Sharing Primitive Skills

We have a new member of Rising Roots Collective, our worker-run collective based at Oran Mor Community where I live. We are so happy to welcome Keven Statwick, a primitive skills artist and teacher!!

He has been involved with teaching and demonstrating primitive skills since 1998. He works with local organizations like the Boy Scouts and Oran Mor Community to share the wisdom and knowledge of primitive peoples so we can carry these valuable skills on with us. Among other things, Keven is skilled at making and using bows and arrows, primitive pottery, flint knapped arrow points, stone knives, leather tanning, drums, and he even welds beautiful metalworks!

Keven frequently joins us at Oran Mor Community to help with work projects and to share skills with us here. We plan to have a Pottery Making class this year and he would love to share knowledge on any of these skills. Please feel free to contact us if you have a particular interest in primitive skills so we can plan a class or workshop!

Contact us at 417-250-9252 or oranmor@speedymail.org

See Keven’s work on etsy here – risingrootscollectiv.etsy.com

And check it out in person at Farm Fork and Fiddle, a local co-op shop in Gainesville, MO. www.farmforkfiddle.com

 

Oran Mor – 2014 Year Review

• New members – Carlos, Desiree, and Kalani started provisional membership on March 27; Svenvic arrived in October
• Finished Projects –
  • summer kitchen cob oven complete
  • Spring tree planting
  • hoop house – repairs, new plastic, shelves built with cedar, bio-char stoves built
  • garden spaces revived – some terracing, hugelkultur beds
  • pathways – dug out as trenches for water, herb garden paths
  • goats – completed fencing, more goats
  • bee hives and swarm boxes built
  • first local sorghum harvest and cook
  • well repairs
  • hatched out over 35 guinea fowl
• Projects in Progress –
  • tipi
  • goat shed
  • summer kitchen – rocket stove, seating areas, solar oven
  • cheese cellar
  • pavilion

• Other
  • developing local barter connections
  • “share cropping” at a nearby farm (sorghum) will be growing sunflower seeds, millet, corn, wheat, and beans with neighbors
  • ONE congress, local bio-regional congress inspired by OACC
  • OCHFP Food Co-Op
  • ONE work parties, potlucks, and workshops
  • hosted 13 visitors and had many celebrations

This past year has been a beautiful transition for Oran Mor on it’s stages from cocoon into butterfly. The community was founded in 2003 by Bunny, Pearl, and two others from East Wind. Many visitors and members have come and go, and 2014 saw the arrival of 4 new provisional members, three adults and one child. Desiree, Carlos, and Kalani returned to OM to begin their provisional membership in March 27, 2014 after a three week visitor period they enjoyed in 2012. Svenvic began his provisional membership on November 17 directly after his visitor period. Provisional membership lasts one year so the potential members must make it through all four diverse and unique seasons before becoming full members. Winter has been the true test to see if we can get through the long haul chopping wood, carrying water, stuck indoors for days and days… We are making it! It’s very cool to be part of Oran Mor morphing into it’s ideal of equality, consensus-based, income-sharing community.

With the arrival of new members, the help of many visitors, and several work parties at the farm and other nearby farms, we were able to complete many projects. Our first cob oven was completed in early spring and used a lot during the Spring and Summer. We made some awesome pizzas with hand-ground flours, cheese from our goats, and homegrown veggies. We also used it for baking breads, potatoes and squash. Most of our garden space was overgrown due to laying fallow for a few years during a rough patch at the community. We grew a decent amount of food considering the circumstances (a bounty of Cushaw squash), and the fall and winter gave us ample time to prepare for our 2015 gardens. We practice no-till and permaculture methods of gardening, attempting to grow in harmony with nature. Many small shrubs and trees that had taken up residence in our veggie gardens over the past three years were cut down. Then the soil received lots of local compost and manure and we also made several hugelkultur beds. We are all really excited about the upcoming growing season and many seeds have been started in trays and in the ground already! Pathways were laid through our herb garden and veggie gardens with limestone from the farm and wood chips from the local recycling center. Every Spring, we have a tradition of planting 100-200 native trees on the property. Last Spring we planted Paw Paw, Persimmon, Elderberry, Short Leaf Pine, American Beauty Berry, and Mulberry. During the Summer and Fall we were able to complete repairs to the hoop house that caved in a couple years ago in a big storm. We used Cedar poles to prop it up and built Cedar shelving to be used for plant starts. Our goat herd gives us the bulk of our protein needs here as well as wonderful companionship, so they are very dear to us. Currently there are five does residing with us, three wethers, two babies who we are trading for beef with a friend, and our buck who is eternally in rut. We are working on a rotational browsing setup and many fences were built last year. We also completed some much needed repairs on our well, and after having to pull up the well seven times, it’s safe to say we learned a lot! The Winter gave us a time of reflection and inspiration and I’m happy to say that almost every communal meal was cooked on our wood-fired stove.

