Our Buildings

Our buildings consist of a large old adobe main house, and 3 smaller adobe houses. The main house, Aspenwood House, is where Full members and Interns live, and the 3 smaller houses, Acequia House, Maple House, and Sunflower House, are where Associate members live.

All of our houses are in need of extensive renovation work, particularly the main house (Aspenwood). When Piñon Ecovillage bought this property in February of last year, the place was quite a mess. In the past 1.5 years, we have cleaned up and fixed up a lot, replacing some plumbing and wiring, redoing some plastering, repainting several rooms, installing vegetable gardens, pruning existing landscaping plants, and much more, but we still have lots of work left to do. Our renovation plans include installing all new roofs, new plumbing, new electrical wiring, and new interior and exterior plastering, as well as lots of more minor improvements.

Our plans for later years, as time and resources allow, include: installing passive solar features, solar panels, solar water heaters, roof water catchment, greywater recycling systems, and possibly composting toilets. We strive to reduce our reliance on the utility grid as much as possible, and eventually plan to use grid interties to sell back to the utilities any excess power we generate with solar panels.

Daily Life

We are a new community, working towards an ideal. We have not yet reached that ideal, and we continuously seek ways to minimize our impact on the earth and its inhabitants. We welcome feedback on how we are doing so far, and on ways we can improve.

On a daily basis, we all work pretty hard doing what needs to be done around here, from renovations and repairs to gardening and landscaping to cooking and cleaning. We welcome hard-working, pioneering souls who are eager to use their talents to help us with the challenging, exciting, and rewarding work of forming a new community.

We buy mostly organic whole foods and bioregional, seasonal produce. We shop mainly at the local farmers' market, our natural foods co-op, locally owned and operated businesses, and environmentally and socially responsible businesses. We recycle, compost, and use salvaged and local materials as much as possible.

In Aspenwood House (where Full members and Interns live), we keep a vegetarian household, and share most meals with each other. Associate members are welcome to join in the shared meals at Aspenwood House as much as they like. Associate member households are not required to be vegetarian.

We have weekly community meetings during which we take time to share how we are each doing, discuss any difficulties members are having, and decide our project priorities for the coming week. We also have visioning meetings a couple of times a year where we check on our progress toward our shared goals. We make major decisions by consensus.

Recreation

At the village, members often hang out together, talking, laughing, playing cards and games, reading quietly, going for walks, watching movies, and more. There are lots of quiet places at the village to relax, enjoy the view, and watch the wildlife. The roads around the ecovillage are good for biking, and there are nearby places to hike as well. Just up the road from the ecovillage is the Pojoaque (po-hwa-kay) Wellness Center, a new fitness center with a pool, sauna, weight room, basketball court, racquetball courts, and yoga and aerobics classes.

Not far away is Santa Fe (20 minute drive) with its museums, art galleries, festivals, workshops and lectures, stores, restaurants, dance clubs and more. On the rare occasions one can't find someone at the ecovillage to carpool to Santa Fe with, there is a free shuttle bus to/from Santa Fe/Pojoaque that runs 4 times daily. Click here to see its schedule.

Farther afield, Taos and Albuquerque (each about 1.5 hours' drive from Piñon) offer various sights, including Taos Pueblo and Earthships in Taos, and the Nature Preserve and historic Old Town in Albuquerque. There are shuttle buses from Pojoaque to both Taos and Albuquerque that run a few times each day.