I started more seeds in peat pots yesterday, including watermelon and yellow, zucchini, and winter squashes. We have a pretty long growing season here in Virginia so I'm not too concerned that I'm a little behind the typical planting schedule. Additional progress on the garden front: we're waiting for a load of horse manure to be delivered sometime today.
We've moved the proposed homestead site once again. I'm really, really hoping that this is the final location. This new site is actually the original site we had considered, but rejected because it's views of the mountains are more limited. But while the views are limited, it has its own beautiful view--the mountains are still visible and it feels much more secluded since it's located further down on the ridge and neighboring farms aren't visible. It's also much flatter so it'll be much easier to put in a garden, less soil will need to be moved for the foundation of the house, and it's located much closer to the existing private roads so we won't need to build a long drive into the property.
For the last several days I've been reading specifically about homestead layout and cob building design. One of the core guide books for building with cob is Building Green: Earth-Friendly Building Solutions for Creating a Home That's Uniquely Yours, by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan; this book starts off with an entire sections on design and alternative building strategies.
These sections so far have been incredibly informative--rather than beginning a home building project with the idea of a fixed, pre-determined structure in mind, the authors argue that each house should be fitted to the particulars of its specific environment, and each part of the house to the function it will be performing. Additionally, the design of the house and property should be aesthetically pleasing, and take into account the beauty of things such as the slant of the late afternoon sun as it hits a patio outside the kitchen before descending over the nearby ridge. That sounds like common sense but evidently common sense isn't what drives current home construction.
Consider these homes:
Before building these home, the builders first clear cut the land, leveled it, and removed any of the natural features such as trees, rocks, hills, etc. These homes could be anywhere in any first-world country, in any climate, in any natural environment, from the dry desert Southwest to the green rolling fields of Kansas to the rocky hillsides of New Hampshire. The design and layout of the homes don't have individuality that would tell us anything about the aesthetic sense of the inhabitants or the kinds of daily activities that give them joy or purpose.
Then consider these homes:
Major difference.
I've been working on a simple plan for the layout of the overall homestead, as well as thinking about the design of the house.
Our homestead is on rolling pasture land, and it curves around the upper edge of a bowl-shaped hollow that is moderately tree-covered, mainly with fir, sumac, and ash. The house will be located on the side of a long, gently sloping hill. We'll have to trench behind it to divert rain runoff, and we're hoping that we can use this water to irrigate our gardens. Another possibility is to divert some of the runoff into an area of the bowl where we can dig out a pond. Our plan is to build mostly with cob, though we'll probably incorporate a mix of green building approaches such as straw bale and cord wood. The clay from the cob will come from the land itself; there are some mounded areas that can be leveled off and the future pond site may provide some clay as well. The straw will come from the surrounding fields. We may need to haul in some sand for the cob mix. There are dead, standing fir trees in the adjacent woods--the owner, B., whose property we are currently living on has said we can use them if we'd like; this wood will be useful for framing. He also has a relative with a portable saw mill who will be able to help us cut the wood.
We plan to be entirely off grid. The house will face south to take advantage of passive solar. Since the summer sun is very intense here, we'll need to build in an overhang toward the south and perhaps an interior cob wall to serve a thermal shield to keep the house from overheating. In the winter, the sun will heat the house--the cob walls will soak up the daytime heat and release it slowly through the night, maintaining a livable temperature. I imagine we'll also have a wood stove, though I've been reading that some people living in cob houses in environments similar to ours find that they need to make very little use of them except in extremely cold winters.
The garden will be located across from the house--there's a bit of a shallow slope down and then up between the house and the proposed garden site. This will place the garden reasonably close to the house and on the flattest part of the property. It''ll also place it between the two private roads that form two of the property lines, and natural borders for the garden. Close proximity to the roads will making hauling in things like manure easier. The garden area is quite large and there's enough space there for us to significantly expand planting space over time and to build a greenhouse and compost piles.