Last year saw much involvement with local community organizations, Ozarks Neighborly Exchange (ONE) and the Ozark County Homegrown Food Project. With these groups we actively took part in several events, work parties, and workshops. Through the Ozarks Neighborly Exchange we organized a work party with a bio-char innovator from Lake of the Ozarks area. He came down with all the supplies to build 12 bio-char stoves and we took two of them home with us to be used in our hoop house. Another workshop was led by Leo Sharashkin, a natural beekeeper practicing the old Russian tradition of keeping bees in large horizontal hives similar to the old log hives. Many hands built many beehives and swarm boxes to be used for catching local swarms. Two beehives and two swarm boxes came home with us to OM and our first swarm moved in at the end of Summer in our Sycamore tree by the pond. They were safely moved from swarm box to beehive, but sadly it was a little late in the season and our beautiful bees died in the harsh Winter. We learned from the experience and will try again this year. The first annual Ozarks Neighborly Exchange One Day Congress was a huge success, a day full of lectures on sustainability and self reliance. The Congress was inspired by the Ozark Area Community Congress, founded by our local sustainable forestry advocate David Haenke in the 1970s. His was the first bio-regional congress in America. We hosted a work party here in the Summer with folks who came out from ONE, East Wind, and local friends. We chopped down lots of Cedar from our woods and got a lot of work done on our tipi which is nearing completion now. With our local ONE group we also grew two acres of sorghum and had a very successful first year, harvesting by hand, pressing with a neighbor’s work horses, and cooking it into delicious syrup with the help of many hands.

This year we are going to be share cropping at least 10 acres of land at Woodpecker’s, where we grew sorghum, and will grow Emmer wheat, a variety of corn, sorghum, sunflower seeds, and some sort of legume. Having a place where local farmers can get together and produce large amounts of shared food for humans and animal feed has been an amazing thing. It’s like our own village grainery. We have been connecting with several friends and neighbors to trade with each other for things we need. Setting up local barter connections is essential in achieving the interconnected self reliance that we are working towards. With the Ozark County Homegrown Food Project in Gainesville, we were able to find a building to start our local Food Co-Op. This is a space where we will offer locally-sourced food from a small restaurant, produce and local meats from area farmers, and handmade crafts. The Co-Op will feature a certified kitchen so all members can use it for canning, baking, and other cooking endeavors. We will host events, workshops, music, and more! We are working on by-laws and saving up money to get our 501c3 and then will sign the lease and begin converting the space this Spring. We have also been working on revising Oran Mor’s by-laws, norms, and creating our Articles of Incorporation so that we can become a 501d and legally operate as an egalitarian community. As it stands currently, the land is still in Pearl and Bunny’s legal names.

Moving into 2015, there are many wonderful things already blossoming. Another family, and dear friends of ours, is moving in on the Spring Equinox, March 20^th, to begin their visitor period with the intention of becoming members here. We are all very excited about having Xela, Christian, and their little baby Dax join us! There have been several others who have contacted us about membership and visiting as well.

Once the tipi is complete, Carlos, Kalani, and Desiree will move up the hill into La Lomah where we will begin setting up a second chicken coop, more garden spaces, and herding goats. Most of the community is on hillsides, but La Lomah is a flat hilltop with more soil than exists anywhere else on the farm, so it will be a great location for future veggie gardens. It will be very exciting to see how things progress in La Lomah. We are working on completing a goat shed up there which is already half built and plan to build another goat shed in another pasture so we can have permanent shelter for our buck to be away from the rest of our herd until he is called upon. There are big, amazing plans to expand on our Summer Kitchen so that most of our warm season cooking can be done off-grid and outdoors. We have the cob oven already and it would be great to build a solar oven and a rocket stove, as well as seating areas nearby. The poles have already been cut and the stones laid to erect a pavilion to serve as a covered seating area. With our nearly endless supply of resources from the old burnt down house and the beautiful clay and sand on the farm, I’m sure we have almost everything we need. Another project that is in the works is our cheese cellar down by Mini Creek. The walls and roof are in place and we have begun filling in the holes between the stone and covering the roof with earth, and a door must be fitted. These are some of the projects we have going on this year and with all the folks coming through to share their unique existence with us, I’m sure we will have many unique and exciting adventures!

