Weekends Full of Fun

Along with the usual busy work weeks, the weekends have been packed here as well.  Last weekend was the third week of the Permaculture Design Class (PDC) and the first one that I have been a part of, and man it was awesome!  Steve Libby was here to talk about Polycultures, followed shortly by David Whichland; Mushroom extraordinare.  He started off talking about the history of mushrooms and how useful they are and we soon got into demonstrations of how to inoculate them into the landscape around the farm.  The amount of enthusiasm that David brought was truly inspiring and overall the workshop was very eye opening for even someone that knew a bit about mushrooms before hand. This all happened on Saturday, and needless to say, we were all a bit mentally exhausted from the amount of information that Dave threw at us.

The next day started off with Bryan Felice, a local builder in the area, who talked all about natural building techniques and processes.  After lunch Josh took the reins and we got to do some hands-on work with an age old method known as cob building.  This involved doing the cob dance to incorporate the right amount of clay, sand and straw so that it would be sculpt-able and dry strong.  We used this to repair the cob oven which has been in much need of repair, and will hopefully be up and running again in the next month or so after the cob dries....

If that wasn’t enough to keep us all busy here, the next weekend (this weekend) has also been packed.  There was an AWESOME blacksmithing workshop yesterday with Steve Ash.  He was an awesome instructor especially to people just starting out and really helped everyone through whatever project they wanted to complete.  After 8 hours of hammering away we all walked away with knowledge, coated in black and maybe a trinket or two.  

Instead of resting on sunday, however, we had the monthly farm feast breakfast to attend to.  With about 100 people coming through it was quite a busy sunday morning, although always a pleasure.  Serving all this fresh food to friendly locals and meeting new people is always enjoyable.  

Even though all these busy weekends have been quite tiring, they have been amazing and I have been learning SO much!  Hopefully more to come.

Until Next TIme!

~Alex