Lost Valley wasteland revived as clever Restorative Ecovillage

that's my home over there by the way this this one here is Queen Anne's just that beautiful geometric pattern oh there's not much left of it but you can see there was a fox here from that little dark black with the cherry pits and the Blackberry seeds it's a very distinctive Fox dropping see I'm completely off grid and I have no electricity you're welcome to step in I can give you the grand tour in about 30 seconds this is one of the best parts is not the house itself but you know yeah this is my morning meditation this is also on wheels there's a film and Anime Film House Moving Castle and I moved here it's like opening these doors and then there's this whole other world out here it's like every time it's a different scene this is the morning view or the evening View or whatever view you'd like to take and and this is my neighbor across the meadow here that's another little Cobb building all Earthen materials made from this Earth the straw and clay and sand of Lost Valley floss Valley it's like a little village in the woods in a way and it's probably about 40 or so people living here now we're all kind of committed to learning to live in Greater harmony with one another and the Earth around us in those bushes there where the Willows are that's a outdoor bathing facilities those gray panels there are a passive solar and that heats the hot water for the shower in the bathtub you can see the solar panels over there that's a little solar charging station and we just run batteries and it's also mobile so if there's a power outage somewhere their neighbors need an emergency we've got a power bank ready to go so most folks who are off grid have generators or have solar or have some form of electricity and I've gotten pretty used to living without electricity and generally much prefer it refrigeration is the the tricky thing so I have a cooler out on the porch there you go old school this is a beautiful home I love the all wood yeah so this is kalakwati the Western red cedar it's all hypoallergenic we use rock wool for insulation and wood there's not a whole lot more to it there's Doug Fir in the framing Cedar is the siding interior and out the exterior and the yeah I got a great deal on some Surplus Lumber and then we have Coke countertops and maple cabinets so there's some Hemlock in here somewhere where is that I don't remember anyway simple design Wide Open Spaces high ceiling I I uh yeah there's not a whole lot I need this is my uh I just drew a sketch in a notebook and then I built this little model and this is how I designed the home and then my fiance and I finished building out the intern interior during the plumbing it's actually wired for electricity in case I want to put a solar system in someday yeah but I recognize that like look how light it is right this is evening time it'll get dark and I'll light a candle and then I'll have this beautiful Ambiance until I get sleepy and then it's dark and I go to bed it feels so good to have that natural light and natural rhythms oh so so they're doing some seed Saving right now harvesting some seed what are you collecting canvas canvas and why because there's a lot around you why do you need to collect because there's water out here yeah it's to keep the canvas continuing and as we're walking through we're also shaking the seeds out and resewing for next year to add more abundance and there's other places on the property that have less canvas so you get to relax down and spread them more canvas is uh traditional foods of the California indigenous peoples they actually cultivated it so this was in theory a cultivated canvas Meadow for them to eat it and they're they eat the bulbs and it takes a long process for them to cook it's like a 24-hour slow bake this whole Meadow in the spring is purple so the canvas flowers are all purple and yellow so this whole area is just like a purple canvas Meadow they're all dried out now now they're just like these little bell-shaped things and they hold seeds but they just opened and we don't mow for the rest of the year because we wait for these to do this otherwise uh they wouldn't produce seeds did you know what campus was before before living here I've never seen it before yeah I'm from Wisconsin the goal is to have more of it growing every year to keep cultivating this traditional foods foreign Harvest or the chemist seed Harvest it's not super common to have kitchens outside in this part of the world but we have one here so there's a propane stove we have solar cookers then we have hay boxes which are super insulated we also make use of propane and electricity and other things food storage Refrigeration that's where I keep my ice and that just this is something that people eat here a lot or during the summer months it's it's continual usage you know we also have a lodge kitchen so we have Community meals up there the land itself was a Christian Community in the 1970s the cabins and lodge and basic infrastructure was built by that community they went bankrupt and we bought the land or in the late 1980s Lost Valley by the former owners they clear-cut the forest and kind of just let it be so most of our 87 acres is a naturally regenerating mixed Conifer and deciduous forest when you take a natural forest ecosystem you eliminate all the diversity and then you pack one species in this case Douglas fir the most common because it's the fastest growing and so it's what the timber industry uses basically above you know everything else what they tend to do is plant them really dense together these are naturally regenerating so they're a little bit thick and we have thin where you see how this is kind