Taking time to think about which traditions we want to continue and bring along with us is something I spend a fair amount of time pondering, especially this time of year. We often continue participating in traditions for many reasons: out of habit, comfort, nostalgia, a sense of place, and our beliefs, amongst others. We all want to live in a world that becomes better over time; maybe one that is more peaceful, healthier, more loving, more abundant, and more empathetic. However, we often carry on with practices which are often not those things.
Our culture is often one that when compared to others can sometimes seem scattered, broken, and lacking in meaningful traditions, rites, and rituals. Besides various religious options, we are left with getting a diver's license at 16 and having a drink at 21. Perhaps we lack events that placehold for us, guide us, or even mature us. Instead, we often hold onto aspects that are not beneficial to ourselves and to others.
I find myself celebrating times in life that are not so much tied to deep meaning, but instead a cultural habit that was created in different times. Who created these and why? I know there are good aspects to our celebration but can we take the good from these, acknowledge the bad, and create better?
We are led to be dependent on food, energy, and political systems that are not regenerative, let alone sustainable. Ones that are built on extraction and domination instead of cooperation. If we are to build a future of peace, health, love, and abundance we will need to design our way into it. This will mean leaving some things behind while also acknowledging and reconciling this country's and others' histories of indegenous murder and erasement.
I want to share genuine gratefulness and appreciation with my communities, and hope we can create one that all can share in.
Maybe we learn to celebrate thankfulness and gratitude in a new way. One that has been built with the intention of cooperation and creation of community. One that asks for forgiveness and guidance. Humbling ourselves and deeply thanking the cultures that have respected the earth is critical, as well as thanking our families, friends, and those who work to provide us our food, shelter, and resources.
Thank you,
Joe Kilcoyne
Wild Earth Farm
From the Sanctuary Desk: Give back to Wild Earth on Giving Tuesday
"Giving Tuesday is a global movement that unleashes the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world." (Wikipedia)
Giving Tuesday refers to the Tuesday after Thanksgiving and was created as a response to commercialization and consumerism in the post-Thanksgiving season (Black Friday/Cyber Monday). On Giving Tuesday we give back to nonprofits which are working for positive change. Your contribution to our nonprofit, Wild Earth Sanctuary, will directly support our efforts to rescue animals from abuse, teach eco-friendly sustainable living, and create an outdoor classroom environment with living examples of methods to help fight the climate crisis. Animals are rescued from deplorable situations in rural Appalachia and given life-long care on the sanctuary. Wild Earth Sanctuary provides education on such important subjects as organic growing, no-till gardening, rainwater harvesting, composting, veganics, solar and alternative energy, permaculture, wild foods, starting your own microsanctuary, and animal caregiving, which are key to creating a more compassionate and sustainable world.
Your valuable contribution will make a big impact, whether you donate $20 or $500. Every donation is important, and the dogs, cats, pigs, chickens, ducks and turtles housed at the sanctuary need you. Thank you for your support! (Facebook pays all the processing fees for you, so 100% of your donation goes directly to Wild Earth Sanctuary, Inc.)
Prefer to support Wild Earth in other ways? Here are some ideas.
With Gratitude,
Heather Patrick
Wild Earth Sanctuar
Cool Winds & Leaf Piles (From the Farm Desk)
There is something about the fall that has always felt wonderful to me. The feel of cooler winds across my face is a sensation I love. This time of year always feels brief and fleeting, which more acutely has me feeling both nostalgic and alive at the same time. Days that can be warm and sunny turn to nights that quickly remind you winter is coming, creating a sense of savoring the sun's rays.
In recent years I have taken to the idea of embracing the cold more. Feeling and listening to it and learning about the lessons this powerful force of nature holds. As the temperatures begin to cool down, I have delayed the impulse to quickly add layers. Feeling the cold and letting my body adapt to the changes has been pleasantly worthwhile.
The sight and sound of leaves blowing to their resting place is a reminder of time passing and moving on. Gather some of those leaves up to add to the gardens and compost piles. Imagine forests abundant with life with no additional inputs. Leaves fall onto the ecosystem of the forest floor, decomposing and adding to the fertility of the soil and ground cover. A forest covers the soil and protects it.
As you are closing out your gardens for the season, are you covering the soil you work hard to build and replenish? Think about the protection and building of the soil like a forest by continually adding layers of organic matter and mimicking this in your garden beds. You may also choose to save some dry leaves as carbon inputs to your spring and summer compost. Shredding the leaves can speed up the decomposition. You can even plant and grow certain vegetables, such as winter squash, in a pile of partially broken down leaves.
As you work on your gardens and yards, listen to the trees and the natural cycles working to prepare for the cold weather, the cycles that are also preparing for new growth after the passing of the cold.
