Dear Folks, Summer solstice! Last night the sun set way up at the northwest corner of the garden. Now it will start swinging slowly south again, though we won’t notice the shortening days for several weeks. Theoretically this is the first day of summer, but actually we’ve been living in a tropical rainforest for more than a week. “Welcome to Costa Rica!” I say to Stephen as we meet in the back yard, both coming from our gardens, both splotched with mud, both soaked from the warm drizzle landing on our heads.
It rained all last weekend while I was away (at a meeting in Shelburne and a community meeting, about which more later), and then, with the soil thoroughly soaked, the rain become torrential. One morning we got two inches in two hours. I could literally watch it rise in the rain gauge. Blow-Me-Down Brook swelled up and engulfed part of the CSA garden — gently, thank goodness, and it receded fast, so no permanent harm seems to have been done. A river ran down our woods-road, washing onto Daniels Road great piles of the gravel I had rather expensively re-covered it with just last year and leaving impassable gullies behind. My garden, in a bowl just down from the house, turned into quagmire. My daily potato-beetle search-and-destroy missions had to stop, as I sank in to my ankles on every step.
Well, what am I complaining about? All over the valley roads washed out and trees crashed down. We got off easy.
Here’s what I’m complaining about. I didn’t get into the garden for two weeks. Two weeks in June, with solstice-long growing days, with tropical levels of humidity, is a lot of time for weeds and bugs to get out of hand. It’s tough for a control freak like me to confront a garden like that, when she finally gets back into it.
That’s what happened yesterday. There’s nothing to do at such times but to start determinedly at one corner and take things one row at a time, trying not to think of the mess still ahead. A fine Zen exercise. Be with the corn when you’re hoeing the corn. Don’t be with the beans until you get to the beans.
Kim came out to help, which sweetened my mood considerably, because things were getting done at twice the pace. He weed-whacked the jungle that had grown on the central path and waded into the forest that was engulfing the asparagus — a job I would have gotten to last, because I could hardly bear to think about it. Meanwhile I hoed the corn, picked slugs off the kohlrabi, picked potato beetles off the potatoes, strung up higher support strings for the peas (which seem to be growing an inch a day), transplanted flowers.
Showers and sun alternated, we worked steadily. Slowly, as order was re-established row by row, I relaxed and just enjoyed being out there. The rains seem to have washed away the black flies and deer flies and even the mosquitoes (probably a temporary respite). There was a rose-breasted grosbeak warbling at me from one tree and a cardinal whistling from another and phoebes rasping from all over. An occasional gentle breeze lifted the humidity a bit. Thick piles of beautiful clouds scudded over. Butterflies danced. Whenever I felt the need for a reward, I could walk over and eat a fat, ripe strawberry.
Hey, life is good! Even weed-choked, slug-chewed gardens produce lots of goodies. We’re feasting on strawberries, kohlrabi, dill (three of my all-time favorites right there!), lettuce, chard, baby beets (yum!), scallions, turnips. We snacked on the very first peas yesterday, raw, right from the pod. The tomatoes are blooming and so are the potatoes, roses, mountain laurel, sweet William, valerian, sage, lilies, dianthus, pansies, petunias, peonies. As I weeded yesterday, I left behind in selected spots volunteers that I never have to buy seed for any more, because they come up on their own — sunflowers, calendula, dill, poppies, Johnny-jump-ups, larkspur.
So many blessings! All I need to do is slow down and appreciate them!
Well, knock on wood, the coyote has not dared come near the electric fence. Verbena and Viburnum, the twin daughters of Violet, the sheep that was killed, became, as bottle babies always do, my best friends. Whenever I go near the pasture, they come running, though I don’t give them bottles any more. Sometimes I bring them some grain, just to keep them friendly. They’re the smallest lambs in the flock, but they’re fat and happy and growing well. With all the rain their pasture is flourishing.
Mama duck hatched out six babies and then undid my slug-control plan. I had taken the drake and the other duck, the one that didn’t set, down to the pond, leaving the setting duck on her nest in the barn, intending to keep her and ducklings in the garden for the summer. I would give them a nice rubber pool and turn them loose on the slugs, which ducks love. That was the plan. So the day after the hatch, I moved the little family from the barn to a nice duck-hutch we have in the garden, gave them grain and water, and locked them in for a day, so they’d come to think of the hutch as home. The next morning I opened the door. The babies were tiny, and I figured it might take a day before mom would lead them out to discover the joys of the garden.
