Author: sumnerni

Petey and I with three friends went on a canoe float on Jack’s Fork after/during some heavy storms (this is when Dallas was flooded a couple weeks back).  It was a three day, two night float and we camped at Jam Up cave.  There was some rain and the water was too high the second day to canoe so we stayed on land but the last day was wonderfully beautiful!

Thanks to Jude for most of these photos!

I am now moved out of Further (I was ‘house sitting’ for a long term member who had left the farm and wasn’t expected to be back until December… however she ended up coming back a lot earlier than expected).  So now I am in Lilliput which is a nice building with its own kitchen.

I built a new shelf for my turn table and my records.  This project took me less than 10 hours and cost me about $100 for the hardware and some plywood.  I was aiming for structural stability and not looks and I think it worked out nicely.  It can easily fit around 350 records.  I should have shopped around to save money on the shelving hardware, but I simply don’t have the time!

I like vinyl because you can get $1-3 classical records that are in like new condition and that were recorded decades ago (and thus they were recorded in high fidelity analog fashion).  I do purchase the latest hip hop albums (most new vinyl pressings were recorded digitally so there really isn’t any sound advantage) on vinyl for only the reason that this is my mode of music listening, but I really like going into the city and browsing vinyl stores for good deals.  Apparently no one likes any type of classical vinyl and so I’ll happily buy it up!  You can’t even find a lot of this stuff on the internet.

Petey got five Indian Runner (Anas platyrhynchos domesticus) for our lower garden this season. He has had ducks in the past, but we didn’t have them in the garden last year. They are excellent foragers and we hope they will be decent egg layers. We will probably eat them at the end of the season.

Having the ducks gave me the opportunity to build a duck hutch.  We didn’t need anything that would last forever.  I went for economy and time.  In all it took me less than 10 hours to build and less than $15 posted against the garden budget.

I built it entirely out of pallet wood, which we have plenty of from the waste of our factory.  The roof is made from tin I salvaged (which is also plentiful here).  I had to combine three separate pieces.  I learned that Henry Wet Patch and Gorilla Glue are my friends for a leakfree roof.

While in the process of constructing the hutch in East Wind’s General Shop the electricity went out due to a storm.  It is amazing how productive you can be with electric drills and scary to experience how much more labor and skill would be needed for a simple project like this without the infrastructure of our industrial civilization.

Quack!

Here are some pictures from my second float trip.  This was Bryant creek.  It was about a seven mile journey (very short) for Petey’s birthday.  It was a beautiful day and we had a magical time!

 

This is a photo of two swarm boxes I built.  This year I was hoping to have a couple bee hives, but for multiple reasons it didn’t quite work out this year.  So I built these swarm boxes and they will be hung up in trees to catch wild swarms of bees.

When a bee colony is of a sufficient size and under certain conditions the queen bee and about 2/3s of the colony will leave their hive in search of a new home.  The remaining bees will raise a new queen to continue.

While searching for a new home the bees have a system of signals and a ‘quorom’ of votes that essentially decides the most desirable spot to move by something resembling a democracy (more so a democracy than most).

These boxes are designed to be especially appealing to bees.  It is late in the season for us to be putting them up, but I hope to catch a swarm and let it live in the box for the season.  Any late swarms probably won’t survive the winter, but having the bees inside the box and putting propolis in the box makes it more attractive to later swarms.

So for next year I am all setup to ensure that the bee project takes flight here.  We will definitely have purchased bees, but also will hopefully have some native bees caught in these swarm traps.

I recently moved out of my luxurious Fanshen loft into Further, one of several personal shelters at East Wind!  This will be a great place to hang for the summertime.

This is a retrofitted bus that has grid electricity and a wood stove for heat (which I won’t have to worry about for the next five months).

The spot is really nice and secluded.  Also a tributary creek runs real close to it.  Plenty of space for me to relax and be quiet.