Happy Fall,
Joe Kilcoyne
Wild Earth Farm LLC
Creating Your Food Preparedness Plan (From the Farm Desk)
Food ranks high on the list of importance in a preparedness plan. Most of us have experienced the effects of an empty belly and how that can change our attitude, perception, and mood. Your decision-making skills may be worse while hungry. With instability and uncertainty all around us, spend some time thinking about what it looks like to have a plan that includes food for you, your family, and your community. Are you in a position to live without going to a grocery for a day, a week, a month, or even multiple months? Do you want to improve your storage? Can you network in your community to create more resiliency for yourself and others? Let's look at some of the key issues that can help us create a plan to accomplish this.
Some of the variables to consider are the type of food, and how to store it, and how to prepare it. For instance, if you are preparing an emergency bag for your vehicle or workplace you may store some protein bars or ready-made meals which don’t require much preparation. On the other hand, your home food preparedness plan will contain a larger variety of options including long-term dry pantry goods that may require rehydrating and/or cooking.
You will have to determine your needs and ability for a variety of situations. How many people are dependent on you? Does anyone have dietary needs? If someone is vegan or has a food allergy, it makes sense to depend on your own storage rather than hope that emergency services will happen to have food for you. Medication and supplement needs should be examined as well. Having extra medication might be a necessity if it is life sustaining. Long term food storage can be found from companies that provide food with a shelf life of 40 years, like rice, beans, grains, etc.
Some options for preserving and storing fresh food include freezing, canning, root cellaring, dehydrating, fermenting, and pickling. You can store foods from your garden or orchard, and still have fresh ingredients for many months by growing your own. Establishing a backyard garden is a great little storage plan, but you can also stock up by visiting a farmers market during the season and buying extra produce, fresh and in season, for preserving at home.
There are many books to check out for the how-to for any of those techniques. Some require more work or skill than others, but most of us can come up with a plan within our abilities that will give ourselves and our community at least a little more resiliency and redundancy when it comes to depending on food systems. By learning these skills you can have food stored for an emergency without having to buy more expensive preserved options. Group buys with others can bring the cost down to buying bulk food. One of the words of advice passed down is eat what you store and store what you eat. Living by that can save money because you can intentionally buy in bulk for a cheaper price that you store and gradually use that supply and replace it.
Many communities host seed swaps where you can get seeds for free without any expectation of bringing seeds to share yourself. Tons of gardeners and growers are happy to share seeds with others for nothing physical in return. Some communities have year-round seed libraries you can access for free. If you can’t find a seed swap or seed library in your area, try starting one!
Nominate Wild Earth ASAP and We Could Win a Grant! (From the Sanctuary Desk)
With your nomination, our animal sanctuary could receive a much-needed $25,000 grant! Tractor Supply is offering one grant to each of eight different kinds of animal rescue organizations. All you need to do is click here, upload a photo of an animal (more on that below) and nominate Wild Earth Farm and Sanctuary in the "Animal Sanctuary (LIivestock/Farm)" category.
Submissions must be completed before midnight on Tuesday, September 15th so please take a moment to nominate us now.
The other information you will need to enter is our city, state, phone number and email address:
Irvine, KY
859-412-2092
wildearthfarm@gmail.com
If you don't already have photos, you can download photos from our Facebook, Instagram or website.
This grant would mean so much to us and the funds would be used for veterinary bills, repairs, fencing, hay, andimal feed and supplies, and a new barn roof. Thank you so much for nominating us!
A Time for Listening (From the Farm Desk)
Listening is a skill that sometimes seems forgotten, tossed aside for the skill of talking or debating. We tend to like to offer our own opinion and experiences. However, listening is a must in order to cultivate true understanding and empathy for people around us and in far away places. It often seems that we don’t listen, but instead react. It seems an even harder skill to listen to people who have different experiences and opinions than ourselves. Really listening to someone instead of just thinking about what you want to say next. Slowing down to comprehend and process the words. Having patience to hear them out. Having humility to ask if you do not understand. Generally, I think we all want to be understood, so take that feeling within yourself and extend it to others, who also want to be understood. Words can be messy and emotions can charge a conversation, but if we can practice listening I think we are going to come out the other side with increased compassion, empathy, and more knowledge. Social media often seems charged on responding, as that is what is rewarded. How can we better listen to people in that space? How can we better listen to people standing in front of us?
As a white man in this world, I need to do a better job listening to black voices, brown voices, women’s voices. Listening to the voices of different experiences and struggles. The voices of different perspectives and concerns. There is no shortage of opportunities to do this nowadays, with the internet making the world a smaller place and more accessible to information.
There’s a book called Farming While Black. We have not read it yet, but are ordering ourselves copies of it. Even though we can’t offer any words recommending it from a perspective of having read it, the book stands out as a powerful and needed study on race and farming. We are enthusiastically waiting to have it in our hands.
