Greetings! My name is Emily Abel (also known as Rainbowface), and I am a dance caller, an avid social dancer, a lover of mountains and good food, and! I believe that civilization as we know it is coming to a catastrophic and violent end. I believe that the cultivation of local, diverse food sources and the creation and organization of relatively small intentional communities will be large parts of what could allow us to continue living on this planet so long as it is capable of supporting human life. These beliefs (and a deep and abiding love of my partner, John) are what have brought me to this place – Woodsy Way – in hopes of making lifelong friends, surviving the potential meltdown of modern society, and creating a model of how others might organize to do the same.
Two months and ten days ago, John memorialized our move-in date here. Since then, we have done some pretty exciting things! We added a more solid roost, some laying boxes (these still require modification, if I’m being honest), and we recently completed a larger run for the chickens to roam in. Eventually we want to experiment with moving the chickens around the farm to weed out beds at the end of harvest season and before planting season, but in the meantime we’ve crafted a large permanent space for them to dwell.
Steve and Lorna created garden beds with leaf mulch and manure, and we’ve planted snap peas, ground cherries, at least half a dozen varieties of tomato, tomatillos, sunchokes, four varieties of potato, sweet potato (though those didn’t take…), onions, several varieties of sweet and hot peppers, apios americana (also known as ground nuts – essentially, a native tuber whose foliage climbs and creates little edible “nuts”), mustard, amaranth, a kale that turned out to be very prickly!, butternut squash, corn (the shoots were devoured almost immediately, probably by birds), sunflowers, several types of okra, Moravian mallow, asparagus, fennel, Turkish rocket, three kinds of oregano, rosemary, thyme, raspberries, strawberries, watermelon, maypops, strophostyles helvola (also known as annual sand bean) and probably a few other things that I’ve failed to mention. We also threw a bunch of 10+ year old seeds into a cleared out bed, which we deemed the “wild bed,” to see what would come up, and this yielded some radishes, mustard, and possibly some beets!
On the tree/shrub side of things, we’ve planted a couple of yellowhorns, a Siberian pea shrub, a male and female seaberry, some gerardi dwarf mulberries, some generic mulberry trees transplanted from a friend’s garden, bladdernut, apricots, a bitternut hickory, some honey locusts, black locusts, single lobe black walnut cultivars, two different types of nut pines, some nanking cherries, some zanthoxylem americanum (yields a berry similar to a szichuan peppercorn), and some Rose of Sharons. We have several fig cuttings that we are looking forward to planting soon!
We’re experimenting with several types of composting; Steve devised a double-circle system in which two circles of fencing are placed around each other and zip-tied, with a layer of mulch in the second circle and more mulch placed on top of food scraps, weeds, etc, so as to fully cover all compostable materials and help them break down faster, inspired by Joe Jenkins.
In terms of community infrastructure, we strive to communicate using nonviolent communication and resolve conflicts through nonviolent means. We’ve implemented weekly house meetings and meal schedules, and we share house chores as best we can with our individual time and energy limitations. We are hoping to implement a chore chart fairly soon, which will hopefully help us to meet a number of different needs in our community here.
Other big things that have happened for us: Steve and Lorna’s dog, Katanga, passed away in late May. We mourned his death and held a funeral together, in which we spread his ashes into the mulch pile. He will forever be a part of this farm. We have since adopted two very cute, very energetic pups – Duke and Teddy – and they have brought us a lot of stress and a lot of love so far.
We have been working with a group called Sacred Tree to work through difficult questions regarding community and our purposes and visions for our lives. We gathered with them for a retreat last weekend, and it was beautiful and exciting.
Steve and Lorna celebrated their 10-year anniversary, and John and I are thinking about getting married and perhaps trying to have a child together. We are looking to connect with local musicians and find a space to hold a contra dance in this area, which would be a really big deal for me, as I haven’t had a reliably fun space to dance in since living in North Carolina.
There are still numerous big questions for us to work out, many pertaining to finance, purpose, vision, goals, self-care, and how to incorporate ourselves into a larger community of people who want to create alternatives to the destructive, short-sighted, wasteful society we all are trapped in. However, we have invested a lot of time, energy, and love in building strong relationships with one another, and that is why we are able to start having those heavy conversations. I’m excited about all the food and the relationships we’re growing. Now I just want to grow more relationships! Come join us in our mission to re-structure our world!