This year’s Spring Equinox occurs at 11:34 AM EDT, March 20, 2022, in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s when the Sun, traveling one degree per day, leaves the final degree of the zodiac 29°59′ Pisces for the first degree of the zodiac 0°00′ Aries! Looking at the sky, it’s when the Sun rises in the east and sets in the west at the midway point of its northward to southward migration.
Let us remember to, or learn how to, balance the opposites within ourselves, light and dark, conscious and unconscious; and let us welcome, until Summer Solstice three months hence, the increasing light!
Remember this, from last Sunday’s post? Marita and Annie digging out the hole for the back stoop?
Here’s the 8 in thick slab that was going into it.
Well, the deed is now done. Yesterday, three strong men converged, Dan, who used to live here, plus Chris and Justin who live here now. A difficult, but coordinated action; the hole was perfect and it took only ten minutes.
This is an example of a goal that was reached, easily! YES!
As ever, during this season, the greenhouse is action central. We’re taking turns with daily watering, and now that most seeds have germinated, new farm manager Daniel asks us to not water so much, or the roots will get moldy! Okay! (That went out in a text message yesterday.)
At Friday’s work party, Daniel and Annie check the condition of the seedlings before transplanting some of them.
Joseph and I, for both Tuesday and Friday morning work parties, worked cleaning up the main garden and laying more chips on the paths, getting it where we want it to be before planting, mostly after Mother’s Day. Except for peas, already in, all over the place, thanks to Annie.
Looking around, some perennials are now visible, including motherwort!
One of our Garden Towers is in use all year long, growing herbs in a smaller greenhouse.
This Equinox morning, I went to the greenhouse, and saw many of the seedlings covered, likely thanks to Daniel, since it was cold last night. I didn’t check, but I bet the heat pad underneath some of them was on as well.
But they’re all fine. Including the chard . . .
and this tomato plant, peeking out of its cover.
Lots of daffodils, all over Bloomington. Here’s a particularly shy one, peeking out.
The situation world-wide makes what we are doing here utterly necessary as one tiny experimental template for a transformed future. Please see this, yesterday’s post on my personal site:
Meanwhile, also yesterday, I used some precious gas in my thankfully efficient, but rusting-on-the-bottom 2006 Prius to drive 7.5 miles so that my dog Shadow and I could commune with the tall trees on a Griffy Lake path. It helps me greatly to enter their calm, spacious presence, if but for only one hour, during these tumultuous times on our home planet. Indeed, nature is my church.
Shadow and I were there earlier than most people get up on Saturday mornings, around 8 AM. I saw only two parked cars, plus a fairly new red truck with a tarp covering stuff of some kind in back; and here’s what drew my attention: small tarps covering the insides of the windows, which were rolled up with a couple of inches of the top of the tarps flapping in the breeze. Hmmm . . . I snorted, assuming a homeless man inside, who had stopped for the night.
One hour later, on our return to the lot, the red truck was just pulling out, flapping tarps gone, a young woman at the wheel, and a license plate indicating she was handicapped.
Wow! Compassion flooded through me. Not a man, but a woman, alone, and not just needing to sleep in her truck in the Griffy Lake parking lot, but handicapped!
Why it’s easier for me to empathize with a woman than a man is probably obvious, since I am a woman, who has seen my own times of desperate struggle for survival.
But now, the entire human race, men, women, gender benders, children — is headed down (up) into inflation so extreme that the entire economy will likely shut down, making it imperative that we re-learn how to connect and cooperate with each other as we grow our own food — and, use leftovers! — in the kitchen, in the garden, and other past projects. Whatever stuff we’ve already got, use it! Repair it if necessary! Repurpose it! Cobble together with other stuff in creative ways to meet unmet needs!
As usual, with Life on Earth, “what we’re doing here is moving stuff around”; which in turn, remember, is just an excuse for relationships!
Growing local food cooperatively is just for starters. Every area of life that we used to take for granted in our “on demand,” “convenience-oriented,” “just in time” society that has recently devolved into extreme divisiveness is to undergo profound, inexorable, long-lasting transformation.
