Dan's DR Blog

Progress on the House This Season

2011-12-24T18:44:00.001-08:00

I made a fair bit of progress this year on the house. The first part of the season was taken up by gardening and tending the grapes, so I wasn't able to start working on the house until about June, when I started by finishing the last section of earthen floor. Last year I wasn't able to finish the section of floor under the batteries below the stairs, so I moved the batteries and finally finished that section. Finishing this section was key to being able to continue the interior construction of the bathroom, which was to be tucked under the stairs.

Another project I worked on fairly early in the season was doing the fascia and soffit and the shingling on the gable ends. The scaffold had been set up all winter and I was anxious to get it out of the way so I could see the house. It was a while before I could move it though. But I'm really pleased with how everything turned out. I did this fishscale design with the wooden shakes. It wasn't that hard to shape each piece of wood and nail it in place, and it added a lot of character to the house.

I really don't like doing this kind of woodwork. The shingling was fine but getting all these reclaimed tongue in groove boards to fit together and getting them nailed up standing on scaffold so high up is not fun for me. After much cursing I was glad to be done with that work.

This summer I got the chance to babysit Mister, an extremely cute rat terrier, while his owner Nani was away. He is definitely my favorite dog at DR. Ever since I took care of him he makes a point of coming to visit me in my house from time to time. He even will scratch at the door sometimes if he knows I'm in there.

After finishing the floor I started framing in the bathroom on the first floor. There is a separate area for the power system in the smaller wedge of space under the stairs. These pictures show the framing, door, and the beginning of the light clay straw walls. I used light clay straw instead of drywall because the straw and clay are local and organic materials that also make a good surface for earthen plaster, which I think looks much better than drywall.

Upstairs I walled in a walk-in closet so I have a place to put all my stuff so it is out of sight. I was sorely in need of a place like this because I'd been living with my stuff scattered throughout the second floor since the previous November. As you can see I used more light clay straw on the walls. The closet is right next to the opening for the stairway. I plan to put a railing along the opening in the future.

This is a picture of the interior of the closet after the light clay straw was finished and I was about to start the plastering. The pole is a rod for hanging clothes on. You can also see the burlap that is used to cover the studs making them easier to plaster over.

Below are some pictures of the downstairs bathroom after applying the finish plaster. I have been really pleased with how beautiful everything has turned out. I used local oak boards for trim. It's that kind of work that takes the most time. Plastering is easy but it's the prep work that is the most tedious. It's worth the time though, because you end up with something unique that you couldn't accomplish any other way, and that you couldn't find at Home Depot.

This is the upstairs closet with most of the scratch coat of plaster on it. The shelves I put in are made of walnut slab wood. I like the organic look of the exterior of the closet. I will be oiling the wood with linseed oil to bring out the natural color and grain.

This is a shot from inside the walk-in closet. This is the same picture as one above, but with the finish plaster on. The pieces of wood in the plaster are nailing strips for future shelving.

I was able to get in the interior finish plastering in just the nick of time because of late season warm weather. The house looks much different with a smooth coat of plaster on. It looks much more finished.

I still have to lay some tile on the window sills, but that will be a winter project. I also have to paint the ceiling. I would like to use milk paint, which is not toxic and doesn't contain harmful chemicals. I experimented with some on the interior of the bathroom (below). I mixed the paint up myself with lime, quark, a cheese made from organic milk, and earthen pigment. The only drawback is that it requires the use of a lot of natural pigment, which can be pretty expensive, considering a quart of paint doesn't get you very far. And given how much milk is required to make a quart of paint, the cost of the organic milk, even at $2.50 a gallon, can make a gallon of milk paint pretty pricey. It goes on earthen plaster easily, though and I like the way it looks. And it's so much better not to have to breath paint fumes. I guess it's the cost of doing something more sustainably.

Gathering Food

2011-11-08T19:43:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I last posted something here, so I'll probably just try to do some posts bit by bit to describe the busy season I've had raising veggies, tending the vineyard, and finishing building my house. Fortunately I've been taking pictures, so there is some record of what I've been doing. I just haven't taken the time to update the blog this season. I wish I could be as prolific in my blog posts as Ziggy.

This season, there was a bounty from the garden in many ways. Because I end up with so much of some crops I try to come up with ways to preserve what I can't eat right away so I can extend the bounty through the rest of the year. Not so long ago, before the advent of refrigeration, everyone grew their own food and knew special ways of preserving it for the rest of the year. Pickling in brine was a great way of keeping veggies edible for the winter and inspired so many delicious new foods. These foods were fermented like saurkraut and could be stored without refrigeration in a cellar for many months. One pickle that I like to make is the Korean kimchi, which is made with Chinese cabbage or radish, scallions, really hot peppers, and if desired, small fish like anchovies. I like hot pickles and one of my favorites is a hot pickle mix of cucumbers, carrots, and hot peppers. In this pickle everything becomes infused with the heat of the peppers adding a kick to the cukes and carrots. This was a good year in the hoop house for pickling cukes, so I made a big batch of hot pickle mix.

Another good way to presere the harvest for winter is to plant good storage varieties of vegetables. I plant tons of garlic every year which I hang up in the house. It usually lasts from mid-July to sometime in January. This season was a good year for onions finally and I ended up with plenty to tide me over until the first spring onions begin to sprout.. For the first year in a long time I planted winter squash and was able to get a fairly good harvest.. I'm not a big squash eater, but I do like a good Thai squash curry. They will store well most of the winter. Then there's always potatoes. I don't count on being able to grow all I'll need though someday I hope to plant that many. This year's harvest was the best in many years. I find them hard to grow in our wet springs and with our high water table. They end up rotting in the ground. Unfortunately my attempt at planting fall carrots failed this year because it was about 100 degrees when I was sowing them. They don't germinate in that kind of heat. I experimented with presprouting carrot seeds in the hoop house with good results. It's not that the plants can't grow in the heat, but the seeds won't germinate, so if you start the seeds inside in a cooler temperature, they'll sprout. Carrots are a great root cellar crop and they usually do really well as a fall crop heavily mulched or pulled up before the first hard frost.

To diversify our diet and get a little bit of valuable manure out of the deal, my girlfriend Julie and I raised 10 broiling chickens this season. I'd raised 7 for the first time last year. These are not a heritage breed but are the common Cornish Rock Cross. They take a lot of time and food, but they sure do taste good. I wouldn't recommend keeping them as long as we did--almost 4 months--because it's more efficient as far as meat to food consumed ratio if you eat them at around 8-10 weeks. Everyone says these birds are too feeble to survive past that age and disparages the breed for being poor foragers, but ours were still energetic and scratching for bugs at 4 months. I think it just takes them a little tome and the opportunity to learn to forage. Of course, compared to heritage and traditional breeds they fall short in everything except their rate of fattening and their feed to meat production ratio.

In addition to the meat birds we have the chicken co-op, which now consists of me, Julie, Dennis and Sharon. This summer we got a new batch of laying chicks and have been watching them grow up very slowly compared to the Cornish Rocks. We started out with 25 chicks and lost one when they were still tiny and fluffy. Up until recently we had 24, and though we got a straight run (meaning they weren't sexed) we ended up with a great ratio of hens to roosters. We wound up with just 6 roosters. Unfortunately, only last week after so much care and feed spent on them, a mink got into the chicken tractor and killed 14 birds. These animals just go on a killing spree and don't even eat most of what they kill. It was pretty devastating for our co-op, but is also a lesson never to let our guard down. It had been so long since we'd had any problems, and we thought they were too big to be messed with, but I guess minks are pretty deadly and can squeeze through a one inch gap under the chicken tractor.

These Buff Orpingtons are really friendly and their color is striking. It was sad to lose so many beautiful birds. So now we are down to 8 laying hens and two roosters along with our older 5 hens that should start slowing down their laying soon.

One local source of feed for the chickens has been the cattail pond behind my house. Every season a bloom of duckweed grows thick over the surface. This is a tiny water plant that is supposedly high in protein, very nutritious, and a favorite food of ducks. The chickens seem to like it too, even the Cornish Rock Crosses. One five minute venture out in the canoe on the pond and you can bring back a full 5 gallon bucket of duckweed. We've been mixing it in with the grain feed we give the chickens. This is such an ideal food source because it replenishes itself so rapidly I"m sure we could sustainably harvest tons of it out of this little pond every year. Our greywater systems feed the pond with nitrogen and the duckweed thrives on the nutrient-rich water. So not only is it cleaning the pond of nitrogen and treating our greywater, we get a renewable, self-replenishing food source for our livestock.

Cornish Rock Crosses eating duckweed

Looking Back on the Season

2011-11-08T12:24:00.000-08:00

This season I've finally been able to focus more on generating some income. My house being livable as of last fall, I've put the finishing touches on hold for most of the season so that I could devote more time to market gardening. The hoop house project has gone really well this season and has brought some more positive cash flow to my bookkeeping. Also, since I'm no longer in Wisteria Lodge, I've been able to rent it out to others and begin making money off my investment. This focus on money is mostly out of necessity since I've been only spending money since coming to DR. But it was all an investment in having a place to live, and in a future means of providing for myself. And although I say “making money”, using our Elms local currency a lot of my income actually comes from barter.

It's been a good season. I've been able to pay my basic expenses and still find some time to work on finishing the house, though of course I never get as much done as I would like.

Spring in the hoop house was incredibly productive. Everyone here at DR was really happy to be able to get local greens so early in the season. I grew a salad mix that contained red and green oakleaf letuce, pac choi, mizuna, claytonia, endive, arugula, baby kale, and mache. I also sold a lot of spinach.

As the season progressed I planted head lettuces, which I found took up a lot more space. They also matured at about the time people started getting lettuce and other greens in from their gardens, so there was not as much demand for them. They are pretty though, and butterhead lettuces like this one are my favorite for salads.

By late spring the lettuces were getting bitter and the greens were starting to bolt, so I cleaned out the beds and planted summer crops. I experimented with many hot weather vegetables this season. Because I've had problems growing melons outside in the past because of pests and the season being too short or too cool, I thought I'd try them in the hoop house. I knew they wouldn't be ideal as far as space efficiency, but I just wanted to see what they'd do. I also planted slicing cucumbers, peppers, and eggplant, thinking these crops would love the extra heat they'd get in the hoop house.

It's interesting that the eggplant and peppers did fairly well in the hoop house because apparently it was so hot outside this summer that a lot of those crops didn't even set fruit until September, when things had cooled off. My tomatoes put on plenty of leaves, but didn't fruit at all during the hottest two months of the season. I ended up with a wheelbarrow full of green tomatoes before the first frost in October. I think the eggplant and peppers were able to fruit because they got a head start on their outdoor counterparts and were able to set fruit before it got really hot out.

The clear summer bumper crop this season in the hoop house was the slicing cukes. I must have harvested a couple hundred cukes off of the one row I planted. Each cuke was at least a foot long and weighed over a pound. And they made the most delicious salads, of which I ate many topped with my homemade feta cheese. Sunflower eating co-op was happy to buy the bulk of them to feed their hungry work exchangers.

The melons were another success story. The muskmelons were able to produce about 9 melons and the watermelons 3 altogether. Not the greatest show considering the space they took up in the hoop house. But they were probably the most delicious melons I've ever had. One of the watermelons weighed over 20 lbs. Each muskmelon was at least 5 lbs.

2011-04-07T15:47:00.000-07:00

More hoop house pictures. We've gotten some more sunny days lately and everything started growing a lot.

Mesclun

Spinach

Bull's Blood Beet

Arugula

Below is some stir fry I made with fresh mizuna and pac choi from the hoop house. Below that is one of the salads I've been enjoying with my homemade organic raw milk feta cheese.

I took some cutting of my grape vines last fall and now I'm rooting them in buckets. If you put them in soil in a warm place, they will send out shoots and make their own roots.

2011-04-03T21:23:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I wrote here. I've been getting little projects accomplished over the winter, but mostly doing research and preparation for the season. Obviously, the hoop house has been something I've been able to work on even in the cold weather. I was out digging up the beds in January and February. Even through the blizzard, during which by the way no snow accumulated on top of the hoop house because of the strong winds, I was able to continue working in the soil.

I've been keeping track of lows and highs in there all winter and the lowest temp recorded was I think around 4 degrees, but that was without using the row cover, a thin plastic fabric, which insulates the soil and keeps a warmer microclimate underneath. Once I'd planted, first small test beds in late January and then the first plantings of most crops in mid-February, I used row cover to add another layer over the beds to hold heat from the soil in overnight. During the sunny days I would roll back the row cover so the plants could get heat and sunlight.

So how did everything do? It's been a really cloudy spring so far and though with the return of the longer days in the past month the crops have been doing better, the lack of real sunny days has meant everything has been growing incredibly slowly. Up until the past week or so I'd felt like everything was on the verge of being ready and if we could just get 3 sunny days I could start picking. Even days when we've seen the sun it's been only for a couple hours or less. The last several days we have finally gotten some sun and I've finally harvested my first produce for sale. I've made up salad mix of spinach, mesclun (which is basically salad mix), and the many other miscellaneous greens I have planted in there. It has been really popular here, but so far I do not have enough to meet the demand. Next year I will be able to plant crops in the fall for spring harvest so the hoop house will be useful for season extension, but because I couldn't really start planting until spring this year and we've had this cloudy weather I may not get much of a harvest before it gets hot and everything bolts to flower.

The picture just above is one of the unusual crops I'm planting that is supposedly cold hardy. It's called claytonia, or miner's lettuce, and is closely related to the woodland ephemeral spring beauty, which is usually the first flower of spring in the Midwestern woods.

Speaking of row cover...I often look up at the sky on the infrequent sunny days we get in the wintertime and I see the view below. These contrails from jet plains are not just innocent wisps in the sky. They change the weather and the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth's surface. It may not seem like they could make much of a difference, but we have a lot of jets flying over us and I've watched clouds form on what would otherwise be a clear day from the remnants of contrails. You can see how these ones spread out. Under the right conditions, which seem to occur often, instead of dissipating they will grow and form thin cloud masses that cover most of the sky eventually. And I'm not pulling this out of my ass. Researchers have studied how this can affect the climate and the amount of energy that reaches life forms on the surface. Of course it's not really possible anymore to study the control of the experiment, which is a sky without contrails. This has only happened once since the widespread use of jet engines. During the only day when there was a nationwide grounding of all air travel in the US, September 11^th, 2001, researchers were able to see the difference in cloud cover. Unfortunately one day was not long enough to base any climate change data on, but the effect on light transmission is obvious to anyone who can watch contrails turn into large overcasting clouds on an otherwise sunny day. Over 30,000 flights a day in this country alone can streak the sky with plenty of clouds. Here it seems to only take a dozen or so flights to put the sun behind a haze that I think significantly reduces light transmission. For organisms that for millions of years did not have daily air travel casting a thin fabric over their lives, I wonder what the repercussions could be. For a village that depends so much on solar power it's another reason, beyond the carbon footprint, to limit air travel.

It was a great year for maple syrup. After last year's pathetic yield, this year we got about 12 gallons off of the trees DR and Red Earth Farms taps. Because I put in a lot of hours tapping, I ended up with almost two gallons of maple syrup. It's delicious. I'll probably end up using it for a lot more than just pancakes since it is a local sweetener and I've got tons of it. The pictures below are of sap being poured into the boiling pan in the sugar shack at Sandhill farm. Sandhill boils down their sorghum syrup in this building using steam heating.

