LE: The project began in early 2007, though there is evidence of it going back much further than that.I was a recent college grad seriously cheaping it in West Philadelphia. I had this idea that it would be really great to end up doing something(s) somewhere I couldn’t even think of yet.

Back then the project was all ideas, different from the current reality. Or it might be the exact manifestation of those ideas. In any case, it was loose. The people involved were scattered around the country, so we formed an online group on which we rambled deep into the possibilities of creating a sustainability-minded space for ourselves and the community. This went on for about a year.

We talked about it enough that some rudimentary infrastructure developed almost without us knowing it. The need for something material to happen resulted in an actual search for land. After we found the spot, some had to traverse the ocean from Hawaii, road trip across the nation, say goodbye to wherever we were and arrive at the destination. Most of us made it to Ithaca before we even closed on the land in July 2008, that’s how excited we were.I’d say the Dacha Project began in those times, because the people, the times, the places all started swirling together then.

MO: Are you currently staying in house on the plot of land?

LE: By the time I finish this interview everything will have changed.

Up until now everyone has been living in the town of Ithaca, 12 miles away from the Dacha Project. We are all unanimously in love with the place, because it’s like a never-ending journey of interesting and useful things to be involved in. I don’t know how we’ve made the time to build what we have with everything else going on. However, we can’t stay in town forever. We’re at an exciting transition point, because some are about to move to the dacha. We also have friends coming to stay awhile.

There’s no hot water or cooking stove yet, but there is a flushing toilet, icy-delicious well water coming through a sink, and a camping stove. We also hooked up one solar panel and an inverter, which allows for having some lights glow without running noisy generators. And it’ll be no time before the solar hot water collectors arrive and heat up water for showers that will most likely be taken in wash basins until we build the bathtub of our dreams. It’s like sleep away camp, except you have to build the camp, direct the camp, be the camper, and dig the pond.

MO: What kind of expertise does each person in the group provide? Is everyone just figuring things out together as you go along?

LE: There are six of us, so this could get long, but let’s just say that while each one of us has different strengths and skills, it is our friend Joe who brought the building, design and mechanical skills. Two years down the line he has transferred a lot of those skills to the rest of us, and now we don’t just follow him around like little baby deeries.

Despite our general naivety, I’d say that almost everything we do we figure out together, sometimes in teams, on super important decisions all together. It has been like this from the very beginning. Each Dachette is involved and up-to-date on what is going on.

Besides the core building skills, we each bring our own flavor-power into the super-stew. We have backgrounds in literature/writing poetry, business/marketing, conflict resolution, international relations, map making, grant writing, mechanics, teaching, web building, etc., multiplied by our tangent interests in puppet making, prank playing, basement tinkering, vegan baking, stand-up comedy, acting, woodworking, event planning, wilderness living, drawing, digital media, filmmaking, herbalogy, permaculture, timelines, DIY education, environmental conservation, plus more. Then there are all of our friends and their skills too.

MO: Many (or at least a few) of you are from the urban northeast, how is your experiencing living in the country side?

LE: Fantastic on most accounts including neighbors, having space, and biodiversity. Our neighbors include homesteaders, an artist who paints life size animals, the neighbor kid into construction and hunting, evangelical Christians who also fly the Israeli flag (rapturists?), and a retired professor of oceanography. Oh, and there is this one guy we haven’t met yet that keeps kangaroos as pets.

One of the big draws for me is that when neighbors come to visit they appear from different directions. The neighbor kid from the southeast, through his back yard and past the upper orchard, the homesteaders from the north through the path in the woods or the path through the wetlands, and our Ithaca friends up the 700 foot long drive way that curves. If the hunter who wears a Spirit Wolf t-shirt ever comes again, I hope he just crosses through his field and enters from the north instead of being polite and walking down the road and up our driveway like he did that one time. Every time someone visits, it’s as if they appeared through a wormhole that deposited them just out of sight.

Being in the fields, woods and wetland, closely observing the seasons turn and harvesting wild edibles is a big part of the experience as well. Spring for us means wild leeks, dandelion greens, garlic mustard and maybe if we are lucky morels. Early summer means young cattail shoots, the beginning of berry season and swimming. The warblers are about in May, the tadpoles in early summer, and eventually everything turns yellow and explodes.  It feels a bit like living out the life of a firecracker in slow motion.

MO: Why was Ithaca, New York the best choice for this project? What type of space were you guys looking for?

LE: We ended up in the Ithaca area by accident. Originally we had settled on the Adirondacks, which turned out to be a terrible place for us.  If we got land there, someone might be dead, several would definitely be missing, we’d all be broke, and the land abandoned. Luckily that didn’t have to happen, because one night during the land search Lily and Joe CouchSurfed in Ithaca, where their hosts talked them into looking for land around the area.  The next day they found the only piece of land that even came close to meeting our criteria.

Criteria
1. Southern facing clearing
2. At least a partial woodlot
3. Access to community/ cool town
4. Ability to get cell/internet
5. A growing season longer than three measly months
6. Within 5 hours of the NYC/NJ area

MO: Do you have any tips for those looking to build their own eco-friendly home?

LE: Some advice/encouragement that is I feel is important is about building a sustainability-minded homestead with a group of people. Two people can go it mostly alone, but I recommend considering working with a group, especially if the workload and the funding seem to be overwhelming your determination to do so. This might mean building with a group of people or creating alliances between your project and another in your vicinity. The point is that given a diverse combination of people and energies there is much more that can be accomplished.

Putting and keeping the group together is also the most challenging part, and it is well known that a great challenge is good for great rewards. And it just so happens to be that those rewards tend to be the exact tools you’ll need for engaging with the current needs and ambitions of your small group and the larger community. I’d even say that the rewards of learning to co-create with like and unlike minds deliver us to the feet of opportunities that we cannot yet imagine. Meaning that they not only help us get through initial challenges, but create space where there didn’t seem to be any before.  For me this is exciting.

MO: I have been reading (on the blog) about some side projects, solar passive energy, mushroom log cultivation, sculpting straw bales with chain saws, which has been your favorite?

LE: My favorite extracurricular has been the wild weed walk Andy Firk gave at the dacha last summer. This consisted of a group of twelve walking around learning about the plants on our land with Andy, steward of Ithaca Forest Farm and Bamboo Grove Organic Farm in Sarasota/Arcadia.

It was the same day the trusses for the common house arrived, and some of the wild plant group helped get the trusses off of the semi and close to the house whose roof they are currently holding up.

On the walk itself it turned out that there were other wild edible enthusiasts in the group, and that is how the rest of us were treated to a workshop with three experts. Andy called the place a “veritable pharmacy,” and pointed out a black birch that smells of spearmint, medicinally excited perennials, and flora features that were just plain cool.

And I was introduced to the autumn olive trees that grow wild in our back field. The rest of that summer and fall I’d sneak away from work to feed myself directly off their branches. I think this would make a good footage for Wildlife Channel special on modern people and their new natural habitats- in the Dacha Project’s case a reclaimed old farm field in various stages of ecological succession.