Hello friends, welcome to our new newsletter  “The Standing Stone”!

First, we would like to thank everyone for their patronage and help over the years. We are grateful to you not just for your the physical help and the money, but something bigger. The help and money keeps the Little Black Bear centre running and has enabled living projects like the cob earthship or the no-till gardens. But perhaps the greater gift is in your giving and openness you have given us all hope to carry on and are living proof that an alternative “community” does exist, however spread out we may be over this land.

   I see now the beautiful open exchange that happens at the workshops is seeding our future, the actions and spirit of the workshops feeding the Earth and our ancestors. During these weeks we become what we are meant to be, a conduit of the ancestors to future generations. When we’re pushing buttons or talking on the phone, as many of us do all day to make a living, we cannot feed and embody our ancestral wisdom; they don’t recognize what we are doing.  Similarly the children of today who only know man-made environments and a virtual life through technology cannot embody the ancestors. We need to be a bridge for them.
 

   Each year the folks who come to the farm are getting more and more knowledgeable and aware of what is really going on here on Earth. With our new eyes we are all looking for more experience to apply our vision. It’s so amazing to see the growth in awareness that has happen since 1989 when I had the first workshop on the Madawaska. It is as clear as a bell to me, that we are waking up as individuals, that we have seen our culture's destructive folly, and we are now collectively creating a new culture to fit our new world view. Its exiting that while ‘we’ who have woken-up are still a minority, ‘our’ small numbers have grown in this short time from tens to tens of thousands, to an unstoppable movement and force of consciousness that is actually starting to reshape our culture.

   We’re so hopeful to see that “we” are starting to move from dwelling on the horrors of our industrial legacy to actually creating solutions and being more thankful for the positive aspects of our heritage whatever that is. In the ‘living’ teachings of The Earth Wisdom Centre at the farm, you participate in how we really live; how we get food, how we build, how we get healed. And in these daily actions we all move beyond our mental indulgence in new age ideology and fantasy into a much bigger reality of co-creating the Earths mythical story.

      In the last two years, over about eight different work sessions starting with the Sustainable Building workshop in June 2008 we created a sustainable non-toxic Earthship for under $1000 dollars. Thank you all again so much, look what we did! Special thanks to Jesse, Bill, Charmaine and Jeremy who came up a couple times to keep the project moving.

 The building is finished in the rough and it's incredible, beautiful and it works. After two months or so of freezing days and nights, some below -20, a bottle of water sitting on the floor of the building had not frozen at the end of December. Only passive solar and passive geothermal heating were responsible for this miracle. No cost to the Earth or us. A couple weeks ago I snowshoed over on a sunny day.  It was a squeaky -15 outside but when I open the door the smell of earth and warmth hit me. The windows had thawed clear in the morning sun and the temperature inside was about +15. More on the Cob Earthship in months to come.
 

 News from the homefront
  
   In the front green house on this cloudy day the low was about 5 and the high 15. On sunny days its about 30 degrees. In response to the approaching spring the rosemary hedge in is full bloom, the first lime tree flower bloomed today and the shinny red cinnamon tree tips are shooting out to gather the coming light. We’re almost through foraging a dense 3’x8’ polyculture of fall greens planted in the greenhouse in October. We’ve had a salad almost every day since early November, when the outside pickin's get slim. I have grown tomatoes, peppers, strawberries and basil in the winter but found them all to be poor quality or too buggy. This year with luck we’ll again harvest high quality, lemons, limes, passion fruit, figs, cinnamon, lemon grass, guava and strawberry guava and of course more eucalyptus. I built a planter for some of the bigger trees like the avocado and banana so there is hope of getting fruit from them in the future. We water the planter with our bath water, which takes a load off our grey-water system in the winter, shifts more heat to the greenhouse and makes watering effortless because the planter is lower then the tub.

