A New Direction

Posted by Tao on May 9th, 2011

I’ve been doing really well since dissolving the community aspirations for Maya Creek. I don’t feel as rushed, and have enjoyed taking long walks exploring the woods with Kita.

On one of those walks it really struck me how beautiful the land was, and how much it easily rivaled many of the parks I’d been to. That reminded me of my high school guidance councilor, and how I’d told her that if I could have any job in the world it would be to be a park ranger. Everything kind of clicked for me at that point.

Maya Creek Nature Preserve & Sustainable Campground

I basically want to set the land up as a private park and sustainable campground. Once the straw bale house is done, the campground upgraded, and the trails cleared I’ll start on my own home. Eventually I may build a larger building to have a space for retreats, workshops, and classes.

At some point whenever everything is set up at the campground I may start charging something for visitors who just want to camp.  I may also sell food and meals from the garden and start making the place financially sustainable as well.

People seem to think that I still want to start a community, but it’s really not even on my agenda. I want to get my own life in order, share the beauty of this place, the things I’ve learned and am learning.  Beyond that adding more people on a permanent basis gets complicated quickly and I’m liking simple.

Environmental Group Retreats

Sustain Mizzou from MU and ECO from Truman State came out for campout/work party.  Unfortunately the group from Truman could only stay for a tour since they had finals looming, but it was still great to meet them.  About a dozen people camped out, cooked veggies and marshmallows over the fire, and basically had a nice party.

The next day they helped clear out what I’m calling the North Ridge trail.  I didn’t actually get a chance to enjoy what we’d accomplished that day until I walked it a few days ago.  It makes a huge difference in how much you can enjoy when you’re not constantly dodging branches and watching your feet to make sure you don’t trip.  So thanks to everyone who helped out!  You can find more pictures of the event here.

This coming weekend May 13-15, the Missouri Student Environmental Coalition is holding their spring retreat out at MC.  Depending on the size I’ll probably put them to work clearing another trail and helping make some more raised beds in the garden.  I may also put some of them to work digging out a space for a small root cellar.

The Garden

I’ve really gone crazy making expanding the garden.  I’ve probably doubled the size of the garden from last year.  If one of my summer apprentices wants I’d like to continue expanding it until I’ve filled in the entire fenced in area with raised beds.  It’s probably a little over half way to that point now.

On May 4 there was a mild frost and killed back most of my potatoes and a lot of my squash, tomato, and pepper plants.  At the time I didn’t know how I could really protect the hundreds of plants, but in retrospect I should’ve piled straw up around them.  It’s lightweight enough not to damage them and easy to apply.  Next year I’m also going to start 3x as many tomatoes and peppers as I think I’ll need just to be safe.  Live and learn.

The Campground

I’ve gotten my camper positioned and cleaned out.  My plan is to live in the campground during the summers, at least until I get my own home built.  After this year though I’ll hopefully be living in one of the summer cabins we build, but the camper will do for now.  Jessica will probably be staying with me a lot more this year, although she did just get a small apartment in Columbia. I’ll be glad to have her around more.

As far as the new summer cabins go, I’ve got the site for the first summer cabin staked out and it’s a beauty.  It’ll have a really nice view looking into a wild field.  I now think that the cabins will have a simple tamped dirt floor, with a rubble trench curtain drain to keep them dry.  I’ve got some chisels and other wood working tools to make a simple timber-frame to support a metal roof and to wrap the scrap billboard tarp around.  I think I’ll call this new style, neo-rustic.  :)

Kita

The little bitch is growing like a weed.  She’s already learned sit, lay down, and shake, although her biggest accomplishments are that she now knows that she’s not allowed in the garden and that she’s not supposed to chase the guineas or chicken.

The training shock collar has really worked wonders, but don’t worry, I hardly have to use it and when I do it has a vibrate option that works most of the time.  The noise I make to tell her she’s doing something she’s not supposed to carries a lot more weight now.  I probably won’t need to use the collar at all in the near future.

Watching her play makes any stresses I have seem silly.  She’s dug out a big crater in the middle of my sand pile, and I’m pretty sure she’d dig a den under a tree if given the opportunity. Also, she’s always picking up sticks, but we’re still working on the finer points of “fetch”.  Her favorite parts of our walks are when we take a break down by the creek and she goes bounding up and down it.

Volunteers

It looks like I’ll have a full crop of volunteers this year.  A lot of people have been finding me through a site called Workaway.info, which is set up sort of like WOOFing but for anything really.  There are hosts and volunteers, hosts can be anything from a family looking for a nanny in paris, an organic vineyard in Italy, or a beautiful nature preserve/campground/homestead project in mid-Missouri.  The hosts are expected to provide room and board and the volunteers provide about 25 hours of help a week.

At this point I’m still looking for one more full-summer volunteer.  I’m going to have 4 people staying for the summer, with a spot for a short-term volunteer that’ll keep changing all summer.  At this point the short-term tent space is reserved for 6 different people with only a span of 2 weeks near the end of June available.  It should be kind of nice having a new person to get to know constantly, not to mention all of the other different people coming for weekend work parties and tours.

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Posted in Campground, Frost Protection, Kita, Retreats, Summer Cabins, Tents |

Dissolution and Renewal

Posted by Tao on April 5th, 2011

As the weather has warmed up my mind has been reeling with the physical tasks ahead of me.  How exactly am I going to build that cistern?  What kind of floor should go in the summer cabins? And on and on.  I can figure that stuff out and I’ll get it done, but the real question is how do you build a community?

There aren’t exactly manuals for what I’ve been attempting.  There are books that talk about successful communities, and some ideas can be drawn from them but every situation is different and every person is different.

So when the community meetings began to get serious and real or imagined divides began to show themselves I was not prepared for it like I should have been, nor did I have the emotional energy or time to deal with it.  In hindsight, it would seem that this was inevitable.  The group I’d assembled knew almost nothing about each other except that they shared a similar vision.  No one in the group other than Jessica was planning on moving out for at least a couple years, yet we were deciding policies and rules to live by before we’d decided if we even wanted to live together.

After giving it a lot of thought and discussing it with people I decided to call off the community meetings and simply aim for having a sustainable homestead.  If some day a good friend is in the right place and wants to move out I’ll consider inviting them and a community may happen organically like that, but until then I just need to focus on getting my own life sorted out.  Right now I need running water, not a pet policy.

I called everyone who had been attending the community meetings about a week ago after I made the decision to discontinue the ecovillage and I was pleasantly surprised at how understanding everyone was. I can’t tell you how much less stressed I’ve felt since then.  I’ve really been enjoying working in the garden, getting a tan,  and playing with Kita, the new puppy Jessica and I got.  I feel like I’m on the right track and have learned some important lessons.

