Trout Gulch: A Homemade Sustainable Hobbit Village

Encyclopedia Pictura is work­ing on count­less ambi­tious projects, and they have been called the “direc­tors of the future” by Esquire Magazine. Their successes—which include a very suc­cess­ful music video for Bjork—fuels a unique project as imag­i­na­tive as their films.

Trout Gulch is becom­ing a mecca for DIY cul­ture and sus­tain­able liv­ing, with 18 friends now liv­ing coop­er­a­tively and pro­duc­tively amongst each other there. They also use com­post­ing toi­lets and make their own cheese from their flock of French Alpine goats. 

“Everything is hap­pen­ing mag­i­cally, noth­ing is forced. The peo­ple who are brought in are brought in from meet­ing peo­ple at the right time,” said Ryan Hett, the res­i­dent farmer who has been liv­ing and work­ing on the organic farm for the past sev­eral months.

Hett is one of those peo­ple who was in the right place at the right time. The inspired farmer came into con­tact with Trout Gulch at the same time Trout Gulch was look­ing for a vision­ary farmer to help start their organic farm.

A cou­ple of weeks ago, Trout Gulch Farm invited mem­bers of the com­mu­nity to share food, con­ver­sa­tion and knowl­edge on their organic farm, which cul­mi­nates at the high­est point of the prop­erty and is com­plete with a state-of-the-art out­door kitchen.

It was some­thing like a farm-to table-dinner with­out the pre­ten­tion, fol­lowed by demon­stra­tions in acorn tan­ning, wild mush­room scav­eng­ing and herbal tinc­tures. Two long tables over­look­ing the val­ley set the scene for a gourmet lunch, which included a shaved apple and fen­nel salad, whole sar­dines from the Monterey Bay, roasted root veg­eta­bles and bay nuts, the seeds of the Bay Laurel tree, which taste like a mix­ture of choco­late and coffee.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Watsonville.Patch.com