Spring Approaches and Opportunities Abound

Whew, what a busy week! These two girls have been keeping me busy! This is from the other morning when I let them take a stroll, they opened the gate and sauntered up on my porch to check out my seed tray and bottle collection mess.  A friend stopped by Tractor Supply and picked up some spare T posts among other items so I can keep their hungry mouths away from my fruit bushes and baby trees! He also picked up a little hardware so we can reinforce my gate. On to some details!

This is a typical one morning score from Zoey. She gives anywhere from 1 1/2 quarts to 2 quarts depending on diet, how much she ate, whether she finished eating before I finished milking, and whether or not little Luna was sipping the milk throughout the day before. Though Luna is eating solid food she sometimes likes to go back to her mom and get the good stuff.

This is feed for Zoey who will sometime share what she doesn't finish with Luna. It is a mixture of sprouted oats, black sunflower seeds, peas, and carrots, with a touch of molasses and flax seed for minerals and vitamins. After milking time they both get some hay and alfalfa to make sure they have enough nutrients while outside it is still yucky and frozen. Of course they seem to like nibbling random frozen brush and leaves quite a bit too.








But wait, there's more! While I was at the seed swap meeting I picked up a SCOBY from another member. Now I am making Kombucha. What is Kombucha? It is a fermented "byproduct" of a living colony of organisms known as a SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast). The many organisms composing the bio-mat (also called a zoogleal mat) consume sugar and other elements of tea and produce a fermenting effect. This makes a fizzy sweet tea substance that is quite delicious and healthy. Here's a quick wiki to get all those interested started on figuring out what I'm talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kombucha. After doing a little reading myself I am curious to see what future batches will taste like when I use molasses as a substitute for raw sugar. Otherwise I take my two week batches and mix a cup or so of finished cider in and let them mingle for another week. Twenty-one days to perfect fizzy-carbonated-sweet-apple-tea. The photos are of my new "mother" culture doing her thing in some tea. That's all for now, more to come later. Be sure to look up the NWI Society for Sustainable Living over in Facebook land if you are interested in learning direct as opportunities arise in the community.

So I went to volunteer...and...Foster Goats!

The title really says it all. I went out for my usual one day weekend in Valparaiso, expecting to meet some of the faces that have joined and typically visit/work on days when I am not there. We were having a seed library meeting and I was pretty excited. I was excited enough that I burned my vegetarian 12 bean soup with organic turnips and onions (I ran around getting things together in the morning and laid down to take a power nap which went through the alarm from the stove-Ooops). So I arrived with an armload of books on soil, gardening, garden design, and a pineapple. About mid-meeting my buddy Ken, who's home takes the beating of 3-20 people at a time some weekends when things are getting organized, looks at me smiling and says, "We might be getting goats in a few hours." I laughed and we went back to the serious subjects at hand of how we will handle the economics of interacting outside of our little community, how we were organizing and funding the seed bank/library system, and how the systems would be organized and by whom. It takes a lot of work just to get things discussed, identified, organized, and simplified when an effort is made to come to a community census. If you're curious as to how we keep up and share ideas check out the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/NWI-Society-for-Sustainable-Living/485822301463576  

I waxed garden gnome and got everyone fired up about the plantings and ideas for upcoming community gardens and the chaos ensued. A few hours later, a box truck pulled into the driveway and I heard Ken say from the kitchen, "Oh are the animals here?" Oddly enough we had been discussing the possibility of chickens for a while. I have my own chicken fortress with two different rare breeds and have encouraged the NWISSL to look into taking on a small chicken project if nothing else for the eggs-perience. See what I did there? As Ken was heading for the door to check out the situation I told him that he needed to purchase 15 chickens if he was aiming for an eventual total of around 25 and that I and another member that has chickens would incubate the rest gradually to bring numbers up to our target.

Well wasn't it a surprise when the box truck outside turned out to be holding 4 goats and 15 chickens!!! Some friends of other members had an abrupt move from their farm of many years in Illinois and needed some space to save their lovely beasts. As we met and greeted them and showed them around it became apparent that the boys would need to be separate from the girls, or the Bucks separate from the Does (or the Billies from the Nannies, whichever gender names you prefer). This is to breed them at specific times when it is healthier, easier, on the mothers and to maintain a certain amount of milk production. Oh yes, these goats are for milking! I also happen to have an 80 year old barn left over from an old cattle operation when the property was much larger and also am a member of an organic grass fed dairy near the house...so eyes began to turn my way...

Meet Zoey and Luna, my new friends, and Foster goats. Zoey is the mother and Luna is her daughter! As soon as their chaperones are settled into their new spot in North Carolina and have some pastures prepared I will have to say goodbye. But in the meantime...

 ...we installed feed and water buckets in their "sleeping pen."

 We also patched in a milking stand in the pen next to their bedroom. A feed bucket goes in the back behind the board there to give Zoey (momma goat) her breakfast to distract her a bit, and the board gently (I promise it's really quite easy on her) keeps her head in place while you milk. If she really wants to she can get her head out with a little twist and shake maneuver, but when food is involved she seems completely disinclined.

But she sure does like to climb. My friend Ricky came with one of the owners that we are fostering for and using some old tires and lumber built a couple different playgrounds inside the barn for the girls to play on. I'll have pictures up and more info. on how the goat fostering is going later this week!

Here I Am - There They Are

What's up trendy travelers? As the spring approaches I have found that things have really started to gain momentum. I suppose the Winter season is the season for relaxation, organization, and planning for the 7 or 8 months in Northwestern Indiana that you can play with the Earth and plants. Wait a minute - did I just put relaxation, organization, and planning in the same sentence? Yes I did. When it comes to us gardeners and sustainable living advocates we act like total squirrels. All year we store things, put things away, and during the winter we finally get them all sorted out and begin planning on that "perfect" garden or permaculture project.

What is permaculture? What are sustainable practices? "Why all the questions, we need answers!" Right? Sustainability (in this case) = "the quality of not being harmful to the environment or depleting natural resources, and thereby supporting long-term ecological balance."  Thanks, dictionary.com. Our goal is to help provide people with the training to do small projects to large projects that empower themselves and their communities to be less dependent on complex systems that don't maintain the views and values of community, health, and independence.

Just at the end of 2012 I had the fortune of meeting a small group of people preparing to go public with their sustainability initiative. We eventually sorted a name that suited the bunch and it is The Northwest Indiana Society for Sustainable Living, or NWISSL for the sake of brevity. Our link is: here  I lumped myself in gladly, hoping to preserve some modicum of work life balance, while charging into yet another awesome sojourn into sustainability.  If we build it, the people will come. I really said this jokingly at one of our first brainstorming sessions, but if the breakout of our Facebook group page was any indication, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Upon an accidental late night launch some random Wednesday, we gathered over 100 likes by the weekend! We are now re-purposing a wooden barn into our first building in which we will teach all sorts of different sustainability courses. This means using old tires packed with plastic and garbage (painstakingly squirreled away mind you, because trash is ya know, hard to come by) to create non-load bearing walls that have amazing insulatory quality/thermal mass and tying them into the load bearing structure which is still very much intact. Many other buildings and projects are going to happen over the next year while we develop the space into a functional, beautiful, productive sustainable living community teaching enterprise. Below I have included a shot of the barn, some recycled and donated materials, and in the lower shot one of the other NWISSL members when we were starting on the back wall inside.

 Our topics will range across the spectrum of things that help one create more sustainable, low cost, independent ways of living while encouraging community and learning.  Come with, check the links, and check the pictures, let's learn together!