Harvest Festival

Since Gabe's been sick, we haven't been out too much, so there haven't been too many interesting things to post about.  Except for...The Harvest Festival.  I already told most of the family about it, but on Saturday, I took Gabe out to the middle of nowhere (literally - we passed through a town to get to this 'homestead' in the wilderness, and that town, Millard, had a population of 75!) to an Open House at a hippie homestead.  I call it hippie because the girl in SAA who posted the information online referred to them as 'hippies' and I call it a homestead because that is what the girl who was dipping candles (a hippie herself, I assume) called it as such. 

Anyway, from what I gather, this particular place/ranch/homestead/ is fairly new in the area and is an experiment in what's called permaculture.  If you're absolutely dying to know what permaculture is, you can look it up at Wikipedia, but for all intents and purposes, it is living in a way that is very eco-friendly.  These people are very green.  They grind their own grain using bicycles, raise chickens and goats, make their own candles, build stuff with wood (they were showing a child, I would guess 4 or 5-year old, how to saw wood with a real saw while I was there), dye their own homespun wool, etc...  Most of them have pretty big beards and go barefoot everywhere. 

Well, every September, this homestead, which is called Possibility Alliance, hosts an open house that they call the Harvest Festival, which is when the public is invited to come take tours of their land, drink their hand-pressed cider and get to know what life is life in a permacultured world.  You should check out their flier, posted in various shops in Kirksville, which is where the news originally spread.

Gabe and I went alone because Phil was studying.  If you're wondering why Gabe's not in any of the pictures, it's because I was afraid to set him down on the long grass (you never know what kind of Missouri bugs are just waiting for some chubby legs to suck on).