Also, I feel that I should mention that the new puppy and the pet policy discussion were only passingly related.  The main issues and disputes were over entirely different things.  I mean just look at that face. :)

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Posted in Cisterns, Community, garden, Help, Homestead, Intentional Communities, Kita, Volunteers, Water |

Spring Greening

Posted by Tao on March 25th, 2011

It’s been wonderful seeing the fruit trees and berry bushes come back to life.  They have so much more vigor this 2nd year compared to the 1st year when they were dealing with transplant shock.  There are even a few plants I thought died last summer that are setting out new leaves.

I’ve been doing some serious sheet-mulching around all the perennials I planted last year. I’ve laid out about 5 cubic yards of compost I get from the composting operation the city runs in Columbia using people’s yard waste. I’ve been putting it on about 4″ thick, and it I’ve made about 500 sq. ft. of raised beds with it.

I planted bird’s foot trefoil on most of it, which is a nitrogen-fixing ground cover. Tick trefoil, another kind of trefoil, grows here natively but gets to be a couple of feet high and makes these burrs that stick to clothes and fur. The bird’s foot only gets to be a few inches high and makes a really beautiful yellow flower the bees love.

Dr. Greenthumb or: How I Stopped Weeding and Learned to Love the Plants

In all the paths I’ve thrown down some dutch white clover seed, which is a really low-growing clover, and like all kinds of clover it fixes nitrogen. There’s a ton of wild mustard, some kind of parsley, and a kind of deep-rooted plant I haven’t identified yet, growing in all the beds and paths. I’m in the process of re-wiring my brain not to see them as weeds. I’ve been pulling some of them out and throwing them in the compost pile, but to make it seem less like weeding, now I think about it as harvesting nitrogen.

For instance, wild mustard has edible leaves, makes a small flower that looks and tastes exactly like broccoli, and it does without me even having to do anything. But the thing I’m most excited about, which I recently learned is that it’s a trap crop for flea beetles. A trap crop is a plant that a pest prefers to the one you’re trying to grow. Last year the flea beetles shredded my radishes, turnips, eggplants, and did quite a bit of damage to my potatoes. After I thought about it some more, I think there were already flea beetles here before, I just sheet-mulched on top of their previous food source.

The flea beetles really liked my turnips too, which was fine with me since I really don’t like turnips. I didn’t even harvest several softball sized turnips last year and they were starting to grow again (turnips are biennial). They’d gotten woody and weren’t good for eating, but rather than composting them I just replanted them near where I’ll be planting my potatoes this year so they’ll act as another kind of trap crop.

I’ve also planted comfrey roots around a lot of the major fruit trees and berry bushes. They put down deep roots and pull up a lot of subsoil nutrients, and then I’ll come by maybe 3 times a year and chop all the leaves and spread them around the base of the plants I want to fertilize. It’s basically like growing your own fertilizer.

Hop Trees

Since I plan on making beer for awhile longer I’ve put in a raised bed for hops. Hops are a vine and can grow a foot a week. They need a really big trellis, and in one of the books I have it says to put in a 13′ cedar pole and put string coming down like a tent around it that the hops will grow up. So, what I did is just cut the tops and some of the branches off of a couple of living cedar trees. I’d already cut the lower branches flush or I would have left stubs on them as well.

Cedars don’t coppice so these should die now and be resurrected as hop trees. I think I can train them to grow up the fence and then into the structure of the cedars. It might be kind of a pain to harvest, but it’s worth a try, and if I have to I’ll just cut the rest of the branches flush and use string.

Pruning

I’ve done my first real pruning after reading up on it in a couple of my books. In some ways it’s kind of painful to cut off any of the precious growth. I have to keep reminding myself that it isn’t a huge loss, because it still has a lot of stored energy that it’ll now go where I want. I’m just telling that grape vine, “hey, look there’s this awesome fence for you to grow on over here.”

I pruned back the large wild russian olives that border the eastern side of the garden. They’re not really olives, but they do make a small edible fruit that birds like so they’ll act as a trap crop for my berries. They also fix nitrogen, but nitrogen fixers don’t share much of the nitrogen they store until the roots die back. Basically, when you prune the top of a plant, it automatically prunes it’s roots. With a nitrogen fixer that means I’ve just freed up the nitrogen nodules on its roots for other plants to use, such as my grapes, and in essence I’ve fertilized them.

Permaculture Design Certification

I started expanding the garden before I left for the permaculture design certification course I took in Wisconsin last week. I already knew a lot about permaculture before taking the class and had a good idea of what I was going to do in the garden already, but I’m looking at things slightly differently now.  Things are starting to click faster, and I’m seeing more of the relationships between things.  It was really kind of the perfect time to take the class because I get to come home and immediately put it into action while it’s fresh in my mind. I also just generally feel energized from all the great ideas and people I met in the class. I hope some of them are reading this and come visit when they get a chance.

Kita

My plans for the immediate future are to build a dog house for Kita, my new dog. She’s 8 weeks old now and can leave her mom, so I need to a place for her to live. She’s half belgian malinois and half carolina dog, both of which are herding dogs so she should be a smart one. I got the pick of the litter and she seems to be the most friendly and intelligent one of the group, at least when I’m around.  There are still some puppies that need a good home, so if you’re interested e-mail me.

Her main job is going to be guarding the garden as well as the house and livestock(currently just the guineas and chicken).  I’ve been reading dog training books and looking into classes.

I’m designing the dog house based on the dimensions of her parents and taking into account she’s a she.  I’m going to make the place out of pallets that I’ll stuff with alpaca fiber and wrap in billboard vinyl.  I’m even going to insulate the roof.  The door will be angled towards the south west so it’ll catch the cool summer breezes, as well as have a good line of site directly to the garden entrance and driveway.  The house will also get shaded by the hops trellis in the summer and have good sun in the winter when the hops dies.  I’m also considering putting a straw bale compost bin to the north west of the dog house to block the cold winter winds.  The house will have a shed roof slanted to deflect those cold winds as well as have a gutter attached that’ll fill up a watering bowl.  Does she have a smart alpha dog or what? :)

I’m going to try to dumpster dive most of her food, but I also just got a book that shows recipes on how to make an all vegetable feed that provides the right mixture of proteins, nutrients, etc so that I can actually grow her own food rather than raising animals to feed her.  If she wants meat I expect her to eat rabbits, mice, gophers, etc.  The person who wrote the vegetarian cat and dog food book had a border collie that lived to be 27 years old, that’s 189 in dog years!  It was almost a new record, but I have to believe that no dog would live to be that old if it didn’t like the taste of its food.

