Our two work parties this week were very productive. Here are pics from both Tuesday and Friday mornings, followed by a final one today, during Daniel’s spray time; finally, pics of the notes taken of what was planted when since we began, February 1..
Lots of seeds started!
When I walked into the greenhouse on Friday, it was still chilly. Somebody had forgotten to fire up the stove hours earlier. Oh well!
And, when I walked in, a conversation was going as to how we could productively use the ash from the stove (on left). Somebody looked it up and discovered that a thin layer of wood ash can be sprinkled under seedlings when planted to deter soft-bodied critters. Don’t know the url, but here’s one source for something like that idea.
Aya, Annie, Marita.
Aya and new farm manager, Daniel.
Daniel, Annie, Joseph with Aya (hidden)
Daniel sprays. Joseph, hidden, waits. He has decided to play the tiny singing bowl, here in his hands, over the plants . . .
This shot taken last year. All people in it were, or had been, residents of GAPV. Now, all but four are gone, and we have yet to take a new group photo.
For the first time ever, Green Acres Village experienced a year when a total of five people out of nine left us, with each one replaced, amazingly enough, almost immediately. This too was unusual, in that a room will often stay open for a month or two before a person arrives who can blend in with the dynamic offered by a community that values individualism as exactly equal to connectivity, continuously honoring and rebalancing this polarity and others in the 3D world.
In fact, the process went smoothly, as if divinely ordained — so much so that it was only after the year had ended that we realized just how profound the turnover had been! Each person who left was called elsewhere by the demands of his or her own singular path, including Dan, who had been here for five years and finally realized, at his Saturn Return (30 years old), that he’d better learn how to live on his own, since he had never done so! Then there was Andreas, another long-termer of four years, who finally found the job he wanted, and it happened to be in Ireland, as a professor in a university music department. 21 year-old Ethyl moved here in February, full of plans, but then suddenly left, after what I call “seven restless months,” for a permacultural circus in Costa Rica! (She is back now, living with her boyfriend until she travels to the Philipines, and came to visit two evenings ago.)
More often than not, people who once lived here return over and over again to visit. In fact, we got our first “alumnus” returning to live here after several years away last year, too. That’s Justin. Will there be more returnees? Who knows. GAPV is a tiny, potent incubator of human potentiality during a time of dramatic and extended turbulence on this planet. We encourage each other to explore our own inner reaches (and that includes taking responsibility for our shadow sides: another polarity, conscious vs. unconscious), as well as to work cooperatively on common real world projects, with particular focus on the gardens. Not everybody is capable of truly doing both well (especially the shadow-work); in fact, these special ones are few and far between, and tend to very much appreciate what they learn during their time with us.
Speaking of the gardens: last year we tried an experiment, to do the garden work without any one in particular as garden manager. Rebecca, our garden manager for ten years, was the first to leave last year, on April 1, after feeling restless for several years. And just this month, after ten months of false starts, she has landed a new position as garden manager at a retreat resort in Hawaii! More on that later.
When she left we thought we’d try an Aquarian approach (since Jupiter and Saturn had just moved into groups-of-equals Aquarius from hierarchical Capricorn). But, though the gardens produced well, and everybody showed up for work parties, it became obvious that no one here had the kind of personal passion necessary to really focus on the gardens over the long haul. We all showed up, and in fact, in true Aquarian fashion, rotated leadership weekly, but it became obvious that our levels of interest and competence varied so widely as to be almost comical.
So, after the fifth person left, in early December, under strange circumstances, luckily we were able to invite Daniel Atlas, who has been the garden manager of an IU garden for three years, and who simply loves growing plants, both vegetables and flowers, to move here and take Rebecca’s place. So we’re back to a kind of quasi-Capricorn mode, though Daniel is very much aided by everybody else to find out just what is in what I laughingly call the Green Acres Bible, the gardening practices to which Rebecca introduced us. That includes planting seeds in soil blocks, which he had never done. So we’re teaching him, as he learns to guide us.
We used to have a Page on this site called “Meet our Residents,” but I took it down, since so much change has transpired. Perhaps someday, it will feel appropriate to put it back up!.