Bushels of Bounty, Goats, and Community

It’s the typical end of summertime here in the Missouri Ozarks, thunder and lightning outside our open door and the rain pouring down. Our ducks and geese are loving it; they waddle around the paths in search of tasty morsels. The nights are getting longer, the days have been cooler and since we don’t indulge in such modern conveniences as air conditioning, it’s the perfect time of year to be canning!

Today we are coring and cutting up a bushel of local apples. Some are being preserved in simple chunks that we can use to bake pies, throw into yogurt or on top of ice cream, or even use them in hearty winter stews. Some of the apples will get peeled, cored, and chopped, and put into our crock pots overnight to become apple sauce. And all of those cores and skins are being saved to make apple cider vinegar. Well, some of them are sure to be goat treats.

We love our goats here at Oran Mor and I’m very sad to report that one of our furry family members recently died. Meatloaf became ill about a week before his passing and we aren’t sure what did it, but it has me inspired to educate myself on goat anatomy and health. Death is a natural part of farm life, but it’s always difficult.

On a happier note, we have been busy preparing our greenhouse to fill with lots of life to sustain us through the coming cold season. We ordered a new cover which should be arriving any day now, the bio-char stove we built is ready to go, and we have cleared and prepared two beds that are now filled with lettuce, radish, carrot, and beet seeds. It’s going to be a delicious winter!

Fall is a time of preparation and Pearl and I have been very busy in the gardens – pulling weeds, cutting down volunteer trees and shrubs, re-building beds, and laying out paths. Our gardens are on a slope so we consistently build up soil by adding plant matter, compost, manure, and dirt from the paths. It’s a sort of mix between hugelkultur and lasagna gardening. And after much trial and error (five attempts), we finally fixed our hand-pump well so it’s working great and we won’t need to pull it again for a while! While Carlos was up on the windmill, he took a pretty awesome photo of the community –

In other news, Carlos, Kalani, and I recently had the pleasure of going to Twin Oaks Community in Virginia for the annual Communities Conference. It is a gathering of communards and hopeful someday-communards sharing knowledge, skills, ideas, and dreams to build our community network. Some of the topics covered were Radical Resource Sharing, Consensus & Facilitation, Building Cooperative Power, Carbon Footprinting, and so much more! We went on tours of Twin Oaks and Acorn communities, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and we were invited to dinner at Sapling community. We also had a meeting with Alex, the secretary for the FEC (Federation for Egalitarian Communities) and we are so excited to be working with him on joining the FEC! We already function as an egalitarian, income sharing community here but becoming part of the FEC will mutually benefit the whole organization. It’s a step that Oran Mor has wanted to take since the founding days in 2003.

Tomorrow we are leaving for another community gathering, the 35th annual Ozarks Area Community Congress, OACC. There will workshops, lectures, and networking centered around sustainability, ecology, farming, and that sort of thing. Exciting things happening all around and many more adventures to come, so stay tuned… !!01

Tipi Pole Work Party

We are building a tipi!! Here at Oran Mor Community, where we live, work and play,  sustainability and simplicity are at our core. Currently we are living in a communal housing space that we call “the Catbox” and we love it. Sharing a house with others is a beautiful experience and we absolutely love our housemates, but our plan is to expand our community up-slope into a place we call La Lomah – Land of Milk and Honey. It’s a very exciting journey and this tipi will be our first living unit so we can begin progressing with our dream.

We ordered the canvas for our tipi online at Nomadics Tipi. It is an all-season marine-treated cotton canvas that hopefully will keep us warm and dry all through the winter with the help of our new bio-char stove that we built over the weekend. We decided to buy a pre-fab tipi cover, because sewing a tipi cover out of something like animal skin is a momentous task to take on. The poles for the tipi came from our rich, green forest of Red Cedars and to harvest these poles, we invited all of our neighbors over for a work PARTY!!

