What a fun week we just had at Dancing Rabbit!
This is Sam, and a big part of my week has been moving forward with the selection of our first Village Council. Teresa and I are in charge of guiding the group through the process we have agreed to for choosing seven people from among the residents and members of Dancing Rabbit to represent us in decision making. It’s a multi-step process involving spreadsheets of characteristics both of individual council members and possible council slates, and spreadsheets reflecting each potential council member and how their peers think they are suited for the job, and whether or not each individual is willing to serve the village in this way this year. It’s complicated and fun. Teresa and I are discovering all sorts of nuances we hadn’t foreseen that will hopefully make this process easier for whoever has this job the next time we select a Village Council.
Kody took a little break this past week from his new after school business of selling ice cream cones in order to do a couple of hours of garlic mustard eradication. The village of Dancing Rabbit offers credit toward our utility bills for time spent pulling up this invasive plant for the good of all. It comes up pretty easily from the damp soils in the draws, which is nice. It spreads like crazy and pushes out plants more appropriate for the area, which is not so nice. It’s also delicious, which give us a pleasant bonus for spending an afternoon hanging out in the woods chatting about plants and other wildlife. All ’round, it’s a pretty swell way for a a second grader and his mama to pass an afternoon or few. I feel grateful for the opportunity; Thanks, garlic mustard!
With the (sometimes) warm, wet weather, a variety of plants are making themselves known to us now. It’s interesting to me how each of us makes decisions about the relative value of different plants in different places. Wild parsnip has a delicious root, providing an early food source in spring, but the leaves give me phytophoto dermatitis, an intensely painful reaction I wish to avoid, so I discourage it from growing anywhere I’m likely to find myself. Lambsquarters is an abundant source of nutrition later in the season, grows easily, and is easy to get rid of once you’re done enjoying its leaves, but there’s just so much of it and it grows so tall, we can’t let it just take over the garden beds it grows best in. Mint is refreshing in tea, has medicinal uses, and looks nice, but it tends to spread underground and can be hard to contain. Mountain mint (aka hen bit) is pretty, makes a mediocre tea, and keeps taller, deeper rooted, weeds at bay, but it spreads insidiously and bothers our farmer neighbors so much I’m not sure how much of it I want to see in my garden’s paths and vacant beds.
All of these plants, and all the ones I didn’t mention, take carbon out of the air and put breathable oxygen in. If we let them grow a bit before pulling them, they can put that carbon back into the ground to build our unfortunately depleted soil back up. The long-rooted grasses I was complaining about last time I wrote this column help us even more by pulling nutrients up from deep in the ground, enriching the compost pile. Good plant? Bad plant? It’s not that simple. The question is: How appropriate is the plant for the environment and in combination with the other parts of the system it’s in?
Choosing a group of folks to serve on the village council has some similarities, I’m noticing, to choosing which plants to let grow in my yard and garden. We did gather information about how “good” each person thinks each other person would be on the council, but that’s just one piece of information. The final slate of people will be chosen as a package, after considering things like how the people on it interact with each other, how representative that small group is of the village as a whole, and how well that group covers the diverse skills we want on the council. In the end we should have a rich and balanced decision-making body.
Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an intentional community of more than 60 members in Rutledge, northeast Missouri, practicing ecologically sustainable living. We offer a tour of our village on the second and fourth Saturdays of the month, April through October, with the next tour date falling on May 11th. The tour begins at 1:00 pm and generally lasts one and a half to two hours. You do not need to make a reservation for regularly scheduled Saturday tours. If you need directions, please call the Dancing Rabbit office at 660-883-5511 or email us at dancingrabbit@ic.org.