Summer Apprenticeships

This is my favorite time of year, when no one’s around yet and I can just wander around observing, thinking, and planning the projects for the year.  I’m starting to zero in on how and where to build the summer cabins, and I’m settling on a plan for the cistern at the house.  The vision for the garden is coming into focus, and I’ve got spots for the shed/greenhouse and ponds picked to maximize their relationships to the other elements.  I’ve got a plan for a small root cellar made out of a 55 gallon drum, there’s a half-built top-bar beehive that needs to be setup, and there’re probably a hundred other projects to work on.

I hope to have at least a couple summer apprentices, which I’ll put to work on any and all of those tasks.  I don’t like the word ‘intern’ or ‘work exchanger’.  ’Apprentice‘ says it better, even though I’m no master craftsman.  Besides, putting an apprenticeship on your resume sounds way better than an internship or work exchange.

I am starting to acquire quite a bit of useful knowledge and wisdom I can share, and there’s plenty to learn for everyone involved.  These aren’t paid positions, although I will provide room and board.  I have guest tents on covered platforms with mattresses in them.  I’ll also provide all the rice, beans, and potatoes you can eat as well as whatever’s ripe in the garden.  Throw in a little spice and excitement in the form of dumpster diving excursions, and what more could you need?

For all the short term volunteers I’ll be holding work parties every month, typically on the second Saturday.  However, this next month it’ll be on the third Saturday, April 16th, because this will be a garden work party and the average last frost date here is April 15th.  There’ll be plenty of planting, sheet-mulching, and weeding(ie nitrogen harvesting) to be done!

Publicity

On March 29, I’ll be a guest on Evening Addition.  It’s a radio program on KOPN, which is a community radio station in Columbia.  I’m not sure specifically what we’ll talk about since he deals with a lot of different issues, but it’ll obviously have to do with everything going on out here.  I’ll be using it to schlep for interns and volunteers too.  You’ll be able to listen to the archived recording here.

On April 22, Maya Creek will have a booth at the Earth Day event in Columbia at Peace Park.  We’ll have the soil blocker out for demonstration and have an assortment of beans and seeds for people to plant and take with them.  Our table will be on Elm St. right by the entrance to the park.

On July 9, I’ll be giving an hour long class at Fiber U in Lebanon, MO.  I’ll be talking about using waste alpaca and llama fiber as insulation and mulch, as well as giving them some permaculture tips on pasture management.

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Posted in "Weeds", Animals, Beer, Booth, Chickens, Cisterns, Class, Compost, Dog House, Dogs, Dumpster Diving, Flea Beetles, Food Preservation, Ground Covers, Guineas, Hops, Interns, Labor, Natural Building, Nitrogen Fixers, Permaculture, Plants, Pruning, Publicity, Radio, Root Cellars, Sheet Mulching, Soil Blocks, Trap Crops, Vegetarian Pet Food, Volunteers, Water, Wine, Work Parties |

Growing through the Winter

Posted by Tao on February 5th, 2011

I called the first community meeting on the second Saturday of this last December.  It was time to open this place up and really start building the community.  While I trusted everyone I invited, it was still nerve-racking to let everything out of my sole control.  I’ve poured all of my money, work, and heart into this place and want to make sure it turns into a place that I’m proud and excited to call home.

After the first meeting I was relieved.  After the second I’m growing confident and looking forward to our third meeting.  There’s a feeling and an energy during the meetings that is incredibly exciting and empowering.  I’m sure that there will be times when we won’t be able to decide on something, but at least with the group we have now it’s hard to see us not being able to work something out that is acceptable to everyone.

As far as the winter goes, the rocket stove is keeping me toasty in the straw bale common house.  I don’t know the exact amount of snow we have on the ground, but this last blizzard hit the property square on and we supposedly got somewhere in the neighborhood of 16-20″ on top of the couple inches already on the ground.  I’ve calculated that I lose about 8 degrees fahrenheit every day while the highs are sub-freezing.  I gain roughly 2 degrees for every hour of rocket stove burn time, so I end up burning the stove for about 8 hours every other day.  The temperature fluctuates between the mid-70′s after the burn, and the mid-60′s right before I burn it again.

While I’m burning the rocket stove I’ve also been heating up water on it to brew wine and beer.  I now have something like 230 bottles of various kinds of fruit wine fermenting, and 150 bottles of beer.  The beer only takes about a month from grinding the grains to being able to drink it, while the wine takes something like 6 months.  The wine is significantly easier to make, but takes up  more space in the meantime so there’s a trade-off.

The wine has already come in handy.  After the first snow of about 8 inches one of my neighbors came by and plowed the driveway and I gave him a bottle of wine.  A few weeks later I slid off the driveway backing out one night and got stuck and another neighbor saw me the next morning and came over with chains and pulled me out so I gave him a bottle of wine as well.  The same neighbor who pulled me out graciously plowed the driveway after this last blizzard, but told me he didn’t want me to give him a bottle of wine… perhaps a 6-pack next time?

Before this last snow I did some exploring around the property.  Winter time is the best because all of the foliage is dead and you can see a lot further. I’ve got a much better grasp of the whole property than I did before.  I also didn’t hurt that I bought a handheld GPS to get my bearings.  I discovered that it’s exactly a 1 mile hike from the visitor common house to the future ecovillage site.  The GPS will be handy when we finish marking the property lines as well as when we do more planning on the ecovillage layout itself.  I’ve started making GPS markers for things like the Paw Paw patch, patches of gooseberries and blackberries, and other points of significance like the giant granite boulder and Justin’s tipi.  The cool thing is that I can import them into Google Earth and get a good feel for where everything is, the built in map on the GPS only has roads on it so it’s pretty worthless.

For me personally this winter has led to a lot of personal growth.  I’ve read books on relationships, communication, philosophy, and buddhism among others.  I’ve had a number of revelations and many of my relationships with people have improved because of them.

As Spring approaches though my attention is turning back to more tactile topics.  I’ll be taking a permaculture design course in mid-March, which I’ve begun doing the coursework for.  I’ve also worked out some of the details for what I need to do on the visitor common house this coming year and so I’ll be researching and reading up on those soon.

I feel like I’m finding a natural rhythm with the seasons.  Physical growth in the form of infrastructure, hands-on knowledge, and just generally getting in good shape during the warm half of the year.  Personal growth in the form of interpersonal relationships and community, book knowledge, attention and focus training, as well as psychological introspection and awareness during the cold half.  The quiet of the woods in winter has done my soul good.

