We have an acorn winner! Plus announcements...

Hey all, hope you're enjoying the fall weather. Got a lot to cover this week, so let's get right into it:

First, the slightly sad news:

After thinking about it for about a month, I've decided not to do a big public sugarbush this spring. I want to give the trees down at the campground a year off, and to be honest I could use a year off too. Nate and I will probably still tap a couple of trees near the house, and we're happy to host anyone who wants to learn the ropes, but I won't be turning it into a whole big organizing project. I want to get some real downtime in this winter, and skipping the sugarbush this year will give me time to do that, as well as time to tackle a few new projects. It should also give me a chance to get ahead on organizing Sugarbush 2027 and make that one really cool.

Now, the more exciting news:

One of the projects I want to get organized this winter is an Emergency Food Bucket day. I really wish I'd ended up in the branch of the multiverse where I felt ridiculous for filling my basement with rice and beans a few years ago, but we seem to be in the one where having some basement beans is probably a good idea. When you pack dry staple foods like rice and beans into mylar bags with an oxygen absorber and a desiccant pack, they can stay good for 25+ years. But it can be an intimidating process, and it goes a lot faster with some specialized equipment. So it's a perfect Montague Commoners project.

The plan is to order a bunch of 50lb bags of bulk food, and then have a day at City Hall where we all get together and pack the food into mylar bags, then pack the bags into buckets for distribution. I did a bunch of research and math this week, and I think we can put together a pretty good 2 week food supply for about $50. We're going to try a first round of 50 buckets, and if that goes well we'll expand from there.

What we need to make this happen:

Buckets - The $50/bucket cost depends on collecting free buckets with lids from local food establishments. I'm already in talks with Montague Foods, but I'd love some crowdsourced help talking to local restaurants. 5 gallon buckets are ideal, but anything between 3 and 10 gallons is helpful. Buckets and lids need to be clean. (I've lived the trying-to-wash-two-dozen-buttercream-frosting-buckets-by-hand nightmare before, and I'm not going back 🤣) We can pick them up if they give me a schedule.
Indication of Interest - Nate and I are willing to front the $2500 to buy the first batch of food if we need to, because worst case scenario we have an extra year's worth of food in the basement. But it would feel much less potentially wallet-tightening if I had a count of people who were definitely interested in a bucket. The standard price per bucket would be $50 to cover supplies, plus helping out for an hour or two. If you want to get on the list for the first round of buckets, reply to this newsletter and let me know how many buckets you want, and when you're generally available to help out.
Fellow Impulse-sealer Enthusiasts - If you've done your own rounds of mylarred basement beans, we would love your help on the day of the event. We'll probably have multiple groups of people working in parallel, and having multiple people they can ask questions really makes things easier. We're especially looking for folks who can bring their impulse-sealers, since having multiple sealers could really speed things up.

I'll announce a date once we have enough buckets for round 1 and we've got a solid plan for ordering the food.

Coming up this week:

On Wednesday, Montague Commoners will be partnering with White Lake Climate Action Committee for an evening of acorn processing. Come to the Artisan Market at 6pm if you want to join in.
The latest national No Kings protest day is on Saturday. If you're as annoyed as I am about being stuck in the basement beans timeline, this is a good opportunity to make your voice heard. We'll have a protest here at the Weathervane at noon, and then a bigger one in Muskegon at 5pm. I'm going to try to go to both.

This Week In Acorns:

I completely forgot to take pictures on Saturday, but we had a great turnout for Pumpkinfest. More than a dozen community members tried their hands at the various stages of acorn processing, and we got through nearly all the acorns we had. If we ever do have to rely on acorn flour to feed the community, 8-12yo boys are going to be a key demographic, because they were practically fighting each other to get a turn on the handcrank flour mill 😂

Kim Tytyk is the winner of this year's Big Acorns For Bold Art contest. Her Northern Red Oak produced nuts this year that weighed slightly over 6g each! This was quite a year for plentiful but small acorns, so congrats to Kim for finding such chonkers. Northern Red Oak usually produces nuts on a two year cycle, so we can look forward to more of those in 2027.

Weather permitting, we'll be doing acorn flour at the Market on Saturdays through the end of October, so stop by if you haven't had a chance to see it yet.

Recommendation corner:

I try not to keep any social media apps on my phone, so I like to have other things ready to browse during those moments in line or the dentist's waiting room where scrolling becomes so tempting. One of my favorites is the (extremely) long running web comic XKCD. I've been reading XKCD since I was in college, and I am chronic back pain years old 😂 The comics are nearly all one-offs, and mostly unrelated to current events, so you can just hit the "random comic" button and enjoy whatever comes up. The jokes often center around math, science, linguistics, or internet culture. The creator, Randal Munroe, also has several books where he applies scientific principles to answering frequently-silly hypothetical questions.

This week's nails!

You made it to the end of the newsletter, and that means you get to see this week's nails! Since we have a decent number of new folks this week, I'll explain that I usually write the newsletter while I do my nails on Sundays, and I include a pic at the end as a reward for thorough readers 😉

Hope everyone has a good week this week, I'll see you here next week if I don't see you around town first.