Well, that evening, driving back home I passed the pond, screeched to a halt, backed up, took a long look. There were FOUR ducks down there. Two I recognized as the drake and duck I had put there. I looked harder. One was clearly not a Khaki Campbell, it must be a wild duck, I finally concluded. And the fourth? I looked harder and saw six tiny fluffballs surrounding her.
How she got them down there, I’ll never know. She had to get them through the garden gate, avoiding the dogs, one of whom (Emmett) is, I’m sorry to say, a duck-lover in the very worst sense, walk them down the woods-road and along half a mile of Daniels Road with cars going by, then through another fence and down to the pond. Two-day-old ducklings, with legs about a quarter-inch long. Talk about epic journeys!
Well, they got down there, and though they’re right in coyote-land, they are still there, paddling around the pond like a close-formation armada, big mama ship and six baby ships. That’s one smart duck. I get to pluck off the slugs by hand and feed them to the chickens.
The early spring allowed Stephen and Kerry to start up CSA deliveries two weeks sooner than last year. They have two acres in cultivation and twenty-some families subscribing, plus the farmers market every Saturday and special orders from the food coop. It’s scramble time! Kerry’s sister Rachel is here for the summer to help out.
Jen Lemieux has covered our kitchen desk with a great tank full of cichlids, rare, many-colored African freshwater fish, for which she has a passion. She continues to bring beautiful glassware and pottery from Simon Pearce (and great vegan cooking!) into our kitchen. I think she should open the world’s first five-star vegan restaurant. Maybe at our new farm?
New farm. So much to say. This project is getting way beyond my ability to sum up once a month. We have eleven or twelve families (depending on how we count, out of 21 planned) signed up or ready to sign up. Email traffic among us consumes an hour or two of my time every day. We will be drilling for a well soon. Tomorrow we meet with a cost estimator, a wastewater engineer and an Act 250 regulator. I feel like I’m way over my head in talk about solar hot water, wood backup, composting toilets, and other “green infrastructure” stuff, which we lump under the label “systems.”
Some of us, such as me, are deeply interested in the systems, in going as far toward sustainability as possible. Others just trust that the systems will work out and are sweating over the challenge of making the place BEAUTIFUL. We all want it to be affordable; we all want it to be designed in a way that enhances community. It SHOULD be that these values all enhance each other. Community should make things more affordable, and so, in the long run, should energy and water efficiency. Nothing ugly is really sustainable. It should all work. But it takes so much thinking, so much creativity, to find the synergies.
Discussion, discussion, discussion. Someone said you should never join a co-housing group if you hate meetings, which is true, but meetings, if they’re done right, are not hateful; they’re the opportunity to know each other, to learn, to grow. So, though I don’t love meetings, I don’t hate THESE meetings; they just seem to be part of the task, necessary to benefit from the creativity and sensitivity of all these good minds and hearts. I keep telling myself we’ll need many fewer meetings when we’re actually living together, but I may be kidding myself about that.
Maybe you’ll be amused by the report of the last meeting as I wrote it up for the email:
INDIVIDUAL UNITS — Jeff talked us through a program list of basic design elements (size of units with increasing #s of bedrooms, congregate possibilities, etc.) and showed us a number of sketches to present the primary design alternatives with regard to roof-lines, half-sunk basements, structure width. He also showed, throughout the day, slides of actual examples from all over, some of which we’d seen before but are now seeing in new light, others of which were new. (He has a neat new book of “cottage houses” that had some appealing examples.)
We responded (this was pretty much the pattern of the day) with random spontaneous reactions (too high, too low, too much like a condominium, yeah I like that!). We got faster at this. (Thumbs up, thumbs neutral, thumbs down.) There was often disagreement, but we’re getting better at asking what’s the disagreement actually ABOUT and finding the underlying buttons that designs push. (Marie reacts against the word “typical,” Peter F responds to elegant design details and natural materials, I see the plantings around the building more than the building.) For the first time in my experience, we seemed to be homing in on something approaching a common taste, which was not a lowest common denominator. (It will be interesting to see if the design team came to the same conclusion!)
Our solar requirement puts some tight constraints on roof design. We had some enlightening discussion about overhangs and snow-dumps. We seem to be in good agreement about keeping units small. We seem to be going for basements, but not walk-in basements if they push the building too high and vertical. We don’t seem to like salt-box or gambrel roofs on houses (though maybe OK on common house).
