life’s everyday adventures in an ecovillage, plus other intentional community, filmmaking, and random musings
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Note: Please find all of my cob building related content at my new blog, The Year of Mud: Building a cob house. Thanks! See you there!
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The second episode in the Dancing Rabbit TV video blog series is ready. In Eco-Cribs: Larkspur, DR members Tony B. and Alyssa give a tour of their house, Larkspur, and talk about the natural building process and design. Check it out.
Here are a few more images from the last couple of months.
(The baby deer that I nearly squashed.)
(Shots from the Dog and Gun, Rutledge’s infamous monthly flea market.)
Here are a handful of photos from the past few months at Dancing Rabbit. Expect more soon.
I suppose I haven’t written in quite a while, so here’s a little hodgepodge of an update.
It’s hot as hell. Ninety+ degree weather this weekend, with heat indexes in the 100s. Not cool.
We had a big ol’ thunderstorm sometime mid-week last week. There is nothing more exciting than watching lightning strike in multiple directions in the sky. Alternating flashes of light came in from the west, south, and north. Intense! Quite a show.
A bunch of people have been coming and going to and from Dancing Rabbit lately. It’s a reminder that the population is never stable, and I wonder what it’s like to experience that over the long term. There have been so many new faces just over the past few months. It’s sad to see a lot of the short term people leave like that, but it’s great to have new people show up, too.
Bobolink has been busy canning and preserving lately. I just got done doing a bunch of tomato sauce and some sauerkraut today, and last week we did some dill pickles and dilly beans, too. It’s actually quite fun, especially with a group of people chipping in.
My parents visited this weekend, and I’m glad they came and were able to get some of the ecovillage experience. Unfortunately the heat put a slight damper on things, but overall it was a fun visit and I hope they enjoyed their time here.
Dancing Rabbit TV episode number two is coming soon! I will be shooting it towards the middle of this week. This should be a fun one. I’m going to put a slight spin on the whole Cribs idea…
That’s about it for now. Time for a dunk in the pond.
On Wednesday, a small group of us went roaming in the pasture next door in search of cow pies. We hoped to collect several buckets’ worth for the earthen floor we are installing in the Ironweed kitchen.
Strangely, it was quite fun. Genuinely fun. I never knew exploring for poo and scooping it up into buckets could be so calming and entertaining. It’s funny how the things you least expect to be fun are sometimes just the opposite.
But anyway, while scooping up the manure, it became quite clear to me just how useful the material will be. It’s a great consistency, and I imagine it will mix in very well with the clay and sand.
While roaming the field, I also became quite aware just how amazing ecosystems can be. I quickly got over the ‘ew’ factor when I realized I was pretty much dealing with plain ol’ digested grass that has passed through a cow. (It didn’t even smell that bad. Really.) And then I thought how beautiful it is that these cows are returning nutrients directly back to the land from which they eat. What a perfect setup!
Speaking of poo and natural building, I just stumbled upon an interesting cob blog: I Love Cob!
The Year of Mud: Building a cob house Green Options: Posts by Brian Liloia