Posted in Beer, Communication, Community, Rocket Stoves, Visitor Lodge, Wine |

Help Wanted

Posted by Tao on January 17th, 2011

Update: I still have space for one more summer apprentice, and I’m starting to get my short-term volunteer tent pretty booked up for the summer. (5/7/2011)

The more time a volunteer spends, the more interesting or creative the tasks they’re given tend to be.  For instance, someone coming out for their first time for a day wouldn’t be given the task of setting up a beehive.

Here are just some of the projects we’ll be needing help with this summer.

Summer Cabins

We’re looking to build a number of cabins to replace the tent platforms and tarp system we’ve used the last couple of years.  The number and design of these cabins has yet to be determined, but we will try to use salvaged materials as much as possible.

Finishing Visitor Common House

I will be finishing the common house and would be interested involving a work exchanger help on a number of projects.  These projects will include finishing the floor, putting in the interior plumbing and walls, digging and installing a rainwater cistern, and building a solar hot water system.

Because of the nature of many of the projects it may not be a full-time position and the apprentice could also be in charge of the communal garden as well as helping on any other projects or projects of their own creation approved at a community meeting.

Common Garden

This year in the garden we would like to focus on growing staple crops such as potatoes, corn, squash, and possibly beans.  We would like to continue sheet-mulching the food forest area around the vegetable beds and plant them with different edible/medicinal perennial or self-seeding plant guilds.

Apart from general weeding, watering, and pruning, other desirable projects for the garden would involve setting up the partially constructed top-bar beehive, digging/building a small root cellar, collecting materials and building large compost piles, and the construction of a greenhouse/tool shed/coop building.

An extended-stay volunteer or apprentice would be preferable to accomplish many of the larger goals, but many of these are not immediate needs and if there are a limited number of work exchangers available one may split their time between the common house and the garden.

The Living Situation

All extended-stay volunteers and summer apprentices will be asked to work 5 hours a day, 5 days a week on average.

Currently the housing situation consists of 5 various-sized tents with covered platforms that have mattresses and limited shelving.  Apprentices and volunteers are in charge of their own bedding.  The other facilities consist of a composting toilet, solar shower, and open-air kitchen.  There is a small solar power system on the common house which is capable of charging AA and AAA batteries, cell phones, and running laptops for short periods is possible.  Most people can get a weak cell phone signal on the property, and internet access is available on a limited basis.

Laundry can be done at one of the two laundromats in Fulton.  Other facilities may be available from friends of the community located nearby, but this would be subject some limitations on volume and frequency.

As far as food goes, we would like to have a rotating cook position this year.  Every day a different person would cook lunch and dinner and be responsible for cleaning the dishes used to cook.  Everyone else would be responsible for cleaning their personal dishes as well as their own breakfast.  The people cooking will receive community credit for time spent cooking and cleaning.

Tao will donate all the beans and rice that could possibly be needed.  Other ingredients will come from the garden as well as from dumpster diving.  If cooks want to buy other ingredients for community meals that’s their prerogative.  There are also a large number of herbs and spices available in bottles and in the garden.

Drinking water will be provided.

Spice of Life

It’s to be expected that we’ll all want to try our hands at the different projects to mix things up and get some different skills.  Weather often dictates which projects can be worked on, so often we may all be working together on the same project.

There will be at least one large community party on the 4th of July weekend, and festive work parties on the second Saturday of each month will continue to be held.  Apprentices are encouraged to take days off if they begin to feel burned out.  Nearby Columbia offers numerous activities and has become quite good at attracting excellent musicians.

Many nights are spent around the campfire talking while others choose to read or do other hobbies.  If you have any musical inclinations or hobbies please bring whatever you might need or want, just remember that storage space is limited.

Sign me up!

Great! It’s always exciting to meet other people with similar interests and aspirations.  Give me (Tao) a call or shoot me an e-mail and tell me about what you’re interested in doing and how long you’d be available.  Things will get going at the beginning of May and probably stop some time in November depending on the weather.

Posted in Community, Help |

Shifting Gears

Posted by Tao on December 2nd, 2010

After making my way through the final push of the year, including cleaning up and taking down tarpopolis, finishing the rocket stove, and putting doors and windows on the house, I now find myself breathing a sigh of relief and am looking forward to a long winter of reading, planning, and preparing for next year’s warm weather.  By the time the weather actually warms up enough to start on projects I’ll be chomping at the bit to get started, and the whole cycle will start again.

Project Updates

The rocket stove is finally complete, well, for the most part at-least, I still have some tweaks to do.  The thermal mass bench took quite awhile, mainly because I had to let it dry in layers to avoid crushing the flue pipes.  Ianto Evans, the guy who literally wrote the book on rocket stoves, says that you won’t have a problem with crushed flue pipes if you build the bench with love.  So either I didn’t add enough love to my cob mix or he should be a little more detailed.

It took awhile to figure out exactly how to burn the stove and what size firewood to cut and how to position it to stop smoke from escaping inside the house, but I’ve gotten pretty good at it.  If I make any modification to the rocket stove it will probably be to raise the height of the feed tube to make it harder for smoke to escape and so longer wood can be used.

Altogether though I’m extremely pleased.  I can burn the stove for 5-6 hours and have the house stay in the mid-70′s for the next 2 days with sub-freezing temperatures outside.  The constant temperature is also great for sleeping because I don’t keep waking up having to add blankets like I did in the camper.

Also, cooking on the stove is really great, especially since it means I don’t have to use the propane stove very much.  It gets hotter than I was told to expect, which works out well because I can use it to cook just about anything or boil water for tea.  To slow-cook or just keep things I warm I set the pot on a raised metal stand.  I haven’t tried it yet, but I undumpstered the top to a bbq grill that fits perfectly over the top of the barrel.  I’m hoping that I can use it to turn the stove into an oven.  Experimentation is required.

In other news, I’ve expanded my brewing abilities.  I’ve got a gallon of blueberry wine fermenting away and a 5 gallon batch of experimental wheat beer going as well.  I invested about $200 in parts and equipment so that I’ll be brewing my beer from actual grains starting with my next batch. It’s a somewhat more labor-intense process, but I’ll immediately drop my cost per beer from about 90 cents to 40 cents.  I’ve been reading on how to use the spent yeast from one batch to use in the next so that will drop my costs another 5 cents a beer, and then once I get hops and brewing herbs planted next year I ought to be able to get it down to about 20-25 cents per delicious home-brew beer.