We invented the term “weekend warrior” for those of us who would like to leave interiors unfinished and finish them ourselves on our own time and money budgets.
This was only a very preliminary discussion on our individual units, which we’ll work on more in the fall. I guess Jeff purposely started with the farthest-off deadlines and then worked us toward the more urgent decisions.
COMMON HOUSE — same general pattern of discussion. We learned about “cut-out” as opposed to “add-on” as opposed to basic block designs and why some are cheaper than others. (We liked “add-on” best, which is, of course, the most expensive.)
We moved the sauna out of the common house and nearer the pond and made it a weekend warrior task. We discussed the possibility of combining functions such as library and dining room to save space. We had the dining room opening to other things in too many different directions (kitchen, children’s play room, porch, auxiliary dining rooms) — what should be on the south, north, east? We decided the office/foyer didn’t need to be very big or elaborate. We decided the teenagers should design (and build) their own space. (Maybe a yurt? Some of the rest of us would like to be included! Honorary teen-agers?)
We got stuck on access and elevators and on number and placement of guest rooms, and I personally think we designed in too few toilets. (She who writes up the minutes gets to put in her personal digs.) Decided (I think) to design in space for a lift, maybe wrapped inside a stairwell, though we may not be able to afford the lift at first.
Given that we’re doing the impossible, namely building the common house first, we may decide to build minimally, with an expansion plan in mind.
We agreed that laundries (which may be in common house or shared by individual house “pods”) ought to be pleasant, social places, not dumps in a windowless corner of a basement.
There was a lot of good talk, but little certainty, about what has made common houses in other cohos well used or little used. Some of us hope that pouring our resources into the ch will make it so wonderful that everyone will want to be there. Others pointed out gold-plated chs in cohos that are little used.
We mused about “great rooms,” high ceilings, “cathedrals” and decided they’re energy-inefficient and pretentious and we don’t need one.
Sounds like we’re designing a slightly too-small dining room for everyone all at once, but adjoining niches or rooms that can be used for smaller dining groups, overflow, or other purposes.
Sounds like a commitment to food storage space, root cellars, walk-in freezers & coolers, or was that just my bias?
No completion on the idea of some living units in or attached to common house. That could have significant code implications, requiring sprinkler systems, etc. — have to get more facts here. Didn’t get into details of kitchen.
Hmmm, that’s all I remember.
SITE AND LAYOUT — Here’s the big one, which has to be settled yesterday, one that had begun to look like it was polarizing. Lots of really good talk here, people with different opinions doing their very best to articulate their reasons, people listening carefully and sympathetically.
Jeff & co. had made a helpful matrix of all the issues (driveway cost, utilities cost, view out from our community, view of our community from the surrounds, driving and parking implications, size and soil character, water & wastewater flows, etc.) and evaluated them for 3 sites (the high road, the low road, and the middle road). Seemed, with a lot of unknowns, to boil down to $30-50,000 more for the uppermost site, which we all realized is only 2% of the cost of the whole project, but $2000 per family, and of course also spendable on solar collectors or something else.
It’s my impression that cost wasn’t the deciding factor, though, as the discussion went on, because there were more compelling reasons to choose the cheaper site, which was where the decision finally converged. The main factors seemed to be a desire to minimize driveway and driving and to relate more closely with the farm and the town, to keep things within walking distance, especially for kids and older people. Also, some of the great characteristics of the upper site could (all but the beautiful view from up there) be duplicated or at least approximated in the lower site — the necessity for tight clustering, the screening trees, the protective “nesting” into the land that the upper saddle invites.
Consensus gradually grew for the lower site, with some important caveats — to keep the clustering, to work very hard on the layout and detailing (such as defining stone walls, paths, and gardens, and screening trees) that will make the (currently rather bare and ugly) site wonderfully beautiful — and to keep the upper site for community magic of some kind.
The discussion really got good when a lot of us, not just Jeff, started arranging the little clay houses on the cardboard contours, trying to make the cluster scheme Peter had worked out for the upper site fit graciously onto the land in the lower site.
About layout, we seem to agree that rooflines and buildings need to be at angles and various, no cooky-cutter condominium look. The solar aspect is important. The commonhouse is “ours” and should be central, while at the same time so dominant, obvious, and accessible that visitors naturally go there first. We haven’t come down firmly yet on “single-sided street,” “double-sided fat&thin street,” “common courtyard,” “several small courtyards,” or a new one we came up with, “pinwheel.” My guess is that we haven’t strong preferences among these, that it depends mainly on the fit to the contour of the hill, the road layout, the solar access, and other practical considerations.