Friday’s morning work party was so engaging for me that I forgot to take pictures. While Daniel (and others? ) were in the greenhouse working with the seedlings, and Marita had to start by “washing a chicken’s butt,” Joseph and I were out in the main garden, attempting to lightly sift (but often ending up clumping; should I use a shovel? a fork?) a large leftover pile of soil that had been covered and out of the way onto existing beds. Looking at this sight later, I recognized that we had thereby broken one sacrosanct permaculture principle: never leave soil exposed! Always mulch over it!
We do have one straw bale extra, so this afternoon I will scatter straw on the newly exposed beds.
Here’s what’s left of the leftover pile . . .
Aa newly exposed bed.
View of more of the garden’s newly exposed beds, plus notice the two chip drops outside the fence. We share our chip drops with the family across the street, and use them to cover all paths. (Chips themselves are leftovers, from downed trees . . . Permaculture: “all waste is food.”)
A few photos from last Tuesday morning, at the first work party of the week:
Joseph, transplanting . . . chard?
Daniel, with seedling . . . tomato?
These golden “always dependable since 1868” seed packets held seeds that did not germinate. No dates on their covers, so we don’t know when they were packaged. BUT: these were the only seeds that did not germinate, despite that this year we concentrated on stocks of left over seed from previous years, rather than ordering new seeds. Good call, new farm manager, Daniel!
Marita and Annie (butt first) decided to use the morning to hack out space for a gigantic eight-inch thick block of granite and concrete (leftover from a previous project) as their back stoop. Annie is figuring out how to level and slant the stoop slightly away from the house, so that rain will run off that way. Good idea . . .
Looming problem: how to move the giant block? Another Daniel, who used to live here, says he can help. Both Colin and our present Daniel have bad backs right now; Marita, Aya, Annie and Joseph are somewhat strong, and me not a bit strong; luckily Justin, very strong! — returns today from a week-long Florida vacation. So we’ll have to figure out a date for this task, and I’m sure we could get a few neighbors to come help, if needed.
Our twice weekly work parties are gathering steam, thanks to the sun’s role in life on earth. March Madness? Not here. Instead, productivity.
In and around the greenhouse, Joseph, Aya, and Daniel especially have taken charge of repotting little seedlings in bigger pots when their roots need room. Daniel and Marita have been doing most of the watering, but this task will likely get divvied up further among the group at tomorrow evening’s monthly meeting.
By Friday, more of the seedlings needed repotting. Here’s Joseph, with tomatoes, working in the back.
Beautiful!
Also, on Friday, a friend of Annie had shipped some blueberry bushes to her, four of which we decided to plant by the fence along the road, where neighbors who walk by can also feast on them.
They’re tiny right now, but will grow, and imagine they enjoyed last night’s gentle rain. We planted them with a bit of our homemade compost in each hole.
Finally, there’s the garage wall, which was identified as a problem that needed to be fixed when the rental inspection person visited that property (an every three year occasion). The fix, according to the city, was simple, just repair the sill to one window.
Well, my son Colin didn’t agree. He said the entire wall needed to be exposed, because who knows what kind of rot is in there. But Colin has been suffering from a nerve problem in his right shoulder and arm, plus his bad knee was acting up. Luckily, I was able to postpone the re-inspection, twice. But the third time was told sternly, that this is the final appointment. If we cannot make this appointment I will have to go before some board of appeals. That was about a month ago. Theoretically, we had plenty of time, since the drop dead date was March 10th. But it wasn’t until this week that Colin felt his body could handle the work (he is scheduled to do a lot of things around here that require carpentry skills, in exchange for parking his bus in driveway, and use of the garage as a workshop for him to “trick out” the bus.
Okay, that’s enough backstory. I won’t go into details of the last time this garage was the focus of the city, during the last rental inspection three years ago, when, after much miscommunication from both sides, we did have to go before the board of appeals, and they told us to paint it . . . in the middle of February . . . or else! So we did, gathering ten people together on the one day in February that was above 45 degrees.
Here’s the chronology of the wall, so far. Colin tells me there’s only about five or six hours of his work left, and Marita has volunteered to paint it. First, this is just after he removed some of the rot.
Then, deeper and deeper into the morass, which he was definitely anticipating.
We already had two windows here from Habitat ReStore, which he used to replace the old ones.
So let’s see, this is the 6th. . . supposed to rain either today or tomorrow. But Tuesday the 8th should be fine. Okay, if all goes well, we will make that March 10th deadline. Whew!