Last week we got more cold weather with a bit of snow, of course clouds and overnight lows in the low 20s. I'm glad about the cold because early warms spells like the one we had last week scare me because they can cause fruit trees and grape vines to break their dormancy early and then if we get a late freeze their blossoms or tender young shoots can be frozen. But I noticed the peepers stopped calling over the last few days. From my new house whose, windows look out on the cattail pond behind my garden the calls of these mating frogs is deafening. I don't mind it at all. The first time you hear it you know that spring is not far off. It is pretty amazing that once they start calling in late winter, it can get back down into the 30s and you still hear them out there all night long.

I've been doing a lot of cheesemaking lately, mostly mozzarella and feta. It's taken me a while but I think I've perfected feta. It's definitely one of my favorite cheeses, and now I can make more than I could imagine knowing what to do with out of local organic raw milk. I've been making delicious spinach and mixed greens salads with the little amounts I've been harvesting from the hoop house.

I finished the hatch for the cheese/root cellar under the floor near the kitchen. It's been staying just above freezing in there all winter long, which is perfect for storing root veggies. I expect it will hang in the 50s in there in the summer, which is good for aging cheese.

Over the winter I was able to finish installing and start operation of my irrigation system for the vineyard and hoop house. This solar panel directly operates a pump that pushes water up the hill from the pond to a holding tank. From the tank, gravity brings the water down to a hose in the hoop house. I will eventually have a drip irrigation system for the vineyard. I've already been using the system to water the beds in the hoop house. The whole system was mostly paid for by a cost share grant from the Department of Energy to help farmers convert irrigation systems and electrical fencing to renewable solar energy. I'm not sure, but I think it was part of the stimulus package. So if you are wondering if that stimulus did any good, it has made possible this hoop house and irrigation system that are growing local organic vegetables for Dancing Rabbit. If it is successful, it will at least help out my economic situation and it is definitely contributing to the building of a sustainable economy here. Go Keynesian economics! At least they are increasing the debt by funding some good things instead of just buying weapons and bombing people.

I'm thinking about starting a new blog. I would still keep this one going to give updates on what I'm doing at DR, but the new one will be more thought provoking and less like a journal. I plan to write about Dancing Rabbit, but I will be relating what we are doing here to larger issues. I will dabble in philosophy, economy, and ecology. Lately I've been writing a lot of these kinds of little essays. I've written some entries to this blog along these same lines in the past. I'm thinking of the two entries on the challenges of creating a sustainable economy here and the entry on the future of our vehicles at DR. I would like to draw some cartoons to illustrate some of the ideas in the essays. Some of the subjects I've written about recently are, the sustainability of cities, privatization of education and the inability of a market economy like the one we have in the US to successfully provide for the public interest, and extremes of opinion and philosophy and how groups close themselves off to new information. I also have a rather long essay I wrote a long time ago on the history of the automobile in terms of it's impact on the planet. I did a lot of research on the subject so it is really good information and I hope will help people who read it to see cars in a different way.

New House Pictures

2010-12-31T11:05:00.000-08:00

Here are some crazy, but good pictures of the new house taken by Jess Ahlemeyer. She has been taking pictures of all the houses at DR so we can update our virtual tour on the DR website. Watch for the update soon. I'm writing the text for the pictures.

Jess used a program that allows her to create a composite image of many photos. She is a great photographer too so these are really nice. Unfortunately, the house is not really finished or furnished and is not looking its best. But still it gives you a better idea of what it looks like inside, with some distortion. Thanks for these pictures, Jess.

Hoop House!

2010-12-11T13:05:00.000-08:00

It's finally getting to the end of the working season. We had our first snow yesterday and many days it's too cold to do much outside. I've finished most of what I wanted to finish outside, though I still have a few important tasks to complete, like building a wood shed and putting gutters on the house. For a while there I was worried I wasn't going to be able to finish the hoop house in time to plant in the spring. I've had a number of problems with the kit. There was no information in the instructions about how to build the end walls, so it's been interesting trying to figure out how to do that and how the plastic on the end walls is attached. There seem to be major parts of the instructions that are left up to the person putting it up to figure out for themselves even though parts provided are sometimes not compatible. It's been much more of a struggle than I would have expected from something prefab, but I have now finished it. The plastic is up and it's pretty tight for the winter.

After the hoop house was pretty much closed in and we had our first sunny cold day, I got to test its ability to keep things warm. I closed up the corners for the winter where there was a gap through which the wind could easily blow. I think that eliminated most of the drafts. We have had sunny days in the low to mid 20s these last two days and it's gotten pretty warm in there. I checked one day at about 2pm and it was over 70 degrees. The ground outside is frozen down to about three inches, but it's still completely unfrozen in the hoop house. It's going to be a nice refuge from the bitter cold on sunny winter days. I can go a couple zones to the south by just taking a short walk. A number of people here have suggested I have a dance party or a contra dance in the hoop house because it's so warm on a cold winter day, but I don't want to compact the soil. It made me think that DR should put up it's own hoop house just to have a sheltered warm space to hold events, do yoga, etc when the weather is bad or to extend our season outside. There's something so much different about being in bright sunlight in the middle of winter versus being in a building.

Michael and Jess, two former DR visitors who are considering living here permanently, helped me with putting the plastic on the house. It was pretty cold this day when we put on the side curtains.

The hoop house, if I haven't explained, will make it possible to grow food year round. It won't be heated with anything but sunlight, but will maintain a microclimate for vegetables that will allow them to survive the winter cold. It will also greatly extend the cool part of the season allowing a longer harvest of greens like lettuce and spinach. There are a number of unique greens and vegetables that can survive the winter in the hoop house. I'm told that I will even be able to harvest lettuce throughout the winter in this part of the country. I'll have to experiment to see which crops grow best here. Because of shorter days, vegetables will not grow much in December and January, but they will survive, so if I plant them at the right time they will mature just before growth slows and they can be harvested throughout December and January. Other crops can be planted in the summer for an extended season. Tomatoes and cucumbers can be harvested weeks earlier and later than would be possible outside the hoop house. I plan to sell the produce I grow here at DR and while making an income, I will be providing fresh local organic veggies at a time of year when there is little in the way of local vegetables. Most people eat fruit and vegetables throughout the winter that are transported from thousands of miles away. Actually most people eat this way during the gardening season as well, but we are already growing a lot of our produce or buying it locally during the season, so this hoop house will eliminate the miles traveled by some of our food in the winter.

I finally moved into the new house after finishing the wood floor on the second floor. I've been living mostly on the second floor while finishing work on the earthen floor on the first floor. I rented Wisteria Lodge to our new resident Chris. It has been convenient to have him needing a place to live around the time that my rental property became available. I did some minor improvements on the house before he moved in. One was putting a new facade on the door. The wisteria vine has grown considerably this season.

Tom helped me put in the reclaimed oak floor on the second floor. He has a special tool for nailing tongue and groove flooring and he works much faster than I do since he's done this many times. I figured I could be doing other things while he did the floor. And I did.

The sanding took a bit of work to get down past the grime. It was a struggle to decide which finish to use on the wood floor. I'd wanted to use something more natural than polyurethane, but because I wanted a harder surface and a certain finished look, and because there were other drawbacks and financial limits to alternatives, I decided to go with low VOC water-based polyurethane, which was still pricy at over $50 a gallon. There are some good products out there. One I'd have to order online was $135 a gallon. It was tung-oil based. One of the natural options was the same finish I used for the earthen floor—linseed oil mixed with Citrasolv. I looked at another floor here that was finished with this mixture and realized it was not the look I wanted. It was a little too blotchy and yellow. I also was not sure of how the Citrasolv would affect the wood since I think it is acidic. I used plain linseed oil for the trim on the house, but that will not be getting foot traffic. Linseed oil alone might have worked but would never have been as hard a the polyurethane. It was a toss up. I decided on polyurethane and I'm happy with the results.

When the subfloor had dried I put another layer of cob mixture down to bring the level up to within a half an inch of the surface. I debated about whether to do just one final layer to finish it, but decided on two more layers so it would be less likely to crack. It was a good idea for a few reasons. For one bringing the layer up to within half an inch of the surface meant the final layer, which requires the use of screened clay and sand, was pretty thin. For the thicker layer below it I could then use unscreened material and save a lot of time on screening. I could also use longer pieces of straw in the mixture , giving it more strength, and preventing cracking. Another benefit was that the layers took less time to dry because they were thinner. And finally, two thinner layers instead of one thick one decreased the likelihood of cracking. I did have some cracking and I think that was the result of the second layer being thicker in some spots. I should have brought the entire subfloor up to withing an inch of the surface and done two final half inch layers. Then I probably wouldn't have had any cracking.

The final layer of floor is troweled smooth with a pool trowel

It takes some care to make the surface as level and flat as possible. The material is laid down as dry as possible to prevent cracking. The floor ended up with only very minor cracking.

With the final layers I also covered up the concrete covering the cheese cellar. I will be making a door to cover the hole that is now in the floor. Once the floor was dry I applied a heated mixture of linseed oil mixed with Citrasolv. I started with a 50/50 mixture and increased the proportion of oil with each layer. The citrasolv is a thinner that allows the oil to penetrate the earthen floor better. As linseed oil dries it hardens and creates a durable surface on the floor so it can stand up to everyday traffic.

I'd been looking for a wood stove for the house and had planned on buying the Jotl model that many people here get, but then I found out about a farmer down the road who was selling a used Waterford stove that was almost identical to the Jotl. So I got that for the house. I've been using it to heat in the last couple weeks and am pleased with how it works. The only drawback is that it doesn't have the window on the door so you can watch the fire. Eventually I might get a different stove, but for now this one will do.

The stove with the now finished floor under it.

Insulation in the attic

2010-10-05T20:12:00.000-07:00

As the weather gets colder it seems I'm moving faster to try to get things done in time to move into the new house by winter. I'm shooting for Oct 31st to have it ready to live in and it's still possible I could make it. I just have to finish the earthen floor, get the wood floor laid on the second floor and enclose the east gable end. Once that is done it will be sealed from the cold at least. I may not finish the interior plaster, but I'm not sure I want to since I would like to add some detail to it and I'd like to take the time to make it really aesthetically interesting.

I found this little critter on the trim above the front door of the new house when I was about to lime plaster the wall. I've never seen a frog just sitting relaxing like this. It's a tree frog and probably like a cool spot to rest in. They have suction cup toes. I moved it before plastering.

The interior base coat of plaster is done and most of the fill plaster, which is used to even out the walls by filling in the unevenness that is more or less unavoidable in making a strawbale wall. The interior trim is all done as well. I was waiting on a part for the planer to be able to continue on the soffit and fascia and now it is fixed so I'm continuing with the exterior woodwork.

Today I finished the subfloor of the earthen floor. That is the thickest layer (about 3" deep) and takes the most time. It took probably about 25 batches of cob to do. That's a lot of cob stomping, but I had help from others sometimes. It feels good to have that done. Now I have to wait for it to dry and I can do the final coats each of which are only 1/2" thick. They should dry much quicker.

A bunch of us got together to rent a cellulose blower so that we could all insulate our houses at the same time and save on the cost of rental. It was really easy to do and much much cheaper than paying someone to do it. I never realized how much better blown cellulose is than fiberglass. Not only is it made from recycled newspaper and not carcinogenic, it insulates much more per inch. I put a little over seven inches in and it's supposed to be R-30 in insulation value. All summer the upstairs of the house has been really hot because the roof heats up so much. It's supposed to be warm this week and I look forward to getting a better sense of how cool the strawbale will keep the house with the ceiling insulated from the roof now.

I finally took the forms off the slab of concrete I poured over the cheese/root cellar and it turned out pretty good. It seems strong and sturdy. I will cover it with the final coats of the earthen floor so that it doesn't stand out so much as it does in the picture. There will just be a wooden door for access.

My Dad came to visit this week and help me with putting up the hoop house. We made a lot of progress, but as with most things here it took a lot longer than I thought it would. I keep telling people it looks like we erected an airplane hangar in the field. It really is enormous and metal and shiny. There's still much to be done to get it to the point of being able to plant in it, but the parts that require four or more people to put up are already up. I will keep plugging away at it.

I have to say it will be really nice to have a new house to live in, a hoop house to grow veggies in so I can sell them to people here, and a vineyard to produce grapes for wine. I've been working towards all these things ever since coming to DR. It will also feel great to be able to focus on the vineyard, the winery, and the garden next year and only have a little to do on the house to finish it.

Monarch Butterflies Take Over

2010-09-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

I've continued this busy building season working on the house. I'm making progress on the earthen floor. The light clay straw has taken way too long to dry and is setting back the entire project, unfortunately. At least now I know it needs at least a month to dry. I've even resorted to pushing boards underneath the layer of light clay straw to prop it up and allow air flow underneath. This worked but it did loosen the straw somewhat. I couldn't wait any longer for it to dry though.

The monarch butterflies flooded our fields this year to feed on nectar from the white snakeroot. I don't know what was going on with the migration or why they are suddenly in such great numbers this year. I've never seen so many in one place before. All the white flowers in the picture below are white snakeroot and each plant has 5-7 monarchs on it. There have got to be thousands in our fields.

I've also been working on the soffit and fascia. I had to build some extra supports to be able to get the scaffolding up as high as I needed it to do the gable end. It was pretty rickety up there, especially when the wind kicked up.

I laid the slab for the cover on the root/cheese cellar that is under the floor in the corner. I had to build a platform to hold the concrete up over the cellar. After the concrete set I took the platform apart piece by piece and brought it out through the access hole. Now I will put earthen floor over the concrete to hide it.

The base coat of plaster on the outside is now complete too, with the south side finally covered. I will work on the trim. There has been a run of equipment failures lately. Every day for four days in a row I had major equipment integral to my projects breaking down. First the handle on the electric planer broke, so I had to order a new handle. The next day my circular saw stopped working, and I'm guessing it is a bad switch, so I have to order one of those too. The next day I realized that my charge controller had not been charging my batteries in the last number of days so the batteries were run way down. I thought I had to get a new charge controller until I was able to fingure out the next day that the wires for the temperature sensor had become disconnected. Apparently this prevents the charge controller from giving current to the batteries. Then yesterday my water sprayer, which I use for spraying down the walls with water before plastering, stopped being able to pressurize its tank. I thought that applying earthen plaster would be a foolproof thing to do because it's such a simple process, but I guess being dependent on any kind slightly complex tool makes you vulnerable to these kinds of failures. Hopefully this is the last of them.

The late season has been pretty good in the garden. The cauliflower and broccoli I planted in April has finally gotten big enough to produce heads. It should have been ready to harvest in June or July at the latest. I've also been harvesting a lot of cucumbers, summer squash, edamame, eggplant, peppers, and beets. The pear I planted by the garden shed is bearing fruit this year. It is a variety that was growing in the yard of a rental property in Madison that my friends and I would always pick from. I took scionwood from that tree and grafted it onto a rootstock and have been moving it around for years until I found a permanent home for it near the shed. The pears are delicious. I plan to espalier the tree on the wall of the shed.

