Hurricane Isabel. We lost power for 8 days when this strong storm blew through on the night of Sept 18! In this photo Valerie surveys a hurricane blowdown at the Conference site. Large numbers of Northern Red Oak (Quercus rubra) trees were uprooted pointing in a west-southwest direction. One tree actually hit a building but there was only minor damage.

Cleaning up after hurricane. Forestry crew removes tree blocking Tupelo Ridge Rd. There was a lot of wild wind, and scary cracking sounds continued for many hours during the night. This tree nearly hit Kaweah but no one realized it until the next morning.

Hand milking after hurricane power outage. Power was out after Isabel passed over us and the generators we own sadly proved to be insufficient to run our milking machines. So teams of people took turns with the very arduous task of hand milking our small herd of dairy cows.

Cider making fall '03. Rowan and Adrian work together to grind apples for cider. The press is usually set up right outside Zk dining hall -- so passersby get to taste the fresh cider and take a turn with the hand cranked grinder.

Cider pressing fall '03. Bill works with Adrian and Rowan to remove apple pressings from the cider press. This was a fairly good year for apples harvested from our organic orchards. The freshly pressed cider is so good!

Vegetarian festival Jul '03. In late July, a group of Oakers volunteered at the Richmond Vegetarian Festival. For their work handing out free samples of vegetarian fare, processing the festival's recycling and trash, and other tasks, they received shirts bearing the festival logo. At the Sept 27 Charlottesville Vegetarian Festival we also had representatives from our soyfoods business as well as an outreach booth for Twin Oaks Community. Viven los vegetarianos!

Good year for berries Jun '03. Now that the drought has truly ended, all over Twin Oaks there is a profusion of berries ripe or ripening like these goumi berries next to Kaweah. Goumi (Eleagnus multiflora) is a tasty berry related to the native autumn olive.

Gooseberries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries and others are all heavily laden with fruit this year. Strawberries though are suffering from excessively wet ground.

Mushroom cultivation mid '03. Shitake mushroom cultivation: Bill drills the holes in white oak logs cut by our forestry crew. Shitake mushroom spore plugs are inserted. Dozens of logs were prepared and will be cultivated in the moist woods near Zhankoye.

Mushroom spoor inserted. Russ packs in a gourmet shitake mushroom spoor plug.

ClassSpeak is one of a series of events held by a culture group called The Junction. Here's an excerpt from a short article by Valerie, the faciliator: "At this Speak, we were naming class reality in our lives. There are many ways to do this, we were doing a particular way which is pretty middle-class in format. This related to the meta-issue of how class is -- the people who name something always bring their world view bias to the naming, and it is the people with power who get to do the naming. We wanted to be aware of this as we were speaking."

Ceramic arts. Wood and ceramics arts are thriving lately. For example, Stella does a lot of work sculpting ceramics. Here are a few of Stella's ceramic pieces which she now sells on the farm and online. A new webstore has recently opened which offers products made by crafters at Twin Oaks and other intentional communities. At launch communitymade.com offers for online sale Stella's ceramics and other products made by community members of Twin Oaks, Tekiah, Acorn, Earthaven and We'Moon Land. [8 Jan 03.]

Dried gourd art. Woody grew these gourds, then dried and painted them to look like fruit. They're house decorations around Twin Oaks and are for sale here as well.

Calendar tradition. This is a long standing tradition in the hammock shop. Every month a random community member volunteers to make a new page for this calendar. There've been some amazing much-praised creative efforts (and one controversial enough for members to request that month's page be covered from public view!). The Jan 2003 calendar shown here has a movable sledding santa and pop-open windows for each day of the month with short sayings. Heather created this one.

Cleo's quilts. Long time member and accomplished quilter Cleo has quilts displayed around Twin Oaks.

Hoop greenhouse plantings. Pele works on thinning greens in hoop greenhouse. This was a precursor structure to our new large greenhouse.