Dandelion is a gift to Nature and Humankind and the Divine. WATCH our first little videos of Dandelion Sustainable Farm: “A Walk With Amanda“, a peaceful stroll focusing on the art of the farm and “Dandelion Morsels“, an upbeat collage of Dandelion focusing on volunteers, activites, and sights. etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWtHkeivZfU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HowtQBvxRw
We welcome volunteers for long stays. Are you an experienced farm caretaker / Jack of all trades? We are looking for YOU. Tell us about yourself! info@dandelionfarm.org
Whole body sustainable living, human and environmental resilience are cultivated here on Dandelion. Our invariable intention is to serve all who participate with us on Dandelion Farm as well as to work together to serve peace and a benign future for us all.
Love is a mysterious and powerful force. For more than 40 years it has moved Candace and Loren Stolley to create this unique gift of their all to all.
In 1979, after some early years of self sufficiency experience, a “calling” came to create Dandelion Sustainable Farm as a profound gift of their lives as service to the Heart of Existence Itself, a gift of their energy, skills and resources. It was to be a gift of all they had and could do.
As they completed their artist dream home, even before ever getting to live in it, they were able to sell it miraculously for sufficient funds to purchase the pristine land in Northern California that was to become Dandelion Farm. Fresh air, a high clean water table, deep rich farmland and wooded rolling hills made the land a choice location. With seasonal creeks, beautiful views and miles of hiking trails, the 190 acres were, from the beginning of Dandelion, a spacious, peaceful place. And so the work began.
Dandelion Sustainable Farm is not for profit. It is intended, with research and demonstrations to provide education in all forms of sustainable living. May the work here help serve a rapid switch to sustainable choices in every area of our lives, as is becoming so critically necessary. Our intuition at the beginning of our work on Dandelion was that sustainable living, even then was an urgent necessity for the world. So we challenged ourselves to learn and live sustainably constantly in order to embody and share a better way of life with a world deeply in need.
Our work on Dandelion Farm over the past 40 years has finally come of age. Our orientation and efforts to serve the collective future of humans, non humans and of our entire earth’s well being has bloomed into a broad gift of help for others to embrace sustainability as a necessary way forward and essential foundation for world peace.
More details about the variety of sustainable life lived on Dandelion Farm can be found under “Farm Sustainability”.
While food, health, home, and energy, etc, are essential needs we must meet and work to do so sustainably on Dandelion Farm, our beings also need to be lifted and inspired beyond rudimentary survival. Simply to life is not sufficient. The whole being needs nurturing toward well being, and fullness. We need a humanizing life that can serve a truly benign future.
Thus sustainability on Dandelion includes an orientation toward Wholeness: whole and wholesome fresh food, whole healthy balanced environment from soil microbes to bugs and birds (and so much more) and the whole human. The whole human orientation includes cultivation of metal clarity and critical thinking, emotional self responsibility beyond negative reactivity, physical balance and health, personality balance beyond self created limitations, tolerance and brotherhood encouraging the human qualities of humility and compassion.
Inner fullness overflows into artistic creativity naturally, as playful whimsy and deeper heart expressions that adorn our lives. Thus visual arts (and cultural arts ), have flowered on Dandelion Farm, serving a sustainability effort that embraces the higher gifts of human culture and benign technology for earth’s future enrichment.
Love is the profound essence of the deeper heart and beauty is its spontaneous expression, calling all to our essential unity at heart. May the art on Dandelion Farm move others toward higher and sustainable choices that serve this heart unity and the well being of all life.
Our many years of farming have been full of endless experimentation. While using our personal lives for these experiments for a sustainable plant based diet and whole body health, much of the research, has been for the future of others. It would be difficult to innumerate all the usual and unusual plants trialed for future food under various climate change possibilities and all the means for healthy fertile soil, all the ways of processing foods for optimum health, all the alternative technologies, etc, trialed.
Common and unusual greens are a specialty especially for yummy, healthful smoothies. Greens are big part of our sustainable diet, so easy and fast to grow.
“Plant Lust”, a green house add-on, is amazingly productive! Common and unusual greens we grow, (often considered WEEDS!) are great for yummy smoothies, salads, or cooked. We can feel their healthful benefits, a key part in our sustainable diet. A great deal of our research has been into GREENS and those edible weeds, for their promising potential to feed a hungry planet. They grow faster on less fertility than other foods providing broad optimum nutrition.
A primary focus has been developing an easily grown (zone 7-8) wholesome plant based diet for food security and optimum health.
The diet must collaborate gently with Nature, broad enough for optimum health and be easy to grow . Likewise better ways to cultivate soil fertility on site strengthens food security and growing systems that conserve CO2 are essential for our collective future. As the years have progressed in these experiments we are enjoying better health and far more productivity in less growing space, less use of precious water and many signs of a more balanced local ecosystem.
We have also observed the benefits of using our saved seeds, from improving adaptation of plants that are difficult to grow here, to greatly increasing vigor of easier to grow plants. Experimentation with unusual food plants is also a way to help address the on going massive loss of food varieties available to humanity which impacts our health.