The hoop house arrived in the last few days. It is much more heavy duty than I was expecting. The entire shipment weighed 2200 pounds. The unloading from the delivery truck showed how having a community of peole around can be really helpful. Within about ten minutes me and a bunch of other DR folks who pitched in were able to unload two pallets of really heavy metal parts. We brought some of it out to the hoop house site, but I'll be using the tractor to move the rest. It is going to be a big project to assemble it, but I would like to get it up in the next week or two so I can get something planted in it. If I can plant some greens in early or mid October, I can probably harvest some by December. I added a trailer load of composted manure to the area, I limed it, added wood ash, and ran the chickens over it. The soil test said the soil had a pH of 5.5 and needed potassium and phosphate. The ash adds potassium and the chickens phosphate.

Quick Update

2010-08-10T12:15:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to try to make this update brief since I feel like blogging takes a lot of time and I don't have extra right now, but I really want to get up some pictures of the changes happening with my projects this season. We'll start with the successes.

The vineyard

All this rain has been great for the vines. They need plenty of water when they are getting established and this season has provided it steadily up until the last couple weeks.

Many of the vines have been growing so fast I was forced to get going on putting up the trellises. They went up just in time and now many of the vines have reached the trellis wire and some have even fully filled out their allotted space on it. I'm hoping that by the end of the season nearly all the vines will have filled in their space so next season they can produce a full crop.

These are locust posts harvested from nearby Sandhill farm. They are an organic rot-resistant alternative to treated posts, and they look a lot more organic too.

This year there was a small crop, which was just enough to test the sugar content, monitor disease, and assess the impact of deer and bird grazing. The grapes didn't get to the sugar content I was hoping for before the birds ate them all, so at least I know birds could be a problem. Some varieties got as high as 20 degrees Brix, which if fermented to dryness would produce a wine with 10 percent alcohol. I'm hoping to have between 22 and 24 Brix so that I don't have to add sugar to make a stable wine. It's hard to say if there were more grapes if the birds would not be a huge impact, but I'd rather not take chances so I'll probably try to be prepared next season.

I had a scare earlier in the year with crown gall damage, but think I've figured out why it was a problem. Last winter I protected the trunks of the vines with foil to keep the critters from girdling them. When we got an early spring and it didn't seem to be letting up I thought it was safe (by late april and after about a month and a half of warm weather) to take off the foil. Then of course in early May we got a couple late frosts, so I think the trunks that had been protected were not hardened off enough to deal with the cold snap. Some must have been damaged and the bacteria of crown gall invaded and eventually stopped up the nutrient flow in the vine causing dieback or just death in about ten vines so far. I will be more careful in the future about taking off the protection too early. Although it has been a really wet year, fungus did not attack the grape bunches at all that I could see, probably because there is still a lot of open space for airflow in the vineyard.

The chickens are still going strong producing eggs. I've been feeding them compost from the Mercantile, which has diversified their diet considerably. They are getting plenty of egg shells to eat so they won't lack the stuff they need to make strong shells on their eggs.

My experiment with meat chickens has had its ups and downs. That cold snap in May happened the week I'd bought my chicks and they weren't liking the cold weather. They are a fast growing hybrid breed (Cornish rocks) that seems to thrive in maximum heat and is weakened by cold conditions. Temperatures that my laying chicks survived killed off most of my meat chicks. I ended up with 7 out of 25 I'd started with. Next year I will get them later in the season, if I decide to try them again. They have been delicious though, and I've been making some of the best chicken I've ever tasted.

Barbecued chicken, grilled summer squash and eggplant

I'm thinking about giving up on chickens for now because they are such a time sucker and they offer very little in return since I only have 7 layers. If I were doing them on a large scale and winter housing wasn't such a problem, it would be a more efficient practice. Maybe eventually I will try something like miniature sheep, which don't need quite as much protection in winter as chickens and may be easier to feed. I've read about people using them for mowing and fertility improvement in vineyards. They are a big commitment though.

This season I also expanded the vineyard planting, adding four more partial rows of white wine grapes. In the space not occupied by vines I will be putting in a 30'x36' hoop house for season extension. I will be growing cool weather greens like spinach, mustards, and possibly carrots along the lines of what Eliot Coleman does on his farm. This project was partially inspired by a government grant that will pay for 90% of the cost of the hoop house and by my desire to have an income source that will have a faster turnaround than the vineyard. It will also give me a way to garden for more of the year. I may be able to harvest crops into December and plant new ones in February. The ground needs some serious soil improvement before it will be suitable for growing vegetables. I plan to add composted manure and minerals and turn them into the soil before setting up the hoop house in September sometime.

Another part of the project is an irrigation system. I was able to get a cost share grant from the DNR to pay for 75% of the cost of a tank, pump, solar panel, and piping to the pond from the tank. I will draw water out of the pond to fill the tank using a solar powered pump, then gravity will take water downhill to the hoophouse and vineyard. Since the hoop house doesn't allow water in, irrigation is needed somewhat during portions of the growing season, though it's likely water will percolate through the soil from outside the hoophouse given our perched water table.

The house

Work has continued on the house. The first thing I did was to build the stairway, which was a considerable project since I had to make the treads and risers out of rough cut local silver maple. Often I needed to saw a straight edge on it before using the table saw and planer to make it look like real boards. I'm very happy with the finished product though. The maple is really pretty wood.

Most of the interior scratch coat of plaster on the walls is done. Drywall has been installed on the second floor ceiling and blown cellulose will be happening soon. I'm still working on putting on the rest of the joint compound, or "mudding". But the upstairs looks like a real room now.

The power system took an unnecessarily long time to put together and get online. The panels had to be mounted on the garden shed, which was a project in itself. The components had to be ordered from many different places and each time I thought I had everything I needed I found I needed to order something else. It's all together now though and there are lights, outlets that can run the planer and circular saw, and even a ceiling fan on the second floor. It's nice to have that power system for building. I probably should have put it together before starting the framing and kept it in the garden shed. The system is about 16 times the size of the system in Wisteria Lodge, so I will probably have power to spare. It also has an inverter that can be tied to grid so when the grid-tied power co-op is set up here, I can feed excess power into it and use that power in the winter when power is low here.

The power system is tucked under the stairs

The trim on the first floor is also done and the cantilever outside enclosed and insulated. I used the same silver maple as the stairs for the trim. I bought a pile of boards from a local guy who removes trees and mills them for $62. I'm running out of good boards from that piles and will probably use the rest for firewood this winter.

The enclosed cantilever

The new door has made the house look a little more professional. It replaces an interior door I slapped on late last year to keep out the elements. This one is insulated and lets in light. Eventually the front door will be a homemade wooden door to fit the rustic look I'm going for with the house.

I'm starting on the earthen floor now. First I have to put down the insulation. I'm using light-clay straw, the same stuff I used in Wisteria Lodge and the south wall of this house. From reading about it, laying the insulation layer of straw is difficult because the finished product has to be firm and not too spongy. The only information I can find about it just says it is a complicated process and doesn't explain how to do it. So, using the same principle used with light clay straw in walls I'm just applying pressure from the top using pallets to compress the straw until it is partially dry. It seems to be working, but I'll have to see if it dries firm enough. This is a good time to do the floor because it takes a long time to dry and needs hot temperatures.

I still have to enclose the gables, plaster the south wall, put in the wood stove, do the soffit, hang the gutters, put in the wood floor on the second floor, and put on the finish coats of plaster at least on the inside. I think I can make it livable by October so I can rent out Wisteria Lodge this winter. Some of this I can do while waiting for the floor to dry.

The garden

The garden has been miserable this year. I'm not alone in this. Everyone around here, including farmers and gardening Mennonites have had a horrible year because of the rain. Crops just sat in the ground for the first few months of the season barely growing. Only in the last couple weeks have my peppers and onions taken off. It's not because of a lack of hot weather either. We've had plenty of that, just like the Farmer's Almanac predicted. Carrot and potatoes rotted in the ground despite my attempts to avoid the saturated soil by holding off planting until June. I have gotten some stuff out of the garden. It was a great year for strawberries. I sold many quarts of strawberries here. Garlic did well too. Lately I've harvested beets, onions, summer squash, cukes, and eggplant. I've been selling greens too.

This was the onions in June sometime. When I harvested them last week they were about the same size.

Overall though, I'm not sure if it would be better to focus less on the garden because it seems like such a waste of time in terms of payoff and I need to get in that house this fall.

Building a Sustainable Economy at DR

2010-07-01T19:58:00.000-07:00

This is the first of a few articles I will be writing exploring the economics of Dancing Rabbit. The economic system we develop here at DR is vital to the survival and growth of our community. If we are to serve as a model for sustainable societies, it is important that our community be not only ecologically sustainable, but economically sustainable. If we cannot find sustainable ways to meet our basic needs, generate income, and trade and buy goods we will not be a viable model for sustainable living. Though we have in many ways achieved our goal of living more sustainably than most Americans, we are still dependent on the unsustainable global economy for most of our income and livelihood. This dependency contributes greatly to our impact on the planet. Creating a healthy economy based on the same principles of sustainability we employ in our everyday lives at DR will make us an even better model for a new way of living.

But developing a vibrant and ecologically sustainable economy is not easy. Part of the challenge at DR is that we are living in both the sustainable and the unsustainable economy. In our ideal world we would produce everything we consumed, so we had control over our resources and could ensure that production was sustainable. We are far from that and probably will be for the near future. Instead, we bring in resources and money from outside our local economy and we pay out money and resources to the larger economy. We have to have as much coming in from outside as we do going out or we are operating with a deficit. Trade deficits are talked about in the national news, but they can exist on a smaller scale as well. Maintaining a trade deficit will jeopardize the sustainability of our economy. If we can produce something to sell from our domestic resources to offset this deficit we will have a more viable economy. But we have to be careful, because we don't want to export all our natural resources either.

To give an example, we could produce our own food here or, to save us the trouble, we could pay local farmers to produce our food for us. A local farmer could grow beans for us, but unless that farmer is buying anything from us and giving back to our community, we will be running a deficit. Our money is going out but not being recirculated in our economy. When someone is growing beans here, the money we pay the grower will likely stay within the community.

Presently there are many ways we send money out of the community. Health care is a big negative cash flow, though we do provide some of our own care here in the form of home remedies, massage, yoga, etc. However, most of us still go to the local hospital and dentist when we have a major problem. As well, construction-related expenses are a massive flow out of our community, though some members of our community do construction work or sell materials. Other ways we send money out of the community are orders from the natural foods distributor, other groceries, power system components, vehicle-related and other transportation expenses, computers, and entertainment-related expenses. Some people here offset money sent out of the community by bringing in income through their jobs. This positive cash flow is a slightly more complicated matter.

There are basically two ways money is brought into the community (and these are the two ways most people survive here): by members who come here with an established means of making money, and by members who come here with savings that will allow them to live without a stable income for a while until they can find a way to make money. I would hazard a guess that most of the positive cash flow into the community comes from the people who arrive with savings or inherit money. A large portion of the non-savings positive cash flow is from web-based businesses that are run by a relatively small number of community members. Some other sources of income for the community are mid-wifery, FIC (Fed. Of Intentional Comm.)work, non-profit consulting and management, and consensus and facilitation training. A small amount is brought in through the visitor program but this does not cover the costs of the program.

Money brought into the community through outside jobs and savings is then cycled through the economy in the form of construction jobs and the sale of other small scale goods and services provided by community members. DR itself also pays some members for certain jobs. It's possible for someone to survive here working for other people who have a stable income, and often people with money are looking for help and willing to pay for it. However, right now I would doubt whether we could say we have a thriving economy that could provide income for many people who weren't already set up in some way. People who come here with ready-made income sources are essential for the existence of our economy in these early stages of DR's economy(and it will always be helpful to have some percentage of our population arrive with income sources). They can keep our economy afloat until it is healthy and diverse enough that it can provide the community's basic needs.

When I think about economy at DR, I get a sinking feeling that our economy is not really sustainable (or viable) in that instead of bringing in money from outside the community, we are living largely off savings. Some build their houses with their savings and others pay people to help them build their houses. Savings are a good source of income for DR and there is no doubt that this sector of the economy is vital to new people becoming established here, but it is questionable that it would be sustainable if the flow of new members slowed and everyone was living in largely finished houses. Unless those people who arrive with savings (like me) can find ways to make income here they will eventually run out of money.

Another nagging doubt about the sustainability of our economy is the question of whether we are really setting an example for sustainability if our economy is based largely on the the internet and member savings. Setting an example to me means having sustainable businesses and trade that prove an economy can be set up from the ground up along principles of sustainability. These businesses and trade would be based on our knowledge and skills, and on land and resources that we control, instead of being based on distant lands and resources, and unsustainable systems. In addition, by creating businesses and trade that go beyond our community we can offer sustainable alternatives to the global economy and bring in income to offset what we are paying out.

If we can come up with creative ways to generate income and produce our basic needs at DR we can build a more stable economic foundation. Other intentional communities that have been able to survive have had some main cottage industry to generate revenue from outside the community. Twin Oaks makes tofu and hammocks, Acorn has a seed business, East Wind makes nut butters, and Sandhill sells sorghum and honey. We could potentially have many different cottage industries here. A good place to start is with the products people here already buy from outside DR. These are the low hanging fruit and will provide three benefits at once in that someone at DR will have an income source, that money will stay in our economy, and we will not have to go outside DR to meet a basic need. The added benefit is that with our local currency, dollars don't have to be exchanged at all. Construction is one of the low hanging basic services we are already providing for ourselves, but there are many more potential business ideas. Food is something we spend a lot of money on and since we have plenty of land available for growing food this could be a lucrative means of income for someone or a group of people.

At Dancing Rabbit we are unique from and have advantages over some other intentional communities because we have a diversity of potential income sources. This makes DR attractive to people who don't want to be limited in the work they do in their lives. Individuals or groups can start their own businesses that will then eventually provide jobs for others. The Milkweed Mercantile is an example of this kind of business. Jennifer's natural building practicum will build community infrastructure while bringing revenue into our economy and educating others in living more sustainably. There is a lot of expertise here, and a lot of people out there who want to learn from us and would want to buy the things we produce sustainably. We aren't tapping into this potential nearly enough now, though hopefully as people get more established we will. I hope that we will realize what a resource we are and how many people are willing to support us by paying for what we have to offer. What better way to generate income for our community than by helping others do what we all came here to do-- live more sustainably.

So we need to build our own sustainable businesses at DR to meet our basic needs and offset the flow of money out of our community. That is easier said than done. In the next article I will explore the challenges of starting a sustainable production business here.

The Challenge of Finding a New Vehicle

2010-05-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

For most of my time at DR, I've been involved with our vehicle co-op, a three-car carsharing organization members of DR are required to use for auto transportation. It's interesting that so much of my time here has been spent on the DRVC since so much of my life has been devoted to the movement against cars. I have long believed and there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the automobile is responsible for much of the ecological destruction being done to the planet. In everything from the extraction of resources to produce vehicles, fuel, and roads, to the destruction of the natural world to make way for roads, to the wars we fight over oil (which are by far the most effective way of destroying a planet), to their importance as a huge chunk of our unsustainable economy, to the way they dominate our lives and shape our landscape, our use of cars is a major contribution to our own destruction. But our lives and livelihood have become so dependent on the car that it is almost impossible to live in our society without using one. This being the case at least at this point, we at DR are trying to come up with the most sustainable option for meeting our vehicle needs and for demonstrating an alternative to the rest of the world.

