200 Trees

As many of you know we are hard at work raising funds for an Indiegogo campaign.....

But what isn't obvious from this campaign page is an amazing donation we got this week from Versaland Farm in Iowa City. Grant called us, knowing we'd probably buy a lot of the stock from him anyway, and offered to donate 200 trees to the project. He also gave us some tree guards and sold us stakes at cost.We toured his farm and saw his adorable Kune Kune Ossabaw cross pigs. The hills were lined with trees from his tree mob planting project this summer. Amazing.

These pictures are from his farm. This is what our planting will look like very soon. Our project wasn't going i the ground until 2015, but these sweet trees have to go in right now. This is an amazing gift. We are very grateful and even though it doesn't look like it on our fundraising page, this puts us at 20% of our goal of 1000 trees in the ground. Thank you Grant!

If you have a donation that isn't dollars that you'd like to make, let us know. Much of Permaculture is about giving what you have and creating relationships. 

In honour of Grant's donation we are adding a donation category for 10$ (our previous lowest one was $25). 10$ will buy one tree, just the tree.  Many of us farmers and farm fans are on tight budgets. We are hoping that 10$ isn't too much. The option is at the bottom of the perk page.

That said, if you know a family that has a child in the hospital or a neighbor that is struggling, we encourage you to spend your charity with them. As parents of a special needs, medically fragile child, I know that the holidays are the hardest and medical bills pile up. If you find yourself with a choice, please do not hesitate to put your $$ to use close to home. Part of my hesitation for creating a funding effort for our tree planting was knowing that our close friends are raising money for medical needs. It took a lot for me to get to the point that I could make this campaign, thinking about their needs while we want to plant trees.

So those are my thoughts today. Get out there, do good in the world. That's a seed worth planting!

Halloweeny Fun

Day Three in Prague: In which I demonstrate that I can actually take decent architectural photos.......

Day three was so overwhelming and amazing that I can't even remember what I ate. Seriously. Ok, Actually I think I had eggs for breakfast with an amazing Czech bread for toast and then frozen cheese on a stick later.....but I know there was other food somewhere in the day and I cannot remember it at all. Why? Architecture. All of it. And the history. This first picture is the place where thousands of people gathered for the Velvet revolution, Wenceslas_Square, but it was also the site of a great many historical gatherings and protests. The sense of greatness and historical importance was dense in the air.

Day Two in Prague

Day two. I slept most of it. Yes I did. I could not sleep the night before. I got up at lunch time and washed my hair, then spent about 45 minutes trying to clean the purple out of my friend's bathroom. Freaking poor planning on my part- freshly dyed hair + staying at someone else's place= frantic cleaning. I did remember to bring my own pillow case and towel though (always travel with a towel because...).  

Day two was spent studying maps, making lists of places I wanted to visit, writing, and getting grounded. Plus, Adrienne had to work and I did not yet have a key to the flat. When she returned we headed out.

Dinner was an amazing beef and gravy dumpling plate and aloe vera tea and then we headed out to a Pub Quiz! Ha. It was fun and I got to use my mad trivia skills....also humbled by my lack of pop culture knowledge in general.....though I did correctly identify Kurt Cobain as a kid.

This was the first time I started noticing the beautiful tattooed doors, but did not yet think to photograph them. Actually, this day I was still getting my artistic mind around how to photograph buildings again. My first job out of college was survey work for the State Historical Preservation Office, taking digital photos of buildings. I even had a portfolio of churches and commercial buildings, but it has been over a decade that I have mostly taken action and macro shots of flora and fauna on the farm and my children. It is a very different kind of photography and requires a different eye. I am posting these terrible shots from my second day as record of the progress I made artistically.