Alabama, raising trees, and beyond:

I do so so so so damn many things every day that the shear volume of them all keeps me from blogging as regularly as I'd like to. However I will once again attempt to cherry pick various events and activities to share. A little over a week ago we went off to Alabama again to do the post raising of the natural building we began work on about a month ago. During our last trip to the house in Alabama we stripped the bark off the trees we cut down so that we could use them for posts, beams and the like in the overall structure of the house. We now had to raise them so that they could have concrete poured around their base to keep them in place.

It is worth noting here that each post is around 14 feet long and weighs over 450 pounds. We had to put up over twenty five of them in a few days. They all to be at exact angles and around a third of them were not vertical posts but had to be at 45 degree angles.

The picture you see here is taken before many of the angled posts, or y braces, had been put in. It is hard to balance 450 pound trees at various angles all in a small space, but we did it and I learned quite a bit in the process. We had to make individual braces for each and every post and make sure that they were braced exactly right so that when the concrete was poured it was all kosher.

The house it self is sort of a mix between a natural building and a conventional one, noting that concrete is not usually considered a natural material. October marks my transition into the natural building apprenticeship although I have been spending time with the builders unofficially already. However this new status of officialness has led me to reading quite a bit not only about the practical how to of the natural building practice, but also the history and theory of it as well. Natural building is interesting in that it is obviously nothing new, it is a rediscovery of techniques have been used since humans began housing themselves. Only within the last couple hundred years have we started swaying from intelligent design methods.

It seems funny to think of indigenous folks or old villages around the world as having more intelligent design then our contemporary buildings, but when you compare the two, that seemingly is the reality. That is not to say that we are not currently capable of intelligent design....it's just to say it is usually not used and almost never used in new residential homes. We don't build considering how to use such things as our house's orientation to the sun to our advantage. We park houses whenever we think they should be and spend a ton of energy and money to heat them up and cool them down.

The good news is that you can heat and cool your house in almost all cases without using any electrical energy. You just have to take advantage of the natural landscape in order to achieve such a result. Indigenous folks have been doing it for thousands of years. In fact a lot of American architecture used to consider the site location and intelligent design principles before the rush to house all the folks that needed houses post world war two. It also should be noted that houses that take advantage of the natural landscape are usually much more beautiful then the conventional houses that have been built over the last half century.

Anyhoo there are tons of resources for learning more about natural building and you can start with this super basic wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_building

In addition to all the natural building I have been doing a bit of gardening as well. Most recently we experimented with a German method of making wonderful loamy soil called Hugelkulture. Hugelkulture is basically layering material to create an in place compost pile you can plant on. The recipe is sort of like baking a cake. You start by stripping the area you want to use of it's top soil (to be replaced later). You then break up the soil with a digging fork. Following that break up you place down tree branches, logs or other woody material. On top of that layer you place less woody material that has more nitrogen content. We used spent Jerusalem artichoke flowers which have the consistency of sunflowers. On top of that you place a much higher nitrogen plant source. We used all the plants that had been on top of the soil we stripped off. Following that layer you place on a layer of compost and then, finally the top soil you removed earlier.

Why in the hell would you do all this you ask...I'm wondering that as I write this and realize that I am giving way to damn much detail, but alas we are already knee deep in this shit and if you haven't clicked over to the comedy central website in order to watch the daily show then you are likely to stick with me the rest of the way. So woodier materials are higher in carbon and need nitrogen materials to decompose and make the organic matter that is important for plant growth. In addition the woodier material an hold a lot of water below ground and make it available to whatever you plant on top of the pile. Berries, squash or any water loving plants really flourish using this method. The best part is that when the pile breaks down you have created over a foot of beautiful new soil.

So ok.....that was a big post and despite my best intentions laden with a ton of shit that may or may not be interesting to read when you are at work....I'll try and post more often with smaller entries....but I can't make any promises.

Word....Ja boy

Grow some fuckin plants

Hey, So I just realized that you all have been leaving comments on my blog. I feel much more loved now as I wondered where many of you were. Keep them coming as they mean a lot to a guy who is the boonies and gets lonely at times. Sheep, what..ok. In addition, the reason there was such a break in the frequency of my posts was because there were two classes back to back at the ETC. The classes were outside of the regular curriculum of our apprenticeship and it was great to be able to take them. My last post was about the earthworks and dam building part of the course. The second weekend of the course was in forest gardening and orchard remediation. What in the hell is forest gardening and orchard remediation you ask? I have no fuckin idea, but I got like 33 chigger bites on my left forearm and that shit hurts. This is not my forearm, but this is a chicks foot who got the chiggers. Gross....we will not be making out anytime soon....probably....

I lied, I know what orchard remediation and forest gardening are and I will share. Forest gardening is a type of gardening system based on mimicking woodland ecosystems. It is a garden you have usually in addition to your vegetable garden which requires more attention and should be placed closer to your house then the forest garden. While you do mimic the forest using this system, you use plants such as fruit or nut trees, edible and medicinal shrubs, herbs and bushes that can give you a food yield. You place plants on multiple levels as in this drawing to take advantage of three dimensional space.

These plants are intermixed to grow on multiple levels in the same area, just like plants in a forest. It is a pretty amazing system and you don't need to live in or near a forest to have a forest garden.

We conducted the course at the previous natural building coordinator's house. He and his wife have been working on their house for four years and it is pretty amazing. They bought 90 acres of clearcut land and have been restoring it all the while. These are some pics of the inside of the place. The walls were made from cob, which is an old English building technique that uses clay, sand, straw and water to make an earthen wall. As you build it you can place glass bottles in the wall to make designs such as these.

While we were there we helped with another building technique called light clay straw which is a mix of clay, water and straw that one can use for insulation. It is about a gillion times faster then cob, which is pretty labor intensive. It is great for places like the pacific north west that doesn't require as much insulation as say Alaska.(Picture Left: Me in the big ass hat and yellow shirt mixing a batch of light clay straw. Picture Right: The wall after light claw straw was stuffed in, it still needs a coat of earthen plaster, but it will keep you warm!)










So orchard remediation. Basically we learned how to prune an ailing orchard to help it get back some of it's gusto. At it's most basic you are trying to trim the tree in such a way that all the leaves are able to collect light and contribute to the energy the tree derives from the sun. It gets complicated, but I'll spare you the details as I'm sure you are actively fighting the urge to click on to internet porn instead of this boring ass blog. Plus I forgot half of what I learned already, so I can just blame my lack of description on your despicable habit. Seriously....porn is gross. And you know who you are.

It was a wonderful 10 days. Side note: It has been great to be in a place where almost everyone knows more about a subject area you are studying together as group then you do. Not only has it been humbling, it has been a growth experience. So often when one asks a question, others answer without truly understanding the question that was asked. This seems to make sense though, as much of the time people are as excited to share what they know as they are to help another. But I think much of the time people who answer questions are more concerned with being able to talk about something they know about then truly shedding light on another's question. A bit more ego then empathy. Maybe I'm projecting here a bit as I feel like I am guilty of this. So I wanted to note that my experience of being in the un-know has left me more sensitive to how I engage with people who ask questions. I often find myself getting so excited about the chance to convey all the information I have jammed in my brain that the other person becomes talked at, instead of to. It is hard to figure out where to draw the lines between the excitement of communication of ideas, ego and empathy. Point being....I'm trying to draw new ones....in erasable ink of course. Until Later Youts.

Ja Boy