The first thing we do to reduce the impact of cars is reduce our vehicle use. Over 50 people get by using only 3 cars. To reduce our use, we do what aside from not using one is the most significant thing one can do to reduce the impact of a car-- rideshare. Each week at our weekly meeting we plan out the week's vehicle use and coordinate rides. There are regularly scheduled weekly trips to the three most popular destinations of DR members and this allows us to plan our activities to fit into those regular trip time slots. Unfortunately, some people don't plan well or decide they need something at the last minute and take a trip without sharing the ride at all. There are also those who just prefer not to have to coordinate a bunch of errands with many other riders and avoid ridesharing. Both of these things greatly increase the impact of the car. Just having one rider who would otherwise have taken a separate trip effectively doubles the mileage of a vehicle.

While this is our first choice and clearly the most effective way to reduce the impact of our use of cars if we must use them, another way of making a difference is to find the vehicle technology with the least ecological impact. We want to set an example at DR by offering an alternative that is accessible to others. In the early days of DR, the vehicle co-op decided on biodiesel as their fuel of choice. DR members collected waste vegetable oil from local restaurants and through a chemical process converted it into diesel fuel. Because it was turning a non fossil fuel waste product into a fuel, it was a carbon neutral fuel option and clearly better than using gasoline. The problem was that making biodiesel from veggie oil takes time and careful monitoring, and if done incorrectly produces a product that is mostly useless as a fuel. Conversions were done on two of the vehicles to allow a second tank to be filled with straight vegetable oil, allowing for use of the unprocessed version of the waste oil as fuel. But there was some question about the efficiency of driving around regularly to collect the waste oil, which had to be gathered from many different places all over. Unfortunately, after a few years people with the energy and knowledge to produce biodiesel moved on and commercial biodiesel became a more viable option, so the vehicle co-op stopped producing its own fuel.

Since then, DR's population has increased and its vehicle use has gone up as well. Biodiesel has never been an ideal fuel because diesel vehicles have trouble starting in the cold winter temperatures and biodiesel gels to the point of clogging the fuel filter and preventing the car from running. When there were DRVC vehicles with two tanks, the car could be started on petrodiesel and switched over to biodiesel when the engine warmed up. Eventually one of the converted vehicles broke down and was replaced by a vehicle without a second tank, then the second tank on the remaining vehicle started leaking and was never fixed. Without the second tank we have had to run a mixture of as much as 80% petrodiesel in the coldest parts of winter, a practice that goes against one of our covenants that requires our fuel for vehicles be from sources other than fossil fuel.

Recently, with our backsliding becoming more obvious and the difficulties with running diesel vehicles in winter still an issue, we've come to realize that we need a new option, or we need to redesign our system to make biodiesel more viable. Many here have begun to question the merits of biodiesel as an eco-friendly option, particularly if we are purchasing it commercially. At this year's retreat an ad hoc committee was assigned the task of researching better options for vehicle transport at DR. We are looking at all kinds of options from electric vehicles to biodiesel, veggie oil, ethanol, and wood gasification. We are also exploring the option of two passenger or fewer vehicles.

I've been researching the possibilities of making our biodiesel system more sustainable. My idea is to have a farmer grow us canola that we would then press and use as fuel in diesel vehicles that have been converted with an Elsbett kit to run on straight veggie oil. The conversion modifies the engine so that it can run on biodiesel in the winter months without all the gelling problems, and can run on SVO during the warmer season. I've done calculations and found that it would take about 8-10 acres of land to grow the canola we'd need taking into account our projected fuel consumption.

Many people have issues with biodiesel because they think rainforests are destroyed to produce it from oil palm or land that could produce food is being used for fuel for cars. But biodiesel production, like many other products, can be made using destructive practices or using eco-friendly practices. If we made our own we would have organic, local fuel that is carbon neutral. Another criticism of biodiesel is that American fuel demand far exceeds the available land for growing fuel and food. But the way I see it, there is no one alternative that can fill all fuel demands in the way that oil has. It's going to take a number of different sources of fuel to keep the basics of our transportation system going. But without a doubt, as oil reserves dwindle consumption will have to go down, and when it does, biofuels will have some place in the mix. So I still see it as an option, and think everyone else should too. And in the comparison of biofuels, producing and burning straight veggie oil blows away ethanol in terms of the efficiency of production. We would need to purchase a press for about $3000, convert at least one of our vehicles for another $2500, and spend about 7 days a year to produce all our fuel. The press itself would be powered using renewable energy and the tractor and equipment used to grow the canola could be run on biodiesel we make from our veggie oil. This option would require some effort on our part, but less than was required when we were making our own biodiesel from waste oil.

Tony has already proposed a large wind turbine to power a power co-op that will provide electricity to residences here. The turbine would be tied to the grid and during windy parts of the season would produce excess power that would be sold back to the grid. With this excess power he says we could also charge the batteries of an electric vehicle. He is looking into the Nissan Leaf, an EV that is due to come out later this year. Its price will supposedly be comparable to a similar gasoline vehicle and it's claimed to have lower maintenance costs. I'm thinking another possible use for the excess wind power is to power the oil press that would make our biofuels. We could make all our fuel during times of the year when power is abundant and have it ready when we need it. We may also end up deciding to try a couple of different options for fueling our cars. We probably can't find a 4X4 pick-up that would run on electricity, and the range of E.V.s is only about 100 miles so ours might be limited to certain kinds of trips.

It's exciting to think about being on the cutting edge of this technology. We will hopefully be able to develop a system that meets our needs and demonstrates that our future is a diversity of technologies. Nor can we expect, as many opponents of biofuels do, that we will find a single technology to replace oil. The abundance of oil got us into this place we are in, with such a complex economy that demands more and more fuel each year, but we have to accept that we are not likely to come up with anything that can even replicate let alone surpass oil's abundance.

Straw walls and lime plaster

2009-11-16T18:12:00.001-08:00

The building season is pretty much over now and the house has come together pretty fast. Sorry I haven't been posting to this blog as frequently as I would like. I was busy working on the house, then we had a few weeks of low to no power so my internet access was limited.

We had some great weather in early November, which made plastering much more pleasant. It worked out well because the few weeks before the good weather, we had a lot of rain, and fortunately most of the work was baling the walls under the tarps. Of course it was pretty gloomy working under the tarps on such gloomy, cold days. The baling took a lot longer than expected. The lower parts of the walls went up fast, but the tops of the walls required quite a bit of notching, which is time consuming work.

The cistern hole was dug before I started the baling. Here is a picture of Bear and Zane perched on the second floor watching Luke work the backhoe. Zane is a funny kid. At two years he's already obsessed with big machinery. I wonder how many two year olds talk about wanting to see a skid steer or a front end loader. I'm always amazed at the precision of the guys who operate this big machinery. He worked straddling a sapling cherry tree and came inches from the framing of the house, but I never was nervous.

Right after digging the hole they plopped the cistern down in the hole and filled it most of the way in.

Like I said the baling seemed pretty slow despite the fact that we designed the house with timber framing instead of stick so that we would have less to bale around. But I guess thinking about it, considering how much the bale walls make the house seem like a house, it went from being open to being enclosed in a relatively short time. This was the bale knife we used to notch the bales so we could fit them around the posts and beams.

To bale you have to start at the corners and you complete one course at a time stacking them up like bricks. To stabilize the walls, I secured the bales to the posts at each course as the walls went up. Some parts were pretty tricky. Around the windows and the top course of the first floor were the most time consuming spots.

This is a picture looking down at the first floor north wall through the stairway. In the process of baling you have to make many short bales, which involves retying a bale to form two smaller bales. This takes a lot of time too.

The front door and the first floor walls almost complete.

Onto the second floor. About this time it got really cold and rainy and dark working under the tarps. Some people don't worry about getting rain on the sides of the bale walls because the rain can't really penetrate past a half inch or so, so they don't bother with tarps. It's important to keep rain off the tops of the bales though because then it can soak in deeper and start to rot the bale. At this point it's really hard to get the moisture out of the bale and it will keep rotting.

Before I was done baling the second floor we prepped the first floor for plaster. This involved weed whacking the outside of the bales to smooth them out for the plaster application. Some people don't do this step, but I found it helpful in preventing the plaster from being flicked up in our faces by loose straw when we were plastering. After trimming the bales, we covered the wood framing with burlap and metal lathe and installed flashing as a plaster stop at the bottom of the wall on top of the foundation. This protects the bottom of the wall at this seam from water infiltration.

Because of the impending cold weather, I decided to use some portland cement in the plaster so that it would set and be protected from freezing temperatures. Straight lime plaster takes a few weeks to set and is vulnerable to freezing, which basically ruins it. Some feel that cement prevents lime plaster from setting properly and you end up with a weaker plaster in the long run. I plan to use straight lime plaster in the remaining coats.

This was a plastering party we organized to help us get a lot of plaster done in a short time. Cory (in the grey hat) , a work exchanger who helped out for the month of October, took part in this plaster party. He also worked on the baling with me, and the light clay straw insulation on the south wall.

Mary Beth plastering the east wall. Plastering is kind of fun, but I do think it's more fun not to be working with caustic substances like lime. Unfortunately earthen plaster doesn't hold up as well in our climate and takes more maintenance.

The south wall was insulated with light clay straw since it will be getting most of the sunlight. I love the way light clay straw walls look when they are exposed like this. I wish I could just leave them that way. I will eventually side the south side of the house so the plaster ended for the season once we'd made it around three walls.

It's a really nice view out the windows on the south side--the garden, the pond, and across the gravel road, a green hillside pasture and cows.

I was relieved to get the plaster finished, and after that there was just a little bit more to do on the light clay straw. I finished plumbing the cistern and filled in the hole, so it will be ready to be hooked up to the sink inside next spring. I put in the last windows and covered up the gable ends for the winter. Now the only thing left to do is put a door on. If I get the house inclosed I may continue to work on some stuff inside over the winter. I'm going to be looking into buying the power system, too.

The chickens moved over to the Ironweed kitchen coop for the winter. I built them some nesting boxes. Just before I moved them over there, they were in the chicken tractor in the garden. I went out one morning and found an egg on the ground. Since then the eggs have continued to come in greater numbers all the time. I think there are about 4 hens laying now. I was also happy to see how the fall planting of broccoli, carrots, and beets did so well this year.

The roof is on

2009-09-15T18:00:00.000-07:00

We've continued with work on the house. It is definitely our highest priority and taking most of our time though we still try to fit in a little canning on the weekends. The weather lately has been ideal for building.

We've made a lot of progress on the framing and have finished tinning the roof. The house has fully taken shape. We have wired it as well and Mary Beth is insulating the south wall with light clay straw. We started the baling in the last few days, and have made some progress on the first floor. The cistern went in as well and I'm working on the plumbing to it. I don't have time to update this blog fast enough to keep up with our progress. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that we will have the house ready to live in by the winter. We would like to take our time and make sure we do it right and there is really too much to do before winter to get it ready to live in.

These clowns have been helping us build our house lately. They are Dan and Danielle, new residents of DR. They do performance art and Dan is a trained clown. They are fun to have around.

We've also been finding some time to continue canning veggies. Lately tomatoes have been the major crop. Sauce, salsa, juice. We are stocked for winter.

I haven't shown the chickens lately so here are a couple pics of them. I think I've decided to keep most of them through the winter so we can have eggs next year. I'd originally planned to eat the chickens before winter, but now I'm thinking I'll like having eggs.

Ironweed blooming

2009-08-24T05:18:00.000-07:00

You can mark the change of season here by the types of blooming flowers on the land. Right now Ironweed, with its purple flower clusters is everywhere, along with white-flowered false boneset. Soon goldenrod will be the dominant flower, meaning winter is not far off. It and purple aster are the last to bloom here. Below is also a Whorled Milkweed.

Work has continued on the house, though slower than hoped. It seems there are always many delays here preventing us from making progress. The recent monsoons have made some things difficult lately. August is usually unbearably hot and dry, but the only unbearable weather came in June. Last week we got 5 inches of rain in a 12 hour period.

We put up the second floor joists a few weeks ago. We are doing 2x6s between the oak beams and orienting them north-south over the cantilever so the joists will be holding some of the weight of the second floor south wall that will hang out about a foot and a half beyond the first floor south wall.

You can see the 6x6 knee braces on the bottom of the two middle beams that will help transfer some of the weight of the cantilever onto the wall. There will be four of these eventually.

After putting up the joists we put on a subfloor of reclaimed OSB and plywood.

Next, we put on the north wall second floor posts and a girt to connect them.

We added the other two knee braces on the cantilever.

This is the view of the garden and backyard from our second floor. It will be a great view to see every morning.

Then we started on the second floor south wall. It will be a stick framed wall like on the first floor. I think the house looks best from the south. The other villagers won't see the best side, but we will from the backyard.

With the floor on the second floor blocking the sunlight we were able to see how the cantilever will block the high summer sun. Even at this time of year, there is no sun coming in the south side windows. Of course, that's good because we want shade in August and for most of September.

We also walled in the future root cellar, which we'll be able to access through our kitchen floor. We are now continuing with the rafters and roof. The house is really starting to take shape.

The wet season has been good for the garden overall, but after last week's rain, my carrots were rotting in the ground. Most plants have benefited from the rain. I planted eggplant and peppers in the bed that had the chicken tractor over it early in the season and they are the best eggplant I've ever grown. I love eggplant, and we've got plenty of it now.

We started pickling some veggies. My hot pickle mix of hot peppers, carrots, and cucumbers is one of my favorites.

I think I've finally mastered the art of growing beets. This year I planted a few successions and hope to have a bunch to store in the root barrel over the winter. These we turned into pickled beets, following the recipe of Alline, a DR member who with her husband has just opened up the Milkweed Mercantile and B&B here at the village.

Since I don't have much space in the garden, but I like sweet corn, I planted just two rows of it. Normally you would want to plant a larger plot of it so the ears get well pollinated, but instead I just hand pollinate the ears. It works really well if you have limited space and a small number of plants. We probably got about four dozen ears off my small bed.

The rain was really good for the garlic. We got a really big harvest this season and the heads are hanging up in our house.

Things are looking good at Wisteria Lodge this year too. The wisteria vine is way past the top of the arbor and has sprouted many new shoots now that it's reached the top. I think it will have taken over the whole thing by next summer.

The New House

2009-07-13T05:08:00.000-07:00

We've been working on the new house a lot lately now that the garden has gotten going. It's definitely been a learning experience because at every step we seem to make some mistake and have to correct for it. Most of our problems are the result of working with reclaimed lumber that is not up to par. We are trying to make use of old barn timbers as much as possible, but we are finding they are not as sound as they might appear on the surface. I notched a 14 foot long corner post and we put it up only to decide after trying to secure it to the foundation that the wood was not sound enough to use it.

