relaxation and celebration, and continue to develop a cooperative management approach to various goals of self-sufficiency. Medicine is the other power course, which we’ll shine a light on in future issues.

We are food people. What we eat, what we grow, what we trade, what we know about our food, and the ways we share food and food stories, are a big part of our lives in community. At Earthaven, organic food self-sufficient practices are a dream in the process of fulfillment, albeit with a long way to go!

We’ve yet to build our long-dreamed-of community center, with multi-purpose spaces for dining, workshops, parties, classes, games, a place to share more of the lifestyle we’ve dedicated ourselves to. Connected to soil, seed, animal life and recycled resources, little by little, folks learn and apply the learning.

Meanwhile, we eat together at weekly potlucks and cookouts, at celebrations, and in a few neighborhood kitchens that provide more intimate spaces. Recently, Marybeth started a “Sunday Soup ‘n Somethin’” supper group, mixed up from neighborhoods across the community. This idea is likely to go viral in the months to come.

This holiday season, folks were attentive to ways of sharing food. At the Bizarre Bazaar before the Winter Solstice, folks sold holiday food. 

On Christmas Eve, Monique and Juan Pablo organized a spectacular dinner party at the White Owl, where Rachel and the kids provided warmth and welcome. River Otter served chicken dinner on Christmas Day at the Hut Hamlet Kitchen to guests from around the community. A surprise ice storm had most folks staying home New Year’s Eve, gathering momentum (one hopes) for more food-focused events in the near future.

Using opportunities to build our food culture with nourishing social connection and opportunities to work, learn and grow together, we learn to care for the soil, discover best varieties, best seasons, best preservation and trading partners. By learning its energetic and nutritional value, by seeing how our food heals and sustains us, we grow stronger. By storying the food and paying respect to its goodness and purity, by remembering what we know of where it came from, we carry on the good work.

The learning will go on, while the concentric circles widen around the essential goal—a human and planetary resilience that promises to fulfill our dearest and most tender needs.

photos, from top:

  Darren in the cornfield.

  Cornelian Cherries.

  Chrismas Eve at the White Owl.

 Michaeljon delighting Heron at the fish pond.

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Every Tuesday morning for over two years, friends and neighbors have gotten together, rain or shine, freezing or scorching, for a social event with a different flair from the nighttime gatherings.

We now fill two tables with food and one or more with people, often with kids playing all around.

Here is the impressive list of foods available for sale or trade at the most recent Coffee Hour, all grown and/or produced right here in our valley: goat milk, goat yogurt, goat cheese, sunflower spelt bread, sourdough pumpernickel bread, sesame flax crackers, sweet red peppers, a wide variety of hot peppers, okra, shiitake and oyster mushrooms, onions, garlic, figs, fig preserves, potatoes, sauerkraut, eggs, kombucha, coffee, tea, and lemon poppy seed muffins. Some star highlights from the past include chocolate pies, lacto-fermented mustard, handmade jewelry, and pesto.

I have always liked attending this morning gathering, enjoying its unique feel. Now as a new mom who can rarely make it to events past an 8:00 PM bedtime, I have an extra appreciation for people getting together in the morning. I take this time to sell my baked goods, buy foods I don’t grow or make myself, drink my weekly cup of coffee, visit with folks, and get what Geoff Stone (very regular coffee hour attendee) calls “The Buzz” of the village. Also known as gossip, news, or keeping up to date, I consider this an important part of community life.

When the weather turns cold we will continue meeting through the winter inside the toasty Council Hall. But for now join us any Tuesday morning starting at 9:00 under the canopy in the village center. We’d love to have you!

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In March of last year, 200 four to five-inch Rainbow Trout were stocked by me in our small pond by the hydropower plant. The month beforehand, Andy and I raised the height of the existing pond level by four inches by installing an overflow pipe that would return all of the water to Rosy Branch Creek. This four-inch pipe was designed to allow several irrigation options downhill or to channel the water to other ponds. This formerly stagnant pond received extra life and oxygenation when we ran 400 feet of inch-and-a-quarter pipe upstream to achieve enough “head” to lift the water over the bank into the pond. The pond already contained thousands of pollywogs, and the young fry gorged themselves. Some of them grew at the rate of one-and-a-half inches per month.   This year, Andy has promised to help me install a small electric light overhanging the far end of the pond, which will help bugs fall into the water for more natural food, in addition to the conventional feed. In this way, thanks to our hydropower generator, the stream will still indirectly feed the trout . . . pretty cool.   I figure last year we lost about forty percent of the trout to turtles and great blue herons. When we made the primary harvest in October, we were delighted that some of the trout had reached seventeen inches. There was also one six-inch rainbow that had different markings; I am convinced that it entered the pond through the inch-and-a-quarter pipe as an egg or a fingerling, and that the Great Spirit also had stocked our pond from Rosy Branch Creek.   My primary goal was to provide an opportunity for Full Members and their children to catch, eat, and simply observe these beautiful fish. This year, we plan on stocking 250 fingerlings and on getting the turtles relocated quicker.

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Sorry to our subscribers for the long gap between this and our last newsletter.  Much has been going on at Earthaven despite our silence! Some of these are covered in this newsletter; another issue is planned for release in about six weeks. If you want to continue to be on our newsletter list, please click the radio button.

Five Icelandic Sheep have arrived at Brian and Farmer’s Gateway Farm. They are considered good breeds for milk, meat and wool. In April we expect a group lambing. Cute! Cute! Cute!

Michaeljon is rebounding wonderfully from bypass surgery, having only just come back from a trip to Machu Picchu, with Kiesa, when we were all surprised by his sudden illness.

Village Terraces neighborhood cleared another three-plus acres of land on the west side of the complex. And Martha and Finch moved into their downstairs flat next door at “Pokeberry Hill.”

Andy and Julie are expanding their biodynamic Yellowroot Farm by clearing close to an acre near the new campground. Their second CSA-season is just about sold out.

Chuck just returned from a permaculture teaching and design sojourn in Jamaica. Since he and Marjorie were married last Thanksgiving, life has gotten fuller than ever, as activities resume to move his Useful Plants Nursery to an officially leased ag site near the former campground. Chuck’s apprentice of the past year, Bruce Johnston, is about to become a new Full Member and a co-lessee on the site.

Folks from the Mediation Center in Asheville, through their federally funded Community Mediation Project, have twice (at our request!) sent a skilled mediator to help us communicate more effectively and prepare the ground to go deeper into some of our hotter issues. Some members have said they plan to take mediation training at the Center this season.

Jill graduated from Gaia University’s Masters program and intends to bring Gaia students to Earthaven for accredited learning experiences. Soon-to-be Provisional Member Mana McLeod has now enrolled in the Masters program as well.

The line to board the Membership Train continues its steady flow. There are currently still eight Provisional Members living on the land and another five Exploring Members, two of whom have already begun the Provisional application process.

Greg has gotten the Earthaven weather station up and running.  You can get very up-to- date information by going to www.earthaven.org and clicking on the weather link. More detail in the next newsletter.

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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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