I didn’t get to the computer yesterday as it hit 67 deg (19 C) and so used what energy I had available outside doing some belated fall cleanup. I also chopped some cook stove wood and wheelbarrowed that to the kitchen porch stash and also refilled the basement stove wood bin, which is about a face cord of wood in each location. We have the main wood pile but on good dry days refill the stash by each stove so it is more convenient.
Tulasi went up on the roof and cleaned both stove pipes. It is recommended to check your stove pipes monthly and clean as required, so we do this a few times a season even though we burn cured, dry wood and let the fire roar for at least a half hour a day even when it isn’t needed.
I am behind on the trip postings. One thing I learned: bring your own USB cable along if you want to post pictures on the road at others’ computers.
Here are some pics from Alachua. “Go” in Sanskrit means both cow and land, ergo the title as this is about cows and living close to the land.
The first thing I saw on entering the temple property was this array of solar panels, showing someone has the right idea.
They were installed for Y2K and aren’t currently working because the batteries got old and are very expensive to replace. They are investigating net metering, where instead of using batteries you feed excess electricity back into the grid and get credit. Apparently Gainesville has just passed a very workable net metering law but Alachua is just outside their jurisdiction so it will take a little more work to get it set up.
Nearby is an old cane mill that rust tells me hasn’t been used for some time but will come in handy if anyone ever decides to do cane or sorghum.
The temple has gardens, mostly greens and brassicas this time of year. We saw Shanka (winters in Alachua, summers in NV) and he was planting a succession crop of broccoli and cauliflower.
There is a flea market type deal at the Sunday feast with devotees selling prasadam, books and crafts. There was one devotee selling produce whose name I have spaced out. He was the one devotee at Alachua I could relate to the most as I used to do farmer’s markets so we had a nice bit of shop talk.
I didn’t get invited to see any private gardens but Kapila said he had about a hundred fruit trees on his property so I assume others have gardens also.
Vidya was joking that we could come down one winter and plant a gourd crop. Then we could go there the next winter and craft the gourds (it takes a year from planting to have a cured gourd) and spend the winter planting the next crop and selling crafted gourds.
We ran into an old New Vrindaban devotee, Jagannath, at the Sunday program. He lives in Alachua now and cares for 20 cows that are protected by an individual devotee whose name I didn’t catch (see a pattern with the names?).
Here is Tulasi being checked out by the cows. When we went and saw the cows Jagannath wasn’t there, but I am guessing they are Dexters, an old heritage breed.
The temple also has 20 cows.
This group was the old oxen. While we got a skewed version of Alachua as two busloads of young people were gone on a trip to Mexico (unfortunately for Tulasi), it does have kind of an old, retired vibe about the place, and these guys exemplified it.
If I had Photoshop and knew how to use it, I would stick my image into this photo and feel quite comfortable about looking at it.
