Today we met with Joe, Pam, and the owners of the apartment complex in NE Portland we are considering converting to a permaculturally oriented cohousing community or ecovillage. We got good news. The current owners are willing to sell to the four of us as partners in the project! So over the next month or so we will be finalizing the details of the transaction.

This means we will be moving to NE Portland by this fall to reside in the complex as we work on its conversion to a more sustainable community. We are naturally quite excited by this turn of events and are looking forward to the project. We have been dreaming of living with other permaculturists for several years -- we will finally have our opportunity.

Afterwards the four of us met and discussed details of how we will go about the process. There is much to be done as we have quite ambitious goals: reclaiming much of the paved area for conversion into gardens, setting up community garden, composting, and recycling areas, weatherization of the dwellings characterized by seventies era construction, addition of new green features like solar water heaters, construction of a common house, and more.

We hope to use our blog to document some of what we are doing and to convey the excitement of a nascent ecoloigcally minded community in NE Portland.

On another note, Vlad and Luke helped me this morning almost double our composting capacity. Due to the large volume of compost we have from Food Not Bombs and New Day School, our existing four compost chambers are full. The three new chambers built from discarded pallets will allow us to take advantage of this valuable resource to more quickly build the soil fertility of our SE Portland permaculture site.