How do we listen better? We can seek out resources from people who are asking us to listen. We can physically listen instead of talking more. We can examine our own issues and work on them in order to better be present for others. We can act in service of the others and listen to stories.
- Joe Kilcoyne
Wild Earth Farm Founder
Summer on the Farm Sanctuary (From the Sanctuary Desk)
Hi supporters of Wild Earth! Intern Abby here to tell you about what has been going on around the farm and sanctuary since my arrival in May.
We tentatively started having our volunteer weekends again, with great success. Volunteers converged from near and far to install a much-needed new fence for the ducks, made firewood bundles for future campers at the Wild Earth B&B, groomed the rescued dogs, built a hugelkultur bed to regenerate eroded soil, flipped the veganic compost, prepped cardboard for sheet mulching in our no-till garden, chopped wood, and designed new permanent beds for our Mike Durschmid Memorial Permaculture Pollinator Garden. We are so excited to start planting our fall and perennial crops in the memorial garden! As always, we are eternally thankful for our volunteers. We are a 100 percent volunteer-run project, and wouldn’t exist without caring individuals donating their time to the farm and sanctuary.
During my internship, I cultivated organic tomatoes, beans, peppers, cucumbers, and melons. Our spring crops flourished (and have been delicious!), and include sunflowers, blackberries, raspberries, blueberries, okra, squash, strawberries, corn, peas, garlic, canna lilies, kale, chard, spinach, cabbage, cauliflower, sage, oregano, and mint. Much of the produce grown on the farm is shared with our sanctuary animals--we love that they eat fresh from the farm! Our pigs are looking forward to more tomatoes, our chickens are snacking on sunflowers, and our ducks have their daily greens. Even the dogs have been known to gobble a few choice berries! Our biggest harvest was our heirloom elephant garlic, which took three full days of harvesting, and is currently curing in the hayloft.
I foraged for wild blackberries which grow in abundance on the land, and it has been a great opportunity to explore Wild Earth’s 200 acres. I came across various snakes, spiders, turtles, insects, toads, frogs, scorpions, moles, mice, birds, skinks, and a rat this summer. I have enjoyed meeting the wildlife in the area and relocating some to safer areas!
We replenished our sawdust supply (used for our composting toilets), from a local saw mill. It was great to directly see full circle the process of the local economy and its products. Unfortunately, we have been suffering from a drought and that is bad news, as we rely on a 100% rainwater system for Wild Earth’s daily needs. The rainwater cisterns and tanks around the farm and animal barns are very low and, for the first time ever, we have had to go to a nearby spring to haul water. We are finding creative ways to deal with the problem.
The weather has become hotter and hotter here and therefore pools have become a common love for the sanctuary residents. There have been a few changes to the animals’ routines and social structures. The pigs were all moved to one living area. This spring, Stella had been separated from Henry and Dillinger for a few months due to some hard feelings amongst the trio. They are all doing really well now and again enjoying their time together. Cassidy the duck (being the only female), decided it was best to leave the boys behind and hang out with the pigs. Virginia, the oldest hen of the flock, soon joined Cassidy. The pig barn has now become the Cassidy, Virginia, and the pigs barn, and although they have separate areas where they sleep and eat, you can hear contented clucks, quacks, and oinks as they all settle down for the night as new friends.
-Abby Roll
Wild Earth Sanctuary Intern
Pondering resiliency, preparedness, and permaculture (from the farm desk)
Designing and creating communities or redesigning and reworking existing ones around concepts that can leave us in a better place, regardless of the social crisis, is imperative. This can be done in ways that will leave you and your community better off, in an emergency or not.
By preparedness, we aren't talking about contributing to a shortage of toilet paper. (By the way, give me a long term supply of soap and water over a limited stash of toilet paper, any day.) Also worth noting is that people who have prepared ahead of time did not contribute to this problem. They had already purchased a supply of toilet paper in line with their preparedness plan months before a shortage in stores. What lead to a shortage of toilet paper was panic buying fueled by group fear which then exposed a supply chain fault.
How do we avoid this? For both our own calm and for the well-being of our community? By having toilet paper ahead of time, one need not take what may be someone else's last available roll.
Through a permaculture lens? Toilet paper will mostly fall under material capital in the 8 forms of capital.
If you are not yet familiar with the 8 forms of capital, it is a framework that values diversifying resource. For an in-depth understanding, please check out Appleseed Permaculture's work on the topic. By paying attention to the different forms we change what sometimes feels like the overwhelming power of financial capital and places it on equal ground with other forms that you call upon and continuously work through.