I’m lucky to have one of the nine personal shelters on our land here at East Wind.  It is a very nice space and a cat also lives here and he has already taken a liking to me!

Because I am higher up on the hill my phone gets reception here (1 or 2 bars it seems, most of the time… the trees are still filling out but I think I will still have reception).  I plan to check my phone at least once a week for text messages, etc.  So please text me if you want to talk on the phone sometime.  Email is also super convenient for me!

Hope everyone is doing alright, life is good here!

A group of about fourteen East Winders, myself included, went to the 3rd annual ONE Congress put on by the Ozarks Neighborly Exchange.  I went the second annual congress last year when I was a visitor to East Wind and was impressed by the broader community’s interest in good food and resiliency.

One of the talks at the Congress was about healthy food, which is very important to me.  Most of the food consumed in this country is sick food.  The industrial food system is excellent at increasing output while ignoring declines in quality.  Making good consumer choices in the city can be extremely difficult unless you are willing to do literally hours and hours of research.

The food and water you consume make up your health.  I like to know exactly where my food comes from and how it was produced.  By growing most of my own food and knowing the people who supply me with food I am able to easily judge if my food is healthy.  I drink raw milk from cows I know (and take care of) and clean reverse osmosis filtered water.  I, by and large, eat produce from my own garden and only eat meat that comes from animals raised and butchered on my own land.  I certainly don’t participate in all the animal husbandry, garden, and food processing tasks required to eat such a wide range of fresh and nutrient dense foods, but I know the who and the how.  The degrees of separation from me to the source of my food is usually one and at most four.  This is one of the greatest reasons I like living in a rural community like East Wind.

 

I am really busy working lately, but I wanted to check in and post some things!

Hey everyone,

Just a quick post on the high tunnel here.  The local paper did a story on it when it was completed last fall.  Richard, Petey, and I all took an afternoon to put chicken wire on the inside of the hoophouse to keep unwanted animals from getting inside while the sides are down.

The high tunnel is a season extender that allows us to grow crops in a more controlled environment.  The state of Missouri granted us $7,000 to build the high tunnel.  We have plans to build more, with grants if possible.

 

Petey and I went to Virginia along with Oran Mor community for the FEC assembly.  It was fun to be at Twin Oaks again (I did a visitor period there last year in April and had a wonderful).  The FEC meetings can be kind of boring but I liked seeing how the whole process works.

Petey is the elected FEC delegate for East Wind.  At the assembly they set the budget for the year.  The budget is mainly to pay for transportation costs of labor exchanges and other trips between communities.  The FEC’s budget is 1% of member communities profits for the year.  The main role of the FEC is to help foster new communities to grow and also strengthen ties between the existing members of the FEC.

Our first potato patch has been dug and we took advantage of a nice seventy degree weekend before a week of rain to get our potatoes planted.  I’m not in any of these pictures because I took them all, but you will be seeing my face shortly!

From left to right: Richard, Felix (the dog), Petey (my boyfriend and fellow Garden Manager), and Autumn

In the background is our dairy barn where we milk our cows.  I milk every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning currently.  Nothing like some fresh raw milk! (although I do prefer the goat milk and plan to get trained on milking goats)

Lil Will and Winter

In the background you can see the high tunnel we built last year.  It was paid for by a grant from the state of $7,000.  The high tunnel is a season extender and we are already planting greens, beans, and some solanums in there.  You can also see our mobile chicken coops.

We saved potatoes from seed last year and we also had to buy some seed.  To plant a potato you can slice them in half (or in thirds sometimes) and make sure each piece has at least a couple eyes on it.  The exposed part of the potato is dipped in wood ash to prevent rot and then we plant the potato (with eyes/spuds facing UP!) in small trenches we dug the day before ten inches apart and then we fill them in.

Hope everyone is having a nice day today.  I’m currently working on getting East Wind’s community blog up and running with the help of many people here so I’m getting excited about that and I’m sure I’ll have some crossposts.