Common Ground Ecovillage

by Margret and Jeffry, photos by Joe and Jeffry

We took advantage of the long Memorial Day weekend to split this month’s work into two days. On Saturday morning Virginia “Tractor Queen” Petrocella spent a heroic four hours getting us further along on mowing the western pasture. Meanwhile, Jeffry, Paul, and Anthony, plus Tara, Rick, 4-year-old son John Michael, George, Donna, Bryan and Maple did trail trimming followed by work on the pumphouse. Randy did beehive maintenance, and he reports that both new hives are looking good. The work ended with a 1 o’clock lunch, after which folks got cleaned up and gathered at Hart’s Nest for the long-awaited Finance and Legal Circle presentation (read about it here). 

Anthony and Victoria camped on the land on Saturday night and were ready to resume work on a Sunday morning after weathering the wee-hour thunderstorms!  They were joined by Jeffry, Virginia, and Paul for clearing part of the dam, resuming pump house work by building a a platform for the 1550-gallon storage tank, and loading last month’s collection of trash and recycling onto a trailer for delivery to the High Rock Road Waste and Recycling Center.  Meanwhile, Margret finished mowing the western pasture while Joe and Maria continued with trail maintenance.  Whew! 

It was wonderful to see so many new and returning faces!  “Hartfelt” thanks to everyone for a very productive and successful Memorial Day Workcamp.

by Margret Mueller

One of the great advantages of spending much more time on the land, tending to our little farm, is that I get to witness really cool stuff. Earlier this spring, Jeffry and I  became aware of a pair of pileated woodpeckers building a nest in a dead pine tree. It was conveniently  located where we had a direct view of the hole from the farm.

The hole was created high up in the tree with much banging and flying wood chips. As the hole got deeper, they both worked  from inside and periodically poked out a head to fling a beak-full of chips into the air, making this wonderful regal bird look briefly very silly.  After a couple of weeks, we heard soft taps, indicating the next phase of nest-building, which is to create a “bed” of smaller chips. Time passed, and one day at the beginning of May I was weeding and suddenly  heard  what sounded for all the world like a swarm of angry bees. It was a pileated feeding its new family!!  I later learned that this buzzing begging sound is typical of all young woodpeckers; very unlike the typical peeping of baby songbirds.

On May 9th I set up my camera on a tripod, aimed it at the nest hole, and waited. And waited. And waited….The backs of my legs were slowly sunburning, but I was entertained by a female bluebird avidly flying back and forth to her nest-box, also feeding babies. So much fecundity!  Just as I was beginning to wonder whether this was the best use of my time (so much work to be done) a sudden loud buzzing ensued from the treetops.  I witnessed and was able to photograph the male woodpecker feeding a beak-full of something (delicious, I’m sure) to two reptilian-looking babies with fuzzy red topknots.  Feeding done, the bird went all the way into the nest hole, only to reappear moments later  and toss out some, ummm… “debris”.

In another couple of weeks we should be seeing the fledglings, who reportedly hang around with their parents for a few months, learning necessary life lessons. Pileateds are said to be rather reclusive, but  I hope to witness this next stage in the lives of our new family.

by Tain Collins

 Randy Dodd and I are heading up two new bee hives!  Our intention for these hives is to care for them and help them to survive.  As pollinators, honey bees (Apis mellifera) are good for the farm and land here at Hart’s Mill as well as our neighbors’ gardens (bees forage an average of two or 3 miles from the hive).

 

Here are just a couple of very cool things I’ve learned about bees so far-  They are complex communal and social insects and they choose to survive together as a community.   One way they communicate to each other is by “dancing”.  Through a kind of dance, or shimmy, foraging bees that have found an abundant nectar supply can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to the nectar or pollen bounty!  

Small scale beekeeping, like any other animal husbandry, is a lot different than factory farm beekeeping, which goes hand in hand with monoculture. (Every year thousands of bee hives are lugged to California to pollinate the monoculture almond crop, for example.)  Large scale or industrial beekeeping also includes exploitation, stealing, culling, and manipulation.  Small scale farms can use small scale bees.  Though many beekeepers take the honey and replace it with sugar water, I would like to allow the bees to use all the honey they need and not have to make them work harder than they already do.   Honey bees will tap about two million flowers and fly 50,000 miles to make one pound of honey.   In general I would like to move more toward “natural beekeeping”, meaning minimal interference in their natural cycles.  There is so much to learn about beekeeping.
 
As I barely get to know bees, I am seeing them as one representation of the abundant beauty and complexity of life.   It feels good to bring new life to Hart’s Mill! 

