evan's ant village log

Day 86 (part 2 of 2)

Devin, Tim, and I were working together on a design project for Ava. It was great to have such creative and knowledgeable individuals on my design team. We burned the midnight oil and I drank a lot of coffee in an effort to put our design together.

We had very little time to draft our maps and prepare our presentation, so there were some inaccuracies, but all in all I thought we did a fairly good job. I feel like I'm better prepared than ever to develop Ava into a permaculture paradise.

Day 87 (part 1 of 4)

Today was design project presentation day. The first group to present was James, Fred, and JR, and their design was for basecamp. This was a pretty huge piece of property to have to design for, especially considering how little time they had to work on it, but they came up with some very intriguing ideas. Their design included a tiny home village, a wofati classroom, ponds, food forests, paddocks, art installations, a company store, a gathering space on top of the volcano, and of course, good submarine access.

The second group to present was Curtis, John, Todd, and Josh, and their design was for the lab. This was an extremely massive piece of land to design for, and they wisely focused on just a couple parts of it. One area they designed for, Dances With Pigs Meadow, included ponds, swales, treed terraces, and a network of paddocks. The other area they designed for was sort of centrally located between wofati 0.7 and 0.8, and it included a community berm shed, outdoor rumford fireplace, ponds, and big hugelkultur mounds.

Day 87 (part 2 of 4)

Brandon, Nikki, Heather, and Mike's design was for Brandon and Nikki's homestead in Georgia. It was about a 2 acre property and their design included a natural swimming pool, some infiltration swales, a vernal pond, a food forest, hugelkultur garden beds, a shady sitting area, a greenhouse for avocados, and some kid's playhouses built out of cob. Sounds to me like it'll be a place that exemplifies southern hospitality and permacultural abundance.

Jesse, Carol-Anne, and Jim designed Jesse's one acre ant plot. Their design included a wofati, a freezer wofati, abundant hugelkultur berms, an annuals garden, a decent-sized pond, lots of fruit and nut trees, a berm shed workshop, and strategically placed paddocks utilizing the berms to minimize fencing. I thought it was an awesomely well-done design, and I'm totally going to steal as many of their good ideas as I possibly can.

Day 87 (part 3 of 4)

Tim, Devin, and I worked on a design for Ava. We tried to do each layer, (water, access, zones, structures, paddocks, etc.) on a separate sheet of semi-transparent paper, so that we could overlay them and view them each separately or all together. This worked alright if you were up close, but it turned out to be less feasible when it came time to present to the whole class. We ended up taking pictures of each layer and displaying them up on the overhead projector, which turned out to be a little confusing for everyone involved.

Our design included a small 10x12 wofati, a larger community-sized wofati, an earth-sheltered solarium spa, a natural swimming pool, a shaded picnic patio, numerous hugel berms along both internal and external borders, 6-9 paddocks containing at least one pond each, a tree perch, a compost toilet outhouse, a diversigolf course, and a series of terraces / chinampas on the south-facing slopes of Avalon. Of course, this is a long-term vision, and this year the focus will be on finishing the small wofati (Siesta,) building most of the hugelberms (and in the process digging some of the ponds,) and building lots of fencing both around the perimeter and between the paddocks.

Day 87 (part 4 of 4)

Talent night was a lovely way to end the day and it was great seeing my fellow students show off all their awesome talents.

There was joke-telling, singing, instrument-playing, mock-oxen-driving, rope-tying, birthday-memorizing, poetry-reciting, and a gapper transformed into an ant before our very eyes. That makes 4 ants now!

For the talent show, I shared a few poems that I'd written from my time living at Bardo Farm, interspersed with little dulcimer jams. This beautiful appalachian mountain dulcimer was a gift from Bardo, originally received in trade for a pig. It was hand-crafted by Alan Carruth, a Luthier out of Newport, New Hampshire.

A poem about the long days of sugaring season:

"Sensibly the sun rises in the middle distance, alchemical mirrors transmute golden photons into leaden electrons, consciousness drips into cups, still steaming.

Sleepwalkers rising from matutinal marshlands to ride the rivers of vernal velocity flowing into estival estuaries of ecstasy.

The sky is covered in an inside-out blanket, the earth a patchwork quilt of greens and browns. Lining beds with stone pillows, daydreaming of a nap.

Simmering sugary mists and fast-burning flames, awake, awaiting. A syrupy fog rises, leaving ever sweeter potions as the day's gallons boil down to spoonfuls."

A love poem to heavy equipment:

"Streaming ribbons of bubble-gum pink liquid fire, the blood that courses through steel veins, fueling a twenty-six ton dragon of earth-shattering fury.

Beauty in disturbance, reorganization, aggradation, transformation, the bright side of a chainsaw, gaps, glades, and golden sunlight.

Weaving among piles of boulders, exposed roots, and fallen trees, the freshly upturned earth giving way slightly beneath my feet, in the once and future woods.

The slow dance of succession, growing green bandages over old wounds."

A poem about living in a leaky tent in a rainforest:

"Fractal pillars hold up a ceiling of infinite stars. Persian rugs of moss, sparkling statues of mica. Camped out in a cathedral.

Arboreal access and arcane arithmetic accelerates arhythmic pitter patter patterns of precipitating particles against my plastic patchwork palace.

Infinite humidity, swimming through dreams, the crash of non-differentiable waves, falling out of clouds of probability and soaking into neurofungal nets.

Gaps and clearings in the clouds, the brightness of heaven shines through."

And finally, a poem about unwrapping thousands of yogurts and feeding them to pigs:

"Societal decomposers recollect organic particles, liberating biomass from petro-plastic prisons.

Post-non-consumed packaged processed products politely provided to patient pigs and poultry.

The cacophony of critters coalesces into concordant consumption.

By and by, the barn becomes a banquet hall, before breakfast, the sacred rite of slop is observed."

Day 88 (part 1 of 2)

I'm now a bonafide official certified legit permie. How about that.

Day 88 (part 2 of 2)

We went huckleberry picking at the spot Richard shared with us. It was just as extraordinarily bountiful as he promised. Thanks Richard!

Our hands were all stained purple and blue from picking, and our lips from gorging ourselves on berrylicious abundance straight from the bush.

It was a delicious end to a great PDC, and while I'm glad to have completed the course, I'm sure gonna miss all the wonderful friends I made over the past two weeks. Y'all come back now, ya hear?

Day 89

Sir Chops is starting to warm up to me, I think. He lets me get a few feet closer before running away now, but he still won't let me get close enough to scratch him behind the ears yet. I was down in Hamelot limbing up fence poles, just minding my own business and not chasing him around, and I think the more I do that sort of thing the more relaxed around me he'll become. It probably doesn't hurt that I give him tons of slop too. Jocelyn has been sending me buckets upon buckets of delicious kitchen scraps for the good Sir, and he's thoroughly enjoying them. Thanks Jocelyn for all the yummy slop! And Sir Chops sends his regards.

Oh, I'm not sure if it's visible in this picture, but Sir Chops has one blue eye and one brown eye! Cool!

Day 90

Brian, Josh, and I worked on tearing the excavator apart to remove the faulty spring inside the track. It was disconcerting to see Brian having to slice through a link to get the track apart, but after much heaving and hoing and grunting and hammering, we got the spring out and Brian took it into town to either get it fixed or get a new one. The excavator looked like a metal giant ripping off his own toe and gruesomely lifting it into the air.

I still have several placeholders back there I need to go in and fill in from my notes, but aside from those I'm finally caught up on my daily posts, so today is actually today! Yay!