At this point, we have planted various tomatoes and peppers, cilantro, parsley, and basil, several types of kale and chard, and onions, in that order.
THE PROCESS:
Making soil blocks, first tiny ones, and placing tiny seeds in the depressed center of each one —
—
Soon the tiny blocks will be placed within a hole provided in larger blocks, but not yet . . .
The process is intricate, and not exactly suited for my tremulous 79-year-old hands. So I carry wood in for the stove —
— and did get to mix soil during one of our work parties (two each week, 10 to noon, Tuesday and Friday).
On one of my trips to get wood during last week’s unusually cold spell, I noticed that goldfish are surviving the winter, under the ice, in one of our tiny ponds.
During that same cold spell, we brought lots of trays inside rather than keep a fire going in the greenhouse all night, and probably over-sprayed them, and maybe shouldn’t have put dark covers on them, for a bit of white mold had appeared on tops of the soil blocks. However, Daniel (our new garden manager, who used to run the IU Gardens) looked it up, and discovered that white mold — though we obviously need to dry them out a bit — is not bad. It’s green or black mold that you have to watch out for.
Here we are (Aya, Annie, Daniel and Marita) discussing the situation, having brought the trays back out into the greenhouse again.
Rather than using popsicle sticks to identify where and what seeds are in the trays, this year we decided to tape names on the sides of the trays.
Plus, Joseph is keeping notes . . .
It looks like we’re going to be planting more flowers this year. YES!
Meanwhile, it’s still only mid-February. Gardens fallow . . .
Here’s a shot of what the greenhouse looks like this morning. Nice and toasty in there, and notice the heat pad under the seedlings —
which are thriving to the point where we’re going to have to remove the covers of some of them soon.
We hold two two-hour work parties each week, 10 AM to Noon, Tuesday and Friday, after taking most of December off, except for cleaning, sharpening, and oiling tools, which we do at some point at the end of each year. And, it’s cold out, so Marita gets a fire going two hours before we start.
(One or more podmates usually have prior commitments, so they make up their hours at other times. For example, Justin’s work commitments mean that he can’t ever make our work parties, so he took charge of getting new wood chips on all the paths the past few months.) And for the entire month of January, Annie was in Ireland, having been entrusted to deliver the kitty, Schulte, to her owner, Andreas, who left us after four years in late August for his new job as a college teacher.)
Our first work party in January was devoted to completing the job of cleaning, sharpening and oiling tools. Joseph, Daniel and Marita in greenhouse.
We then started the process of cleaning and disinfecting walls, shelves, and trays. Here’s Aya, who got all the walls cleaned.
Daniel and Marita worked on the first trays we’ll need, those for cold weather seedlings, plus tomatoes.
Meanwhile, here in southcentral In-Diana (Goddess of the Woodlands), we are blessed/cursed with constant falling branches from various storms that whip fast-growing trees and bushes. We’ve already made one recent to a place which accepts them for mulching purposes, but needed to borrow a truck again for two more loads. Aya’s partner Chris came to the rescue, his old truck with a big bed that could handle the load.
This was the first pile; notice the truck bed already seems almost full.
Joseph and Aya took turns stomping it down.
Next, more cleaning inside. This time the back room, which also needed to be reorganized. Joseph, Aya, and I tackled that task.
At last, all these weird power tools in one bucket . . .
What’s this? Aya and Joseph prepare to store it elsewhere.
It’s been nearly two years since anyone has posted on this website. Life in Green Acres Permaculture Village, as a tiny fractal of this astonishingly strange time on planet earth, has been unusually tumultuous, and yet fulfilling at the same time. This intentionally created little paradise, now over ten years old, is proving itself resilient, no matter what. Many tales to tell. Is there time and energy to tell them when life continues to roll along faster and faster, deeper and deeper? Our social media presence has obviously suffered. It’s time to resurrect that aspect of what we’re doing here, so that we can continue to offer vignettes of daily life in this tiny alternative cultural template for how to “grow community from the ground up.”
This post is the beginning. Tomorrow I will start to post pics of life in community now, as we begin our gardening season for 2022 in the greenhouse, dropping tiny potent seeds into the living soil.
