VeggieCaravan blogs

Yet another chapter done... this next one looks fun! ;)

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 07:31:47 -0500

So i just left Costa Rica after an incredible visit! Punta Mona was a delight! things seemed to be running so smooth. Why couldn't it be more like that when I was living there full time. The farm looks sooooo great and the jackfruits.... forget about it.. they are dripping. I am soo proud of the crew down there. Its amazing how the energy of the crew there actually fully effects the way the actual plants feel. Wow thats some deep stuff, but it really is true. Also Zak and my dad came down along with the Feldmans and we made some big strides with our new farm outside of San Jose in San mateo de Orotina. We actaully harvested 6000 kg of Dah-licous mangos which we brought all the way to Cartago to have them dried. YUM!!!

The Magic of Punta Mona

Fri, 12 May 2006 13:29:07 -0500

Each day I wake up and am continuously amazed that this is my life! Wow- the beauty and magic of Punta Mona is practically beyond words... each day I look out at the gorgeous ocean, just beyond my front yard... a front yard full of tropical flora- brilliantly colored flowers, fruit trees, and lush lush green... butterflies of every size and color, birds of a hundred different songs, the call of the proud monkeys, 60-something kinds of bananas, fresh organic food everyday, fresh air, solar power, eco-conscious living, bonfires and drums by night, and the people... the people are the best of the best- brilliant, talented, beautiful, artistic, motivated, dedicated, creative, ecowarriors...yes, this is my home...

Its been an incredible run!!!

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 18:13:26 -0600

So just finishing 3 weeks w/o bearly leaving punta mona. Things are going incredible!! Wow. The fruit trees are growing and the crew that is there managing the center and the garden is incredible. The brother and sisiter dynamic duo Nico and Aurora are just rocking the place!! Nico is working with groups and Aurora is managing the farm. YEA!!! They are amazing! Jaze and her kids Talin and Torin are handling the office, Jon from Scotland and Jason are running the kitchen, Clint is lifeguarding, doing compost and working on the website, Ryan has taken over the permaculture talks and then the gandoca boys Roger, Moshe and Ricardo are working with the volunteers. Also Itai is back from israel and just finished teaching a 10 week intensive Permaculture, Bio-dynamics and tropical Ag course and is now working on the Chinampa system in the swamp. Kalil and Evan have been kicking it on the hill and Tom and Abeja are in out as Abeja is getting ready to have a baby. Zak and I just had an incredible stay out there and the farm is just more happening than ever. Lots of music, bonfires and firedancing and the groups have been super smooth!!! There have been an average of at least 30 people out there at all times. I love it there. So I am in San Jose right now getting ready to go and visit our new farms in Machuca and near the Miravalles Volcano. Siempre p' delante!!

A good video clip

Sun, 22 Jan 2006 21:37:30 -0600

Hey guys,

i found this while browsing tribe. i really enjoyed it and hope you will as well,

peace,

/\/\ike

http://www.supershorts.org.uk/view.html?id=512

On the road again!!!

Sat, 21 Jan 2006 15:19:27 -0600

Just glad to be back on the road again. The Conscious Goods Caravan is back on the road!!! :-) Today is our second day and its a GREAT day already. We are at the Glendale Whole Foods Parking lot and we're feeling and doing great!

Music is playing out of our brand new TX50D Limo battery powered amp both inside and outside the bus, we're parked right in front by the main entrance, we have coffee demos going on outside, hibiscus cooler (Jamaica) brewing inside, preserves, chocolates and other yummie organic treats being tasted by many and in a few hours we will have a full blown puppet show for the kids.

The marketing folks are beyond angelic as usual and shoppers, team members and people just passing by are all grooving by and on the bus and all around Whole Foods learning about food that is... you got it, good for us, the farmes and the planet we all share ;-).

Our schedule will be updated regularly on this website so alway check for updates and if you are nearby please stop by and visit with us.

We WILL be posting photos, videos, and blogs and more... stay tuned! --zak

La Fiesta Buenisima!

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 16:17:32 -0600

THANK YOU SOOOO MUCH to all of the perfomers,organizers and volunteers who helped to make the 3rd Sustainable Solutions Caravan Benefit another amazing success! Having fun is a crucial aspect of sustainability and we have become quite a team of fun professionals.