We started in late May when my parents visited. My Dad brought his miter saw and we worked together to cut all the framing for the south wall on the first floor. It took us a couple of days to cut and assemble the wall from 2x6s we'd salvaged from a building in nearby Rutledge. It was a great help for my parents to come and spent time working on the house. When they first came the weather wasn't cooperating and the rain made it difficult to get any work done or have power to do work. They left for a couple days and came back when the weather had gotten better.

After we finished the wall it sat there for a while before we were able to get the rest of the timbers ready and put it up. We put down a strip of sill seal and got a bunch of people to come help us lift it up into place. This only took a couple of minutes. We braced the wall and suddenly it looked like a house was going up.

Building a house like this we are finding it very helpful to live in a community. When we need help lifting timbers we round up a group of willing neighbors and the job seems to go quickly. Huge heavy timbers are lifted into place easily with many hands helping. We are using a method of timberframing that uses fasteners, angle irons, and plates to join timbers together for the framing. Instead of assembling entire walls or "bents" as you would in traditional timberframing, we are putting up timbers one by one and connecting them with metal plates and bolts. I found a rusty old stand of some sort near our machine shed, made of metal angle irons. I cut them up into 6" pieces that could be used to connect the timbers and to tie them to the foundation. This is a way of recycling garbage and at the same time saving money. Pre-fab post bases bought new are expensive, have a lot of embodied energy, and do not usually fit rough cut lumber sizes, so the homemade bases are easier to use and better in many ways. That's not to say we didn't have problems putting them in.

We are following a book called Timberframing for the Rest of Us that shows you the tricks of this more up-to-date method of timberframing. But though it talks about the ease of framing without complicated mortis and tenon joints, it's not as easy as it's made out to be. One method they recommend for joining timbers is long screws called GRK screws. You have to drive supposedly self-drilling screws these through 8" timbers and into the adjoining timber. The first couple went in smoothly, but then the wood seemed to be too hard on other joints and we ended up stripping or breaking off 5 of these $2 apiece screws before giving up on them until we could find a long enough bit to pre-drill them.

The angle irons we made worked well, but we found that despite our efforts to line up all the timbers they did not end up meeting together perfectly as they should to be able to connect them tightly. This was partly because we screwed up in fastening the posts to the foundation, and partly because some of our timbers were slightly warped or not milled very square. We'd wanted to connect them with plates, but found we couldn't when the timbers didn't line up. We are finding other ways to connect the timbers at joints, but have less confidence in the strength of the joints we are making.

You may wonder why different parts of the wall look so different. The south wall is framed in 2x6s and the rest of the walls are timber framed. The south wall has a lot of windows because the house is designed to take advantage of passive solar heat during the late season and winter, when the sun is low. It would have been difficult to insulate the south wall with strawbales as we plan to do with the other walls because the wall spaces between windows are so narrow. So we thought stick framing would work better for that wall. The foundation wall is narrower on that side as well. The house looks a lot bigger than it will actually be on the inside because three of the walls will be strawbale. The timberframing on three walls will make baling the walls easier (we hope) because there will be much more open space between bales and this will mean less notching of the bales to fit them into the walls. We could have had a load bearing strawbale wall, which has no framing, but that would have limited our house to one story because bale walls are not stable above one story without framing. The framing also allows you to put a roof over your structure before beginning to bale the walls. Without the roof to keep out the rain, you are much more likely to end up with wet bales and moisture in the walls that will be difficult to get out before it does damage.

Our most recent workparty was to put up the four 16 foot beams that will be the second floor. We were worried these beams would be too heavy to lift into place and comments from others were doubtful as well, but it's amazing what you can accomplish with many hands. We were able to quickly figure out the easiest way to lift the beams up onto the two scaffolds we were using and from there lift them up onto the framing that was in place. Seven or eight people on a 16 ft 6x8 beam makes light work of lifting it.

Once the beams were in place, we began to secure them at the joints. We are working on the knee braces for the cantilever on the south wall. These knee braces are partly for function and partly for aesthetics. We hope they will give the cantilever an old European look. With the first floor pretty much framed, the house is starting to look like a house.

Chicken tractor

2009-06-10T18:45:00.000-07:00

We went to the flea market aka The Dog 'n' Gun in early May and I bought 16 chicks from a hatchery there, 7 Barred Rocks and 9 Rhode Island Reds. At first we had to keep them in a box in the house because it was still a little too cold outside for them. During the day we put them in the coldframe where I'd started many of my vegetable plants.

That seemed to keep them warm enough. Usually people keep chicks in a brooder and try to maintain a temperature of about 85-90 degrees for the first couple weeks of their lives. The brooder has a heat lamp in it much like the kind they use to keep fast food hot. The lamp takes the place of a hen who would, under more natural conditions or in the old days, keep the chicks warm. I would love to have a hen to sit on the chicks but "broody hens" are hard to come by these days apparently. Heat lamps have taken their place for the sake of convenience and mass production and broodiness has been bred out of most breeds because it is not desirable in the world of mass-produced eggs. Anyway, since those lamps use at least 500 watts of power I had to find an alternative. I just kept them in a box with a compact flourescent lamp in it. They stayed at around 80 degrees in the box at night and though they huddled together under the lamp, they made it through just fine at that temp.

Eventually they grew more feathers and were insulated enough to be outside in the chicken tractor all night. The nighttime temperatures eventually warmed enough for them to be fine outside. Now they are close to their adult size and have been in the tractor out to the vineyard for about a month. So far I've had no problems with predators, which was my main worry. The chickens are still making chick sounds and the roosters have yet to crow, but I expect they will start sounding like chickens soon. They are doing a great job of fertilizing the vineyard. At first I was feeding them chick starter, which is prepared food, but now I've switched them over to local organic grains, like barley, corn, and flax. They love the clover I planted in the vineyard rows and can't wait to get into the fresh pasture each time I move the tractor.

Last week I was able to work more on the soffit on Wisteria Lodge and finally finished it. That meant I could finish the arbor on the front of the house. Mary Beth came up with a design for the cross pieces and I installed them, so now the arbor is done. Just in time too, because the wisteria vine is rapidly making its way up the arbor post. It still has about a foot and a half before it reaches the cross pieces.

The garden is mostly planted. I got the ok to rent additional garden space on the south side of Skyhouse garden and with the hard work of my work exchanger Charles, we have sheet mulched, fenced, and planted almost the entire new space already. Sheet mulching allows you to quickly create a garden without having to till up the soil. You just mow the wild plants, cover the ground with cardboard, and put straw mulch on top. To plant, you just cut a hole in the cardboard and drop your plant in. The space went from a wild field to a garden in a very short time. The space had actually been someone's garden in the past, but hadn't been tended for several years. I decided to put the tomatoes, squash, cukes, and beans there because they are easier to plant in a sheet mulched garden.

We've been harvesting tons of strawberries lately. The small beds we have just keep producing. We've made jam, syrup, and strawberry ice cream. The ice cream was really good because Mary Beth used only cream to make it. It was a hit with everyone here and was quickly eaten. We are probably going to make strawberry wine with the next harvest.

Another crop we've been enjoying lately is salad greens. It's nice to have fresh local veggies again. Soon we will be adding other veggies and herbs to our diet.

Mary Beth created an herb spiral in the garden recently. She'd been inspired by the herb spiral we saw at the Hostel in the Forest. Hers looks really good now, and the many herbs she's planted are taking hold well. Rosemary, lemon grass, nasturtium, oregano, marjoram, creeping thyme, parsley, cilantro, chamomile, thai basil, sweet basil, and epazote, a mexican herb much like oregano used to flavor beans. We'll be doing a lot of drying of herbs so we can use them year round.

The vineyard is growing like crazy in this rain we've been getting. Some vines are already almost 6 feet tall, which is as tall as I want their main trunks to be.

Spring in Missouri

2009-04-27T19:16:00.000-07:00

It's been busy ever since we got back as things are warming up and we are gearing up for the gardening and building season. I have a long to do list and with the help of a couple of work exchangers I have been ticking things off. It's really nice to have another person around to help me with gardening so I can focus on other projects.

My little starts have been going for awhile now. In the absence of power for flourescent lights and a greenhouse I have been using a simple coldframe to start my seedlings and it seems to be working great so far. I put the plants out in the coldframe on warm days and bring them in on nights when it is supposed to freeze. The only problem I've had is mice or rats or something coming in and eating a bunch of the brassicas. Fortunately I had already planted out most of the ones I wanted, so it wasn't a total loss.

While my work exchanger, Adam, was working in the garden, I was busy last week building a chicken tractor for my chicken experiment. I plan to put the chickens in the vineyard to naturally fertilize the grapes. The chicken tractor is just a mobile chicken coop. You move it daily so the chickens can fertilize a new area every day. Moving them also allows them to graize new pasture and forage for bugs. Because the chickens are foraging they don't require as much feed and the food they get is much more nutritious. If you've ever had farm fresh eggs, you may know that eggs from the grocery store are literally pale in comparison. When chickens eat bugs and graize pasture, they get all the vitamins and minerals they need to make bright orange yolked eggs that are much more nutritious than factory farmed eggs. The taste is also starkly different. I probably won't be keeping my chickens until they are able to lay eggs because I don't have anywhere to overwinter them yet. I plan to eat them all before winter, that is if something doesn't come and eat them first. In the future if raising chickens seems worth it, I will keep them over winter and get eggs in addition to manure.

We thought that maybe the rain wasn't going to come this spring, but after getting a few garden beds worked up and planted. the deluge came. The village turned to mud and made us all want to speed up the roads project which will turn our wood mulch roads to gravel and grassy pavers and divert rainwater in a more intentional manner. But for the roads project to begin, the rain has to stop for a good while.

The garlic has been growing swiftly and the peas, spinach, and lettuce are up. The strawberries I planted last spring are flowering abundantly and little fruits are forming. I can't wait to have fresh salad and strawberry-rhubarb treats. We will probably make jam.

This season I decided to really raise my garden beds up to combat the spring monsoons. I'm using old barn beams to divide the beds and give me something to walk on. With the help of my work exchangers Adam and Charles I have been adding topsoil and composted manure to the beds. The topsoil scraped off the ground during the digging of the foundation has been sitting in a pile on my warren for a year and a half and I'm determined to get rid of it this season by redistributing it to other places. That will free up the space in front of the foundation for construction. The gardens look great now that the spring rains have taken a rest for a bit and we've been able to work up the remaining beds. I'm finding that the garden is too small for what I want to plant so I'm going to be renting additional garden space for the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and squash. It seems like a lot of space, but the additional space will be gardened using a no work system that involves sheet mulching and planting directly into the mulch. I'll be explaining this system when I get to it later in the season.

The perennials I planted a while ago are coming back again this spring and flowering, making the house look even more quaint than it already does. I love how the irises smell.

Mary Beth and I have gone out morel hunting a couple of times already and found a couple dozen altogether. They are best sauteed with garlic in butter (cream from the local dairy hand churned in our butter churn).

I've been experimenting a little more lately, this time with refrigeration. I've built a strawbale icebox, so we can keep our food cool in the summer. It's just a wooden box, surrounded on three sides with strawbales, and a door insulated with light clay straw like the kind used in the walls of Wisteria Lodge. We get blocks of ice from the butcher and put them on the top shelf. I'd left the bottom open to the ground but now I'm realizing that the ground is probably sucking the cold out of the icebox and I plan to insulate the bottom too. Another improvement will be foil on the inside to reflect radiant heat. Hopefully with these improvements the icebox will retain cold better.

The grapes in the vineyard are popping up with renewed vigor. After getting established last year, they have plenty of roots and are ready to go. I'm giving them a little help by protecting them from deer grazing with chicken wire cages. I haven't been able to determine the survival rate of the vines from last year to this, but it is very high. I counted around twenty vines out of about 200 that may not have made it. I say may not because with grapes you can't always tell. When I came here I brought a lot of grape plants with me, too many in fact, and I ended up giving them away. Someone here took a bunch and kept them in a shed for a few weeks before planting them out. They waited and waited for weeks and there was no sign of life. It must have been about a month and a half later that a really strong shoot poked out from underground.

I'm excited about the potential for the vineyard. I also plan to visit another Missouri vineyard in June to take cuttings of two varieties I have had difficulty finding from a nursery. I want to add a couple more rows this year.

The clover I planted last fall had trouble getting established, but I replanted it a few weeks ago and it is taking over. I expect the vineyard rows will be carpeted with clover by the end of the season. This cover crop is part of my effort to improve the soil in the vineyard, which before I began was pretty depleted. Decades of conventional corn and soybean farming on the rolling terrain led to erosion and a basically lifeless soil. It will take time to restore fertility and the balance of microbes and fungi. We just got some composted manure from a local farm and dressed the vines to give them a little boost. I will probably get some more and spread it throughout the rows later in the season.

Winter migration

2009-04-07T06:02:00.000-07:00

As I usually do, this winter I left the snowy blustery northern winter for a break in the southern snow free warmth. Mary Beth is not crazy about winter either, being from Florida originally. In the past I've gone to Texas or the southwest and the cool desert regions instead of the subtropics. But since Mary Beth has many Florida connections, we decided to go there for most of our winter getaway. For me Florida is not the top choice, only because it makes me sad that such a once beautiful place has been turned into suburbia and strip malls that make it look like every other place in this country. But there is the ocean, and the gulf, and despite the efforts of developers to ruin those natural wonders, they still retain some charm. It's not all bad news in Florida as there is some indication that people are trying to recognize the natural world and accommodate it. Where we spent most of our time, in Mary Beth's home town, we were able to find a few nature preserves and a botanical garden in short biking distance, and even a CSA farm that we could volunteer at in exchange for fresh local vegetables and fruit.

That was another great thing about Florida-- the fresh fruit. We drank fresh grapefruit and orange juice almost every day that came from an orchard nearby. We picked key limes off a tree in the front yard and enjoyed lime water and pie whenever we could. On the bike ride to the preserve and the farm we picked coconuts that we cracked open for the milk and meat. The CSA farm gave us fresh grapefruit, oranges, and carambola, or starfruit, that came from a tree in a neighbor's yard. If only we could have that kind of fruit here. Well, I plan to eventually keep a lime tree in a greenhouse.

Our plan had been to try to make some money while in Florida so that we could bring it back to spend on our projects here at DR for this season. Mary Beth had some connections from her work at restaurants in the area and was able to get a job bussing tables at one of the fanciest, most expensive restaurants around on her first attempt at getting a job. After working there for a couple of days she found out the restaurant was looking for a valet. So despite living in an ecovillage where we aren't allowed to own a car, I found myself parking other people's really expensive cars. It was a strange world to have ended up in, but we were able to make a little money. Unfortunately, the economy was affecting even the rich, and the restaurant was not as busy as it normally would be at that time of year, so we weren't getting as much work as we might have otherwise. We were only really making enough to pay for our expenses and for doing some fun things like going to a winery, the Mote Marine Aquarium, Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, and a number of other Florida site seeing adventures.

We also made a few trips to see my Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Zeke, checking out the Dunedin farmer's market and the brewery. Zeke and Elizabeth also fed us stone crab claws and took us sailing one day. It was nice to be so close that we could visit them on a whim and hang out.