Building a Cob Pizza Oven

Outdoor cooking can be a sustainable alternative to cooking with electricity indoors and it’s so much fun to join around an outdoor kitchen, especially when there is pizza involved! Here at Oran Mór we use our cob oven to bake breads, pizzas, squash, and even make soup. One of the best parts of cob pizza ovens is the building of it!! So when a friend of ours reached out for help to get a cob pizza oven erected in time for the Healing Retreat at Celestial Spring Herb Farm, we were all over it!! (Side note- Celestial Springs offers fabulous herbal products on their website.)

If you have ever thought of building a cob oven, I highly recommend it. The baked goods that come out of these ovens cannot be beat! They are incredibly fun to build, especially when you get your local community, friends, and family to come out for a work party! Here are some photos of the two day cob pizza oven work party that we were a part of.

Spring on the Farm at Oran Mor

Good morning! We just finished up all the morning chores… chickens, ducks, and geese are out. Guinea keets have been tended, fed their organic starter grains and probiotic supplements. They are so cute, those little tiny baby guineas. The guinea eggs we are incubating have been turned and my favorite chore – the goats have been milked! Pearl is making breakfast of fresh turnips and eggs for community breakfast and I thought it would be nice to share some photos of the garden.

Motherwort in bloom, will soon be harvested for tincture.

Squash, Tomatoes, Peppers, Okra, Sweet Potatoes, & Cukes ready for the ground.

The rock bench below our Bradford Terrace gardens where we are growing greens, potatoes, bergamot, and elderberries.

Dale Gardens – growing tomatoes, basil, onions, kale, cilantro, and other greens.

Arugula flowers in another green bed.

A greens bed growing lettuces, mustard, and arugula.

Our many, many elderberry bushes are blooming!

We have been using our cob oven a lot this Spring, delicious pizzas!

There you have it.. hope you enjoyed a small taste of what’s going on here at the farm. I will update soon with some photos of our animals and more of the gardens once things get a little bigger. We have lots of corn, squash, and cukes in the ground and so much more to be done! Fun on the farm never ends.

What are you growing this year?

Give a man a fish and he’ll be fed for a day. Teach a man to grow tomatoes and he’ll feed the whole community!

My wonderful soul partner said this to me the other day… I think he got it from Grow Food Not Lawns. 🙂 I love it!!!

History of My Passion for Food and Life

I have lived a very interesting life, especially these last 4 years or so. I moved to California from Texas with my ex-boyfriend and lived together with his mom in her home in Oceanside. That’s when I started growing my first garden, using no-till and permaculture methods that I had been reading about, and buying almost all of our food from the local farmers market. That was in 2008 and I have been flourishing in this lifestyle ever since, constantly learning and growing more every day!

This is a little part of my backyard garden in Oceanside. We used manure and straw to build up the soil a little, very little digging or tilling, and we grew GREAT broccoli and cauliflower, peppers, tomatoes, lettuce, and herbs!

Here’s another raised bed I did – manure and hay. Everything in there was purchased from a local man who sells starters from his backyard and these plants grew to be HUGE!

We rode our bikes to the farmers market every week to pick up all the food our household would need, aside from a few grains that we got from a local natural food store. Living in Southern California meant there was never a need to preserve food. It’s always growing and abundant. Almost all of our food was purchased from the same farm, La Milpa Organica. Eventually I ended up moving onto the farm to live and apprentice there! It was wonderful, for about 3 months… They had been getting loads of fines from local and state authorities because of all these random regulations that eventually put the farm out of business. My boyfriend and I broke up, the farm shut down, so then I began hitch hiking and traveling around the west coast. 🙂

Delilah, a beautiful Jersey cow

Eventually I fell in love with my now-boyfriend Carlos and traveled through more of the country with him. One of the first places we stayed at was a commune called the CRIC house. That’s where we first learned how to milk cows and goats, to make cheese, how to pickle and can loads of food, how to use a solar oven and how to set up a composting toilet… among many other things. The lessons we learned there were life changing and totally empowering. I am forever grateful for the incredible people who shared their lives with us.

One of three solar cookers at CRIC

The front porch of CRIC house (painted by Carlos, Shirley, and myself) where we spent lots of quality time.