We beefed up our storage in the root cellar. Instead of just putting fruit and roots in bushels as we did we now have two-bushel cedar boxes with screened lids and bottom. We also created a separate vented cold area for boxes of apples and pears, which go bad first and release gasses that cause all your veggies to start their decay process. For the first time we’re still eating crisp apples in the new year. Our root cellar is also for tinctures, vinegars, wine, beer, miso, mushrooms, dormant plants, maple syrup and honey. We’re still selling last seasons garlic, frozen greens, fresh and dried and herbs, through the Ottawa Valley Food Cooperative.

New homestead renovations are on they way for next season. Last year, thanks to Mr. Smallman ‘mikey' we got a good start on an outdoor shower for workshop and workweek participants. We had some nice warm outdoor fall showers. We previously had a funky solar shower but it seems it left much to be desired by many. Having a hot shower in the morning or when its cool or cloudy is now possible!
 

 Out on the Land

  Things are good. We see lots of deer, almost daily. The wolves are close by too these days. We hear them most nights, sometimes trying to taunt Sophie out. We got enough snow and cold early this winter that its held through these wacky temperature fluctuations we’ve been getting. So the plants and animals should be ok. If we lose the snow, then were all in trouble because then some start to wake up too soon. Last year a fellow bee keeper in the area had about ten hives ripped apart by a bear who had come out of hibernation way to early and there was nothing to eat, so it wandered around looking until it found his bees. The good news is they never caught the bear, so someone had a nice midwinter snack.

    A couple days ago I tracked the first Bobcat I’ve come across. Local loggers always say they’re around but I’ve never seen one or seen signs of one. As I first came across the fresh track Sophie seemed especially interested. That got my attention. I thought it was a fisher, which always get her going. But nope, the prints were clean and fresh, they had past this morning, but not loping and the prints too wide symmetrical. Predator prints for sure, bigger then a large house cat and smaller then Sophie (a small lab). Then I thought fox, but the prints didn’t line up as the foxes usually do, and they were again too wide. When I started to look closer the four toe prints had no claws, often appearing roundish, not pointed like dogs. Around the whole print there was a circular padding clearly created by lots of long fur. Also at the front of the release a wide brush left one track trailing to the next, as apposed to a sharper line generated from canines centre toes and claws. I tracked it for about an hour. It walked around the edges, and then across the wetland, waiting here the there for mice or muskrats hiding in sedge mounds under the snow to emerge. I could feel her slow deliberate movements invisible to all but the owl in the clear calm light of the new moon. Even though she moved through lots of dense bush I didn’t find one hair or scat, though Sophie scented out a branch she had rubbed on. It smelt a little musty/skunky to me, strong but not nasty like domestic cat piss. That bobcat didn’t fall through the ice crust once in the hundreds of feet I tracked, incredibly sensing the strength of snow under the crust with each step before transferring her weight and then placing her back foot exactly where her front foot had been. Someone from the dog or weasel family could never have done something so careful and sustained, reveling the eagerness in their hunting character relative to the cool reserved nature of the bobcat. Since the cougar a couple years ago this had been our most exiting visitor.
 

 The Algonquin Tea Company

 is kickin' along. Looks like were breaking into the big time; Roots and Sobeys are two of our most resent retailers. The cousins, Delores and Eugene Kohoko do most of the production work out in the barn Monday to Thursday. Eugene was having a beaver and bannock sandwich today, and talked about how the beavers don’t seem to have any fat on them any more. He keeps saying, “the animals are changin’”, and he grew up here thirty or forty years ago hunting and trapping with his elders, so he’d know.

   As the sun grows stronger we start to move faster again. Soon it will be time to start onions from seed during the waxing moon in February. Organic onion starts,  or bulbs,  are almost impossible to get organic, and if you start from seed you always end up with bigger onions because their growth hasn't been arrested. Also this month I'll be transplanting tropicals, pruning the apple, pear and cherry trees. This is the best time to take sions for bud or end grafting in the spring. store them in your fridge or root cellar, not the freezer. And of course I'll be getting ready for Maple Sugaring.  Until we see each other, many blessings and enjoy the snow!
 

  Look forward to being with you this year,

Steven, Megan and Oscar

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