of more opened up when the trees are planted so thick together Wildfire will come in and Wildfire has always been part of the fire Ecology of the system it keeps the forest healthy we need fire but in a system where you've taken away all the space you have all the trees at an even age they're all planted at the exact same time then they grow up and the crowns are crowded together and the fire will just tear through those so it comes much much hotter and then it burns out all the microorganisms in the soil whereas if you have bigger more healthy mature older trees the fire is moving up above it's not raising the ground so much and it actually is giving enough heat for other species that allows there's certain kind of pine trees for instance the cones won't open until they get hot enough so you need fire for the cones to open and release their seat people drive through here or they look down from the plane and it's like oh it's all forested and it's like no 97 percent of what was Forest is now a tree farm to an untrained eye it's just green but you start looking and it's like you go into a diverse forest ecosystem there are dozens of different conifers dozens of different deciduous as well as every other shrub in plant and Herb you know all the different layers there's just an immense amount of diversity that is eliminated from transitioning a forest into a tree Plantation so most of our 87 acres is a naturally regenerating mixed Conifer and deciduous forest another big component is the oak Savannah which is a rare and endangered habitat in the Pacific Northwest it used to be a very dominant habitat but the impact of Agriculture and the timber industry has been pretty prolific so we're really working to restore and retain the the Savannah that we have and we do some of that with fire we actually just did a burn of this Meadow season before last so we are you know managing it to keep it in open Pace again conserving and preserving the oak Savannah habitat so in the late fall after the rains or in the early spring when the ground's still quite wet when the sun comes out it gives us the opportunity to just dry the grasses enough that you can light fire without any danger of it getting out of hand it'll just burn the grasses back and just really refreshing for the land itself to have that fire burn through so it's it's knowing when and how to work with fire obviously we do a lot of biochar generation cleaning out and thinning our forest and to make a healthier more vital ecosystem and to capture that carbon and return it to the Earth through the process of biochar production this is an area where you can see where we did some thinning to allow more light into the forest and these will burn in the fall again put the carbon back down you can kind of contrast that with an area here where we haven't been able to do any management it grows in a little bit thick and dense like this is an area where we actually do want to do some management so what we would do is come in here and just saw it up or clip it up and just chop it and drop it onto the ground so again just taking the carbon out of the air and returning it to the soil that's part of mimicking burning the landscape which is more what the native people would do so we do actually do some fire ecology projects we have codes and restrictions that limit how much we can do of that we are working to get toward the place where we can actually just let the fire burn through but we're not there yet and that's part of the backlash it's like the timber industry created this extremely treacherous situation with fire by really unintelligent logging practices not just the logging but the replanting like I say you know the way too thick way too crowded together one species one age hot hot hot fires burning close to the ground killing the microorganisms and then people's homes get lost and people freak out it's like oh fire we need to do everything we can to stop it so when we actually need to be bringing fire back to create healthy ecosystems and that's the if you use fire intelligently then you create a healthy system that when these wildfires catch they're not so blazing hot they're not so wild and out of control and you can actually keep your home safe around them you know native people live with the fire this the whole continent was tended and cared for by people who were living in right relationship with it this is Oak Savannah that we're walking through now so these are obviously more mature but uh this is the habitat that we're trying to really preserve and uh really so this is an idea to get a lot of it back to this yeah yeah this is what we're working on you know like this used to be the the whole Willamette Valley used to be Oak Savannah before we came and cut it down and put tree plantations in so you know you had rolling grasslands and hills and and uh that was part of fire ecology right you burn out all the new growths that the Oaks stay healthy we would thin out a forest that became unnatural because of human influence and try to bring it back into a more natural state here you can see this as an area that has been cleared they're clearing because well for different reasons you see these are oak trees these are again the quercus Carion or the Oregon White Oak and that's an endangered habitat in terms of forest ecology and diversity this is what we're controlling for so the shade of the the Douglas fur because they grow so thick and fast they'll just shade out everything below them so we're opening it up you can see these piles of charcoal around here so this is a biochar pit we load the wood in such a way as to basically Char it so it's reducing the amount of oxygen so that the carbon isn't