This year's party kicked off withanother great Puppet Show followed by Betty Biodiesel and her Sustainable Air and Road show, rollerblading in from the past Betty joined Jaqueline for a trapeze duet! Santa Cruz's HOT samba drummers got everyone shakin' it on the dance floor including a funky crewof stilters dancing, bouncing and doing acrobatics all over the place.

A few updates to the web tips

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 03:04:02 -0600

I have recently gone back to using FireFox again as Flock is not as stable when you have 100 tabs open as I always do. I like the delicious extension available at del.icio.us - Firefox extension. Its really crucial to get an account at del.icio.us and start tagging your links and bookmarks. This is an excellent way to share your findings with your friends. You can add your new del.icio.us account info to your account right here at thefractal.org/user ... click the delicious tab on the far right and type your username and password for delicious. Now we can see your bookmarks.. We can discuss what youve found... For blogging I like http//www.performancing.com/firefox . or wblogger which has drag and drop now...

Happy New Year's from Kopali land

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 15:35:16 -0600

Just wanted to say Happy New years from all of us from Kopali!! We spent the weekend up at Arrowhead Lake in the mountains outside of LA in the house of My Uncle Heshie. It was incredible. We had a feast and danced lots. The Kopali launch has been incredible. We have at least half of the 23 stores and it seems like things are really selling. Keeping our fingers crossed!!!! Off to Costa Rica tomorrow! Yea!!!

Stephen

Our New Years eve dinner in Arrowhead Lake, California

New year in paradise

Sun, 08 Jan 2006 17:51:53 -0600

What can be new year's eve in paradise? We think we know now in Punta Mona! Yesterday we had everything ready for the celebration:some were cooking while Hylah was dressing the table, others went to look for some wood on the beach and Niko and Tom made a wood sculpture of a huge monkey for we do are at monkey point! The wood monkey was burnt at night

Everything was so sweet and "tranquilo": singing, fire dancing performances , nice dinner in a nice atmosphere... We basically experienced 2 new year's eve celebrations since Panama's countdown was at 11pm Costa Rican time and we could actually see the lights of their fireworks, how strange! And at 12everybody jumped into the ocean! Happy new year from Monkey Point!!

Living at Whole Foods!!

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 17:51:03 -0600

Here we are in the parking lot of the Phoenix Whole Foods and we are having an excellent time. The tour has been such a blast. All the folks at Whole Foods have been treating us soooo nice and even hooking us up with lots of Organic foods. Yesterday we did our first full blown puppet show in the parking lot of the Tempe store. It was lots of fun. We are beginning planning our full blown tour which will begin on January 18th in LA. I'm leaving the tour on the 2nd of January for Costa Rica to film the pilot for the show we are doing on the Travel Channel. It is about where food comes from, from the field to the plate.

You can watch the trailor here http://puntamona.org/?q=node/74

Life is super sweet. We are getting on the road on our way to Las Vegas!!! I will try and do this more often. Love to all!

- What do puppets have to do with organic food???

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 14:52:43 -0600

December 27, 2005

Well I have to admit I was a bit skeptical myself. I knew that taking the veggie bus to the Whole Foods Market parking lot would create a spectacle in and of itself and offer us the platform we've hoped for to promote organic agriculture, and people and planet friendly business. But puppets? Since Jonathan Yute joined us last week, we've been gearing up to add puppets to our repetoire.

So we tested it out yesterday at the Tempe, Arizona Whole Foods Market parking lot and were all blown away. The kids LOVED it, their parents LOVED it, and other folks passing by LOVED it too. The show was called "The Good News Report" and featured incredible breaking news like "people being kind to one another for no apparent reason!" and "shoppers looking to buy food that is not only good for them but ALSO good for the farmers who grew it AND the planet we all share!" It also featured Grease Monkey who sang about veggie oil as fuel, Johny Unite Us, a farmer who sang about "farming in the name of the earth", and a live interview with Kopali bus driver yours truly about bamboo wood, natural latex cushions, stone counters made from recycled paper, and other sustainable solutions featured on and in the eco-show-room-bus.

In addition to the puppet show, we gave dozens of inside and outside bus tours, parking lot and in-store product samples, made lots of new friends among shoppers and team members of the store, and generally had a super successful and fun 1st official Conscious Goods Caravan event! We were also graced with the presence of Conscious Goods Caravan sponsor, Eco Teas! Stephan and Alisha drove all the way from Tucson to join us in the store and on the parking lot. And I guess they in-joy-ed it because they are coming back today to meet us at the Paradise Valley Phoenix store and then caravaning with us, on their own Eco Teas van to Vegas!

web tips from veggieryan...