Finally, chicken inspecting bluebells on other side of the fence.
Our two work parties this week were very productive. Here are pics from both Tuesday and Friday mornings, followed by a final one today, during Daniel’s spray time; finally, pics of the notes taken of what was planted when since we began, February 1..
Lots of seeds started!
When I walked into the greenhouse on Friday, it was still chilly. Somebody had forgotten to fire up the stove hours earlier. Oh well!
And, when I walked in, a conversation was going as to how we could productively use the ash from the stove (on left). Somebody looked it up and discovered that a thin layer of wood ash can be sprinkled under seedlings when planted to deter soft-bodied critters. Don’t know the url, but here’s one source for something like that idea.
Aya, Annie, Marita.
Aya and new farm manager, Daniel.
Daniel, Annie, Joseph with Aya (hidden)
Daniel sprays. Joseph, hidden, waits. He has decided to play the tiny singing bowl, here in his hands, over the plants . . .
This shot taken last year. All people in it were, or had been, residents of GAPV. Now, all but four are gone, and we have yet to take a new group photo.
For the first time ever, Green Acres Village experienced a year when a total of five people out of nine left us, with each one replaced, amazingly enough, almost immediately. This too was unusual, in that a room will often stay open for a month or two before a person arrives who can blend in with the dynamic offered by a community that values individualism as exactly equal to connectivity, continuously honoring and rebalancing this polarity and others in the 3D world.
In fact, the process went smoothly, as if divinely ordained — so much so that it was only after the year had ended that we realized just how profound the turnover had been! Each person who left was called elsewhere by the demands of his or her own singular path, including Dan, who had been here for five years and finally realized, at his Saturn Return (30 years old), that he’d better learn how to live on his own, since he had never done so! Then there was Andreas, another long-termer of four years, who finally found the job he wanted, and it happened to be in Ireland, as a professor in a university music department. 21 year-old Ethyl moved here in February, full of plans, but then suddenly left, after what I call “seven restless months,” for a permacultural circus in Costa Rica! (She is back now, living with her boyfriend until she travels to the Philipines, and came to visit two evenings ago.)
More often than not, people who once lived here return over and over again to visit. In fact, we got our first “alumnus” returning to live here after several years away last year, too. That’s Justin. Will there be more returnees? Who knows. GAPV is a tiny, potent incubator of human potentiality during a time of dramatic and extended turbulence on this planet. We encourage each other to explore our own inner reaches (and that includes taking responsibility for our shadow sides: another polarity, conscious vs. unconscious), as well as to work cooperatively on common real world projects, with particular focus on the gardens. Not everybody is capable of truly doing both well (especially the shadow-work); in fact, these special ones are few and far between, and tend to very much appreciate what they learn during their time with us.
Speaking of the gardens: last year we tried an experiment, to do the garden work without any one in particular as garden manager. Rebecca, our garden manager for ten years, was the first to leave last year, on April 1, after feeling restless for several years. And just this month, after ten months of false starts, she has landed a new position as garden manager at a retreat resort in Hawaii! More on that later.
When she left we thought we’d try an Aquarian approach (since Jupiter and Saturn had just moved into groups-of-equals Aquarius from hierarchical Capricorn). But, though the gardens produced well, and everybody showed up for work parties, it became obvious that no one here had the kind of personal passion necessary to really focus on the gardens over the long haul. We all showed up, and in fact, in true Aquarian fashion, rotated leadership weekly, but it became obvious that our levels of interest and competence varied so widely as to be almost comical.
So, after the fifth person left, in early December, under strange circumstances, luckily we were able to invite Daniel Atlas, who has been the garden manager of an IU garden for three years, and who simply loves growing plants, both vegetables and flowers, to move here and take Rebecca’s place. So we’re back to a kind of quasi-Capricorn mode, though Daniel is very much aided by everybody else to find out just what is in what I laughingly call the Green Acres Bible, the gardening practices to which Rebecca introduced us. That includes planting seeds in soil blocks, which he had never done. So we’re teaching him, as he learns to guide us.
We used to have a Page on this site called “Meet our Residents,” but I took it down, since so much change has transpired. Perhaps someday, it will feel appropriate to put it back up!.
