Winter at the Homestead

Well, things sure have slowed down here since the summer.  Just before winter hit, we had a spell of really nice, warm weather.  It allowed us time to overhaul the engine in the moving truck, and Jeanne spent time every day, peeling the bark off of logs to be used for the timber frame of a future greenhouse/garden building we plan to build.  Here's a picture of her, peeling one of the last of the 40 or so logs we'd gathered.

It's amazing what she accomplished.  The pile of bark chips alone grew so big that it was taller than she was, even after we'd removed it once (and chipped it in the mulcher for garden paths).  Spread out over days and weeks though, a few logs a day, she said it was good exercise and very peaceful and meditative.  She'd usually arrive back at the yurt with a story about a Stellar's Jay that visited and talked with her, or a flock of turkeys that wandered by, scratching in the leaves.

We also both worked at cutting up, splitting and stacking several cords worth of firewood logs that we'd gathered from the national forest with a fuelwood permit during the summer.  We don't own a chainsaw yet, and possibly never will.  It's slow, harvesting trees and cutting them up with one and two person timber saws, but it's great exercise, and at the end of the day you feel so good.  I imagine if we'd spent the day running a vibrating, noisy chainsaw, the feeling at the end of the day would be totally different.  Here's Linc, sawing away.

We got to the point where if both of us did some sawing, then Linc split, and we both stacked, that we could process almost half a cord a day.

We drove down to Flagstaff, Arizona for Thanksgiving with Linc's sister and his mother for a few days, then back up, away from the San Francisco Peaks, through the sandstone canyons and past the pinyon-juniper covered slopes of Black Mesa, through the towns of Tuba City and Kayenta of the Navajo Nation, and back up into the Ponderosa and Oak mountains of our home.

Linc also finally got a chance to focus his attention for a couple of days on the vegetable oil powered VW Jetta diesel that had sat since we bought it in California back in June (and had the engine die on us in Flagstaff on the way home with it).  After a day or two of diagnostic work, and consultations with our Apache neighbor mechanic Dawn, we removed the injection pump and shipped it off to Ohio to have it overhauled.  Then the storm hit.

In a day and a half, it went from cold temperatures but dry to cold and over two feet of snow.  The winds during the storm itself were like nothing we'd ever experienced here.  We didn't sleep much the night of the blizzard, with the crashing noises of clumps of snow blowing off of the Ponderosa Pines and hitting the roof like mortar rounds, the wind roaring around and around in the trees, and the yurt occasionally inflating and then suddenly deflating with a loud pop.  In the morning, we looked out on an entirely different scene.

Here's our place from the driveway looking in, with the hoop greenhouse looking like a burrito, insulated in a thick blanket of snow.

Well, snow makes things different here.  Instead of peeling logs and processing firewood for exercise, we started skiing the canyon slopes below the yurt and shoveling snow.  But the snow was this bottomless powder without any base, so deep it was hard to get any momentum, and we'd hit logs and rocks when we sank in for a turn.  We switched back to running a few miles down the canyon entrance road and back, with sheetmetal screws threaded into the bottoms of our running shoes for traction.

Two days ago, while run/walking back up the steep, narrow, snow covered canyon road, a neighbor went by, waving happily.  Unfortunately, he didn't notice that his left wheels had gone off the road into the ditch.  We watched in concern as he gunned the engine and cut the front wheel to get out of the ditch, then relief as he made it out, then horror as he shot right across the road with all that momentum and launched off the other side into the 30 foot deep gully.  Luckily, the car hit a small Boxelder Maple, stopping it about 8' feet down the 45 degree slope.  Jim jumped out yelling "I'm OK I'm OK!"

He headed down the canyon on foot in hopes of reaching someplace with cell phone reception while we hustled 2 miles back up the road back to the yurt to get help.  When Linc returned, Jim's girlfriend had arrived, but in her haste to back down the hill in her car to call a wrecker, she went off the road too!  What a mess.  Two guys who we know as "Cheech and Chong" showed up in their enormous four wheel drive truck with chains on all four wheels and were able to pull Jim's girlfriend's car out of the snow, but Jim's required a wrecker to drag it back up the slope.  We somehow felt guilty about all of this, maybe we shouldn't be jogging on that road, but it's such a great hill climb on the way back up...

Well, back at the yurt.  Being in the yurt in winter is like being wrapped in a warm blanket on a cold night.  You can hear the sub zero wind outside, the snow pelting the roof and sliding off in great, noisy bursts, but inside it's warm, especially when you walk over and stand in front of the cook stove, with the pot of water murmuring away on top, and the aroma of a baking Buttercup Squash rising up from the oven.  And while we can hear the wind and the birds outside, the snow acts to muffle any sounds from civilization that we'd normally hear during the summer (vehicles driving by on the main road at the end of the cul-de-sac, a neighbor's generator humming).  Instead, it's quiet, and we feel like we could be 100 miles from the nearest people.  We feel like we're back in Gothic, four miles from the nearest plowed road, studying field guides again.  Just us, in a tiny yurt, with a huge supply of firewood, a root cellar full of vegetables, a storage box full of dry goods, a cistern full of water, but with a phone, internet and radio to stay in touch with everyone else.  It's a good feeling to finally be able to relax and slow down, and it feels like the right thing to do at this time of year.