The off-grid power system got another serious upgrade.  The limiting factor on the system was storage capacity.  The system was making way more power than it could store, which isn’t a problem if it’s sunny and windy every day, but for weeks of overcast doldrums it becomes a problem.  So, I bought 6 new deep-cycle batteries to add to just the 2 I had previously.  That brings the system to 450 amp-hours from 112.  Enough to easily run all the lights and my beast of a laptop for hundreds of hours on a full charge, which I get from a single sunny day.

Winter Goals

I was beginning to physically wear down near the end of the warm season, and now that my body has recovered from that my brain is anxious to get to work.

The main goals will be organizational this winter.  I want to start holding monthly meetings for everyone interested in Maya Creek at whatever level.  I want to involve everyone in the decision-making process, figure out things like what it would mean to be a member here, how the membership process would work, how the decision-making process would work, etc.  I have ideas on a lot of these aspects, most of which I’ve posted on the website, but I want to hear from people interested in this place, what ideas and concerns they have, etc.  A dozen heads are better than one. It’s also just a good excuse to get everyone together to try out my beer and wine.

Apart from the meetings I’m going to start recruitment efforts for next year.  Last year was great, and I was lucky to have the people helping me that I did.  I didn’t do much in the way of recruiting volunteers or work exchangers, partly because I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with being in charge of directing a large number of people.  Now that I have a little experience with it I have some ideas how I can handle a lot more help.

The first thing is going to be getting at least 2 or 3 work exchangers to be here all year.  These people will essentially be like foreman.  I have several large projects which I would want them to oversee next year such as building semi-permanent summer cabins in the camping area where the tent platforms are, making a trail from the camping area that goes to the ecovillage site, and starting on the main driveway to the ecovillage site itself.  Once they feel confident about the different projects I’ll essentially let them oversee them and put them in charge of short-term volunteers who come out to help.

I know the colleges and universities near here are brimming with people interested in what’s going on here, it’s just about letting the right people know what opportunities are available. So, I’m going to start a more aggressive campaign to get the word out at the universities this winter, try to identify organizations and professors who would be interested and let them know what I have going on.  I’m also going to post a detailed description of what the work exchangers would be involved in and responsible for and once I find them to start preparing them however I can for those projects as well as just generally being prepared for life out here.

My other mission this winter is to make Maya Creek Ecovillage a bonified legal entity.  I’m going to attempt to set it up as 501C3 tax-exempt non-profit educational organization.  It will make it much much easier to get grants as well as donations.  When that gets set up Maya Creek can create a formal agreement with the land trust, and once that agreement is in place it should serve to allay concerns about members’ property rights and provide a framework for what Maya Creek can do with the land which would facilitate more long-term planning.

Recent Events

I’d like to thank everyone for the attending the sweat lodge.  A memorable 30th birthday to be sure.  Justin and I will be reworking the sweat lodge to be smaller, more accessible, and ultimately much hotter.  After all, you’re not going on a vision quest unless you’re on the verge of losing consciousness.  Justin and I will hopefully have it down to an art for the next gathering.

Maya Creek also hosted the Weill/Lundemo family Thanksgiving this year.  Despite the house still being only roughly livable everyone seemed to be impressed and enjoyed learning about the different building aspects and other projects going on around the land.  There’s a profound since of satisfaction at having built a structure to protect your loved ones from the elements, especially when Thanksgiving day was the coldest day of the winter so far.

My dad enjoyed splitting firewood while he was here.  It’s also become one of my favorite new past-times because it involves and improves concentration, hand-eye coordination, strength, and when you’re done you’ve also produced something useful.  Last winter I had trouble finding ways to stay in reasonable shape, but this year it found me.

Upcoming Events

As I mentioned earlier I’m going to start holding monthly meetings for everyone interested in being a part of Maya Creek in one way or another.  So I’d like to announce the first Second Saturday Meeting on December 11, 2010 at 4pm. If that date and/or time doesn’t work for a lot of people then we can move it.  Please let me know if you plan on attending the meeting here at Maya Creek so I’ll know to expect you.  If you need directions or more info contact me.  I expect the meeting will last a couple of hours and time will be credited to everyone in the work log.

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Posted in Beer, Renewable Energy, Rocket Stoves, Straw Bale, Wine |

Mr. Pink

Posted by Tao on October 30th, 2010

As I was leaving to head into Columbia last night I found Mr. Pink on the side of the road near the driveway.  He’d been hit and killed probably hours earlier.  He looked as though he’d died immediately, or at least that’s what I’d like to believe.

Pink was the only animal I’d had since it was a baby, and I loved him more than I thought it was possible for me to love an animal.  He was my friend, a fuzzy, cuddly, sassy, little friend.  The world and especially this coming winter seem a lot more lonely and bleak.  He was the only cat I’d ever had that would meow at me not because he was hungry, thirsty, or cold, but because he just wanted my attention, to be picked up like a baby and have his whiskers rubbed.  I think that’s what I’m going to miss most about the little turd, the way he’d take me out of whatever work I was doing and make me feel loved even just for a few minutes.

He led a good life, one any cat would envy, even some people.  He was born in Berlin, El Salvador on July 1, 2005.  His favorite past time in his early years was eating cockroaches, which would have gone mostly undetected if it weren’t for his distaste for their antennae which I would find scattered around the hacienda.

When I came back to the U.S. there were more than a few Salvadorans jealous of Pink’s new found citizenship.  Delta had informed that I didn’t need any paperwork for him, because cats don’t need paperwork to my disbelief.  I then verified that cats are essentially the only animal that do not need paperwork to enter the United States and only have to “appear healthy”, whatever that means.

At the airport in El Salvador I was asked for his paperwork, and when I told them I had none and didn’t need any I was informed I was wrong.  At one point the woman running security told me to just let him go out in the parking lot.  That probably gives you an idea of how animals are thought of in many third-world countries.  After hours of arguing and almost missing my flight they allowed me to leave their country with him.  Thinking the worst was over I was dismayed when the large black woman at the U.S. customs asked for his papers and when I told her I didn’t need them she responded “uh uh honey, every animal needs papers”.  I then asked for a supervisor and watched as half a dozen customs employees gathered around a computer terminal to look up the same information on the state department website.  Twenty minutes later I was told that I could go without so much as an apology, I suppose they were embarrassed that they didn’t know such a basic aspect of their job.

The ordeal did not end their, as up to that point Pink had dealt with the flights and cage-time stoically, but when the plane from Atlanta to Jackson was delayed over 4 hours he began to reach his limits.  As he began to yowl on the flight full of already severely annoyed passengers I reached my hand through a small zipper in his cage to calm him, which worked until the flight attendant angrily told me I couldn’t open my dog’s cage.  After informing her that it was a cat and it was the only way I could keep him quiet, she told me that she didn’t care if it was a baby.  And that’s how Mr. Pink came to America.

