Acorn Community

Normally, right around late January/Early February I get a notion that I should probably go out and disk the spring garden and get that soil all prepped up in time to plant some early peas and spinach. This year however, between chronic rains and snow on the ground for 3 weeks thin,gs got a bit behind!

I like to put the peas and early spinach in around February 15th but it wasn’t until March 9th this year that we could get our direct sowing done! This is not to say I didn’t try though. Owen and I were out there in the end of February spreading wood ash on the spring garden plot to get it to melt early. (Which worked, but it dried out at about the same rate as anything else.)

So as it was, over 3 days we did all our disking, bed prep, and sowing for all our direct sowed crops this spring and it feels great. We’re forecasted for rain and lots of it, and now I can just sit back and relax and let our seeds germinate. Here’s the early spring garden photos to get y’all excited for the growing season!

Elephant Garlic

Replanting Carrots to Grow for Seed

We are really, really, really, really busy.   I mean it, really.  This winter so far, much like last winter, has brought huge success for our seed business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. This February has been our best month ever in sales, bringing in nearly $150,000. Before that in January, we saw a 40% increase in sales over January of ‘09. It seems that more and more people are not only gardening, but also appreciating the value of organic, heirloom varieties of plants. Fulfilling the needs of our customers requires endless work during the winter. Our main office is constantly busy throughout the day with people buzzing around trying to get seeds in the hands of gardeners. There is other labor to be done as well though. Our seed rack services are expanding very much this year, and we are busy creating lots of our new wooden seed racks for customers who distribute seeds in stores. I went around various work areas here at Acorn and took a few quick pictures of people. Now you can see what an average day is like during the Winter at Acorn.

Hans & River shipping out seed orders

Irena & Puck picking seeds out in the inventory room

Lauren and Ashleigh packing seeds into packets

Andy constucting wooden seed racks

Hans posting packages of seeds to be mailed

Not only is the office really busy, but the snow is melting and we are entering March.  It’s time to start preparing for spring and gardening!  This is of course another important aspect of our business.  We are excited to be doing lots of variety trialing this year to provide the highest quality seeds we can.  It will be an exciting time for blogging, because there will be lots of beautiful things to take pictures of!  Well, till next time.

Acorn just purchased 18 pullets of 4 varieties. We have Black Stars, Red Stars, Barred Rocks, and Rhode Island Reds. The Star breeds are Hybrids, and the other two are Heritage breeds. All of them are dual purpose breeds that will lay eggs, and also provide some meat. We purchased our pullets and supplies at Eden Farms, right down the road in Gum Springs. Our particular birds are 14 weeks old and should begin laying in about a month. Once they get going, each bird should provide about 5-7 eggs per week. We eat a lot of eggs here at Acorn, so 90-127 eggs is unlikely to supply our needs. Hopefully in the future we’ll be able to provide for all of our own egg needs.
Fortunately for us, years ago Acorn had chickens and there was already a mobile chicken coup available. It was cleverly built on top of an old car frame in disuse. It had lots of aging problems, but Andy and I have done a rough refurbishment. It’s likely in the future we will build a new stationary coup, and maybe even build a new mobile one using this old car frame. Ideally, we would already have fenced in the area around the coup for the chickens to roam in, but all of the intense snow has prevented us from getting to that stage. As soon as the snow melts enough, we will get the fence up and start letting the chickens out during the day. Well, here are some pictures:

Chickens...

Inside the Coup

Outside the Coup

Andy Feeding the Chickens

A Chicken and I

Chickens Eating

Andy

Oh yeah, this is Andy.  He is our newest provisional member.  Andy has been traveling through the FEC, other communities, and even to China.  He has been the main source of energy in starting up our new chicken system.  Thanks Andy!

I love Acorn! One of the many big things I love here is that the land is absolutely stunning. As the land evolves throughout the seasons, everyday brings new beauty to the surface to enjoy and marvel at. Today brings a thick and fluffy snow that covers all of our buildings and landscape. It is the second major snow fall we have had this winter. It was so inspiring, I decided to go out while it snowed and take as many pictures as I could.

Heartwood Residence

The Frozen Pond

The Barn

Farmhouse Backyard

The Farmhouse

The Greenhouses

Acorn

Various Buildings

Into the Woods

I can't feel my face.