One of our naturalist friends (from a stint of volunteering as naturalists introducing local elementary school children to the outdoors in September), taught Jeanne how to make pine needle baskets.  Jeanne, who's always been an avid crocheter, took to basket making right off.  She quickly made a basket to use for rising her sourdough bread in, and then immediately started in on a second basket, including learning how to make plant-based dyes to color the needles and the natural cordage that's used to lash the needle coils together.  Here's a photo of her first basket.

All of the stillness and the chance to do nothing in winter also makes you introspective.  You look back on the year and give thanks for all of the things that you've experienced.  I roll in the snow and run naked and yelling back into the enveloping steamy warmth of the wood fired sauna we'd built earlier in the fall and realize that this is all a gift.  The sauna is a gift, the snow is a gift, the trees that gave us the fire that heated the sauna are a gift.  Yes, we built the sauna with our own hands, but even those hands are a gift.  There's so much we all have to be grateful for.

But, any introspection always ends up looking forward too, not just backwards.  And for me, looking forwards brings worry (it runs in my family).  We're middle aged, we abandoned our "careers" almost a decade ago in search of lives with more meaning, and when we tried to return to them last winter we found that it's hard to go back.  It's not just remembering the skills, it's that we've changed, and it isn't where our hearts lie any more than it was when we left.  We'll probably still do it whenever we can to keep ourselves afloat I'm sure, but it does seem like we're headed away from engineering and physical therapy.  It's not that there's anything wrong with those careers either.  If our hearts were in it, we could do something really beneficial with those skills, and who knows, someday maybe we will.

But where do we go from here?  We've learned a lot in the last few years about what things are wrong with our civilization, about how good it feels to live very simply on small fraction of what the average American spends, meeting basic needs as directly as possible, and about how to connect with something wiser than our own minds (just sit outside for 45 minutes a day in one spot, day after day and you'll understand what I mean if you don't already).  But we still need an income to make it in this world.  I need to be involved in something meaningful on a community level and as a career of sorts.  Jeanne, a hermit at heart sometimes, believes she could probably be happy just homesteading, but I think I need the homestead and the community and good work to feel whole.  And, it still comes down to needing to make some money.  We haven't been able to find work in this area that is sustainable, that in doing it you're helping to grow something that is better instead of, like so many jobs, impoverishing an ecosystem or ruining the lives of other people or of future generations.  Heck, we haven't been able to find jobs here at all, nor have several of our unemployed neighbors.  So, it looks like we'll be moving soon.

Gosh, taking this whole homestead apart and carting it somewhere is going to be tough, but we've tried selling it as is, and so far have no offers.  So, move it we may.  We're looking now for land in a community of irrigated organic farms, ranches and orchards, in a valley surrounded by mesas and mountains, still in Colorado.  We'll keep the blog going though, so stay tuned.

We did get the veggie oil Jetta running again, two days ago.  The injection pump came in, Linc shoveled the car out and spent two days hovering around the engine compartment, occasionally running into the sauna to thaw out his hands.  Late on the second day, we primed the pump, charged the battery, and cranked it over.  Nothing.  Linc bled the injector lines and we tried again.  Finally, coughing great clouds of black smoke, the car came back to life.  Great!  But, the car is now about 100 feet from the nearest plowed road, needs a lot more work before we can be driving around on used vegetable oil, and it's too cold out for car mechanic work now, so we'll abandon it for the time being.  But stay tuned if you're interested in the idea of running a car on used fryer oil, it's definitely in the future of this blog.

Have a great holiday season!

Earthen Floor in Hotchkiss, Colorado

Enough about rocket stoves, what about the earthen floor?

Earlier in the summer, David and Maureen had, with Doni Kiffmeier, installed the rough base layer of the earthen floor.  Having missed that event, I don't have the exact details, but it goes something like this.  The bare earth was leveled and tamped.  A 2" thick layer of rigid insulation (blueboard polystyrene, R10/inch) was put down to keep the heat from the home from being conducted out through the floor.  Roadbase gravel was then brought in (using a bucket loader through a window opening) and spread on the floor several inches deep, then leveled and compacted.  PEX hydronic radiant heat tubing was installed in a serpentine fashion at 12" on center, on top of the road base, which in retrospect was a mistake.  It should have been installed deeper down, in the middle of the roadbase.  The shallow installation of the flexible tubing later caused the base layer of earthen floor material to crack above the tubes.  Then, a dry earthen floor mix was prepared (I believe this was a small amount of clay slip, mixed with a large amount of coursely screened sand/gravel) and a small amount of water as needed to make a tamp-able mix.  The mix was then spread 1-1/2" deep, leveled and tamped with homemade tampers.  Afterwards, heated linseed oil was painted on in several layers.  This proved to be another problem, as the dry-tamp floor quickly absorbed several hundred dollars worth of linseed oil.

