A Hippy for Four Days!
Viera & I are arriving at The Bullocks’ Brothers Permaculture Farm & Nursery long after their peak season for the year. During the Summer, there are about 20 interns and other assorted visitors from around the globe. My own impressions were coming to rest on the inspired notion that this was a very special place, seemingly imbued with the best intentions of back-to-the-landers and hippies from thirt years ago all the way up to the present day.
B-Brothers Sam & Doug truly look the part, wearing their slightly weather-beaten faces partly or covered in whole by salt n’ pepper beards. Jeans, flannel, fleece, caps and toques account for the rest of their typical garb for a life out-of-doors since they began husbandry over this land some thirty years ago. I hadn’t camped in a while, and I was taken aback by an interns advice that we take a sought-after camping spot beneath a huge spruce. Apparently, everyone had only moved back inside the several cabins onsite a few weeks before. I later on gazed in wide-eyed summer-camp satisfaction at the frame of a large tepee permanently staked into the ground, which is used a group gathering space and fire pit during the peak season. Some other first-impression detailing made themselves known, such as the unique composting outhouses, whose painted demeanor speaks of the unique personalities of their creators. I later found out that each of the eight or so outhouses gets moved after each of their respective pits is filled with human fertilizer for the gardens, easier than it would seem, since each one is only made of wood and bamboo-mat screens.
There are a number of greenhouses, the hub of human activity for cooking, meeting, and hanging out within the largest one with the most permanent moorings, which also serves as a sauna. I sampled the Sauna a couple of nights, wandering outside naked in the middle of the night without so much as a single goosebump from storing up so much heat in meditation beneath the cozy wooden walls.
As an aside, since I was on this sub-adventure with Viera away from the rest of the seven riders, I began to imagine the group and its activities as a living creature. I would later be mistaken, but at the time I imagined the two of us at the head of the creature, leading its head around with an adventure-carrot on a string to new and bizarre happenings, while Lucas resided in the infirmary-gut mending his sore knee, with the remainder of Kristi, Justin, and Garret at the tail-end, processing the creature’s food into blog-entries. Oh, and I guess Steve would be inhabiting one of the limbs, as he had been away as well, visiting friends on the other side of Victoria. What this analogy was intended to symbolize was that it’s still one group on a common mission, despite the wayward directions of its parts and the physical distances which sometimes form temporarily between them.
Saturdays’ work involved preparing recently cleared pond-front land for the growth of several non-native species of schrubs and trees, including Sechuan Peppers. Holes were dug with much humour and carrying on, then tree-cages were gathered, some additional chicken-wiring to protect from voles, and posts stuck in the ground for the tree-cages to hang on.
The second work day was for a totally different type of planting, the creation of holes with power-drills up the trunks of chopped birch logs for the insertion of mushroom mycelium plugs for the future growth of hopefully many upon many Shittake mushrooms.
We ate like land-kings & queens the whole time, the most memorable lunch was this day, a magnificent vegetable squash soap with leftover dahl from Sid inserted into fresh grilled-cheddar and sourdough sandwiches courtesy of Tatton.
In force here is the garden-forest type of plural culture, for there are many different types of plants growing here. There are a few dogs roaming the pathways between things, and many chickens behind their free-range fence.
From the B-Brothers Library, altered excerpts from ‘The Road Back to Nature’: The Author, of Japanese Origin, describes how Man should learn from the most short-lived creatures (the mayfly, for example, who dies after only three long days!) how to live, a day at a time, to our fullest, instead of dreading death, one hour at a time.
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