Well, that’s all for now. I think I’ll try to start blogging more about my Acorn adventures, and I definitely want to start putting up more pictures!

it’s been a few weeks since my last post. we’re still doing old-fashioned mondays, i still have a lot of crafty stuff to do. i still have laundry days and wash my things by hand (my clothes now, too, instead of just my cloth wipes), and we’ve had more snow since early december. here are a few photos from the past weeks.

orange and blue sunset

this beautiful horizon was  a nice surprise one evening as i went out back to bring my laundry in before dark. i love the silhoette of trees in the wintertime.

gloves from a cut up old sweater, fixed

i made these fingerless gloves in the winter of 2007 with two then-interns at acorn. we cut up a hole-ridden sweater from commie clothes and used dental floss to make gloves. i knew better than to attempt fingers with cut-up knitting. and now, two years later, the edges were getting awful ragged – and i finally had enough basic knitting skills to just pick up some of the hanging loops to keep it from unraveling further. other places required more creative measures.

fiver climbing ladder at heartwood

i woke up one morning to find fiver ascending a ladder just outside my window. the heartwood re-siding project was going ahead full steam every day until the snowstorm came (and then christmas). that ladder is still outside my window.

laundry day - hand washing clothes

another laundry day. it feels good that it’s becoming a simple routine, and still isn’t something that i resent or feel stubborn about. sometimes i put it off for a few days, but it’s always a pleasure once i make it outside and sit on my bucket in the sunshine for a simple hour of rewarding work. now that i’m washing my clothes as well, i have that delicious fresh air scent all the time. you can’t find that scent anywhere but line-hung clothes.

ashleigh wrapping crystals

another old-fashioned monday found ashleigh wrapping a few crystals to turn into necklaces. i got one of them as a trade for some henna body art that i did on her weeks before. it’s wrapped in copper, and i haven’t taken it off yet.

after the snow - heartwood wreath

we got nearly two feet of snow out here, and so for the first day or two everything was especially scenic, a veritable winter wonderland. of course now we’re in the waning days of dirty slush and scattered patches of stubborn snow. i made this wreath for heartwood after pruning an evergreen that always tickles my head when i walk on the path to the farmhouse. the trimmings made a fine wreath (for a beginner, anyway), and made heartwood feel a bit more festive.

dandelion tincture

i just started this dandelion tincture yesterday, after going on a weed walk the day before and finding some hearty dandelion south of the greenhouse. it’ll serve as a good winter tonic six weeks from now. i’ve been really excited to be undertaking more herbal projects, and have also finished decanting the herb-infused oils, and then used some of them to make lemon-balm lip balm and lavendar burn salve.

i hope you’re having a good new year wherever you are.

i almost forgot! i meant to share a picture of our first snow. it was a lovely day – bad for driving, but great for staying in and sipping hot cocoa. i walked around late the next day to catch a few pictures. it was cold enough that even two days later patches of snow still lingered in the most shaded areas.

i grew up in rural pennsylvania, and really appreciate a good snowfall. i spent my elementary school years making forts in 5-foot snow drifts and sclupting snow turtles, tromping around in snow clothes knowing that Mom was waiting with hot chocolate when i got home. it’s nice to see snow come back to visit this year… i’ve been living in richmond and alabama for the past ten years, and the snow was… not plentiful, there, to say the least. i’m looking forward to hunkering down at acorn for a snowy winter.

here’s the wood pile outside of heartwood – we’re in the midst of a huge re-siding project, and this is the pile waiting to be de-nailed. needless to say, no de-nailing happened that day.

my pile of tasks for the evening

this past monday we gathered in heartwood for yet another ‘old-fashioned night’. usually it means crafty things – mending clothing, knitting, or crochet. this monday had all three and more. i was joined by several lovely acorn ladies and a few gents while we created headbands, baby wipes, hats, and tooth powder (i was running out). the guys in the room helped by playing old-fashioned music and reading books on the elizabethan era. one guy said he enjoyed just sitting and watching us all at work. it was a cozy evening.

today we went on a craft store run to charlottesville. we got various knitting needles and crochet hooks so more of us can do projects at the same time, and hit the goodwill for sweaters to unravel for yarn. i think it’s safe to say good times were had by all, though we were very happy to get home just in time for dinner. we had enough of the city for one day.

We have a daily community errand runner, here at Acorn.  Sending out one person in one car to get the half dozen things that we need from town saves a lot of time and gas and cuts down on the number of cars that the community needs to keep to function efficiently.  Today I was that person.

I’m also one of a small number of folks who look after the machinery here.  Today the errands were unusually machine focused as I had been saving up errands that required my special attention for a week or two.  I discovered that a good metric of how mechanically inclined one’s basket of errands is is the proportion of stops that result in the person I’m visiting pulling out their “mics” or high precision calipers.  Today that was three stops out of six (the library, post office, and hardware store had no desire to measure anything I was bringing them).