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 02:18:37 -0600

A few tips on things I am up to right now that you might find useful:

flock.com : go there, download it. This is the new super browser.. Its for Mac, PC and linux.. its a suped up version of firefox which is the best browser to begin with... with it you can:

blog from your browser right into your webpage(if your webpage is cool like ours and uses drupal.org as its software backend... some others work too.. wordpress, moveable type, etc..) ( i am writing this in my browser right now)
flickr.com which is a cool place to share photos.. and you can drag and drop them into the blogging window of flock! there is a tool bar of your flickr photos in the blog window... cool!
flock has a "shelf area" where you can drag a drop links from the web to be blogged about latter... COOL!!!!
flock shares your bookmarks with your friends.. you click the star button and you "tag" them with words that describe them to organize them.. revolutionary! this works via del.icio.us you NEED an account there. even cooler is that drupal allows you to share these bookmarks in your website... mine are at thefractal.org
start flocking today!!!

love,
ryan.

technorati tags: tips, web tips, delicious, del.icio.us, flickr, flock, flock.com, blog , share, drupal , civicspace

thefractal begins

Sun, 04 Dec 2005 14:34:52 -0600

Wow.

It has begun...

Welcome to our new websites.. TheFractal.org is home to many businesses and organizations. We are here to create a better kind of website. One that is transparent with information as the driving force. Through interactive and dynamic websites that you and I can both contribute to, we hope to bring you the best information on the projects and ideas that we are passionate about.. These websites are built on Drupal and Civicspace, which is a distribution of Drupal.... The most powerful software available for building dynamic websites. The development community behind Drupal is extremely active. All the bases are being covered. This has led to Drupal being used for such high profile websites as MoveOn.org, Deanspace.org, OurMedia.org and the internet archive, the backends of Yahoo, Skype and Ebay, theonion.com, and many more progressive sites focused on community driven information portals. Drupal is extensible, flexible, scalable, secure, hip and is considered by Macromedia to be the premier open source development platform.

- Kopali Organics is birthing!!!!!!!!

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 18:41:18 -0600

So here we are just weeks away from the birth of Kopali Organics. I am soo honored and proud to be a part of it. From the dream of making a bigger difference in the lives of small farmers to the reality of affecting the lives of 1000’s of small family farms throughout both Costa Rica and Mexico. Each day as we work endless hours trying to pull this all together, almost coming to the brink of burning out, all we need to do is think of the farmers and their families and how this hard work may change their lives. It feels really, really great! We have danced on all extremes of the spectrums from not wanting to support trade at all to starting a food exporting company and I feel super grounded and solid in this giant step we have taken. This is only the beginning I am excited to be involved in making this website an open space for sharing ideas and thoughts about a whole new way of doing business!!! Love to all!

- Commerce as a healing force in our world

Sat, 17 Dec 2005 00:31:36 -0600

think about it... unless we are all going to grow ALL of our own food, weave, cut and sew ALL of our own garments, and make ALL of the stuff that we use on a daily basis ourselves, then we are going to engage in commerce.

it often seems as if commerce (the buying and selling of 'stuff') is inevitably pitted against the planet's and all of its beings' wellbeing... and sadly, the truth is that the production and trade of much of the 'stuff' that we consume these days is indeed harmful to us, harmful to those who brough it to us, and harmful to the ecosystems that sustain all life on our planet.

but what if we can set up the commerce game differently? what if we can set it up so that commercial sucess is measured, not only by its financily profit, but by its human and planetary profit too. that is, how much each and every transaction & relationship improves our world and ALL of our lives? this is what we like to call triple-bottom-line business, defined as socially, ecologically and economically sustainable. what if we really start to learn and care about where everything we use comes from? what if we then start to make choices that are truly consistent with our highest values?

then we would choose the products we consume based on how good they are for us, for all beings & for all life.

through kopali organics, we aim to prove, together with all of you, together with all existing and future triple-bottom-line businesses, that it is possible indeed for commerce to not only become less-harming but for it to be a healing force in our world. we believe in fact that it is necessary. and our commitment is to do it in joy, in love, and in faith, living each day the reality we dream of.