After a while we got restless and planned a work exchange on an organic farm in Live Oak Fl. The farm had goats, turkeys, and chickens. We were looking forward to learning about livestock because we have some interest in getting some kind of livestock here at DR in the near future. Unfortunately, after staying at the farm for a few days, we realized that the farmers weren't really a good fit for us, so we went to Gainesville, where Mary Beth went to school and still had a number of friends.

Gainesville was a really fun town, with a farmer's market, an independent film theatre, and a lot of the culture you'd expect to find in a progressive college town. We also checked out the springs in the area, and were able to go on a canoe trip down the Suwanee River, which was beautiful. Had it been warmer we could have gone swimming in the springs, but we'll have to save that for another time.

Our next adventure was to Georgia, which we found to be sort of the bizarro alternate universe to Florida.
Our destination was the Hostel in the Forest, where we'd arranged another work exchange. Different from other hostels, this one is in a forest, and guests stay in treehuts instead of rooms in a big building. Also different from other hostels, there are chickens running around everywhere, and fresh eggs to be eaten every morning.

They had some quaint cabins and there was a lot of focus on aesthetic beauty. It inspired us to want to bring some of this back to DR with us.

We volunteered there in exchange for being able to stay there for a couple weeks. While there we built this bamboo fence around the herb garden.

The finishing touch: Putting siding on the house

2008-11-26T19:05:00.000-08:00

Now that things have cooled down a bit and the days are much shorter, I haven't been doing quite as much outside.

This is the winter sun coming into the house through the south facing windows. When the sun is at its lowest at this time of year we get the most sun in the house. It will heat the house to near 70 degrees on days when it is below freezing outside, even if we haven't used the wood stove since the night before.

Our first really hard frost came about two weeks ago and I went out the evening before to harvest celeriac, beets, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and chinese cabbage.

The carrots are mulched but I'll probably pull them and put them in my root barrel. Up until last week we were still eating fresh tomatoes we picked before the first real frost that happened in late October. It's been nice to have these fall crops. At Bobolink eating co-op, I think we are the only people in the village still eating dinners of lots of fresh local vegetables. We are enjoying salads of Chinese and regular cabbage tossed with carrots and scallions. We have root bakes of carrots, beets, and potatoes and soups of all these veggies combined. I love celeriac. It's a gnarly vegetable, but it sure is good in soup.

We were still in the process of reorganizing the house up until about a week or two ago. I got a new dresser from the demo I got my siding from. It was just sitting in this building I was taking down and it looked like someone had started stripping it with the idea of refinishing it, but they never finished the project. I brought it back, liking the fact that it was well made, tall, and spacious. After we cleaned it up and put linseed oil on it, we realized how pretty the veneer was, though the veneer is chipping off in spots. It just barely fit up through the door to the second floor.

Mary Beth brought a bookshelf back from her house in Kirksville and she organized all my books on it. We also brought upstairs a dresser we found on the curb on our visit to Madison. It is a pretty piece of furniture too, and we think it is from the early 1900s. We found a little stub from a train ticket for a Milwaukee intracity train from the '20s stuck in the top drawer.

We had a housewarming party last week that many in the village came to. We had around twenty people packed in the house. Many were getting their first glimpse of Wisteria Lodge in its more or less finished state. We decided it was time since we'd organized the inside of the house the way we wanted it.

This is the kitchenette we set up so that Mary Beth can make her meals since she is no longer in an eating co-op and so that I can make cheese. It's pretty makeshift, but it works for what we need it for.

This is a little shelf for some of our homemade wine and canned goods. We canned these pears we picked at a friend of Mary Beth's house in Kirksville. They are the biggest pears I've ever seen--and they taste good too.

The siding is the last thing that we are working on now, and it's almost done.

It's interesting to cover new ground in building and try my hand at learning new skills. I had practiced doing siding on my garden shed, so I did have some experience with that. But the soffits were something new to me. I was able to get some boards with shiplap, so they fit together and overlap, sort of like tongue-in groove. I had to do the soffits before I could do the siding.

The big challenge though in this project has been power. We had about two weeks straight of cloudy weather and I can only use my power tools when the sun is out or when the batteries are charged, and we were all on almost the very lowest power level by the time the sun came out finally. We've had sunny days for the last five or six days, some of them, like today, beautiful and temperate. Today I was working on battens. I just have trim around the windows, and the rest of the battens to do. As you can see, the house looks much better with new siding.

Mary Beth and I also had a visitor staying with us recently. Kyre the kitty stayed with us for about ten days and we were sad to see her go. She was very cuddly and really the perfect cat in every way. We were taking care of her for Mai'kwe while she was away.

I forgot to put up a picture of my solar panels mounted on the roof, so here it is. Unfortunately, my new solar panel that cost me $500 is now only putting out half power for some reason. I'm going to have to have it sent back, so at the lowest light time of year, we're at half power.

Finish plaster and floors

2008-10-21T06:13:00.000-07:00

It has been a whirlwind of home improvement the last few days as Mary Beth and I moved all our stuff out of Wisteria Lodge to do the finish plaster and refinish the floors.

With winter coming soon, we knew we had to get going on doing the finish plaster on the walls to seal up any drafts. Last year I put on the scratch coat of plaster, but because I hadn't done the trim there were large areas around the windows and door that were not completely sealed. The finish coat of plaster is supposed to leave a smooth, beautiful wall that will totally seal up the walls. We started by organizing a plastering workparty, at which others from DR would help us get a lot done in a short time so that the plaster coat would be as smooth as possible. If you don't do the finish plaster all at once there will be transitional lines visible that mark where you left off one day and started the next. Unfortunately, even with our workparty, it took us two days to finish. But we did get a lot done with others helping. These kinds of "barnraising" parties happen often here at DR with everyone helping someone do with many hands what could not be done with just a couple. Like the other day when we all helped Ziggy lift a 35'x35', 400 pound sheet of pond liner up onto the roof of his new house. Check out Ziggy's blog to see what I'm talking about.

We had to do a lot of prep for the workparty, because I wanted to have as much plaster ingredients ready to go so we could get people plastering as quickly as possible.

We had to collect manure from the nearby pasture, gather cattail heads from the pond, sift clay and sand through hardware cloth, and make up wheat paste. All these were the ingredients in the plaster mixture. The cattail heads are broken up to yield cattail fluff, which in finish plaster done the same thing as straw in the scratch coat--it adds structure and stability to the plaster by stretching in between the grains of sand and the clay.

The sand and clay are screened to remove the larger stones so that the finish coat will spread on smooth. The manure stinks at first when the plaster is wet but not once the plaster dries.

Unfortunately, though we tried to prevent it, cracking did happen on some of the walls. This could have been from having a plaster that was too wet, or not quite the right recipe, or because of the composition of the scratch plaster. I think our recipe was fine, but I think sometimes we added too much water to the mix before applying it. Mary Beth and I used the same plaster to do the entire upstairs and there was very little cracking. But it is hard to say for sure what the cause of the cracking was.

After finishing the plaster last Thursday, we were considering the idea of renting a sander and doing the floors as long as we had everything moved out. We quickly made arrangements to have someone pick up the sander for us in Kirksville, and to get us some low-VOC polyurethane, a less toxic and harmful water-based version of the typical polyurethane most people use on their floor to protect it. The weather forecast showed that we could expect sunny days on both Saturday and Sunday, and we would have to have sun to be able to use so much power at once. Using a machine like a sander on our of-the-grid systems would quickly drain power from the batteries on a cloudy day. We usually wait for sunny days to use power tools and big appliances. Saturday morning was not as sunny as predicted, but by the afternoon we were able to test the sander. We plugged in to the common house power with extension cords, but the sander didn't seem to be getting enough power. We tried more heavy duty extension cords and switched to the Milkweeds power system, which was closer, so there would not be as much power loss over the length of cord. The sander was working better, but would shut off after about 5 seconds every time. There was a lot of work being done on the Milkweeds mercantile as they tried to get the building plastered in one day, and we thought maybe there was too much drain on the power. We also thought that maybe the sander was too much of a power drain and we were too far away from the power source. We thought that if we couldn't use the Milkweeds power, it probably wouldn't work on any power system here. We gave up upon finding out from the rental company that using the machine with an undersized system could blow the motor and cost about $400. We thought maybe we'd have to return the sander without even having sanded the floors.

That evening we asked around and came up with some ideas for things to try the next day. First we tried plugging the sander directly into Skyhouse's large power system. It worked fine and wasn't shutting off, so we knew the power system or the extension cords were the problem and not the sander. We hooked up the heavy duty extension cords to the common house system and though the cords were much longer than those going to the Milkweeds the previous day, the sander worked fine. It must have been that the Milkweeds system was not able to handle the sander's power drain. So we finally were able to sand the floors.

It took us most of Sunday to sand both floors and by evening we'd put on the first coat of polyurethane. Now we've got newly plastered walls and a finished floor and we are moving our stuff back in.

Fall is a busy time

2008-10-15T09:11:00.000-07:00

So Mary Beth, my girlfriend, and I have been working hard and making progress on various projects in the last few weeks.

I started out a few weeks ago doing more demolition on a local barn to get wood for my house. I was able to salvage enough barn siding to side my garden shed, which looks much better with a face lift. No more ugly OSB. Now I just have to do the same for Wisteria Lodge, the house I've been living in. Anyway, I'm hoping to get some good posts and beams from the barn, and possibly a lot of firewood. It's sad to see beautiful barns like the one we are dismantling fall into disrepair. Because of a bad roof, most of the wood, hundreds of 2x6s, 2x8s, 2x10s, and tongue-in-groove flooring, is rotting away.

We put tongue-in-groove flooring in the second floor of Wisteria Lodge a few weeks ago as well, we finished up the trim around the window and door, and now the house is ready for the finish coat of plaster. We have a plaster party planned for tomorrow and hope to get help from community members so we can finish the plaster in a short time--maybe even in one day.

Last week we had the concrete poured for the bond beam on the foundation for the other house I started last year. We spent a couple days building the forms over the urbanite foundation and they did their job well, as the bond beam looks solid and level. Now that I've got a lot of wood, I should be ready to do the framing. I didn't make it as far as I thought I would this year, but gathering the materials can be the biggest challenge here, and that's what I've spent a lot of time doing. I plan to frame the house partially with post and beam from the barn and partially with 2x6s and 2x10s from other demo projects.

A couple weeks ago I mounted my solar panels on the roof. With a donation of metal framing pieces from Tom, I was able to set up the panels so that I can adjust their angle to make them face the sun as it move lower and higher in the sky. The amount of energy the panels are collecting has increased greatly since I moved them up to the roof, since on the ground they were getting shaded out by trees.

With late season warm weather, the garden has continued to flourish and provide tons of delicious veggies like eggplant, tomatoes, carrots, and tons of sweet peppers. Now the fall crops are beginning to come in and we'll be planting garlic soon. Next year I won't be gardening for my eating co-op, and I'll focus on building, the vineyard, and my own garden. I would like to garden on a larger scale, but would prefer to be at least a little mechanized, because it was a lot of work handling the Skyhouse garden, and I still felt like we didn't produce enough food simply because of space limitations. I'd love to grow beans and grains in addition to veggies. Of course, it will be easier when I'm not having to grow food for 7 other people.

The summer is flying by

2008-08-28T03:39:00.000-07:00

It's been a busy season and my camera has been on the fritz for the greater part of it. I've been reluctant to buy a new one because I'd rather not contribute to the creation of another disposable thing made in China. So now I've been handed down a camera second hand and I'm back in business taking pictures for my blog. This season I have been kind of overwhelmed by the amount of stuff I've had to do. It's inevitable in this place where we are trying to build a village that I should get distracted by everyday community activities having to do with helping keep the village running and growing. I've also been consumed by the task of gardening for the Bobolink eating co-op, which has been a struggle with the weather this season.

Fortunately I have been making progress on some things. So far the vineyard, though a little nibbled by deer, seems to be surviving and growing. I've been harvesting black locust trees from out along Woerhle Rd to use as posts for the trellising system the vines will grow up. Black locust is a very rot-resistant tree and makes posts that last as long or longer than treated posts and grows like a weed along the road. Using real tree trunks for posts will also, I think, give the vineyard a more natural look. I will be installing the posts this season and they should be pretty well settled by next spring when the vines will be trained along them.

Some greenwood cuttings of vines to be planted out in the vineyard. I took the cuttings a few weeks ago. They only take a couple weeks to form roots and will be established in the vineyard by the end of the season. This is a much quicker way of multiplying my vines.

Last year when I came here, I brought a bunch of vines from Madison and ended up having many extras which I gave away to others here, creating sort of a boom in the grapevine population here at DR. Rachel planted a few of these vines in her garden and this year one already produced a significant crop of grapes. Since she was away for the harvest, she allowed me to take the grapes, and I'm making a small batch of wine with them. It was inspiring to see such a harvest of beautiful grapes in such a short time from my own vines. Of course mine are not fruiting yet because I had to temporarily store the vines in a nursery row while I waited to get access to land to plant. I expect I should have a small crop next year in the vineyard though and the following year the vines should be close to full bearing.

Another project this season has been researching and buying a power system. Right now, I am typing on my computer powered by my own solar power. I was able to get some of the components for my systems second hand from Tom, another DR member. I also bought some batteries, an inverter, and another solar panel. It's not a huge system, but big enough to power my simple needs in my small house. I should be able to power a stereo, lights, a laptop, and a few other low power items with the current system even during the short days of winter.

The garden has been a mixture of success and failure this season--I guess as it usually is--but maybe more failure than I'm used to. The early and heavy rain delayed planting not just for me, but for most farmers in the region. I planted potatoes three times and still most of them rotted in the ground. Next year I will wait and plant them later to avoid the wet weather and to be able to harvest them closer to winter, when its easier to store them. But the rain here continued through July, so it made things difficult for many crops beyond potatoes. Fortunately, some crops like peppers and eggplant are flourishing in the rain, and are the best I've ever grown. The rain also made establishing the vineyard much easier because it meant I didn't have to irrigate to get the little vines root systems going.

Another efforts this summer has been gathering wood for building. Since all the wood we use if building has to be reclaimed we all have to either buy used wood from local people who take down houses, or we have to do the demolition ourselves. I've been working on scavenging wood from a couple different places. Recently I was getting some barn siding from a local barn. I'm using this to side my garden shed and my house. I also hope to get some posts and beams from the site for use in my future house, the progress of which has been set back slightly by the fact that I've decided to make it bigger than originally planned. I have also completed taking down a small house in nearby Rutledge from which I was able to get many 2x4s, 2xs, and sheets of plywood and OSB.

These are some of the peaches from the Dr orchard. It's been really great to have fresh fruit again this season. These peaches were so delicious.

Last week I started putting siding on my garden shed to cover up the OSB, which looks really ugly and didn't contribute to the quaintness of my garden one bit. I took siding off a barn recently and decided that the wood was a little too crappy to put on my house, so I thought I'd practice on the shed before getting better wood and putting it on my house. Despite the crappiness of the wood, the siding looks really good. I will put some one by two strips on to cover up the gaps between barn boards. I've been asking around and calling up the local radio show to try to find barn boards I can use for siding. I stopped by one house on the way to Kirksville that had a few nice looking outbuildings that weren't being used. An older man with a big cowboy hat answered the door and said that though he didn't use the buildings he didn't want them taken down. I will keep asking around. I've got to get the house sided before winter.