It was clear he was an outdoor cat, but still spent a year in Baltimore shredding carpets and otherwise letting me know he wasn’t pleased with his limited quarters.  A year after that he finally got his breathing room and got to his first taste of outdoor living in Virginia.  I was terrified he’d be hit by a car on the suburban road or mauled by a dog or any other catastrophe, but I knew I had to let him do his thing if he was going to be happy.

When we came out to the land I’d been mostly worried about wild animals and dogs getting him, but he always seemed to find his way home.  He was a very brave cat when it came to dogs, and more often than not would hold his grown rather than run.  I once saw him run up and growl at someone coming through my neighbor’s porch door in Baltimore.  He seemed to have abnormally long claws, which he kept finely honed by scratching on logs or my couch cushions, whichever was more readily available.  I think it was those traits that helped him be successful out in the wilderness.  It was only earlier this year that I was told he was actually a Norwegian Forest cat, which makes me think he had an actual genetic predisposition to this type of landscape.

The idea that he would be hit by a car actually never factored in to my thinking since only 20 or 30 cars pass by the road along the property every day.  I knew he liked to prowl in the field across the road sometimes and yesterday morning was extremely cold compared to what it had been.  My thinking is that his reflexes just weren’t as fast as he’d been used to and couldn’t get across the road or out of the way as quickly as he expected.  Either way I’ve tried to reign in my emotions from angrily blaming the driver, my mind wants to think the person was recklessly speeding or sadistically even trying to hit him, but nothing good comes from that way of thinking.  He’s gone and there’s nothing I could say or do that’s going to bring the little fluffwad back.

I buried him in the garden between a couple of grape bushes.  I wanted to do it right away because I couldn’t stand to see him like that.  I sobbed, screamed, and cussed at everything and nothing and put my little buddy to rest.  I can’t describe how much I miss him already.  He can never be replaced and I just wanted to write down a little about his life and what he meant to me.  I was hoping it would be cathartic, but now I’m just weeping and missing him more than ever.  Give your loved furballs a rub for me.

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Posted in Animals, Cats |

Rocketing into Fall

Posted by Tao on October 21st, 2010

It’s hard to believe that the building season is already coming to an end.  The house isn’t as far as I’d hoped, but I’ve begun to get used to that.  As long as the progress is tangible it’s hard to get too depressed.  Watching the granite footing go up with Emily’s hard work has been exciting and has turned the house into a work of art.  The loft and interior wall studs in conjuction with the first half of the base layer of earthen floor have added a new dimension to the interior and although it’s still probably a whole building season from being done the finish line is in sight.

With the first light frost of the year and the leaves changing and finding their way to the forest floor where they’ll keep the tree roots well-mulched and cozy I’m reminded of my own winter preparations.  It would be easy to get stressed about all of the work still to be done over the next couple months, but I know I’ll get it done. Just knowing that I won’t have to spend the winter cramped in my tin can of a camper again is enough to keep my spirits high.

My most pressing project is getting the rocket stove done.  A rocket stove is a type of wood-burning stove similar to a masonry stove in that rather than the heat going straight up and out of a normal chimney, the flue runs horizontally through a bench made up of really heavy materials like rocks, bricks, and clay so that the heat is absorbed inside the house before the stove gases exit.  This means that the temperature of the air leaving through the flue is only a hundred degrees or so, even though the stove burns cleanly and efficiently at over a thousand degrees.  After setting up a mock-up of the heat riser guts of the stove at the last work party there are at least 3 new stoves in the planning stages by impressed observers.  I foresee many winter nights and days spent on the thermal mass bench in the future.

The earthen floor base layer is only a little over half done.  I held off doing the whole base layer because I wanted to bury the rocket stove in the floor so that the floor will also hold the heat.  I was more than ready to be done with the tedious work of mixing and leveling the floor.  Each batch of mix only created a couple square feet of floor space, so it would easily take 300 batches to do the whole layer.  Even after 3 weeks of running a couple of fans to dry it out it’s just now really begun to dry out.  There are two more layers, which involve a lot less material, and thus less mixing and work.  Any more work on the floor is going to have to wait until next year so I’ll have a half-gravel floor for the winter.  No big deal.

The solar power system has gotten a significant upgrade.  We’ve now got 400 watts of panel on the roof and new MPPT charge controller which is significantly more efficient at charging the batteries with those panels.  I’ve cut a couple trees down that were blocking significant sunshine and I’ll have to cut down several more before it’s all said and done unfortunately.  I also need to get some more battery capacity since we’re making way more power than we can hold when it’s sunny, but it only lasts a couple days with regular usage.

My first attempt at a brewing beer since I stopped about 5 years ago was a resounding success.  I’ve been doing a lot of reading on brewing beer with more raw materials so I can lower the price and have more control over it.  I’ve also got my first batch of wine brewing and plan on doing a lot more brewing and experimenting this winter as my pet project.  I’d like to have a lot of beverages tucked away for next year.  We go through a lot of beer and wine, and I figure this will cut down a lot on our recycling and expenses.

Emily finished the solar dehydrator that she’d taken on as her own pet project.  We’ve tried bananas, apples, persimmons, tomatoes, acorns, and herbs and they’ve all been delicious.  I’m especially fond of the fruits when they’re only partially dry and chewy.  It’s going to be a lot less depressing not seeing tomatoes and other veggies going bad because we don’t eat them or give them away fast enough.

Dakota headed out in September, and Emily has just headed back early to Ohio.  She’d expected to stay through Thanksgiving, but her father’s health has taken a turn for the worse and she’s gone back to spend some time with him.  Both her and Dakota were really crucial in getting as far as we did this year, not to mention just being good company.  Hopefully I won’t be too lonely this winter though, Justin is putting the finishing touches on his tipi cover and is planning on having a tipi-raising party in the next week or two.

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Posted in Beer, Earthen Floor, Recycled Materials, Reusable Goods, Rocket Stoves, Solar Dehydration, Visitor Lodge, Wine |

Plaster, Compost, and the beginnings of a Forest Garden

Posted by Tao on September 1st, 2010

Since my last post Dakota, Emily, and I have finished the discovery and infill coats of earthen plaster on the house.  Others participated in various plaster parties and I’d like to thank them all graciously, but I especially want to thank Dakota and Emily.  The infill coat was a herculean task, and took just over a month to complete.  I’d guess we mixed a couple hundred batches of plaster in the cement mixer altogether, but the really time consuming part was smearing it on the walls and smoothing it out.  The walls look relatively flat and it just generally made it look like a serious building.  Tom Mudd, a local housing contractor, came by earlier today and told me it was “professional”.

