Acorn Community

As a resident bicycle enthusiast, I’m delighted to join an upcoming bike tour with folks from the Baltimore Free Farm, a recently formed urban homestead, with the aim of fundraising for their community kitchen.  Their kitchen currently hosts Food Not Bombs and Food Rescue Day, both projects that seek to divert food from the waste stream and decommodify food.  Our goal is to raise $3500 – hopefully enough money for the community kitchen to operate throughout the year.  We plan to spend the month of October biking down to New Orleans, about a 1500 mile trek, camping along the way and growing sprouts out of our paniers.  We’ll be taking the transcontinental bike route to the Mississippi river, then following it due south all the way to New Orleans.  Once we get to New Orleans, we’ll form a temporary autonomous art collective and infoshop, where we’ll do street performance and musical storytelling to further raise funds.  Although it’s difficult for Acorn to spare a member for this length of time, as a group, we’re passionate about supporting projects like this in the spirit of mutual aid, to further strengthen the cooperative movement.

Are you also excited and supportive about this project?  Check out what the Baltimore Free Farm as to say about the bike tour and consider making a pledge for each mile we bike – 1 cent, 5 cents, 10 cents, 25 cents, or a donation of your choosing.

The other day I decided to take photographs throughout my lovely day. If my memory is correct the day was Monday September 22, 2014

I started off by taking  a walk down one of the main paths at Acorn.

Horus, one of our dogs ran up! Then JR one of our visitors walked by. I asked for consent to take his photo and he obliged.

This is my kitty friend, her name is Fight Club. I love her.

One of my favorite drawings in the smokeshack. Drawn by my friend and former intern Piera.

Me enthusiastically chopping potatoes. I cooked dinner today. I made some meat with bell peppers for people who like meat. I made tofu, soysauge and bellpepper stir-fry for the vegetarians/vegans. I made mashed potatoes with a cream cheese sauce on the top, I put in the oven and the top toasted- this was my favorite part of the meal. I made a couple of veggies dishes, one being roasted eggplant.

Pretty bell peppers. They are my favorite.

Meat Dish!

Vegan Stir-fry!

MASHED TATTERS!

Eggplant, Squash, Tomatoes! YUM!

People eating meals I cooked! This person is Aster!

Birddog and Fox eating dinner!

Rejoice on tractor!

Chicken coop from far away!

I went to feed my chicken friends after dinner.

The chicken coop!

Some eggs!

Lots of eggs! Yay for being nice to chickens!

My best friend/member of Acorn, Abraham, drove me to Twin Oaks for band practice. I am in a Led Zeppelin cover band there called Non-Violent Communication Breakdown.

The stage set for the band I am in!

Thanks for reading about my day! Love, Belladonna

I realized that I never posted this video from February or so.  Here, a bunch of little goats and their dad explore their new toy, the old white Corolla that broke down and we never fixed, and that I eventually fenced in for them.  Someone took out the back seats and propped the door open so they could play inside of it.

Eventually we scrapped the car in order to raise money for the pig project and traded away two of those little goats for pigs.

Mr. Buckles, the big dark-colored adult, is an Alpine dairy buck, but all the mamas (the big white goats) are Kikos, which are usually raised for meat production in the United States.  We saved two of their cross-breed children (Tashkent and Mooncake) and added them with the other young ladies from our dairy herd.  Maybe they’ll become good milkers in a year or two.

Our Golden Comet chicks are now one month old.  They’re starting to get feathers, enjoy running around in their outside run and eating bugs.  We hear that they are excellent layers and very friendly from both our internet research and our friends at EastWind Community.

Rooster Hanz surrounded by his ladies.

Our Black Austrolorps are almost six months old now, and they’re laying eggs like, uhm, like chickens.  We have fifty of them, and they slowly started with small, ping-ping ball sized sort of eggs and are now laying more than 30 eggs a day, often with double yolks.  They’re dual-purpose chickens, for egg production and meat, and with a rooster they can start making more baby chickens for us in the future.

Future updates could include:  How soon until the Golden Comets start laying eggs?  Pictures of them in their lovely chicken tractors?  Letting you know how our new $40 craigslist incubator works out and if we have a steady stream of baby chickens?  Will the Austrolorps go broody in the spring?  Here’s hoping we don’t break/lose our camera again.