Maya Creek Ecovillage

We haven’t made much progress in the last couple of weeks.  We got delayed roughly a week due to the rain, but we finally got the drains in and filled the rubble trench with gravel and tamped it down.  Unfortunately, not much else has been done for the last week.  I’ve been searching and searching for a source of broken-up cement, also known as “urbanite”, as well as rocks that we could mortar together to build the stem wall.  I haven’t had any luck.

The stem wall is what the bales will sit on and is built directly over the filled in rubble trench.  I’ve thought I’d almost found a supply of building material a couple times, but they’ve all fallen through.  Now we’ve moved to plan b (pun sadly intended), I’ve ordered about 1,000 misprinted polypropylene feed sacks which we’ll fill with gravel and build our stem wall out of.  A couple of strands of barbed wire will be put in between each course of bags to create tensile strength.  I ran the whole thing by a natural building guru online and he said that’s been tried and tested and as long as we make sure to cover up the bags to protect them from uv-ray degradation, it should last indefinitely.  He did suggest double bagging them so that’s why I ordered 1,000.  We’ll still probably have some left over, but I’m sure we can find a use for them down the road.  It’ll probably be slightly more than building with urbanite, but we won’t have to buy any cement.

It’s been oppresively hot and humid the last week, which hasn’t exactly been motivational in getting work done.  Liz and I have been working down at the lake cleaning up the gazebo, fixing the steps, and removing the trees from dam and along the shore blocking the gazebo view.  The roots in the dam can weaken it and cause it to fail.  We’ve also become fond of swimming in the lake.  The water in the first foot or two is extremely warm, and it gets cold very quickly beneath that.  At first we didn’t know if we liked it or not, but it actually gives you a lot more control over the temperature than a uniformly heated swimming hole.

The trees right along the water have been pretty hard to get out since they lean out over the water which means I have to secure them and wench them back so they don’t fall in the water.  I let one fall in the water though so it’ll become fish habitat.  We’ve turned in our application to the Missouri Department of Conservation to have our pond stocked for free.  There was a rumor going around that you had to open up the pond to the public to fish in, but it’s not true.  They’re going to stock it with large mouth bass, bluegill, and catfish.  We’re also adding a grass carp or two to control the duck weed floating on the surface and possibly some fathead minnows which eat mosquito larvae and make excellent bass food.

Speaking of trees, we sadly also had our application for donated trees from the big nursery around here denied.  Apparently they had a good year and didn’t have anything left over.  We talked to another group that had applied and they were told the same thing, so maybe it wasn’t just us.

On the happier side, I’m proud to announce that Elizabeth Stanfill and I are now engaged.  I know some people are shocked since I’ve never been one for traditional things, especially something as institutionalized as marriage, but meeting the right person can change your perspective on things.  I considered getting her a ring without a diamond at all, but none of them seemed right.  Then I hit upon guaranteed conflict-free diamonds with recycled-gold bands.  So, it’s somewhere between traditional and sustainable.  We don’t know when the date is yet, probably sometime late next spring in Virginia where most of Liz’s family lives.

Over the course of the last week or two there has been an explosion of color as a wide variety of wild flowers have begun blooming.  We woke up one morning to find Daniel had collected a bouquet after his morning run.  He added to it later as he found more and more kinds.

We’ve also discovered something that has changed our road construction plans for next year.  I went down to the county assessor’s office and got a print-out of the satellite imagery of our property with the property lines overlayed on it.  It appears that we do own the land right along the road all the way down until Jerry Austin’s farm equipment area.  We’d been under the impression we didn’t own the strip directly along the road and so were going to have to build a much longer and more difficult road back to where we plan on building.  Now we’re looking at simply cutting across a few small gullies and connecting up with the more well-established road back to the lake and middle field beyond it.  The other road we’d been planning would have gone along Maya creek and been incredibly beautiful, but would have involved some bridge-building, drainage control, and just a lot of manual labor in general.  We’d still like to make a trail along it, but if we can get away without having to do all of that we will.

The garden has gained new life.  A lot of plants that didn’t look like they were going to make it, such as the beans, a lot of the transplants, tomatoes, etc, have greened back up and started growing.  A few things that initially looked very promising have faded such as the onions, and the peas looked good, then looked bad, then looked like they might be getting better, and now seem to have petered out again.  We’re hoping that next year the manure will have broken down and be more accessible to more of the plants.

Some of the plants don’t seem to mind one way or the other.  The squash and zucchini are starting to come in, although it’ll probably be another 3-4 days at least before we can actually pick some of them.  The corn is doing awesome, and we actually wish the lettuce would stop growing so fast.  We think we planted too much in too large of an area.  Also, some of the varieties in the mix we sowed aren’t as tasty as we’d hoped.  Some of the lettuce that looks like it should be bland has a bitter taste to it, and the arugula has a very strong nutty flavor that can be nice in small amounts but the taste has already gotten old.

We took a trip into Columbia today for “Free Mulch Day” and got 2 pick-up loads of what looks to be excellent stuff to put on the garden.  We were hoping we could use it for the paths as well but it’s got a lot of dirt and larger sticks in it that wouldn’t be too good for that.

Oh, and I’ve switched over from my own personal blogging software to a Wordpress blog because it offers more features than I could ever have had time to program.  Specifically the photo stuff was killing me.  Sorry, but it means I lost all of the comments on the old posts.