It will also be possible to place a small structure for animals close to the garden, with a fenced paddock area sloping away from the garden; this will make it easy for garden waste to be hauled to the animals and animal waste to the compost piles, in keeping with permaculture principles. I'd also like to have a smaller kitchen garden with herbs, lettuce, and a few tomato plants closer to the house.
********************************************************************************
On other fronts: I really had slacked off on reading over the last week but last night I started in on Off the Grid by Nick Rosen. So far, he's presented some interesting information that I was previously unaware of about how the major electric companies have worked over the last hundred years to promote consumption of electricity by American households and to develop one super interconnected electric grid. He argues that a much more sustainable approach, given the development of new technologies, would be multiple networks where communities band together to produce their own power using local natural resources such as the sun. A major part of the book I haven't gotten to get consists of the stories of individuals and groups who have chosen to go off the grid and their various reasons for doing so. I'm really looking forward to that.
We have a long draw out thunderstorm last night and it rained throughout the night. So far it's been a pretty dry spring so I welcomed the rain.
This afternoon we're waiting on a load of horse manure to be delivered from a local farm. For the first time in my life I'll be the proud co-owner of truck-sized pile of shit. Happiness!
Afternote: I think it's very peculiar that the homesteads and homes that are created using green building methods and permaculture philosophy are regarded as more primitive and less civilized. That seems completely ass-backwards to me. These methods are more advanced--and more well-informed--in that they use the latest scientific knowledge and the materials and designs that are subsequently developed from that science to design living environments that are environmentally sustainable and based on what we know from the psychological research, which are supportive of human well-being.
My area of professional expertise is in education and political philosophy. I'm used to asking critical questions about educational practices and proposed reforms, questions such as, "Whose interests are being served? What are the assumptions about human nature, society, what kind of life is worth living, that are implied by those practices and proposals?" Until recently, I hadn't thought to apply those same kinds of questions to the ways we develop our communities, neighborhoods, and homes. Looking back at the two sets of pictures of homes from earlier in this post, ask those same questions: "Whose interests are being served by these designs? What do these designs imply about human nature, society, what kind of life is worth living?
We've moved the proposed homestead site once again. I'm really, really hoping that this is the final location. This new site is actually the original site we had considered, but rejected because it's views of the mountains are more limited. But while the views are limited, it has its own beautiful view--the mountains are still visible and it feels much more secluded since it's located further down on the ridge and neighboring farms aren't visible. It's also much flatter so it'll be much easier to put in a garden, less soil will need to be moved for the foundation of the house, and it's located much closer to the existing private roads so we won't need to build a long drive into the property.
For the last several days I've been reading specifically about homestead layout and cob building design. One of the core guide books for building with cob is Building Green: Earth-Friendly Building Solutions for Creating a Home That's Uniquely Yours, by Clarke Snell and Tim Callahan; this book starts off with an entire sections on design and alternative building strategies.
These sections so far have been incredibly informative--rather than beginning a home building project with the idea of a fixed, pre-determined structure in mind, the authors argue that each house should be fitted to the particulars of its specific environment, and each part of the house to the function it will be performing. Additionally, the design of the house and property should be aesthetically pleasing, and take into account the beauty of things such as the slant of the late afternoon sun as it hits a patio outside the kitchen before descending over the nearby ridge. That sounds like common sense but evidently common sense isn't what drives current home construction.
Consider these homes:
Before building these home, the builders first clear cut the land, leveled it, and removed any of the natural features such as trees, rocks, hills, etc. These homes could be anywhere in any first-world country, in any climate, in any natural environment, from the dry desert Southwest to the green rolling fields of Kansas to the rocky hillsides of New Hampshire. The design and layout of the homes don't have individuality that would tell us anything about the aesthetic sense of the inhabitants or the kinds of daily activities that give them joy or purpose.
Then consider these homes:
Major difference.
I've been working on a simple plan for the layout of the overall homestead, as well as thinking about the design of the house.
