East Brook Community Farm, Glomus Commune’s business, needs to be organized to run. Lately, by building more shelves everywhere, they have gotten more organized. Here’s the farm office (which is my–Raven’s–former bedroom) and the shelves in it that Anande (who lived at Glomus and is now at East Wind) built. Rachael and Telos built shelves in the farmhouse to grow seedlings (plus a closeup of some seedlings). Then there’s the shed that Keenan and Rowan built while visiting Glomus that Telos built shelves for–which made it easier to organize the farm’s tool shed and the farm’s work shed.
It’s clearly spring from all the gardening advice (as well as the relaxing advice). The stats this week weren’t terrible, but they weren’t that great either.
The first bit of gardening advice was from SESE.
I’m not sure how many of our Facebook readers are into gardening. Eighty-eight views and only one like isn’t great–unfortunately, this wasn’t our worst performing post of the week.
The next post was posted on a Friday on our FB feed as well on the original instagram post. I know Chamomile and he is a pretty mellow cat.
This post did a bit better. Although it also only got one like, it got almost a hundred views, which I think of as the minimum decent amount of views.
Not exactly a gardening tip, but sometimes you need a green house to grow stuff.
This post did reasonably well–best stats of the week actually.
And speaking of relaxing advice, Twin Oaks makes hammocks.
I also liked Zamin’s cute comment.
Unfortunately, despite the comment and the motto, this post didn’t do very well. While it got two likes in addition to Zamin’s comment, the sixty-one views it got wasn’t so great.
Finally, another piece of planting advice.
This did well enough: a like, a love, and over a hundred views.
The Facebook posts from a couple of weeks ago featured quite a variety of communal endeavors and one of the most popular posts (a question!) we have had lately.
For anyone who doesn’t know, Daleks are usually metallic villainous things that cause problems on the TV show, Doctor Who. They are seldom described as cute, but these are.
Cute enough to get three likes and over a hundred and fifty views.
You like leafy greens? They’ve got them at Glomus Commune.
This post did well enough with five likes but only a hundred views.
I never heard of sideways planting but apparently it’s a thing.
This also did well with three likes and over a hundred and fifty views. (Does this mean folks like sideways plants about as much as they like crocheted Daleks?)
The one comment is worth reprinting here because it’s from Rachael from Glomus Commune/EBCF. It seems that they also do it.
The former garden manager at Twin Oaks is a published author who has a blog on growing stuff. Here she talks about weeds.
It also did okay, with five likes and loves and a hundred and one views.
Finally, I occasionally post a question on Facebook, usually on a Monday. These tend to either do very well or terrible. One thing I’ve found is the more often I post them, the less well they tend to do. So I try to occasionally post what I think is a provocative question. I don’t think this question was that provocative, but I haven’t posted any for a while and this did very, very well–not only in terms of likes and views, but it got (as was my aim) a lot of comments, which I will put just below the question. I was pleased with the variety of thoughts and ideas even if a few were a bit negative.
Seventeen comments, six likes and loves, and almost four hundred views. I’d say that this post was successful. I only wish this could translate in to new growth for the communes.
I’ll admit that it’s cute and it got three loves and two likes, so I was more than a little surprised that it didn’t do well on our Facebook feed. Maybe there aren’t that many bunny lovers out there.
Then, I had to repost this when I saw it.
To my surprise and delight, it did very, very well. Maybe some folks do have their priorities straight. (Of course it probably helped that it got a couple of ‘shares’. That’s what the two next to the arrow means.)
SESE continues to be a boon for many of the Louisa communities. Twin Oaks posted this update.
This post also did very, very well with thirteen likes and loves and over two hundred views.
The farmers at East Brook Community Farm (Glomus Commune’s main business) take their work–and their tools–seriously.
This didn’t do as well. I usually use a hundred views as my marker for whether something did okay or not and this came pretty close. I’ve noticed that even after a couple of weeks, the views can still creep up very slowly, so I suspect that this will make it very slightly above a hundred eventually.
Finally, Acorn, having already posted about their musical band, posted about a painting they did together.
This did okay, with seven likes and loves and a decent amount of views.
East Brook Community Farm (Glomus Commune’s business) is partnering with the Iridescent Earth Collective to help their mutual aid farm grow food and raise geese. Check out this Instagram video.
Unfortunately, there were no likes on Facebook and hardly any looks.
Another local article was from the Louisa County Historical Society.
This did a little better and got a couple of likes, but still did pretty poorly.
The Magnolia Collective is small, but committed to each other.
This did even better, with a like and a love, but I consider anything with under a hundred views to have done poorly.
East Brook Community Farm wanted to show off a new piece of equipment.
This post did pretty well (best of the week) with three likes and a decent number of views.
Finally, Acorn put a simple Instagram post up with a black and white drawing and a notice that this was “megafauna_the_super_cool_band”. Curious, I went to their Instagram site and immediately realized that I knew these folks. They were all either members or associated with various Louisa County communes.
While it didn’t do as good as the Glomus post above, it got a like and a love and a decent amount of views.
I have a long time interest in social change. I’ve often talked and written about communities as “laboratories for social change”.