released into the atmosphere but it's contained in the wood not releasing it into the air and then putting it back into the soils or other things to grow and again it's a food Forest so a lot of these plants you see all around us are food in medicine this this is a hazelnut right here we've got tons of wild Hazel those are pescara berries the berries are delicious you can use the bark on a pharmaceutical grade laxative back in here this is an Oregon White Oak we've planted a whole bunch of California Black Oak in here as well and the acorns are another staple food source for indigenous peoples but also our old European ancestors you just have to know how to process them oh and this is a St John's Wort by the way which is another very popular anti-depressant which you can use for skin ailments as well this is a one of the tastiest berries this will be a beautiful bright red it'll form a little thimbley so we call it thimble Berry these beautiful little flowers down here are salal berries they have like five times the antioxidants the blueberries they're super dense in nutrients and this is just full like you see this whole feel this full of the thimbleberry and salal Berry we've got all the hazelnuts and the acorns all the different berries all of this is coming in to feed the deer and the rabbit and the fox and you know in here you can see we've got these swales dug in the idea is that we're slowing water movement through the land we want to retain as much water as possible so we encourage it to gather in certain areas this is a human created Pond then we planted the Willows in here if you can imagine this is just a blank slate of just a field all the water is going to dissipate and we're trying to hold it in we put this pond in and we actually have a whole Swale system that goes through here and our frog population has increased dramatically so they have a habitat that wasn't here for them before so there's more water on the land there's more plants that can feed from it and obviously the butterflies insect population increase oh Birds too you know birds are a great indicator species for the health of an ecosystem and we have such a wide diversity of bird species on this land because you know if you go out again everything up here if you look at a satellite view it's like tree Plantation and then pasture lands and people's yards they have their grass they might have a few ornamental plants but having this deciduous Conifer mixed forest and just all the different species of plants have really attracted a lot of different species of birds because they have all the different habitats they're looking for that used to occur all across this country and now are like only a very few places and this is one of those magical spots where we been able to protect this little piece and so we you know all the animals come here we you know right now we're not seeing a whole lot of wildlife because we're just having a conversation when you go out alone and you're moving very mindfully through the system there's a Technique we call fox walking so you lay your foot down very gently and roll it over and as you move this way you can you can stop anywhere in your motion so like if you're seeing you have your balance set in such a way that you don't move and the animals look at you they don't see any movement and they relax and then you can kind of step forward you can also like when you're moving you feel the Earth with your foot so if there's like a little Thorn there you just readjust and then you shift your weight over this is actually kind of fun if you want to play for a second you can try just walking with your hands and your ears and if you just walk normally you hear this like rumbling crashing sound with every footstep because it's like this is we just do controlled falling that's how we walk in this world today but if you if you shift into a fox walk the sound that you make just kind of goes silent if you do this again with your ears closed it's like you can't actually hear when your foot touches the Earth anymore so just something to play with there's all kinds of interesting off paths here that we could we could explore um yeah let's let's I guess you all have shoes so oh I'm pretty good with this sort of thing it's pretty thorny at the very start of this but um just to give you a little picture of what a little bit of the off the beaten path looks like here to uh yeah calluses this is another beautiful medicinal plantain this is a broad leaf plantain so would you have planted that like somebody no these ones are actually one of the colloquial terms is white man's footprint it just sort of followed the Pioneers across the continent and dropped around so it's similar to the prinella here and that can be used for a lot of different skin conditions it's also a very nutritive herb so you can make cold infusions and you chop it up and let it sit overnight and water and then you drink it and you've got all kinds of good nutrient and immune smilaginous layer over your gut so if you have an irritated bowel which this is one way to treat it so this is the back side of the little tinyville South where this RV is is a new tiny home building project so he's just getting started are you familiar with Beltane it's this is a a maypole this is from our last Beltane celebration [Music] Beltane is a very common Celtic and now Pagan slash neo-pagan celebration it's something I like to celebrate the seasonal celebrations around the equinoxes and the solstices and such partially because it's one of those many things that we've become deeply disconnected from in terms of acknowledging and recognizing how the seasons shift over time [Laughter] and one of the key things there