FINANCES — DPs only. The always-alert finance committee chairman presented the cash-flow spreadsheets for the design & permitting phase, which show serious deficits as soon as this August (assuming only the present seven fully-cleared member households, and assuming the second capitalization payments come only next April, which is after most of the work will be done.) Part of the problem comes because much of the design and engineering (hydrology and well drilling, etc.) comes far up-front in the process (meaning now), because it has to be done in order to start what could be year-long permitting processes.
There was a constructive discussion of how to fix this, which boiled down to a multi-prong approach. Most of the DPs will be able to put in some or all of their second capitalization payments earlier than next spring. Several PDP (pre-DP) families are well on their way through the clearness process and will probably join us before August. We agreed to advertise more widely and also to work more systematically with newcomers and CPs to be sure they move toward commitment where appropriate — without any pushing or hurrying, because the membership decision is far too crucial to be rushed by money considerations. (High intention, no hurrying — good Zen koan!) We agreed that the major aim is to get the planning at least to the point of applying for the permits, so they can grind along. If, at that point, we have to delay the remainder of the architectural design for awhile, so be it. Though it was pointed out that in New England, delaying construction starts for a few months could mean delaying them essentially for a year.
On the basis of our new plan, Phil will redo the cash-flow plan and see whether we planned ourselves out of trouble. For sure we delayed the trouble significantly.
CONFLICT RESOLUTION — We were too exhausted to talk about conflict resolution, having just had a great day of resolving conflicts. Postponed till next month.
You’d think that a person who is having so much trouble planning a community would never think of trying to plan the whole Vermont economy, but you’d be wrong. I happily went up to Shelburne Farms on Lake Champlain last weekend for an epic meeting about a sustainable Vermont, called together by so many of my sustainability buddies that I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. John and Nancy Todd and Will Raap were the major motors, I believe, and they invited me, Amory Lovins, David Orr, Ray Anderson of the Interface carpet company (about whom I have written a column — actually I’ve written columns about all these characters). Paul Hawken was the only one who couldn’t manage to get there. The facilitators were Alan AtKisson (of the Balaton Group) and Ellen Furnari and Peter Forbes of our new community (among other things). So it was a great group of friends.
We spent two days with about 50 Vermont movers and shakers (including the mayor of Burlington, the owner of the Rutland Herald, the director of the Agency of Natural Resources, the head of the Vermont Land Trust, several utility owners and other business people, government people, environmentalists, etc.). Vermont is a small state and these people had run into each other, often literally, in many contentious settings. But “let’s drop our baggage at the door,” they said, and “let’s tell the truth about our state,” and “let’s think about the good of the children,” and “let’s admit that we have an underlying class issue that we never properly acknowledge.” It was so refreshing to work with them. Even when their differences came out, they came out constructively, not destructively. Some action plans for real change emerged — they’ll require follow-up, but some of them will definitely happen. Most important, a crucial conversation was started, among people who will by their very nature carry it throughout the state.
The most visually memorable part of the exercise was the public meeting in the Shelburne Farms Breeding Barn. That barn is one of my favorite buildings in the world; it’s HUGE! Think of the biggest barn you’ve ever seen, multiply it by somewhere between 20 and 50, and you’ll have the Breeding Barn, a beautiful wood structure, built 100 years ago by a multimillionaire to house his prize horses. It has just been restored, and this was its first use for a public event. Over 600 people showed up on a Friday afternoon, just to hear Amory and John T and David and Ray (and me) and the others give short speeches. (600 people fill up maybe 1/4 of the floor area of that barn.) Everyone was wowed by that response — hey, a LOT of Vermonters care about this sustainability stuff! Senator Leahy gave an opening talk, and former Senator Strafford sat in the front row, and all the politicians in the crowd took note of the turnout.
It was so great to see such a festive gathering in that great barn on that topic! As I said in my talk, I really think that if any state can lead the way to a truly sustainable society, Vermont can. So many of the pieces are already there (organic farmers, green architects, alternative energy experimenters, serious foresters, people who know how to live without conspicuous consumption, even Thich Nhat Hanh!)
Makes me so excited that I’m about to be a Vermonter!
Love, Dana