Unlike a lot of radicals, I’m not interested in getting rid of the horrible things we are dealing with. I don’t want to defund the police, abolish prisons, or smash the state. I think that getting rid of stuff only creates a vacuum which allows other things to emerge which might be just as bad or worse. I’m interested in replacing the police, replacing the prisons, and replacing the state.
I’ve been inspired by the Buckminster Fuller quote: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I’ve also been further inspired by quotes from two system thinkers. John Gall claimed that “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work.” Kevin Kelly said something similar. “The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.”
Communities (along with various kinds of cooperatives, land trusts, local economies, sustainable living laboratories like Living Energy Farm, and many other small scale alternative models) can be examples of those “simple systems that work”. But my reason for referring to them as “laboratories” is that at this point, we don’t always know what’s going to work. I think that Twin Oaks (for all its problems and it has quite a few at this point) is an example of communism that works. It’s been working for over fifty-five years now and is still going along. East Wind Community has been its version of this for forty-nine years this year and Acorn just turned thirty. Glomus Commune that I just left is in its eighth year of farming and sharing.
Unfortunately, this is a small number of functioning communes. The failure rate of new communities is very high and income-sharing communities are at what I’ve been calling a low ebb. Obviously, if we knew a formula to create new communities that was fairly successful, we would have a lot more of them, but we are still in the trial and error phase. This is why at one point I listed ten good reasons to try to create new communes.
With climate change and a lot of social problems at an all time high and seemingly accelerating, I know folks want to have more working alternatives faster, but I think that pushing the process is a recipe for disaster. I’ve said that urgency is what got us into this mess, it’s not going to get us out of it.
This is why I’ve adopted Joanna Macy’s three part model for social change. My version of it is we need all those protests and demonstrations and direct actions (which Joanna Macy calls “holding actions”) to give us time to build the “structural alternatives” (communes, co-ops, etc.) and figure out how to make them work reliably as well as to let people know about them (to, as Joanna Macy says, shift “perceptions of reality” or, basically, educate folks). I truly wish that the communities were ready to provide a replicable model that could be widely distributed, but at this point we are still learning how to do it. At this point we are still in the testing phase. Which is why we need to build more communes.
I try to repost things from a variety of communities each week but, as I was preparing this week’s recap of Facebook posts from a couple of weeks ago, I noticed I had three posts from Glomus. I don’t know if it was just a slow week–or maybe I was favoring them because they had published so little over the winter and were putting out so much now.
The first was about a seed swap that they were participating in.
And while it didn’t have any likes or loves, it did well enough in terms of views.
Then, a few days later, we published this cute picture of a crocus that was on the East Brook Instagram page.
This got four likes and one ‘care’ and a respectable number of views.
However, I couldn’t resist publishing the sequel that they had on their Instagram page the next day.
And it also did well. I guess folks like spring flowers.
We also published another repeat from Acorn. They just kept putting stuff out about their Land Day and I couldn’t resist this picture of the stage there with the colorful artwork.
And, in spite of all the stuff we already put out about Land Day, this did very well, with the most likes, loves, and views of stuff we put on Facebook that week.
But what I thought was the most important thing we published during this time period (especially given the saturation of Acorn Land Day stuff and Glomus flower and seed swap pictures) did terrible. Twin Oaks announced that they would once again be having summer events and gave dates and links.
Since the links above are simply from a photo and won’t actually work, here are the real links:
I can’t say I was really surprised at how bad this did. Facebook has always turned out poorly when it comes to these events. Which I think is a shame because, honestly, I think they are more important to publicize than already past events (like Land Day and the seed swap) and pictures of flowers. There were no likes and only 44 views.
The North American Mycological Association is doing a CHOPPED cooking competition—we had to make a cohesive dish with a mushroom, cabbage, grapefruit, ritz crackers, and bourbon. #mushroomqueer#mycologytok#recipeideas#namachopped2023
Saturday, April 8th, was the Land Day celebration for the Acorn Community–honoring the day they moved on to their land, and this was their thirtieth anniversary. They posted a whole bunch about it and we reposted several of what they posted. I know I posted about it last week, but here’s two more posts–but first, everything else.
Starting with a couple of pretty pictures from the Magnolia Collective.
For a couple of pictures this did okay, getting two likes and a love and just over a hundred views.
Serenity Solidarity is a community in formation that’s also doing a lot of important stuff.
Here’s the link to the article. You may only get to look at it once before they start to tell you that you can only re-read it if you subscribe.
It didn’t do anywhere near as well as I thought it should. While it got three likes and two cares, it only got eighty-two views.
Then I found something on the East Brook Community Farm Instagram account which had been dormant through the winter, but was now back in farming season–and East Brook is basically Glomus Commune so I reposted this.
This did very, very well with five likes and loves and over two hundred views.
Finally, Acorn’s Land Day posts–one from April 8th, the actual Land Day, and the other, a leftover that we published on Monday the 10th.
This did pretty well with nine likes and loves and almost two hundred views.
When I didn’t have another post for Monday, I reposted this silly one.
While it was the second post about Land Day and just featured a couple of pictures of a dog–and only got a couple of likes, it still got a respectable number of views.
commune life 