We will cover these in more depth in later newsletters, but the 8 forms include Financial, Social, Spirituality, Material, Experiential, Living, Intellectual, and Cultural, In place of the material toilet paper, you may have the social capital that would have a friend share some with you. You may have the experience to know you don't need it, but can wash instead. You may have cultural knowledge that understands other ways around the world this problem is solved. Living capital can be the plants you have planted that have leaves perfect to replace toilet paper (and if you are practicing humanure, will add to compost). Think about these as options to build a resiliency, and preparedness that not only leaves you with more, but your community with more, as you have provided and shared more of yourself in return.
To the spring gardens,
Joe Kilcoyne, Co-Founder
Spring musings, event updates, and thanks! (From the Sanctuary Desk)
Spring is always an exciting time of year. The trees slowly begin to wake up and their canopies begin to fill in with an array of shapes and colors. Spring edibles pop up all around and provide a welcome addition to meals. The constant chirping of birds fills the air, weather favors warmer days, and everything is eager to bloom.
A number of projects were taken this spring. More lawn was dug up and converted to a large garden area and planted with vegetables and flowers. The swale (which was built by two groups of vegan permaculture students) needed a bit of a makeover, and is now home to a number of highbush blueberry plants with various spring vegetables interplanted. Red raspberries were planted into a hugelkultur bed that will provide much-needed nutrients to the plants as the buried wood breaks down. The fig tree garden was adorned with dozens of spring flower bulbs.
The kitchen garden was expanded with raised beds using scrap lumber repurposed from previous projects. We started two new square foot gardens, a container garden, and a straw-bale garden. A visitor to the farm sanctuary will be able to learn many paths to resilience, food security, and veganic eating, whether they live in a crowded urban area, or have a suburban plot that needs a permaculture transformation.
During these times, planting gardens, growing food, and making the most use of what we have is proving to be more important than ever.
Warmly,
Jason Huska, Volunteer
Heather Patrick, Co-Founder
BUILDING COMMUNITY RESILIENCE IN COVID-19 TIMES (FROM THE FARM DESK)
This letter is being sent to you during a time in which Covid-19 has caused the world to pause. We hope this letter finds you well, but the truth is we know that many of us are struggling with a myriad of problems, or even with overwhelming heartbreak. Wherever this finds you please know that you are not alone in the physical or mental state you are experiencing. As part of the Wild Earth community, we want you to know how important you are to us.
Instead of our regular newsletter we find it more appropriate to acknowledge this is not a regular newsletter.
During these times, we may know someone who is scared and uncertain of what lies ahead. Maybe that someone is in our household, or is a neighbor we have barely spoken to before. That person might be trying to stay strong through this, while inside they are afraid of what may come.
Community is a winding path that can hopefully lead us through this, or at least help us navigate the future. Let’s show empathy and courage, in the face of whatever may be shown to us. We have power in each of our communities that is profound, and is outside of government or corporate hands. Check in on each other and offer help if you can without expecting anything in return. At the same time, take care of yourself, acknowledge limits and needs, and ask for help if needed.
Many of us have time to work on projects that have sat idle, read books that have sat dusty, and check off things on a to do list that we always wanted extra days to take care of. However, at the same time, we have not experienced any other time in our own lives quite like this. Let’s not be hard on ourselves or each other. Many of us need this time to unplug, zone out, day dream, or rest. Some of us are just trying to survive.
At times we feel productive and should be, and at other times we need to rest and we should. So much importance and pressure is put on us to be busy, accomplish things, and get it all done. As minutes and hours of our lives go by, it is just as important to sit, be quiet, watch a squirrel scurry about, or a flower bloom. What is important is true happiness, and we each find that for ourselves.
We learn a lot about people when they are uncomfortable. We are all learning a lot about ourselves, and we will learn a lot about people who are in positions of government. Some things are going to surprise us, both good and bad. We have an unique moment to practice the values and principles we hold high. We have a tremendous opportunity to learn what will make our communities more resilient. Let’s be on the right side of that in our own story, as well as our community’s story. Please remember to consider all the nuances as we navigate the information coming to us and consider how we can come together to solve problems.
Please consider joining a CSA near you this year. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Farms run their own CSA a little differently from each other, but the model is generally this: You choose a share (sometimes you have the option of choosing a size). You then get that box of fresh produce weekly (sometimes you can choose every other week or twice a week). In most cases you pay the farmer up front at the start of the season (some offer payment plans). This is a way of investing in the risks and rewards of the year with your farmer. Share sizes and what is in the box sometimes fluctuate based on growing seasons, so some patience and adventure is recommended. This is a great way to get your food from a farmer who you can develop a relationship with. Also, with an uncertain year ahead of us, you will have direct access to food even if supply chains become strained. It’s one way to make our communities more resilient!
Here’s an example of a CSA - one of our favorites since we used to manage it! For a listing of CSAs, you can check this listing out, although it’s not all encompassing. Also, you can google “Organic CSA near me” for more options close to you!
To the blooming flowers,
Joe Kilcoyne
Co-founder