There’s a lot happening here in the world of machines.  We’re upgrading our tractor capacity now that we have the labor and money to do it.  We finally bought a used John Deere 1520 a couple months ago.  Hailing from the 1970’s and weighing in at about 46 HP it’s a big step up from our vintage 1938 Ford 9N with it’s 24 HP.  Plus, it has a front end loader.  As River predicted, once you have a front end loader you look at the farm in an entirely new way.

The three errands today all stemmed from the purchase of the tofuier tractor (thanks to my friend Pax for finding a vegan friendly alternative to “beefier”).  The bigger tractor has the ability to run a mower conditioner which means that we can start haying our own fields.  This means that it made sense for us to get a hay rake and a pair of pallet forks (which can double as hay bale lifting forks) at an auction recently.  As with many things purchased at auction, the upfront cost is low but the amount of money you’ll have to sink into someone else’s junk to make it work is unknown.

On the way home, one of the universal joints on the drive train for the hay rake shattered.  It was quite the ordeal dragging the whole thing the remaining 15 miles home.  The project now is finding a replacement for the shattered yoke.  The discovery, sadly, seems to be that the u-joint in question is ancient and idiosyncratic.  Dickie, of Louisa Auto Parts, says it’s of a size that simply isn’t available any more.  We’ll have to chop the whole thing off and substitute a newer model.  One caliper usage down.

When we got the forks home from the auction we discovered that the pins for the forks were a few fractions of an inch smaller than the holes in the front end loader.  Now the project is finding bushings or reaming out the holes on the fork so that the front end loader’s pins can fit.  I brought a sample pin off the forks to Dick Harris, the machinist in town, for him to puzzle on.  Second caliper usage down.

Now that we’ve got a big tractor we can finally run our tractor mounted back hoe again.  Our previous big tractor died some 6 years ago and we didn’t have the money or skill to repair it or replace it until this year (I’ve been training myself for the last few years and finally started figuring out the rusting behemoth in the tractor lot last spring).  So last week I pulled the tarp back from the poor neglected backhoe, dug out the accumulated humus from years of rotted leaves, and hit all the joints I could find with penetrating oil.  Miraculously, all the valves look to be in great shape.  Sadly, the hydraulic lines supplying the PTO mounted pump had sprung leaks and the adapter that affixes the pump to the tractor’s PTO shaft had rusted half to dust.  I got the pump off and with the help of plenty of penetrating oil and a bearing puller managed to separate the pump and the adapter.  Then it was in to the local backhoe dealer to get a replacement adapter and some advice on the pump and backhoe.  We needed a new key to affix the adapter to the rusted pump drive shaft.  But what size was the key supposed to be?  Third caliper usage down.

In a week I expect us to be fully functional in tractor land.

I hope I didn’t bore you.  Joan told me to just go ahead and write what I know.

day of the dead altar

sixer and i organized a low-key celebration for day of the dead just after halloween. we turned the piano into an altar complete with marigolds, other flowers, painted skull masks, candles, personal offerings, and lots of skull cookies. here are a few photos.

skull cookies

for those of you unfamiliar (we were pretty unfamiliar too!), day of the dead is a celebration of loved ones who have passed on. it is often a multi-day celebration, during which families honor those who have passed with flowers, favorite foods, drink, and other things the dead might miss from life on earth.  there is typically a parade to the related cemetery, where festivities continue, altars are created, and offerings are made. stories of dead loved ones are shared amidst traditional sweet bread and sugar skulls. there are also often dolls made to look like the deceased.

day of the dead altar

we had a fun time with the cookies – i made vaguely skull-shaped sugar cookies and then filled a few henna cones with chocolate icing for decorating. we ended up with cookies decorated as famous folks, bugs, spaceships, and all manner of crazy things.

acorners around the bonfire

in anticipation of the rains that came today, jason lit up our massive burn pile last night and we gathered round for an evening of fire worship. some sang, some just sat and pondered, others convened in the smoke shack (that’s most nights, though). there were swapped massages, poi spinning, and offerings released into the fire to be cleansed.

though sometimes our fires are a big event involving food and friends and frenzied activity, last night was much more calm, and with the number of people at acorn now, it’s starting to feel like we have a nice big cozy family to celebrate with. these are the good times.

mousetrap (my cat of 18 years, a venerable old lady) joined me around the fire, enjoying various laps and much tall grass for late night stalking. that’s us in the picture, with various acorners in the background (and the fire, of course).

you can see a nice picture of the fire itself on the “culture and recreation” page under “about us”.