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Ecobricks and Mushroom Logs

Ecobricks and Mushroom Logs

Hey all, hope you've been enjoying the nice weather this week! It's nice to have proper Michigan temperatures back. Here's the latest news from the Commons:

This Week in the Commons

On Tuesday, we had our local Rank MI Vote meeting and then collected signatures over at the Magic Bus concert. We'll be making a new round of clipboards this week, so if you'd like to help gather signatures, this is a great time to get involved. Statewide, we're up to ~12,000 signatures, but we've got 599,000 signatures to go, and only a little over five months to get them, so we need to pick up the pace if we're going to make ranked choice voting a reality in Michigan.

A row of oak logs laying on a firewood rack

I was able to make it out to Treespeaker Woods on Thursday, where I felled a small-diameter oak that's been in the intended path of the driveway. It was a heart-breakingly straight and sturdy oak, but at least it's going to be able to start a new life as a set of shiitake logs for our friends over at the Great Lakes Mushroom Company. We'll use the branches as firewood at the sugarbush next year, and the twigs and leaves will compost down to feed the forest soil. In the meantime, we're one tree closer to having space cleared for our long-planned forestry operations building.

Four 2-Liter soda bottles that have been filled with plastic shopping bags

Ecobrick month at the Artisan Market got off to a good start, with four completed bricks and another four or five well underway. I was a little worried that we'd get buried under plastic bag donations, but so far we've been able to keep up with them. We got far fewer 2L bottles though, so if you have any of those in your recycling we'd love to get ahold of them. We also need help with the actual bricking process! It takes about an hour to fully pack a 2L bottle. You can stop by our table at the Artisan Market for a lesson, and once you've got the hang of it you can bring us completed ecobricks to trade towards anything in our shop. Completed ecobricks should weight at least 700g (about a pound and a half) to make sure they'll be sturdy enough, but ambitious ecobrickers may be able to cram in as much as 900g. Eventually, we hope to have enough ecobricks to build a shed or an outhouse at Treespeaker with them.

Coming Up Next Week

  • Tuesday is Election Day, so make sure you get your ballots in before the end of the day! Crucial operations funding for our local library system is at stake, so don't let this one fall through the cracks.
  • Once you've dropped off your ballot, join us at the Artisan Market picnic tables to help make additional clipboards for Rank MI Vote. We'll be there on Tuesday from 4-6:15pm before we head over to collect signatures from the bandshell concert crowd.
  • Wednesday at 6pm, White Lake Climate Action is meeting in the back room at Book Nook. Come learn about their efforts to move the White Lake area towards net zero carbon by 2040 and how you can get involved.
  • Thursday at 9:30am, White Lake Area Futures is having their monthly meeting to get ready for next week's Ice Cream Social fundraiser
  • Friday at Noon, join us at the Weathervane for our weekly Dance for Democracy protest. We've always got lots of extra signs, so all you need to bring is yourself
  • Saturday from 9am-2pm, we'll be at the Artisan market selling baskets and making ecobricks, so come check it out. Sweet corn is starting to come into season at the farmer's market, and you wouldn't want to miss out on one of the best perks of rural Michigan life 😊

Food of the Week

A small Lion's Mane mushroom growing out of an oak log

This week's food is this Lion's Mane mushroom I found growing on one of our mushroom totems at Treespeaker this week. Normally I think of Lion's Mane as a fall-fruiting mushroom, but the end of the heat wave must have made this little guy think it was time to give it a shot. Lion's Mane is a great "starter mushroom" for new foragers because it doesn't have any toxic lookalikes. Hopefully we'll get more of them in a month or two as the weather cools and I can show you more examples of what they look like. They make a great seafood substitute in many recipes, and eating them *may* provide health benefits. (There are a few promising studies, but as usual the health food marketing industry has gotten way ahead of the science.) So if you see a white mushroom that looks ready to start a 90s grunge band, go ahead and give it a try 😊

Solidarity Steps

Many of you might know Maggie Doyle, one of the lead organizers for Indy Next Gen in Muskegon. She's having major spinal surgery soon, and some of the other organizers have put together a Meal Train for her and her family. She's done a lot of work for the Muskegon-area protest community, and this is an opportunity to support her in return.

Recommendation Corner

If you or your friends/family have lost money to a multi-level marketing scam like Amway, Herbalife, or Cutco, you might be interested in Little Bosses Everywhere by Bridget Read. It's an engaging read, and it covers the history of multi-level marketing, the impact it's had on our society, and the political maneuvering that has kept it legal. I tore through it in a day and a half, and immediately lent it out to a friend.

Concession to Capitalism

Acorn season is starting to appear on the horizon, and this year we're going to try to step up our acorn flour game. We want to send out a paper edition of our newsletter to everyone in town, letting them know about the community acorn harvest and about this newsletter. But it costs about $250 to send it to everyone in Montague, and $600 if we want to cover both Montague and Whitehall. With all of the out-of-pocket expenses Nate and I have been incurring for the Rank MI Vote campaign (and the recent demise of our 30-year-old washing machine,) we can't quite afford to swing the mailer without help. If you want to help us get the word out about Acorn October, you can donate at our Ko-Fi page and help make the next mailer a reality.

This Week's Nails

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! I kept it fairly simple this week, but I quite like the way they turned out. The black flakes and silver glitter in the blue base color add a lot of dimension to the finished look, and while it's always hard not to smudge black dots on a white background, I've been working on a new topcoat strategy that's showing promising results.

Hope you all have a good week! Enjoy the cooler weather and keep an eye out for harvest-able wildflower seeds.