I have a lot of things to do still before it gets cold so I suspect I'll continue to be busy for a while yet.

The Missouri Monsoon Season

2008-06-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

I had to write a little post about the incredibly wet weather we've been having lately. In the last few weeks we have had torrential downpours on a regular basis such that I am getting really tired of schlopping around in the mud. And that is only a small part of the problem. A few days ago we got five inches of rain overnight. Last week we had and inch of rain in a ten minute downpour and the runoff cut a gully through the middle of about 6 garden beds in the Skyhouse garden I am tending this season. It washed away some tomatoes and peppers, but fortunately I hadn't planted most of the beds yet. I've since made a trench to divert the water through the garden and this morning in a flash flood it turned into a garden river. Watching the storm from my house early this morning I was traumatized when the huge raindrops began making a much louder noise on the roof and I saw that the rain was turning into hail.

Hail is a nightmare for anyone trying to grow anything outdoors. Just imagine bullets raining down on your vegetables and fruits. Fortunately this hail was small enough that the damage was minimal, but considering all the strange weather we've been getting, I worry that we might get golf-ball sized or worse before long.

Anyway, the rain has prevented me being able to get into some of the garden beds to prep them because the soil hasn't ever had a chance to dry out enough to work. I've already planted potatoes twice because every time I plant them it rains and the tubers just rot in the ground. The broccoli is being wiped out by something related to the moisture. Surprisingly, some plants are doing well, though blight due to the wetness is beginning to show up on the peas, and I've heard others' tomatoes are being damaged by blight. If this rain keeps up the plants doing well now soon will not be.

Garden and Vineyard

2008-06-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

Spring is definitely far along now as the grass gets higher and the fruit gets bigger. Stuff planted out in the garden seems to be doubling in size every day. I've been focusing on getting the vinyard all squared away and getting the garden in. It's been a tough spring in many ways for farmers. Most notable it has been very wet and cold. I couldn't really work the garden beds until pretty late. In fact I think I got stuff in later than I usually would in WI.

The orchard bloomed lushly,with only a minor frost scare one night that appears not to have done any damage. We will hopefully have a bounty of peaches and pears.

Spring out here also means mushroom season, and morels are some of the tastiest you can find. I went out at the same time I had last year and didn't see any. But later in the season I went out and found a bumper crop. It seemed like everywhere I looked there were huge specimens of these strange looking mushrooms. I fried some up for breakfast a couple of days in a row.

The vineyard has been something I've been dreaming of for a long time, and this spring I was able to find a good spot on a south facing slope to plant about 200 grape vines I'd brought with me. I took cuttings of vines I'd been growing for years in my community garden plots in Madison and brought them here. Last year I'd planted them in close together in a nursery row so they could establish their root systems. This year they were ready to plant out in the vineyard.

I was able to get our old tractor going and borrowed a tiller from neighboring Sandhill Farm. I tilled up ten rows about 200 ft long and planted one vine every eight feet. Some visitors to DR helped with digging holes and planting the vines.

It only took about a week to plant the vines, between many other things I was doing. I left about two rows open for softwood cuttings I will take of some wine varieties early in summer. Until I plant those vines, I've planted rows of dry beans in those open rows.

I planted a cover crop of buckwheat around the vines to fill up the tilled areas. This will smother out weeds so I can plant a more permanent cover crop later in the season. I will also scythe the buckwheat throughout the season to add green manure to the soil to improve its fertility. The last steps have been mulching around the vines with straw mulch and staking each vine. I will train the vines up stakes and hopefully by the end of the season they will have good tall trunks. Next season I will put up trellises and train the grapes laterally.

I plan to make and sell wine, juice, and fresh grapes in the future. I will sell the wine to people outside as well as inside the community, whereas the juice and fresh grapes will be for me and some within DR.

I have been doing a little experimenting in the garden with drip irrigation. I don't think anyone here has tried it, but I thought it might be a good idea because we try to conserve water here and because last year I spent more time watering than doing anything else. I laid out a system of tubing with drippers that regulate how much water is dripped into the soil. The system is hooked up to the cistern I set up last year, and gravity is enough to pressurize the system, though if I want the water to come out faster I hook up a little solar powered pump. I am now able to water about a third of the garden by just turning a valve, instead of having to water each plant individually. The system seems to work well so we may expand it to other areas of the garden.

The main drawback to drip irrigation is that it requires a lot of plastic, which is of course made from fossil fuel. I bought thicker tubing instead of drip tape, which is often used in garden systems. Though if you are careful, the drip tape might last 5 years, it is much easier to puncture and difficult to repair. The tubing should last much longer than 5 years, I'm hoping, and is easily repaired. We've been getting so much rain this season, I haven't had to use the drip irrigation much yet.

Everything is growing well though. All the starts I planted, though they took a while to get going in the greenhouse, took off once things warmed up and they were transplanted into a medium of well-composted manure. I've since planted most of them out in the garden.

the plants in the above picture are garlic. I have some really big varieties and planted them last fall so they are getting really big already.

Above are some pics of the gardens, though now these plants are much bigger. We've had a really wet season so far, and I had to wait longer than usual to work up the beds unfortunately. I am just getting the rest of the tomatoes into the ground. We've already harvested walking onions, which are kind of like scallions, lettuce, spinach, and just in the last two days, strawberries.

Speaking of food, apparently the Food Network wants to do a show on DR to showcase groups that grow their own food. The other day Brian, whose videos you may have seen on DRTV, interviewed a number of us on the request of the FN to talk about the food we grow and our diets here. The FN was really excited about the DVD we sent them and will be sending a crew here sometime soon to shoot some footage. Maybe I'll be on TV.

I plan to get started on the new house as soon as I'm done with the garden and vineyard, so watch for more updates.

Spring Again

2008-03-21T18:36:00.001-07:00

It has seemed like a rather long winter in some ways and short in others. I am happy to see things warming up here and to hear the signs of spring. A few days ago I noticed the frogs in the pond by my garden starting to call again. There are at least two different kinds, spring peepers and some other kind that I know is very small and has a very loud call.

To hear the frogs and see me on video check out the latest installment of DRTV.

I have been starting into some new projects now that the weather is warming up. I've gone out a couple times with the maple sapping crew to gather the sap buckets. If you help with the sap gathering, you get a cut of the final product. Sandhill, the nearby community, has a sugar shack where they boil down sorghum juice in the fall to make the sorghum syrup they sell around the country. In spring it doubles as a maple syrup shack. We don't have sugar maples around here, only silver maples, and although the sap requires more boiling, the product is just as tasty.

A number of us have been pruning the fruit trees around the land and hoping we don't get hit with another late frost this season. Last year it meant no fruit for us here, and no fruit for those in most of the southern half of the country. There are peaches, pears, apples, sour cherries, and an apricot or two. I'm looking for a place now to plant my own fruit trees. I brought apples and pears with me, and just ordered more apples, pears, and cherries from a nursery. I will probably plant them around my houses, and as well make an orchard wherever I end up planting a vineyard.

In the last few weeks I've been gathering wood for various building projects. I got some wood by taking down sheds at the Dog and Gun flea market that takes place a few miles from here. Yesterday from this wood I built a wood shed for storing firewood at the cabin I'm living in right now--the one I had moved here. Last week I was taking wood out of a few houses in nearby Rutledge. I got some nice tongue-in-groove hickory flooring for the cabin and some good 2x6s for the new house I'm going to be working on this summer. I've been planing the floor boards and installing them as beautiful new floor in the cabin. As soon as I get it all in, I will protect it with a coating of linseed oil.

I have already gotten all my seed orders in and have begun starting some of the longer season veggies, flowers and herbs. I've never had to start plants without the use of florescent lights and a reliably warm place to germinate them. I do have the use of a greenhouse now, but unless it's a sunny day, it doesn't get very warm in there. I also built a cold frame for getting some lettuce and spinach going early out in the garden. I'm determined to start eating fresh garden veggies as soon as possible.

We had a little peace rally in nearby Memphis, MO, the county seat, to mark the fifth year of the US invasion of Iraq. It was definitely different from anything like it I've ever been to. I've been attending peace rallies and vigils in Madison, WI for many years. In Madison, most of the people were against the war already, but were not moved to get in the streets to show their opposition. True, many more people attended the peace rallies, but it was definitely friendly territory. When we stood quietly on the lawn of the courthouse on the square in Memphis, I felt like we were part of a spectacle never before experienced by the other locals. In some ways, I wondered if it was worthwhile because I thought people that didn't agree with us would not ever understand where we were coming from--that they would just see us as unpatriotic terrorist lovers. I think everyone in town must have made a point of driving by right in front of us just to read our signs and see what it was all about. Two older men who claimed to be veterans stopped to tell us we should be ashamed of ourselves. One said he'd been in WWII and that we should always support our troops because they'd protected the freedoms that allowed us to stand here opposing the war. I never understand this argument because if they'd protected our rights, why are we supposed to avoid exercising them? I would say that it's likely he did help preserve our freedoms by fighting in WWII, but every war since then has done nothing to protect our freedoms. Threats to our freedoms since then have come purely from within--McCarthyism, denial of civil rights to people of color, and the Patriot Act. Activists have fought to preserve rights that people within the US want to strip from us, and still we find our civil liberties being eroded. The other guy claimed to have fought in Vietnam, and aside from calling us cowards for wanting to withdraw from Iraq he told us the only way to win the war in Iraq was to stay in it until we've killed every last Iraqi.

Then there were two people who came by to tell us that they supported what we were doing and others who gave us supportive hand gestures like the peace sign. Overall, I think the result was positive, though maybe different than it would have been just after Bush declared "mission accomplished" when things in Iraq didn't look so grim. Maybe it made people in the area realize that others feel the same way they do and are not afraid to express it.

Back at DR

2008-01-07T19:10:00.001-08:00

I took a two week break from DR to travel for the holidays and left behind my work on the house. Upon my return I found that the plaster had mostly dried. I was a little worried that not heating the house for two weeks would prevent the plaster from drying, but even though there were a few days of below zero weather, the drying continued.

The last few days I continued the plastering and finished plastering yesterday. It's a relief to have it done finally and have all the drafts sealed up. But the last few days have been in the 70s, so I can't really test it.

Now I'm working on cleaning up the mess left behind from plastering. I 'm moving in some more of my stuff and putting up decorations.

The house is not technically done, but this is far as I'm going this season. The finish plaster, which will make the walls smooth, and the trim will have to wait for next summer. I also plan on putting in a different ladder in place of the fiberglass work ladder you see in the above picture for getting upstairs. The house will also need wood siding and trim on the outside, and wood flooring on both the first and second floors.

Winter comes to DR

2007-12-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

I've been continuing with the house despite the onset of cold weather. Some of the things I've been working on have been: installing the chimney and stovepipe; finishing the ceiling in the second floor; finishing the light straw insulation; plastering; and putting on a new door. The house is now almost winter proof as far as insulation, heating, and sealing up drafts.

This is the full wall of the lower level insulated with light clay straw.

Thor puppy demonstrates the value of straw as an insulator. Being an outdoor dog, Thor has to endure the cold weather and though he doesn't know the science behind why straw is a good insulator, he is drawn to straw beds in the gardens around DR because he knows they are warmer places to sleep. The kids helped him out by piling more straw on him.

I chose fiberglass insulation for the roof between the rafters simply because it is easier than the light clay straw since the roof is not vertical, and it insulates better, which is important for the roof, where more of the heat is likely to escape. It is not the most ecologically sensitive material to use because it has a lot of "embodied energy" (meaning its manufacture requires a lot of energy), but since I had to get the house ready for winter in a short time I decided to make this concession.

After finishing the insulation. My goal was to get the stove in so I could begin lighting fires to dry out the insulation and new plaster. I finally got the chimney and stove pipe, but then we had an icestorm, which made climbing up a ladder and walking on the roof difficult as both were slick with ice. I began framing the inside rafters to hold the heavy weight of the double walled stainless steel chimney. When the weather cleared up I made the venture up to the roof and began cutting the hole and installing the chimney. After some minor snags I got everything installed.

I finished up the ceiling in the second floor by putting a vapor barrier over the fiberglass and covering it with 1/4" plywood that came with the house when I bought it. I will probably take out the plywood in the future and replace it with something more substantial later.

Before actually lighting the stove I wanted to plaster the area closest to the stove and stovepipe so it would be protected from the heat. I nailed a few blocks up on the studs to stick out from the plaster so I would have something to attach a sheet of roofing to as a heat shield (picture below).

I continued plaster the upper level and after finishing moved my bed in. The wooden boards are nailing strips nailed to the studs to allow the hanging of pictures. I really like the way the plaster looks against the woodwork.

To mix the plaster in the cold I've had to bring the ingredients inside the house and warm them with the heat of the stove before bringing them outside to mix. People don't typically mix and apply plaster this late in the season. There could be some potential problems with mold forming because it's so cold and drying could take longer. I 'm hoping that because in a wood heated house winter is such a dry season, there won't be a problem with drying out the walls at this time of year.
I put up the tin heat shield behind the stove to reflect heat back into the room and away from the straw insulated wall. When I touched the tin during a very hot fire in the stove it was cool.

The last thing I did before going away for the holidays was to put on a new door. The old one opened out and was hung crooked. I had to cut down a scavenged door to fit the small opening available. I also had to cut and shape the threshold from a 2 by 6. I plan to put a more interesting veneer on the front of the door and add another pane so that the window insulates better. For now, as long as it keeps out the cold, I'll be happy. It does not allow the draft that the other door did.

When I get back to DR I will plaster the last section of wall on the first floor and hopefully the house will be warm enough to live in. I am looking into power systems since right now there is no power in the house. I would like to cooperate with others in the area to get power, but right now there is no excess power. I may get a wind turbine and cooperate with the grain bin next door that now has only solar panels for power.

Getting the new house ready to live in

2007-11-16T19:21:00.000-08:00

So I've been working hard to get the house ready for winter. Things have been going well overall. My Dad came to visit in late October for a few days and we made a lot of progress.
The first project was to move the front wall out to enclose the porch.

I wanted to get the front wall off in one piece so I wouldn't have to take it apart piece by piece. This was a bit of a trick, but it did come off.

Next I worked on getting the floor insulated. My Dad helped with redoing the floor over the former porch, moving the front wall out, and framing the side walls.

Finally we put wheat sheet over the side walls as sheathing. Wheat sheet is a pressboard made from wheat straw, so it is made from recycled material. I didn't have enough extra OSB(oriented strand board, it covers the rest of the house) to cover those new wall sections, so I had to use the wheat sheet, which is acceptable under the DR covenants. New OSB would not be.

Once we got the wheat sheet on I had to cover it with temporary roofing tin to protect it from the rain (see picture below). Then I continued on the light clay straw insulation. I'm just now finishing up the insulation. The walls are essentially done, there is just a small strip to insulate between the first and second floors.

The next thing to do was to order the stovepipe and get going on installing the stove so I could warm the place up and dry out the insulation. It has to be dry to be able to plaster. It took a week for the stove parts to arrive, but after getting the parts and bringing them back here I realized that one very important part of the chimney is not included with the chimney kit, so I had to wait another week to get this part.