 

by Margret Mueller

Due to dire warnings about severe afternoon thunderstorms, our workday began a bit early, spanned lunch, and wrapped up around 3:00—just as the skies opened for the first round of rain. On the workday agenda were several clean-up tasks: bringing trash out of our otherwise beautiful woods, breaking up and removing the concrete and stone around the abandoned well up by Kim’s house, and clearing tailings and soil from around the new farm well.

Jeffry and Anthony brainstormed about the farm well and came up with a plan to not only level the site but dig a circular trench for a pump-house foundation while they were at it. Paul gathered up much of the fine gravel the well-drillers brought up, and used it to fill potholes in Ben Jones Drive. Meanwhile, Margret led a contingent of volunteers into the woods at the Far Field to begin trash cleanup. She and Tain were joined by Earth’s Turn Community members Tami, Whit, and Rico (thank you!!). As is often the case in rural areas, a few spots on our property are long-ago dump sites for a curious variety of items; we extracted, among other things, washing machines, a kitchen range, bicycle parts, a car bumper, a dishpan, a large amount of bright-blue plastic, bottles and cans (but sadly, no treasure). We plan to take all these items to the local trash/recycling site in the near future.

After lunch, Jeffry and Margret started breaking up the old abandoned well. After many Herculean swings with a maul (Jeffry) and many chunks of stone and cement tossed into a trailer (Margret), we were about half done and called it a good start. Anthony declared the chunks of stone perfect filler for the pump-house footing, so they were immediately re-purposed!  As the skies darkened, Paul led a quick impromptu tour for 4 young people who came by to visit. Fat cold raindrops ended another successful Hart’s Mill workday.

Written by Margret

On March 17, a group of Hart’s Millers gathered on the land to celebrate a unique version of St. Paddy’s Day. Though both potatoes and the color green  were involved  (but sadly, no beer), the theme of the day was decidedly not Irish!

  Jeffry and Margret led a team of volunteers in planting several hundred starts of broccoli, kohlrabi, cauliflower, and red and green cabbages. These seedlings had been incubating on racks of donated Gro-lights in the garage at Hart’s Nest and were more than ready to be set out. Tain, Paul, Marilyn and Margret were on the planting team. Jeffry watered the new “greens” manually via a hose from the tractor shed rain-water reservoir. We will be relying on this plus rainfall until the new farm well (yes, we now have a well!) has a source of power.

  Next on the agenda was cutting up and setting out one hundred pounds of potatoes into pre-dug furrows. Amy, Lisa, and Jae joined us for this activity, and we now have eight long rows of Red Norland and Yukon Gold potatoes.

   All of this was accomplished in three pleasant hours. The cool, cloudy weather was ideal for new transplants and hard workers alike. Much gratitude to our helpers—it takes a community!

Four years and seven months ago, one of our matriarchs brought forth for this land, a new Forest Stewardship Plan, conceived in Great Wisdom, and dedicated to the proposition that all forests are worth caring for……

While this noble plan is a testimony to the eightyish acres of forest on the site, it also pays homage to the stark reality of living in a time and place where land and money are “part and parcel” (pun intended). One way this reality is etched into law and local government administration is through the ability of private  landowners of 20 acres or more of forest to enter their forested land into “Present Use Value” status.  Doing so hugely reduces their property tax burden.  So it is with the Harts Mill forest.  The Forest Stewardship Plan is the document that lays out the road map for what needs to be done from a forest management perspective to keep the land in “PUV” status.

Plan implementation has been on our collective radar over the past several years, but the myriad of other activities to launch this ecovillage enterprise has, at least to date, made it a bit difficult to stay on track.  We have managed to check a few items off the list, like building trails and a worthy if not entirely successful foray into helping the Tree of Heaven gene pool understand that this is not the right place to further evolve.  But, on the big ticket items related to making sure that this is, societally speaking, a “productive” forest (i.e., for timber, pulp and paper, other valuable manifestations of cellulose, and spin offs such as edible mushrooms), there is more to be done.  So, a 2018  conception that has been gestating in the Land Stewardship Circle is to catch up on a few of the plan’s action items.

The plan identifies 10 or so different parts of the forest, known as “stands”, that each have their own requisite implementation actions.  A careful read of these has led to the decision to move forward with some actions in the coming months for Stands 6 and 8a.  Namely, we’re planning to cut down some trees (a very high majority being pine and sweet gum) and turn them into some combination of timber,  mulch, mushrooms, perhaps horse stable shavings or pulp and paper.  This will dovetail with village and farmstead development plans, as clearing will be required in both of these stands as part of preparing to build, and our farm soils need more organic matter. The “thinning”, as spelled out in the plan, will also help the trees that remain thrive. There will be workday opportunities in the coming months, so stay tuned, and check out the Plan to learn more.  Volunteers are also being recruited to adopt and take leadership with invasive plant management areas.  If potentially interested, please contact Randy.