my favorite corner of ecohouse

Harvest Festival planning underway...

Fall is in the air (okay, so it was 85 degrees on Friday...but we've had those few important cold days that signal that summer is definitely at its end!) and it's time to start celebrating! This year, EcoHouse will be hosting its first annual Harvest Festival, where we will welcome the arrival of fall through food, music, games, and other fun activities! We're especially excited to try some canning and composting workshops, where we can expand our ever-growing knowledge of sustainable practices by learning from members of the greater Grinnell community (Sustainability director Chris Bair has offered to help us start a new, bigger composting bin, and canner extraordinaire Valerie Hammond has volunteered to come help us learn how to can vegetables!).

The Harvest Festival will take place on October 12 at EcoHouse and will be open to all Grinnell students and community members! More info to come soon.

David, Leah, Jacob, and Adri relaxing in the living room

Family Weekend at EcoHouse

This weekend was family weekend here at Grinnell, and we decided to greet our parents with a home-made meal! Eleanor led our endeavor with her famous salmon patties, while the rest of us made yummy side dishes. (Special shout out to David for his delicious pesto pasta -- made out of fresh basil from his garden back home in Kentucky!) 

Best of all, the meal was made from mostly local foods, including the kale, carrots, peppers, tomatoes, rice, and pesto (well, local to David's garden), to name a few. We even had some yummy local beer from the Amana colonies just down the road!

Everyone's families seemed to enjoy it, and overall I'd say we considered the evening a great success. 

The food! (Well, some of it)

House meeting time. Everyone just looks so enthused to be talking about dirty dishes again! (Just kidding.) (Kind of.) (We also talk about other things, I swear!)

Jacob and his parents enjoying the blue couch (the comfiest couch in all the land)

An after-dinner jam session in the living room is always a good way to end the night.

First picture upload! Bulk, cooking, and garden

An assortment of bulk foods and garden harvests...and other yummy things! 

More bulk food!!! Oats and flour from Paul's Grains in Laurel, IA.

Hannah cooks dinner!

David examines a squash plant in the Eco House garden.

David posing with his beloved squash

A pepper plant from the garden. How lovely!

David oversees the garden

First blog!

A new year, a new Eco House, a new .... blog? Yep, that's right! Welcome to the first official Eco House blog post EVER!

As the semester begins, the house is quickly transforming from its summer self -- a quiet, too-clean space (serious thanks to facilities management!) -- to the Eco House we know and love, filled with enthusiastic conversation, laughter, folk music, and the delicious smell home-cooked [insert tasty wholesome meal here]. As one of our first (and largest-scale) projects of the year, we have decided to buy and cook food as a house this year. That means we'll also be buying from local sources, whether through individual farmers or through CSA share purchases. Hannah and Jacob are cooking our first house meal tonight and we'll rotate cooking throughout the week. It's all very exciting! Yum.

We'll be sure to keep you posted about upcoming events and projects! And hopefully we'll get around to adding some pictures soon, too.

Happy fall!