is that we in the modern world Human Society especially you know North America in particular but people are moving all over the place and we used to be you know more or less like we might have a nomadic route but we knew where we were and we stayed within the walking distance of where we were and now we're like flying all over the world and it's like you don't get to recognize those patterns and shifts and changes over time because you haven't stayed with one spot so personal experience with in living in this land you know I've done it my share of traveling but I've always kind of come back here and so I've gotten to watch shifts and changes over time this is our sacred yurt it's just a yurt but we call it a sacred year because the sound just amplifies through here and it sounds whoa you know like whatever sacred spaces that we want to create this is a nice cozy and you got the fire in the winter time one little community space and obviously The View when you come out this is one of my favorite signs connect and you can feel that connection to the earth when you take again take your shoes off I'm not gonna but like it feels good to stand on the earth and you start feeling all the Contours but not only is it just like sensorial muscular experience like in terms of the Contours of the earth and just feeling it it's also neurological you know the nerves all the systems of the body but all the the capillary beds of the blood and then the nerve endings it's like you touch the Earth and the more you practice it the more it's like for me at this point it just feels like there's like this magnetic like connection and it just brings me down to like oh it just feels so good if that's the thing is it just just like I I just yeah sorry I think I just uh I just got to say that though that like take a breath and connect that's what we're talking about it's like just pause so I was born about eight miles over the hills in the town of Cottage Grove but my parents were part of an Eco Village project that was 1200 Acres now a lot of the land that I grew up on it was kind of what supported me as a child we all become who we are based on the environment that raises us and that was actually what brought me here around 2005 going back to The Meadows into the forest is where I could feel safe and held and taken care of I got to watch those forests that supported me as a child be just completely destroyed by the timber industry and so that was part of the like really visceral experience of what it is to be in deep relationship with a land that is just devastated so this you can take a weft oh wow oh wow isn't that great uh incense incense Cedar this by the way is also A really lovely smell it's different very different yeah it's different it's a like almost more lemony or something yeah yeah it's kind of a citrus yeah yeah and like a citrus it also has the vitamin C so the the fresh needles um so your nose is telling you the information you know that it's like there's something familiar here to me and maybe your body needs that so who doesn't need a little extra vitamin C at any rate this one is the uh Douglas fir m so this is our Creek Garden and where we currently host the Native Foods Nursery Evergreen huckleberries blueberries strawberries Dumbo berries would you like a black cap raspberry oh thank you but we also have the the nut trees the we can see what we can find oh that's a Mr Bell could start misting these are all the strawberries these are look like when flower and bracken fern these are looks like Sorrel which is just cooking herbs maybe yeah yeah so that's wood sorrel this is all the plants that we're growing for sharing with the wider Community you know we do seed swaps and more currents more assemble Berry those look like grapes huh I mean they are grapes I'm not aware of native grapes around here so I'm not sure what's going on there maybe there's something I haven't learned yet so we have all kinds of fruit trees this is more vegetable garden you know you can obviously recognize the broccoli in here and chard and kale and peas and squash and artichokes and these are Burdock burdock root is really good for cold infusions or the intestinal tract so lettuce and sunflowers and this is a black locust here sometimes we have chickens foxes feasted on these ones that's kind of okay because the idea is care for the Earth care for the people and share the abundance or kind of three popular principles of permaculture in growing food we're storing nutrients to the land we're growing in such a way that it's building soil rather than tearing it down there's a little fig tree growing up under all this cleaver also known as bed straw because you can use it to pack your pillow or make a bed out of and it's medicinal in different ways and you can make a substitute for coffee with little seeds so these are just you know what we call weeds because they do like this but they're not actually a problem we just need to keep things in Balance so give this guy a little more sunshine so we can have some figs growing here too these are all potatoes but yeah care for the Earth rebuilding soils through the way that we Harvest it's before we plant so that like what we plant and how we plant is part of how we build the soils but we also make like compost tea and then sharing the abundance we grow more than we need so that it's okay for the birds to come take some and it's actually quite expensive to try to barricade everything from nature and protect it if we just grow a little more then we can afford to lose a little bit and it's actually less expensive than paying for big fancy fences and electrical systems this here is the thuya placada Western red cedar or in one native