This centrally located Sign of Things to Come is in the main camping area: Enchanted Encampment where it directs visitors around Dandelion's 190 acres. From the meeting, eating, sleeping, house, Hub of Happiness, you can walk on the Magic Carpet Trail to one of the rain catchment and swimming ponds, Sea of Infinity or Lake of Dreams. After a rewarding day of working in the garden, Primal Sustanance, you can clean up in the cobb bath house, Reign of Grace.

Above: Metal spire for Faithful Fountain is being dropped onto its destination in Dandelion Ballad.

Learn Sustainability by Living on Dandelion: Here you find a detailed list of most of the sustainably realated things you will experience and can learn about first hand on Dandelion:

-Resource Conservation is Primary here . We live in close relationship with the land that provides so much of our sustenence on Dandelion. We depend on our personal work and the farm's resources to provide much of what we eat, drink, and use for heat, cook with and run our kitchen. In so living we are connected with sustainable future of the world. Living thus is a HUGE goad to responsible resource use and management. We are always aware of the need to CONSERVE all our resources, from water, firewood, toilet paper, food, fuels, electricity, etc. We constantly remind ourselves and others here of the urgent need to conserve and minimise our footprint on Dandelion and the world in our every day living. This is a learning challenge and opportunity for all Dandelion participants short or long, to gain green habbits now and forever, and to pass these habbits to others in service of our shared planet, earth.

-Housing: All living spaces large and small are of passive solar design, save the original ranch house (Huge Happening) and have natural wood heat. At 2 people per room/space there is sufficient year round living space for 20+.

-Natural buildings We are working on our 3rd natural cob building and will be experimenting further with recycled and natural materials as Enchanted Encampment,
our mini educational ecovilliage campground continues to develop in 2010.

-Repair shop: Being able to make, maintain and fix machiney and other useful things on the farm is another part of our efforts at sustainability. Over 30 years we have collected tools and equipment that are frequently used for these purposes.

-Alternative energies: There are photovoteyic solar energy systems for the host house and water pumping for drinking and irrigation systems for the whole farm. Wind power via our old Jacob wind generator will be resurected for additional power. We are slowly moving entirely away from the grid, propane/natural gass use starting with the volunteer host house. We expect to experiment with methane generation for cooking and growing algae fuel. We plan to obtain or build our own bio-char cook stoves.

-Heating for Spaces and Water: Passive solar building design is the case for all buildings save the old original house. The pasive solar heat is helped greatly by insulation and augmented by wood heat, burning prunings and fire reduction/harvested wood. This is for heating both living space and water through the use of interal coils or "heatilator" in the wood stove fire chamber for hot water. We enjoy this extremely effecient solar/fireplace hot water system in the host house. A solar/demand hot water system is installed on "Reign of Grace" Bath house.

-Free and Low Energy Refrigeration/ Cooling of Foods: In the host kitchen and in several other locations on Dandelion, north exposure - vented cool storage areas serve as refrigreration in winter or coolers in the summer for food storage. We also use a solar PVextremely efficient refrigerator in the warm months for garden produce. This chest style fridge can convert to a freezer in the winter when our larger pantry/coolers double as refridgerators. This fridge runs on 75 watts...unbelievable!

-Cooking: Although we use propane still, in cold weather we also cook and dry on an "airtight", effecient wood stove that provides heating, cooking and hot water simultaneously and is fueled by on site sustainably harvested renewable firewood. The sun is generally abundant often even in the winter. When the sun is out for long we use our solar Photovolteic system to power electric cooking using a small electric oven, electric burners and other electric kitchen aids. We also enjoy cooking in a Sun Oven and a larger home made solar oven/solar drying combo made by great volunteers who were solar cooking fans.

-Food Preservation: Since we live almost exclusively from our gardens and orchards year around, we use cool vented storages areas for holding fruits and some vegetables that will keep for long season fresh eating, fresh cooking, and fresh juicing. Root vegetables are stored mostely outdoors in garden beds with heavy mulch protection from freezing, We preserve excess perishable summer food for off season ise by freezing, canning, drying and fermenting.

-Fermentations and other cultures for preservation/food/health: Fermented foods is an art we have been developing for many years on Dandelion. Most foods want to ferment, and if not previously fermented before eating they often do that in the stomach. Fermenting food boosts digestablility, while helping preserve the food naturally as the ancients did. Use of fermented foods adds more probiotics for immune system resiliance, production and absorbtion of enzymes, and some vitamines, plus wonderful flavors. The list of fermented, cultured foods we make and enjoy is constantly growing. Amongst others it includes: slow/cool sourdough for optimally digetable bready foods, kombucha, kimchi, rejuvalac, koji for making miso, misos-various long and short non soy ( makes salt more digestable, adding vitas, enzymens and serves as a vegitable bullion), non soy tempeh, non soy natto, (an anti cancer, anti heart disease or stroke fermented legume dish),and occassional raw goat milk buttermilk.

-Greenhouse 60x30ft. "Chanting Frog"...with a cystern/ pool/heat sink, grows mostly fruit trees, spring starts, some vegies, Oyster and shitaki mushrooms....hopefully spiralina soon!

-Greenhouse (small) is used for starting garden seedlings and propagating unusual perennials using mist and other techniques. The small GH also provides solar heat gain into the host house.