There’s still a thin coat of lime plaster to put on before the walls are totally complete, but that’s going to wait until after the granite chunk footing goes around the very bottom of the walls.  I’ve been picking up loads of free granite chunks from a counter top maker in town and I’m going to mortar the chunks together with a lime mortar.  Functionally, it protects the gravel-filled bags that make up the stem wall from degrading in UV.  It also acts as a splash guard and a moisture barrier for the bales and clay plaster.  Aesthetically, I think it’s going to make it look kick ass.

We’ve also set up a basic tarp storage area outside the house to get all of the tools and supplies out of the house so work can start on the earthen floor.  There are a couple of things that need to be done inside before the floor can start being poured, but that should begin within the next few weeks.

The garden is in decline.  I knew it at the time, but I really should have done succession planting so I wouldn’t be swamped with different crops all at once.  The tomatoes have come and gone, and without a solar dehydrator many of them either rotted or were given away.  Emily is working on an Appalachian style solar dehydrator, which ought to be completed in relatively near future.  Many of the turnips and beets went bad before they could be eaten as well, so food preservation and succession planting are the name of the game for next year.

I spent this last week weeding and working on the garden.  It had been badly neglected because of all the work on the house.  The flowers I’d planted had overtaken large swathes of the beds, and so had inadvertently become a kind of weed and so were trimmed back hard.  I also put a bunch of compost and mulch around the fruit trees and berry bushes, as well as laying down some paths.  I’m essentially going to sheet mulch 3/4 of the area around the vegetable beds and plant a whole range of useful plants in the under-story of the fruit and berry bushes.  I did roughly 1/8 of what needed to be done, but it’s certainly a start and it felt good to improve the garden after all the neglect.

The majority of the work in improving the soil involves importing organic material.  I’ve used compost and manure from a number of sources, some were good and some weren’t.  Right now my main source is William Woods University’s horse stalls.  The fine people there load me up for free, and it’s only a 15 minute drive away.  The food forest section that I sheet mulched used basically two truck loads of material.  Once all of the soil has been improved though, I won’t need to be trucking in material any longer as long as there’s a closed nutrient cycle and all of the waste and humanure is composted and returned to the soil.

I also spent this last week making two large compost piles, improving on my previous straw bale system.  The original pile I made didn’t get compost in the very core of the pile.  It just wasn’t wet at all because the mound shape had hardened and redirected all of the water to the sides.  My new piles were slightly rectangular to handle the full truck load and be flat on top so the water would soak in more evenly.  Also, I layered the horse manure/bedding with weeds and other garden wastes which are high in nitrogen.  Horse manure by itself has the perfect C:N (Carbon to Nitrogen) ratio for composting, but with the wood shaving bedding material added it puts more carbon in the mix, so the greens help to balance that out somewhat.

I also sprinkled a shovelful of finished compost on each manure layer and wetted it down thoroughly.  Then I topped the whole thing off with several inches of straw to stop it from forming that hardened surface and to hold the moisture in better.   I stuck my soil thermometer in one of the piles and by the 3rd day it had reached 140F.  It’s cooled a little since then, but I think that’s because it didn’t have enough water.  Because it got so hot I decided to build the 2nd pile with humanure in the core to sterilize it.  If a compost pile spends 24 hours above 121F it will kill all the harmful pathogens in the poop.

The two piles should give me enough compost to give the vegetable beds a good layer and re-energize them for another productive year.  I’ll continue expanding the sheet-mulching of the food forest as I have time and available helpers.

I’ve got 4 new guineas in the guinea house and I’ve moved the lone chicken up by my camper as a personal tick guard.  I’m going to go get her a friend soon though.  I think she’s starting to go a little crazy by herself.  The guineas should provide excellent tick clearance, but really I haven’t even so much as seen a tick in more than a month now.

As far as community goes, Justin has begun work on a tipi he plans on trying overwinter in.  He had originally planned on making a type of yurt but has scaled back his plans as winter looms.  He’s cleared out a space in the main community field and has already collected the majority of poles he needs from the surrounding woods.  He’ll use the billboard tarps to make the covering.  He’s also discovered a vein of paint rock, basically a type of mineral ocher that can be used as a paint, such as on a lime plaster to make a type of fresco.

Patrick has downgraded his plans as well and is going to make a simplified geodesic dome assuming he has time.  He’s also cleared out a space in the central community field.  He’s had some transportation issues that have been slowing him down, along with other projects he already has in the works.

Dakota and Emily left last week for a 2 week trip to visit Emily’s friends and family in Columbus, OH, but they’ll be back this next week.  Dakota will probably be leaving a week or so after they get back, but Emily plans on staying until the weather heads south.

A new work exchanger, Joanie, should be arriving this coming weekend for several weeks to help out.  Also, Jessica, who’s actually from Fulton has been camping out in her van for a few days.  She’ll be leaving for California in a few weeks, but is hanging out until then.

The weather has been getting progressively nicer.   It’s not as hot or humid, and there have been plenty of blue skies filling up the battery banks.  It’s actually been kind of nice needing to use a blanket on some nights.

I know I’m missing a lot of different things that have happened, but I’m going to make it a priority to post once a month. So stay tuned, and check out the flickr feed for more pics.

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Posted in Chickens, Compost, Guineas, Humanure, Raccoons, Sheet Mulching, Straw Bale, Ticks |

A Gravity All Its Own

Posted by Tao on July 11th, 2010

There have been a lot of great developments at Maya Creek in the 6 weeks since my last blog post.  I’ll start with the oldest and work my way up to the present.

The roof has been completely insulated.  Dakota and I spent 2 days blowing insulation into the roof space we’d created between the rafters with used billboard tarps.  The inside of the roof isn’t the prettiest, but I’m planning on getting some kind of fabric or saris, and hanging them up over the tarp to make it prettier and to add some character.  Even without doors or windows it’s noticeably cooler and less humid inside the house.

After the roof was finished we started preparing the walls for the earthen plaster.  That mainly involved stuffing cracks and spaces with straw slip, essentially straw dipped in a clay/water mix about the consistency of cream. We also taped off some parts that we wanted to protect from the plaster.  Afterwards we made a gritty adhesion coat out of flour paste, sand, and clay.  The adhesion coat was smeared on all of the non-straw surfaces that were going to get plastered such as wood, parts of the gravel bag stem wall, and the metal compression wires.  We also stuffed some of the spaces between the gravel bags with cob to minimize the amount of plaster that would have go in there to even it out.