Our homestead is on rolling pasture land, and it curves around the upper edge of a bowl-shaped hollow that is moderately tree-covered, mainly with fir, sumac, and ash. The house will be located on the side of a long, gently sloping hill. We'll have to trench behind it to divert rain runoff, and we're hoping that we can use this water to irrigate our gardens. Another possibility is to divert some of the runoff into an area of the bowl where we can dig out a pond. Our plan is to build mostly with cob, though we'll probably incorporate a mix of green building approaches such as straw bale and cord wood. The clay from the cob will come from the land itself; there are some mounded areas that can be leveled off and the future pond site may provide some clay as well. The straw will come from the surrounding fields. We may need to haul in some sand for the cob mix. There are dead, standing fir trees in the adjacent woods--the owner, B., whose property we are currently living on has said we can use them if we'd like; this wood will be useful for framing. He also has a relative with a portable saw mill who will be able to help us cut the wood.
We plan to be entirely off grid. The house will face south to take advantage of passive solar. Since the summer sun is very intense here, we'll need to build in an overhang toward the south and perhaps an interior cob wall to serve a thermal shield to keep the house from overheating. In the winter, the sun will heat the house--the cob walls will soak up the daytime heat and release it slowly through the night, maintaining a livable temperature. I imagine we'll also have a wood stove, though I've been reading that some people living in cob houses in environments similar to ours find that they need to make very little use of them except in extremely cold winters.
The garden will be located across from the house--there's a bit of a shallow slope down and then up between the house and the proposed garden site. This will place the garden reasonably close to the house and on the flattest part of the property. It''ll also place it between the two private roads that form two of the property lines, and natural borders for the garden. Close proximity to the roads will making hauling in things like manure easier. The garden area is quite large and there's enough space there for us to significantly expand planting space over time and to build a greenhouse and compost piles.
It will also be possible to place a small structure for animals close to the garden, with a fenced paddock area sloping away from the garden; this will make it easy for garden waste to be hauled to the animals and animal waste to the compost piles, in keeping with permaculture principles. I'd also like to have a smaller kitchen garden with herbs, lettuce, and a few tomato plants closer to the house.
********************************************************************************
On other fronts: I really had slacked off on reading over the last week but last night I started in on Off the Grid by Nick Rosen. So far, he's presented some interesting information that I was previously unaware of about how the major electric companies have worked over the last hundred years to promote consumption of electricity by American households and to develop one super interconnected electric grid. He argues that a much more sustainable approach, given the development of new technologies, would be multiple networks where communities band together to produce their own power using local natural resources such as the sun. A major part of the book I haven't gotten to get consists of the stories of individuals and groups who have chosen to go off the grid and their various reasons for doing so. I'm really looking forward to that.
We have a long draw out thunderstorm last night and it rained throughout the night. So far it's been a pretty dry spring so I welcomed the rain.
This afternoon we're waiting on a load of horse manure to be delivered from a local farm. For the first time in my life I'll be the proud co-owner of truck-sized pile of shit. Happiness!
Afternote: I think it's very peculiar that the homesteads and homes that are created using green building methods and permaculture philosophy are regarded as more primitive and less civilized. That seems completely ass-backwards to me. These methods are more advanced--and more well-informed--in that they use the latest scientific knowledge and the materials and designs that are subsequently developed from that science to design living environments that are environmentally sustainable and based on what we know from the psychological research, which are supportive of human well-being.
My area of professional expertise is in education and political philosophy. I'm used to asking critical questions about educational practices and proposed reforms, questions such as, "Whose interests are being served? What are the assumptions about human nature, society, what kind of life is worth living, that are implied by those practices and proposals?" Until recently, I hadn't thought to apply those same kinds of questions to the ways we develop our communities, neighborhoods, and homes. Looking back at the two sets of pictures of homes from earlier in this post, ask those same questions: "Whose interests are being served by these designs? What do these designs imply about human nature, society, what kind of life is worth living?
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