-Nursery: In "Plant Lust" nursery we propagate larger plants, fruit trees, nut trees, vines and bushes. All new plants in the last many years have been carefully researched and selected for hardiness and desease resistence, for specific micro climates and permaculture niches on Dandelion. We layer, take cuttings, grow seedlings and later graft where necessary to constantly increase our perennial food production capacity,

-Gardens are varied and many here. We live as much as possible from the main gardens "Not Two is Green", and "Vanished Gardens" that are deer fenced permanent bed, NO TILL/ bio-dynamic demonstration in progress. These contain besides vegetables and some unusuals, many grapes (yearly juice pressing, concentrate and rasin making), apples and pear trees (yearly juice pressing, concentrate and drying), gojis (fresh and dried), cane berry patch, benificial insect garden, medicinal and culinary herbs, new plantings for developing stable humus, carbon sequestration, and our own nutrient rich herbal plant fertilizers. We are also beginning to use bio-dynamic preparations. Permaculture principles are also used as we deveope grouping of plants (guilds) that serve each other, and the forest garden several stories for production approach.

-Seed Saving: We have, for many years, saved much of our own seed for many of our food staples and unusuals including some herbs. This is almost always visably happening on the farm. We get abundant extra vigrous seed this way that are aleady, by having grown here, adapted to our micro climates/growing conditions. Another fun part of seed saving is that we are able, over years to develop our own verieties of plants specificly to meet our needs. Tomatoes and squash are in the front in this area..

-Walnut Orchard: Walnuts are used liberally in our diet, especially soaked and then dehydrated for yumminess and extra good digestability. Producing trees are almost yearly increased by grafting older established black walnut trees to English Walnut in June.

-Apple, Pear, Plum Trees, and Grapes as well as other unusual pernnial edibles: We have taken advantage of different micro climates on the farm to grow many kinds of apples pears, plums, and grapes, guarenteeing yearly production. Each year we work on orchard improvements with hardier, more disease resistent and tasty variety additions to our plantings. These are acquired by purchacing, trading scion wood or other starts, and grafting in Feb-April.

-Olive Orchard: We planted 27 olive trees in '06. Between them in the large spacing we added Jujubee trees (Chinese Dates) and Goji berries (in production '08) and some of the other unusuals, below. Open areas are no-till, cover cropped with experimental dry farmed staples.

-Unusual Food Trees and Shrubs: To incresase food production, to learn and educate others about more food growing options, we constantly experiment with what we can grow here that will make Dandelion more sustainable. Some of our more unusual perennials include: Seaberries, Gooseberries and Currents, Goldenberry, Gumi, Autumn Olive, Trebazond Date, Jujubees/Chinese Dates, Russian Quince, Strawberry Tree, Aronia, improved Elderberries, Japanese Rasin Trees, Cornelian Cherries, Hardy Kiwi, Fuzzy Kiwi, Palmogranite, Barberry, Vegitable Bamboo and (and timber varieties), Prinscepia, Korean Cherry, Saskatoons/Juneberries, Honeyberries, Origan Grape, Siberian Pea Tree, Pawpaw, Chinese Haw, Medlar, Manchurian Peach, Korean cherry, everbearing Mulberries, Highbush Cranberry, fruiting Viburnums, Yellowhorn nuts, etc.

- Water, is becoming a serious issue for Calfi. We have reworked our water catchment system 2 times since first digging. We have 2 large ponds, several vernal ponds and swales for rapid charging of the water table, many shallow wells, solar powered water pumping to houses, gardens, orchards, and large water storage tanks. Rain Water from roofs to cistern/catchments provide rain water year around for drinking. Ponds are stocked with fish and have a very healthy frog and crawfish population too, which all reserved for use ONLY in dire emergency. We eschew killing creatures and attempt to serve the natural balance of Dandelion via biodiversity.

-Wood land areas are thinned carefully to reduce the fuel density for fire safety on Dandelion. This is a sustainable way of providing wood for heat and cooking. Much of the farm, flat land and wooded, are left untouched as wildlife habitat. We will soon also be starting wood lots for extra firewood.

- Flatland Acreage/Grain Production/Dry Farming:: Spring, and into winter 2010, we will be doing experiments with growing high carb/starchy foods. These will be small plots of many grains and tubers, etc, grown to familiarize ourselves with what can be grown here to feed large numbers of people in an emergency situation. These experiments will also enable us to acquire our own extra hardy, micro climate adpted bulk seed to plant large areas in case this is necessary. We will begin to familiarize ourselves with "dry farming" that has been practiced in this location by the early settlers until recently. We will also begin growing our own fertilizer/biomass to maintain soil fertility should we not be able to bring in outside improvements like manure.
Much experimenting in these areas has already been done over the years with many grains, tubers, legumes, and seeds for emergency mass production on Dandelion. Examples of susistence starches/proteins, we have experimented with so far: drought tollerant non hybrid corn, quinoa, millet, sorgum, barley, potatoes, jeruselum artichokes, yacon, oca, sacred water lily, desert tepary beans, field peas, vetch, seseme seed, chia seed, flax seed, sunflower seed, styrian hulless pumpkin seed, indian rice grass, and perenial seed producers such as mesquite and siberian pea tree.

-Native Food: Over the years we have experimented with eating and using some of the native plants growing on Dandelion. These include several attempts at treating and using acorns, soap root, grey pine buds, manzanita berries (ripe and green), miner's lettuce, dandelions, plantain, cattails (tuber/rizomes, pollen, shoots), wild grasses, and oyster plant, to name a few. We have planted a tanin free burr oak we hope to graft onto older oaks for better acorns. The other wild food are a delightful addition to our gardened foods.

Art to Inspire: Much of the art on Dandelion, created to inspire higher, sustainable living choices is made of recycled metal, wood, paint and tile.

- Future projects need your help: Grey water systems, methane generation, algae growing for food and fuel...(we are getting close to starting this one), biochar cooking and heating stoves, unique architectureal designs for very small cob cabins and much more! Improving natural pests control with more bird/owl houses and pollination with orchard bee nests, and any other sustainable improvement you might think of!