We hitch hiked up the west coast from San Diego, CA to Eugene, OR where we took part in a tree sit in the Elliot State Forest, part of Willamette. They are tearing up that forest, clear cutting left and right. We helped set up barricades to keep out the bull dozers… they didn’t last very long and eventually people were arrested and the destruction continued.

Then we continued up to Olympia, WA and stayed with Carlos’ sister and her new baby for a while. Olympia is an amazing town with lots of barter opportunities and free wells that get water from the nearby Mt. Rainier. They have wonderful farmers markets, tons of community and front yard gardens. If you ever get a chance, check it out.

Multnomah Falls, on the Columbia River Gorge

Picking thimble berries along our journey.

After Olympia, I decided it was time to visit my parents in Branson, Missouri so we went down to the Columbia River Gorge and hitch hiked through beautiful Oregon to head east for Missouri. We met so many incredible, loving, smart, and wonderful people during our travels, and now that we have been in Branson since March of this year, we have an incredible group of friends here.

Local food in Branson, MO

Tomorrow Carlos and I are taking a bus to Des Moines, Iowa where we are picking up our new house on wheels – a 1985 Toyota Dolphin! We will be traveling once again, and this time we’ll be the ones giving rides to hitch hikers and hobos! We are spending every dime we have on this gypsy caravan to start a fresh chapter in our life together, and I have an incredible positive feeling about it. I am taking my small business on the road. We are packing up our instruments, our seeds, and going wherever we feel called to. I am elated!!

Our soon-to-be House on Wheels

I have met a lot of folks who think that the world is doomed, that people don’t give a shit and we are all going to die in a flaming hell of fire. I’m here to say – that’s bologna! Almost everyone I talk to does care about the fate of our planet and they do want things to be functioning in a more sustainable way. I have met numerous people who live off the land and invite strangers into their homes with open arms so they can spread the love they have for this earth. It’s heart warming. We all have the power to be the change we wish to see in this world!

So let’s do it.

Local Ozarks Barter / Trade Meeting

Bartering is a way of life for me. I use very little money, yet I’m living in total abundance and prosperity. I have more than I can use so I share it with my family, neighbors and friends. The love and gratitude that I share for everything brings me more of … everything. Thought > Emotion > Action

So here we have a barter meeting coming up. Join us if you can! 🙂

Building a CommUNITY Garden

Starting a garden bed

I have recently been working with a group called Homegrown Missouri that I totally resonate with. The goals of the group that stand out in my heart are localizing food and localizing the community by building relationships and connections with our environment, ourselves, and eachother. Everyone has their own ideas in the group and I totally honor and respect each individual, as they do me. 🙂 It’s a beautiful thing. The group has meetings every month and in November we are having a workshop about fermented foods where members of the group will be teaching what they know. I am sharing beet kvass and Carlos, my partner / soul mate, is going to be teaching sauerkraut. Check out my last blog that features the flyer I made – https://regrowroots.wordpress.com/2012/10/25/free-fermented-foods-workshop/

I would like to share my newest endeavor that is going incredibly well and will one day become everything I dream of… a COMMUNITY GARDEN! It is located in my dear friend JoAnna’s backyard. I’m sure you will hear much more about JoAnna in future posts, as she is an amazing woman in my life. Her backyard is mostly grass with wild onions and dandelions growing here and there, as well as a pear tree, an elm, and a couple other little trees. My vision is to shift the entire yard into a food forest / community space where people can share food, potlucks, community, music, love, and growth!

Alpine Strawberries and Echinacea

We picked up some Alpine Strawberry starts from a friend and put them in the ground. I cut off the tops of them so all the energy will go to the roots and build a strong plant that will pop up in the Spring! 🙂 I also planted a bunch of echinacea Purpurea seeds that will come up in the Spring.

Huuuge backyard space!

This is the view from the deck. It is north of the house so that will be something to keep in mind. The beginning veggie patch is in the back by a big tree and an elderberry patch. Right now there are kale, cabbages, jerusalem artichokes, elephant garlic, and one lovely marigold.

Closer view of the garden beginnings

To the left of the photo are 2 raised beds that Carlos set up and we have some buckets waiting to be relocated and filled with dirt. Carlos actually dug the grass out for the raised bed. For most of our future beds, we will place down cardboard to suffocate the grass and build on top of that. That way, we will get lots of beds done before planting time in the spring!