The Milkweed Mercantile at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an off-the-grid, straw bale bed & breakfast, organic cafe, and eco general store. Alline gives us a mini tour of the business, which is currently under construction, but opening soon.

The Mercantile is currently a finalist for a $10K award at Ideablob.com. Please consider voting for us if you like what we’re doing. The winnings will go towards the purchase of a wind turbine if we get enough votes. Simply visit this link and register to vote: Straw bale off-the-grid business opens!

Thanks for your support!

However, there is some exciting and relevant news. Life With Thomas, the fifth DRTV documentary entry, is playing at the Hi Mom! Film Festival in Carrboro/Chapel Hill, North Carolina next week on September 5. Here’s the schedule.

If any DRTV fans are in the area, I urge you to check it out. And if any festival attendees happen to see this, I’d be curious to hear how it went.

Expect a return to DRTV in the soon-coming future…

- Brian

Rocket stoves are superefficient wood-fired stoves that can easily be built using readily available and recycled materials. They are a common sight in cob, straw bale, and other natural building designs.

In this video, Nathan and Tony describe two different rocket stove systems, detailing the inner workings of the stoves and their unique ability to store heat much more effectively than traditional wood stoves. Unlike other stoves, rocket stove flues can run horizontoally through cob benches or other cob furniture, effectively storing much more heat that would otherwise be lost.

For more information about rocket stoves, visit rocketstoves.com, or check out Ianto Evans’s and Leslie Jackson’s book Rocket Mass Heaters: Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (And Snuggle Up To).

This video is also available on Revver.

Here’s a brief look at the seasonal aspects of life at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Daily routines are largely influenced by the current season - winter is a time for relaxing, socializing, indoor projects, spring planning, and most importantly, staying warm. And by the end of winter, members are gearing up and itching for spring with new or continuing building projects and gardening plans.

In this video, Alyson describes wintertime maple sap collection, Liat shares her plans to transform a school bus into a house (complete with greenhouse), and Dan talks about seed saving and starting seedlings.

This video is also available on Revver.

In the meantime, keep passing on the previous DRTV episodes to friends and family. The response has been great to this project so far, and all of the positive comments and feedback have been very welcome!

Part 2

Mushroom hunter, tent dweller, food fermenter, odd jobber and eco-expounder, Thomas has been living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for the past five years. In Life with Thomas, we get the chance to familiarize ourselves with one of the community’s unique denizens. Thomas shares his personal story and how he came to desire a more ecological lifestyle, inspired by life experiences and global environmental issues. He also gives us a cooking lesson, goes mushroom hunting, reflects upon his wigwam, and pursues other exciting daily activities at his home in Dancing Rabbit.

You can also find this video at Revver. Be sure to use our spiffy new social bookmarking features below, and share this video with friends and family!

Nevertheless, the fifth video is coming soon. This one gets more personal with one of our members here.

Check back soon!

In the meantime, there are five other DRTV videos out there, so now’s your chance to catch up if you missed any. Be sure to share them with your friends and spread the word! And remember, if you are watching our Dancing Rabbit TV videos on Revver, you might consider helping us out by clicking the ad at the end of each video. This helps to generate us some revenue to keep things going. (Don’t worry, the ads are pretty harmless, and you can immediately close the window that pops up once you click them.)

Don’t forget, our videos are also available on YouTube as well, where you can sign up and subscribe to our videos, or makes us your friend.

Last but not least, you can subscribe to the DRTV RSS feed, and you’ll be instantly notified once new videos are made available! Yahoo!

Thanks, and see you soon!

- Brian

On October 5-7, Dancing Rabbit celebrated its 10th anniversary and reunion, and rabbits present and past joined to commemorate and reminisce about the community. In this episode of DRTV, Tony and Cecil, two of the six original Dancing Rabbit co-founders reflect on the progress and growth of the ecovillage against the backdrop of the reunion celebrations and festivities.The land on which Dancing Rabbit is situated was originally purchased ten years ago, in October 1997, and since then it has come quite a ways since the days when the community was almost nothing more than a vision.

About a month or two ago, we set about creating a short video to enter in Current TV’s so-called “Ecospot” contest. Although we didn’t make the cut as a semi-finalist, we can at least share the fruits of our labor with you now. Just for some background info, the theme of the Ecospot contest was global warming, and contestants had up to 60 seconds to create a video centered around inspiring solutions to the climate crisis. Anyway, here’s what we came up with.

(As a little note, if you happen to watch our DRTV videos on Revver, you can help support us by clicking on ads at the end of each video. We receive a small share of revenue for every click! Although we wouldn’t condone clicking on any ads elsewhere, hey, at least this one serves a good purpose!)

And as another note, have you considerd subscribing to our RSS feed? If you have an RSS feed reader installed on your computer, you can subscribe to the DRTV feed and become instantly notified as soon as new videos are made available.

Thanks!