In the meantime I got started with putting a skirt on the bottom of the house to stop the wind from blowing under the house and cooling it off. This took less than a day but has already made a huge difference in the temperature inside. The corrugated tin not only blocks the wind but it provides a wall to hold soil in a garden bed, which I plan to build on at least two sides of the house.

My new house

2007-10-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

The house move I talked about in my last post happened last week. Though there were some skeptics who never thought the house would make it here, it did make it in one piece and with only minor blemishes. Those crazy house movers Zimmerman's Excavating had told me earlier in the day that because of the rain storms we were expecting, they wouldn't be able to move it. It did rain a lot that day, and unable to do much I practiced piano in the common house. While I played, someone stuck their head in the door and asked if I knew my house was coming down the road. I said no and ran outside to find the house at the end of the drive.

I ran to get my camera and a crowd gathered to watch a house on a front-end loader coming up the drive.

As the loader eased its way in, the house swayed side to side with the uneven terrain. People kept thinking it would tip over.

They got the house in close to the spot where it would stand and began to dig the holes for the posts. The house would stand on the same Osage orange posts it was built on. Over on Red Earth Farms, where they moved the house from, they'd pulled up the posts after picking up the house. Osage orange is an extremely rot resistant wood and the tree grows everywhere here. The posts reach down below frost level so that the house will not shift over time with the frost heaving that can happen in a cold climate.

They didn't have time that day to finish getting the posts level so they left everything there for another day. When they came back, they lifted the house above the posts and bolted them on before lowering the house and posts down. Everything worked out, though getting the posts all set up took awhile. I figured it was better to spend the extra time to get it right so I wouldn't have to worry about it in the future.

Once the house was in place, they went and got the shed, which was considerably easier to move and put in place.

So now DR has a new residence, I have a new place to live, and I have a new storage shed on the warren of my future house. Now I will focus on insulating the house, getting a wood stove installed and making the new house ready for winter living.

Insulating my new house

2007-10-13T20:38:00.000-07:00

I came to DR thinking I would build a small house I could practice learning natural building techniques on, but then my plans changed. I decided to build something a bit larger and more permanent. When I was originally planning on building something small and temporary, I thought I would live there until I finished a larger house, then rent it out for a little income. DR also needs more living space for people just moving here, so figured more houses here would be better. But then, after I'd changed my plans, I found out about this house at neighboring Red Earth Farms (kind of like DR, but for homesteaders).

The person who built it only lived there for a season and never fully finished the house, but the important parts were there-- the framing and sheeting, windows, door, wiring for electricity, roof and gutters. The house was for sale but there weren't really any takers because the person buying it would have to become a member of Red Earth, or rather, a Red Earth member would have to be interested in the house for it to get sold. There was a deadline for the house to be sold or the owner would have to come and take it down. I thought it would be a shame for it to be torn down after such a short life and with DR needing housing I thought of the possibility of moving it over here. I thought I could live in it while I build my other house, then rent it out and DR would have another housing option.

It seemed like a small house, but it was hard to find someone who could move it. Finally, I did and now I'm waiting for them to set up a time to come and do it. I was originally planning to start insulating it and getting it ready for winter (it is not insulated and has no heating system) after it was moved here. Then the other night I was wondering why I had to wait. Since I have no exact date when the movers will get a chance to move the house, why not begin getting it ready for winter. With the days getting chillier all the time, I have no time to lose. So I've begun the insulation.

I thought about doing blown cellulose in the walls but wanted at least some part of the house to demonstrate natural building methods. At Red Earth there are no restrictions on using new lumber, so the house was built with all new lumber and OSB (oriented strand board). I'm keeping with the DR covenant on new lumber by recycling the entire house, but I decided to insulate with something called light clay straw, or light straw clay as some people call it. This is basically a mixture of clay slip (clay and water mixture) and straw.

Forms are nailed onto the studs to enclose the wall and the space is filled with this straw clay mixture. It is packed into all the corners.

After a section is filled the form can be immediately removed and the packed straw clay holds its shape. It is then allowed to dry in place and is later plastered over with earthen plaster.

This insulation has an R-value of at least 10 and the clay coating on the straw retards fire apparently (I still would like to test this sometime). Anyway, Brian, one of the newer DR residents is helping me out during October and we've been doing this project together. It's actually pretty fun to mix the straw and clay and pack it in the walls. So if we can make some serious progress on insulating, maybe by the time the house is moved, we can start the plastering. We'll see.

If you want to hear about another house here that was insulated with light clay straw, check out the DR video blog at drtv.dancingrabbit.org.

This season's garden

2007-10-02T20:07:00.000-07:00

One of the first things I did upon getting to DR was start a garden. People at Skyhouse let me use a few beds of their garden at first and then I added to my garden space by renting a piece of land next to the Skyhouse garden.

This area had not really been gardened for awhile so it was a tough job getting all the beds laid out.
I wound up with a huge pile of sod that I've been composting all season. Ananda came to visit me about a month after I arrived and helped me get this garden established.
I was able to begin planting in this new garden in June or so, a little late for this region. I've planted a lot of bean varieties, peppers, tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, parsnip, basil, epazote, summer squash, muskmelons, watermelon, cucumbers, broccoli, cabbage, onions, scallions, walking onions, Chinese cabbage, beets, cauliflower, corn, cilantro, garlic, and celery.

One thing I was really happy to be able to grow this season was corn. In Madison, if you plant corn it will get eaten by raccoons as soon as it gets close to being ripe, so there really was no point in growing it there. Here I was able to grow it, but the only things interfering with a good harvest were the soil and the rats. This new garden was not very fertile, so the corn grew, but didn't produce much. Only one variety really produced good sweet corn, and the popcorn did well. I planted pole beans with one flour corn variety, and this made the plants lush, green and productive, but then the rats were able to scale the beans to reach the grain and they ate it all. I'm going to have to figure out a better way, because I love corn.

These are pictures of the garden about a month after planting. After planting the garden, I needed to figure out some way to irrigate. I'd been used to gardening with a water spigot within a hose reach of my garden, but at DR there are no spigots. There was an old cistern that had been used in the past by a former gardener near the machine shed, and it wasn't collecting water anymore. I decided to have that moved over to a building closer to my garden and to other water-intensive activities.

I also installed a few rain barrels on the Skyhouse garden shed to collect water off that roof too. Unfortunately, the dry spell that lasted about two months this summer had already begun when I finished these water catchment systems, so I didn't really get to test them until later in the season. In the meantime, I used the Skyhouse and common house greywater system to irrigate. Wastewater from the kitchens and showers flows into a filter pond planted in water plants before it makes its way through a pipe to the cattail pond. We use biodegradable detergents and soaps, so the water is ok to put on the plants. In fact the part of the Skyhouse garden where the greywater used to drain is incredibly fertile.

I was able to overcome my mulching difficulties by getting newspaper from the local Memphis Democrat, which I spread between rows before covering it with hay and straw. In Madison, I'd always had access to leaf mulch, something not so abundant out here in the country.

I could water, and I didn't have to weed anymore, so I mostly spent my time watering and watching stuff grow. The harvest has been good, though there were some surprise pests and notable absences of pests gardening in a new region. There were strange new bean beetles, and blister beetles, that ate the leafy greens, along with the usual flea and cucumber beetles.

This is a pizza Brian and I made with nearly all garden and local ingredients. The basil, tomatoes, garlic, and onions came from our garden, the wheat (freshly milled) came from Sandhill, a nearby community, and the cheese (homemade mozzarella) came from milk from the organic dairy only about a mile down the road. One pizza was topped with homemade tofu I made with soybeans grown at Sandhill. The only non-local ingredients were oil, salt, and a few of the spices. It was probably the best pizza I've ever had. Next time I want to make it with cheddar cheese.

My garlic harvest was pretty good considering I planted it in the spring. I plan to plant a lot of it this fall and have a bumper crop next season. I've continued to fill in and plant more crops when I've harvested something. I planted cauliflower, cabbage, and broccoli as fall crops and they are huge now and setting fruit, or rather setting vegetables.

I eat at Bobolink eating co-op and I'm able to count my gardening time towards my food bill. I've put in enough hours this season to offset my food bill entirely. I've also provided a lot of food for Bobolink.

Latest on the House

2007-09-27T20:06:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd give an update on the house progress before talking about the garden.

I've been steadily building the foundation walls of my house. I'm reusing concrete for my foundation so that I can reduce the amount of cement I have to use and thus lessen my impact on the planet. I heard about a pile of "urbanite" at the local airport and inquired about it. Urbanite is a funny name for broken pieces of concrete from the pulling up of a road or sidewalk. In my case it was the removal of a runway. Many of the pieces were cut out with a saw so fortunately they have some smooth sides, making them better for making a smooth-sided wall. I decided to use mortar to bind the urbanite together in the foundation. I could have dry stacked the pieces, but I wanted a stronger wall and wanted it to be animal proof. Mice can find their way through the tiniest of holes.

I also scavenged some concrete block from a house that was being demolished in the small town about a half mile away. This was a boon because I was thinking of buying block for the one side of my house that will be framed with wood instead of strawbale. This was also a good thing because the urbanite is very heavy and had to be hauled from a town 45 miles away (about $70 for the trip in the vehicle co-op). I cleaned the old mortar off the block and was able to use them just like new block.

I had a plumber dig the foundation trench for me and ground was broken on August 30th. They dug a 3 and a half foot trench so that I wouldn't have to do it by hand (some people here have dug theirs by hand). The idea is that you fill the trench with gravel and line the bottom with drainage tile. You build your foundation on top of the gravel trench to keep it from sitting on soil or clay where the frost heaving action of freezing and thawing can cause your foundation to become unstable in time. The gravel trench also drains any runoff after rain. In our clay soil the rain runs right off.

Then I had a load of gravel dropped off and I raked it out and tamped it down to fill in the trench.

After that I could level off one side and begin to build the foundation. I laid out the corners and sides of the building and figured out how high I wanted to build the foundation wall. It's a good idea to build the top of the wall at least 12 inches above grade. This meant the south wall would be much higher than the north because of the slope the house is sitting on. Fortunately that was the one that I was using block on. Block is easier to lay than urbanite.

This is the block wall after I'd laid two courses. Below is the cement mortar I used.

I laid four courses of the block to reach the final height of the south wall. I wrapped the block around so that I could tie it into the adjacent walls.

Then I started on the urbanite and right now this is as far as I am. I think it's looking pretty good. At first I wasn't sure I'd have enough urbanite to make all the walls, but now it's looking like I might.

This is the urbanite up close. It looks like stone more or less. I'm trying to lay it so that from the outside it looks good. The inside of the foundation will be filled with mostly clay up to about 8 inches below the top of the foundation wall. I plan to make a natural earthen floor and that will be where the floor will lie.

Dan's New DR Blog

2007-09-25T01:19:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been talking about making a blog since I came here and here it is. It is now late in the season, but I can bring you all up to date on what I've been up to since coming here.

It's taken a little longer than expected to get started on my house. I had to wait to become a member to be able to have access to a warren of my own. A warren here is the same thing as a lot in other places. I had to wait three months to be eligible to become a member. Being a member means I can vote in decisions for the whole community and pay membership dues, which are $5 a month. I've been living in this house for most of the time I've been here. Before that I was living in a large tent. The walls of this house are made of strawbales. I would not advertise this as the model strawbale house. The person who built it was in a rush to get it done before winter and did not have much attention to detail. There are major problems with it and as many people here say, "It looks wonky". Despite the fact that there have been many times I've wondered when it was going to fall over, it is a nice little house. It stays cool inside on hot days and it has a very earthy feel. I'm building a strawbale house right now, but I want it to be different from this house.

Maybe I should explain a little bit about Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. I know it is a weird name and I'm not exactly crazy about it, because I think the name doesn't sum up at all what's happening here. The goal of the community is to build a village sustainably from the ground up. It is very difficult to retrofit an existing community to make it more sustainable. There are zoning laws in most places that prohibit doing things outside the norm, and to change these laws can take a lot of time and energy. Here in the middle of nowhere in MO there are really no zoning laws for residential housing. There is no building code, so we can build houses out of natural materials using methods that aren't allowed in most cities today (though we hope that our example will lead to their acceptance elsewhere). Many of these materials and methods of building have been used by humanity for thousands of years. The problem with many modern building methods is that they use materials that are manufactured from fossil fuels, they require the destruction of natural habitat, and their manufacture pollutes the environment and requires the burning of large amounts of fossil fuel. Cement, for instance, has a high "embodied energy". Its manufacture requires a massive input of fossil fuel compared to natural materials, which require little if any input of fossil fuel.

Some alternative building materials here at DR are cob which is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw and is often used to build walls of houses. And strawbale, which is used to build a thick wall that insulates from the cold and heat. Foundations may be built of earthbags or gravel bags, which are reused plastic mesh bags filled with earth or gravel and laid in overlapping courses much like rows of bricks. I'm building my foundation out of reclaimed concrete blocks and urbanite, broken concrete chunks that are the byproduct of road demolition. Here at DR, one of the main rules, or covenants as we call them, requires us to use reclaimed lumber or local sustainably-harvested wood when we build. With so many old houses and barns falling into ruin in this economically depressed part of the country, it's not hard to find lumber to scavenge.

Cob has been used for hundreds of years in places like Ireland. This is a cob cottage with a thatched roof and is likely hundreds of years old. This is another difference between conventional and natural building methods--often natural buildings are built to last, and if they aren't, they can be easily composted at the end of their life. This is a kitchen being built by a group of people here who share income. It incorporates many different natural building methods.
Tony and Alyssa are building a cob wall that later looked like the lower picture. Although cob takes a long time, it is very malleable, allowing you to mold it like clay into just about any shape--something you cannot do with any modern building material. These bottles allow light to come in during the day and shine out at night creating a lantern effect. As I said earlier, an advantage of cob is that it will last forever if well maintained. This wall still needs finishing plaster, which will make it smooth and protect it from the elements.

Another building method involves using strawbales to build the walls of a structure. Strawbales are a waste product of grain harvest. Because they have a uniform rectangular shape they can be stacked in courses much like bricks. After the walls are formed they are strengthened by a coating of earth plaster, which is made of basically the same materials as cob--clay, sand, and straw. Skyhouse, DR's biggest building, has strawbale walls that have been inlaid in wood framing.

The second photo shows the interior of Skyhouse with its thick bale walls covered with a smooth, durable finish plaster. Notice the rounded walls around the windows and the built in shelves in the corner. Although they are thicker than conventional wood framed walls strawbale walls can insulate up to three times better. If you are wondering about fire hazards, strawbale walls are less flammable than you might think. Covered in earthen plaster (which is not flammable) strawbale structures do not catch fire as easily and burn more slowly than conventionally built homes. It is fairly difficult to burn a tightly bound strawbale because there is little oxygen within the bale to feed the fire.

If you'd like to watch some videos to learn more about DR, check out DR TV. One of the latest videos talks about the house Tony and Alyssa built over the last year using reclaimed lumber and light clay-straw insulation, another natural way of insulating a home.

http://drtv.dancingrabbit.org/

Next time I'll talk about the garden I've started here and show some pictures of the house progress.