Next we rented an air compressor and stucco gun and blasted the straw bale walls with clay slip, the clay/water mixture about the consistency of heavy cream.  At that point I bought a cement mixer and generator to help with the mixing and it has already been incredibly helpful in mixing the plaster as well.  While I could see mixing plaster by hand for a small project, the cement mixer has probably doubled the speed at which we’re plastering both with the time it takes to actually mix and the energy saved and used on applying the plaster.

The 4th of July: Get Plastered weekend event was a resounding success as far as I was concerned.  14 people showed up at one point or another and there were a dozen that helped with the actual plastering.  It was extremely gratifying for me to see my old friends getting along so well with my new friends.  It took us a good 6 hours to get 3 of the outside walls done and we finished up the last wall in a couple hours on the 2nd day.  Dakota and I built a dock at the lake just in the time for the party and the bonfire was quite impressive, seen here with flames only half as high as they got to be.

It sounds cliche, but it really is hard for me to put into words how grateful I am to everyone who has helped me along the way so far, not just the people at the plaster party, but all the support I have gotten with the ecovillage project.  It is fueling the progress here, not to mention giving fire to my determination to see this through.  Without it, this simply would not be possible and so I thank you all from the bottom of my heart. I have an optimism about the future that I have never experienced before as an adult.

Whew, now that I’ve let that wave of emotion sweep over me let me get back to the business at hand.  I have a new work exchanger, Emily.  She arrived from Ohio a day or so before the plaster party.  She’s inquisitive and hard-working and we seem to get along well.  Dakota was planning on leaving after the plaster party, but seems to find it harder and harder to leave.  This place seems to be developing a type of gravity all its own because he’s not the only one.

Over the plaster party weekend I talked with Justin and Melainia and they wanted to start construction on a DIY yurt.  I’ve already seen some of the initial plans on it and it seems fantastic.  They’re wanting to start some time this summer and I couldn’t be more thrilled.  They’re already good friends to me and I welcome them whole-heartedly as the first community members apart from myself.  The construction of a small dwelling in the actual ecovillage area fits in exactly with that I’d envisioned for the first phase of the main ecovillage area construction.

I’d only met Patrick once before early this spring.  I liked him after that one encounter, but after the plaster party weekend he’s already entered the ranks as a good friend as well.  He’s been building a geodesic dome about an hour or so from here and hung around an extra day after the plaster party weekend.  He seemed to be at home here and I was sad to see him leave.  I’d already been conspiring on how I could get him more involved here when he e-mailed me and said that he had to be a part of Maya Creek sooner rather than later and wants to build a small dome here this summer.

There’s this sense that the pieces are starting to fall into place and that my “start building it and they will come and help you” strategy is working.  I feel like I’ve been able to attract exactly the kind of people I’d been hoping to find.  The ecovillage seems to be well on it’s way to becoming an actual village and not just a wild man in the woods.

So, getting back to the more hum-drum ecovillage news.  The plaster is still going up.  Dakota, Emily, and I have already significantly improved our plastering methods and are moving much quicker than I had thought possible judging by how much we got done at the plaster party.  It’s quite a relief since it was beginning to look like a herculean feet to finish the next 2 coats, especially since the next coat involves 3-4 times more plaster than the discovery coat we’re still applying does.

I’d like to put out an open invitation for a plaster party this Saturday, July 17 as well as one on Saturday, July 31.  Everyone is welcome to camp for the weekend.  There are a number of tents already set up on raised platforms with protective tarps.  A few of them have mattresses, and I’m looking for a couple of double mattresses to throw in two of them.  If you’re coming out remember to bring clothes that you don’t care about since clay can stain clothing.

In non-housing related news the garden has exploded in productivity and lushness.  Many of the companion planted flowers are blooming, tomatoes are ripening, zucchini, squash, and cucumbers are growing faster than I can pick them, and my only regret is that I can’t spend more time there examining bugs, growth patterns, and generally just poking around.  A couple raccoons got in one night and ravaged the sweet corn, but it’s recovered fairly well and I’ve since trapped and relocated the rascals about 20 miles away.

A couple fruit trees have died, and some are struggling.  A few seem to be doing really well though, which is I suppose to be expected in essentially unimproved clay soil.  Next year I’m really going to kick my compost-making operation into high gear and make it so that I can grow pretty much any plant the climate will allow.  I have the sources for material and means of delivery, just not the time to do it right now.

Sadly I’ve lost two of the three laying hens I bought this year.  The first one happened when the chickens accidentally got locked out of their coop one night and nested in a tree.  I could hear it screaming as something attacked it and ran down and scared away whatever was attacking it, but it was mortally wounded and I had to put it out if it’s misery.  The other was mortally wounded by some dogs and was likewise mercy killed.  It’s really pretty depressing, and I’ve begun to wonder if the act of butchering these animals is worth the meat.  I’m almost to the point of burying them in the garden and using them as fertilizer.  It seems right since that’s essentially what I want done with my own body, except in the forest, not the garden.  Jason is raising some guineas for the both of us, and so I should have 4 or so of them running around tick-hunting in a couple months.

Maya Creek is also now solar-powered.  The wind generator doesn’t reliably produce very much power.  The turbine needs to be higher above the trees, but I’m hoping that in the winter when the leaves are down and the winds are generally stronger and more sustained I’ll see more production out of it.  If not I have a plan to raise it another 5-10′ and possibly trim some tree tops.

The 90W of amorphous silicon solar panels are doing the trick on these hot sunny summer days.  The battery bank had been consistently topped off, but as more people have arrived and the weather has gotten cloudier, they may not be enough for what we’ve been demanding.  I’ve got 2 new LED lighbulbs that put off a nice omni-directional warm light that only use 5 watts each.  Over the winter I’m also going to be looking at getting a new super-efficient laptop.

In more recent news, I’ve lost my dumpster diving cherry.  I spent most of the time laughing at the incredible amount of perfectly good food thrown out.  I didn’t even notice a smell in most of the dumpsters and within the course of an hour or two the car was packed to the brim with a huge array of food and goodies, including a perfectly fine step ladder, which had been on my list of things to get for plastering.  If I had to estimate what it would have cost to buy the stuff we got, I’d put it somewhere in the area of $200-300, if not more.

We did all of that on the way back from St. Louis where we went to an event remembering the 1877 general strike in St. Louis.  The main reason we went was to see David Rovics.  I designed David’s site about 5 years ago and had never met him until yesterday.  He introduced me to some extremely interesting people in the St. Louis area and I’m really looking forward to getting to know them better.

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Posted in Chickens, Compost, Dumpster Diving, Earthen Plaster, Guineas, Raccoons, Recycled Materials, Reusable Goods, Solar, Straw Bale, Ticks, Visitor Lodge, Wind |

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