by Raven Glomus
One way our community gets food is by dumpstering. Last week, I published a video of Theresa getting so many cherries from the dumpster. Here is a response to the video that Theresa published.
Food and Drink
Glomus makes lots of cider
Folks at Glomus Commune have been pressing apple cider for years now on our little press, but this year they got to use a professional machine and used it to make so many gallons of cider!
Dumpster Cherries!
One way that we get food at Glomus is called dumpster diving. Theresa does a lot of it and makes videos about it. This particular video got over 10 million views! Next week we will publish one important response to this video.
Peaches, Moths, Mushrooms, and Manure
by Raven Glomus
Wrapping up some posts from the Commune Life Facebook feed that blog readers might find interesting, here’s some stuff (mostly food and agriculturally related) that is happening at Glomus Commune and Acorn Community.
At Glomus the last couple of weeks have been about the harvest and what to do with all that food. The biggest, juiciest harvest recently has been peaches–so many peaches!–and what to do about them, and lots of the other things we’ve been harvesting is canning.
Here’s what we said on Facebook: “Peaches, peaches, peaches! Glomus Commune is currently blessed with three trees full of ripe, juicy peaches.” And the pictures:
And then the canning: “Yesterday’s peaches have been canned. With the harvest coming in, there’s a lot of canning going on at Glomus Commune. Along with the peaches are canned tomatoes and there are two different types of relish canned, all done in our outdoor kitchen, created this summer for the mycology camp. (Not sure why this is called canning when it’s all being done in jars.)” Of course, more pictures:
And the comments responding to my question:
Acorn has put out a number of posts this last month that we have re-posted on our Facebook feed. One of the most surprising (to me at least) concerned a moth. When I saw the picture, I was certain that it was a hummingbird and I had to look it up on the internet to learn that, indeed, moths also drink nectar from flowers this way.
What I wrote on the post was: “Like a hummingbird, this moth is drinking from a flower at the Acorn Community.” Acorn wrote:”A spectacular shot of a moth drinking from one of our primroses! We love all our pollinators here at the farm🌻🦋🐝🌸🌼🌹” Here’s a still of the moth:
And a link to post with a little video clip: https://www.instagram.com/p/CSMf3CUAAxh/
Then, there’s Acorn’s post about finding a lovely ‘Chicken of the Woods’. Look at the size of that thing:
Acorn wrote: “Found this chicken in the woods mushroom on our property! We cooked it up for our community dinner and it was delicious! 🐓🍄” There are also pictures of the mushroom cooked up and the satisfied diners on their Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CUBTj0glCcy/
Finally, Acorn’s business is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. On SESE’s website, they wrote this piece on “Using Manure in the Garden” with everything you might want to know about using manure. I was kind of flip on our Facebook page: “Here’s a load of manure: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (Acorn Community’s business) talks about how to use Manure in your garden.”
Here’s a link to the article from the SESE blog: https://blog.southernexposure.com/2021/09/using-manure-in-the-garden/
And that’s some of what’s been happening so far this month at the communes.
Dealing with the Llano disaster
by Raven Glomus
I wrote about this in July when it happened, but at Twin Oaks a tree fell on Llano kitchen and destroyed it. This kitchen served the courtyard area of Twin Oaks (four houses) and by now they are well into the process of trying to come back.
First, they needed to come up with a replacement kitchen, at least temporarily. As I wrote in a recent Commune Life Facebook post: “After the destruction of the Llano kitchen in midJuly, Twin Oaks has had to be creative to have a kitchen that services their courtyard area.” What Twin Oaks wrote was: “TEMPORARY KITCHEN. While repairs are progressing on Llano, we’re using TaChai living room as a temporary kitchen.” TaChai Living Room (often abbreviated TCLR) is a major meeting space in the courtyard area–or it was. Now it is functioning as the courtyard kitchen while they are doing repairs to Llano.
And they are well into doing Llano repairs. Twin Oaks did a recent Facebook post where they wrote: “LLANO REPAIRS. Putting it all back together. We hired the excellent Jason Taylor to lead the repair work (red shirt in one photo.) The bathroom wall was destroyed – we decided to remove the tub permanently.” Here are pictures of the work:
Hopefully, that replacement kitchen in TCLR will be very temporary and there will be a new Llano kitchen functioning soon. I do know Oakers who actually felt that Llano kitchen was no longer servicing the courtyard well and are looking forward to having a lovely new addition there.
Making Maple Syrup
by Raven Glomus
It’s late winter and the nights are cold and some of the days are reasonably warm. This is when the sap runs in trees. Here at Glomus Commune, several folks, led by Taliesin, have been tapping maple trees to make syrup. The process is sometimes called “sugaring”.
I published two Facebook posts about the process, trying to document it from collecting the sap to boiling it down. Here’s the first post:
One of our neighbors, Jeff, left a comment about our sugaring history and, having only been here a bit over a year, I realized I had written “every year” in error. Fortunately, Rachael had the correct history.
Once the sap is collected, it’s boiled down. Taliesin worked at this a long time.
We now have homemade maple syrup for pancakes and waffles (and a jar of ‘maple cream’ to spread on toast). We grow vegetables and raise livestock here, but we also use our land in other ways, and collecting sap when we can is one of them.
Donut Privatization
You read the title right. I’ve often talked about how Twin Oaks offers public/private options. You can take something out of ‘commie clothes’ and make it yours if you want to. Of course, then you have to wash it yourself.
Apparently this also applies to food and when goodies are dumpstered and there isn’t enough to go around, privatization can be a problem. Jules from Twin Oaks published this post on our Facebook feed.
This post got quite a few comments–ranging from serious questions to humorous responses.
You can live in a commune, but folks were still raised in a capitalist culture, and sometimes a scarcity mentality prevails.
Feeding the HONK! activists
We dumpstered enough food to feed an entire festival. Here is how.
I am lucky enough to live at Glomus Commune with Theresa and Rachael and Telos and Sophia, all of whom are sitting together in the video. But there are also other communards who get involved the dumpster diving and the Honk! festival–Anande, who also lives here, and Jules, from Twin Oaks, are especially prominent in the video. It’s a way that we take our communal values out into the world. – Raven
Dumpster Mandala
Many communards are avid dumpster divers. Here’s what you get if you let a bunch of folks from the communes loose in a city. As Theresa says on the blurb that she wrote on the Commune Life YouTube channel: “food waste is real, friends”.
Peaches as a Marker of Time
East Brook Farm, the home of the Glomus Commune, was founded five years ago. One of the things that the founders did was plant peaches. We have reaped what they sowed.
There was only one comment, but I liked it.