language of this land which is chinookwawa is the kalakwati these ones have little butterflies little butterfly pattern is one thing with this one uh everything this plant has many medicinal properties also it's just great wood you can split it native people here would build canoes build baskets and you can Harvest and you don't need to cut the tree down you can Harvest planks off of the side of the tree and then let it regrow but if you just take a strip up and down then the tree will regrow that and then you can use the strip of the inner bark I was just blown away when I first learned that it's like oh you can actually Harvest wood from a tree without cutting a tree down so like we have this tree species here Texas bravifolia which is the Pacific yew tree taxes is taxol taxol is an anti-cancer drug oh yeah they discovered that in the 80s so when they discovered that you could make an anti-cancer drug from the bark of this tree what did they do they went and stripped the bark off of all the trees here's one here they strip a ring around strip all the bark as soon as you close that ring around the tree no nutrient no water can come up so they all die this tree can grow to be thousands of years old in modern terms we call Old growth you know like anything over 100 years but this is a baby in the cycle of these trees lives from where we're standing here to the trunk of that tree this could be one tree one trunk they grow enormous but you never very rarely come across any like that because what we did in the 80s just like this whole forest ecosystem of the Pacific Northwest what wasn't Oak Savannah was Ancient Forest just down this slope here is what we call the grandmother Maple and since we're out here in the woods we gotta at least say hello permaculture starts with observation and when we come from a busy modern Western life it's really hard to observe anything beyond our racing Minds until we learn to calm that down so this is another one of our classrooms and this is another one of our teachers stick she's grandmother maple oh this is just huge challenge 150 off hand 150 to 200. foreign Emily's former home it's been bacon for a year or two someone lives here yeah no this is the door it's kind of needs to be redone but you know you re-weave some new material in there and it's fresh and you got your Little Shelter real simple so even in Winter or just yeah yeah I mean well she had another little Hut that was a little bit more insulated for colder months this is kind of what we would call rewilding right just living off of the land as simply as possible you know running around Barefoot like me and that's not necessarily the goal it's a fun side product of like deep nature connection you start to just get a little more playful start climbing trees starting with that kind of deeper self-attunement prepares us to observe so when we go out in the woods just like if you go with your friend like kind of what we're doing right now we're not really noticing a lot if I'm pointing something out we're talking about that we're noticing that but really how many foxes did you see you know how many different species of birds did you hear right where's the closest bird to you right now they're a little bit further away right now but I can hear them and part of it is like we're making all this noise so they're moving away from us the point is it's like we don't notice what's going on in the world around us because we're so up here and even if we're alone if we haven't learned to drop below our thoughts and drop below the frenetic energy of our busy lives we don't notice how plants are moving in relationship to one another we don't notice how the water is Flowing across the land yesterday we hiked from the bridge to this spot up the creek you can imagine this Trail it just keeps going up and up and up and up this is kind of basic permaculture but so we start start with a deepening Attunement and awareness through our minds our bodies and then we go out and we sit and then we observe and we start recognizing patterns and from recognizing patterns we learn how to plant how to harvest how to grow when things are are ready and how ready they are for how much harvesting there's just a lot going on that we really need to attune to so this is your daily life being out here among trees and my daily life is varied in my daily commute to the office is that walk through the meadow that's pretty great I got to go into town a couple times a month to get groceries for you know the grapefruits and things that we don't grow out here and but other than that I really don't like to leave the land that's my favorite part of the place yeah I mean obviously yeah you obviously see I don't have a television in here I haven't watched television in many years because how we wake up in our day you know if we're in a box in the city somewhere versus Under the trees in a meadow it's all shaping and informing then we can be more or less present for it yeah and like I said before there's the fire pit for the evening fires Under the Stars foreign

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 131,664

Keywords: regenerative agriculture, permaculture, medicinal plants, edible wild plants, rewilding, ecovillage, intentional community, lost valley ecovillage, meadowsong ecovillage, western oregon, eugene, forest bathing, douglas fir, oak savanna, unelectrified tiny house, offgrid tiny house, voluntary simplicity, community living, selective thinning, food forest, swales, forest garden, native plants, native plants nursery, indigenous knowledge, regenerative intentional community

Id: a15yT_1S97A

Length: 36min 7sec (2167 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 23 2023