Our 2 main food growing areas now: #1) After our many years of food plant experimentation, we have narrowed our production to the main vegetables we live on: greens, beans, squash and potatoes. We do not grow our own dry beans or grains, although we have done the research and can do so with our own saved seeds, should it be necessary. This is because we value time to do things other than grow all our personal food! AND #2) We grow WEEDS! We allow them to self seed and we cultivate them. The garden has become a cross between a conventional vegetable garden and wild lands, allowing nature to do far more of the work and provide us with vigorous edibles of all sorts we cook, use in green smoothies, and sell for a little extra garden income.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming video “From Weeds to Riches” which will give you some new gardening perspectives and unusual edible options.
And that is what he is doing in a big way still!
A summer afternoon’s watery contemplation
Dandelion Farm nurtures the deeper being, attracting the heart and speaking there of inner and outer peace, harmony and well being via the language of art and nature, kindness to creatures, openness of expression and service to our world at a critical time in its history.
Great Swan Peace Cathedral is our culminating gift to the world on Dandelion Farm in service to world peace. It is requiring everything of us, a huge endeavor and great Leap of Faith to accomplish this. Will you participate?
We are all part at a pivotal moment in human history. Thus we feel urgent to share our long (50+ years) of sustainable living experience and knowledge as education on Dandelion Farm. May it help the necessary transition humanity faces to survive and achieve world peace. This dimension of Dandelion Farm is most associated with Great Swan Peace Cathedral.
Great Swan Peace Cathedral is a vision becoming manifest, a crowning gift to the world on Dandelion Farm. (see GreatSwan.org for this story). Much of the art work has been accomplished, almost entirely by Candace with broad technical and installation support from Loren Stolley, while much still waits to be created.
Now, in 2021, Great Swan Peace Cathedral stands a resplendent taste of the vision that called it into being. There are many embellishments yet to come to enhance the fullness of that vision. But from this point forward, Great Swan stands already visually expressing its rarefied origin, beckoning all to sublimity and heart exaltation.- Sustainable living, our long developed lifestyle has lead to a very productive environment. We eat from our gardens, grapes, berry patch, orchards and sell what is excess. After 40 years, the excess food from healthy soil and perennial fruits can be overwhelming indeed! Maintaining all this including the buildings and systems on Dandelion farm while working to further the inspiring sign of Great Swan Peace Cathedral is a BIG task.
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Volunteers learn a great deal while helping in so many ways, from gardening to natural building, and numerous skills for maintenance. Become a participant in our farm family, helping in exchange for room and possibly food stipend! Of if you are long term and have farm caretaking skills, we can offer a much larger stipend besides room.
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Mighty tall Noah was an incredible help with mulching, one of his favorite forms of exercise.
- Many wonderful people have helped in many ways on Dandelion Farm, volunteering their energy, enthusiasm and skills in exchange for their stay. It is a rich human sharing and educational experience for all. Is there a way you could help?
info@dandelionfarm.org
Candace and Loren Stolley
P.O. Box 1744
Lower Lake, CA. 95457-9411
(707) 994-1814 PLEASE EMAIL!
Volunteers with special skills make their mark on Dandelion…Tiny house builders welcome! Want experience with cob natural building?
2012-2013 Ivory Tower, a cob cabin, (made of mud and straw with an old satellite dish roof) is located in Enchanted Encampment, our mini educational eco-village in the making. We hope to complete this cozy little art cabin soon. Tiny houses for camping while inspiring recycling and creativity is one of our delights. Many more playful little sleeping places being dreamed and stared.
Winged lion mosaic windows are part of the MANY art adornments of Dandelion Ballad (“A song to the Heart of all”). This is the educational center of Dandelion that is nearing completion!
Stefan and Jennifer, superb artists, stand by their fabulous paint job on Sentinel Fire as there farewell day offering. Their color job transformed the metal art from a drab to a knock out piece. They were especially heroic in our epic 2012 apple and walnut harvests. Oh, for more of that wonderful color talent help!
4 great volunteers that helped us greatly in 2007 and had a blast together. Notice 18yr. old Ansel on right.
Below: Ansel 6 years older and still vastly ahead for his 24yrs, returns to Dandelion from Arkansas for a New Year’s visit. With him is the lady of his life, a beautiful Ginny (body and heart). Ansel spent several months in ’07 getting the landscaping of the center of Dandelion well under-way, teaching us how to do it and making himself another well loved member of the Dandelion family. He was a good man in the true sense of the word, even then at 18!
Below, students come by the busload for a day of help and fun together on the farm.
Volunteering: Please consider our work exchange program and internship possibilities on the next “Learn From Living” page.
Support Dandelion With a TOUR of the farm…These include 1hr. mild hike/tour + 1hr. question/answer. $10/person, $50 minimum. Bring a group!
Dandelion Farm is tobacco, drug and alcohol free. Please help us keep Dandelion a healthy environment for all.