When we showed up to help install the finish coat of earthen floor plaster, David and Maureen had already prepared all of the ingredients.  The photo below shows all of the materials required for one batch of finish floor plaster.  Two buckets of clay slip, each made by mixing 2/3 to 3/4 bucket of finely sifted clay from the site with enough water to cover, mixing with a paddle mixer, then sifting the resultant slurry through a fine screen into another bucket.  Three buckets of fine masonry sand.  One bucket of sifted red sand from a sand dune near Moab, Utah.  A small amount of straw to give color flecks to the finished floor.  A wheelbarrow and shovel for moving materials, and a small, electric driven cement mixer.

Materials for one batch of finished earthen floor plaster

The next photo shows some of the tools we used to apply the floor plaster.  Hand pump mister bottles to dampen the subfloor before plastering.  Heavy carbon steel pointed trowels to initially apply and roughly level the plaster, and rounded, stainless steel "pool" trowels to do the final leveling and smoothing.  The sponge is used with a bucket of water to frequently clean mud off the trowel as you work.

The next photo shows Doni Kiffmeier and Kaki Hunter, authors of the book, "Earthbag Building", applying finished floor plaster.  It took awhile for the rest of us to have the courage to try this.  At the start it was frustrating and seemed very difficult to get a result that looked anything like what Doni and Kaki could do so easily.  By the end though, we all were plastering like pros (or so we thought).

  It took us two days to plaster the 1000 square feet of so of floor.  Here's a picture of the result:

The finished floor, still wet

At this point, David and Maureen headed off to go Elk hunting, and the rest of us headed home.  The next step for this floor would be to do a finish troweling when the floor is "leather" hard, then a light sponging with a grout sponge to expose the bits of straw for color.  Finally, the owners will apply seven coats of linseed oil, each coat cut with greater amounts of non-toxic thinner, to allow it to penetrate.  The final coat gets mixed with beeswax for a water-proof, fairly durable finish, and rubbed in.  The final finish may need to reapplied every year or two.

We're looking forward to seeing how the floor comes out when we go back up in December (we're signing up to caretake at an elk and bison ranch in the area).  We're told that the floor will have a slight give, unlike concrete, and with the slight waviness caused by hand troweling, will have some texture that also feels good to walk on.  The home is a passive solar design, with large, south facing windows that let in the low angled winter sun.  The floor will absorb the Colorado winter sunshine, and be warm to walk on.  It should be nice!

Rocket Stove Mass Heater in Hotchkiss, Colorado

While waiting for parts to come in for our truck, we got a call from friends in Hotchkiss, Colorado.  They were planning on installing the finish layer to the earthen floor in their house that weekend.  Doni Kiffmeier and Kaki Hunter, renowned earthen building experts from Moab Utah, were coming to instruct and help with the floor.  Would we like to come up and help?  Of course!

When we arrived, we spent a while admiring, and then firing, the homemade rocket stove mass heater, www.rocketstoves.com, that David and Maureen had just finished building in one corner of the living room of their strawbale home.

Rocket Stove Heater and Base Layer of Earthen Floor

The heater consists of a small feed barrel (closest to the door), then a larger 55 gallon drum which conceals an internal, insulated, firetube heat riser, then a long section of piping that serpentines through an adobe block and cob masonry bench with flue cleanouts (the bench that wraps around the corner to the left of the 55 gallon barrel), and a chimney.

Rocket Stove Feeder and Burn Barrels

Above is a closer view of the smaller (20 gallon?) feed barrel on the right, and the larger 55 gallon barrel that conceals the heat riser tube.  You feed sticks into the small barrel on the right.  They burn at the base of that barrel in the start of a masonry, fire-brick-lined horizontal passage.  The hot gases then rise up in an insulated tube inside the 55 gallon barrel, hit the top, then cascade down around the annular space between the concealaed tube and the outside of the barrel, then into an 8" metal stove pipe that heads out through the mass bench.

Rocket Stove Mass Bench

Here's the mass bench.  It has two cleanouts - one at the start just to the left of the barrel, and one at the far left end of the bench, where the internal pipe does a U-bend to head back though the bench, along the exterior wall, to the chimney.

Rocket Stove Feed Barrel

Here's a view looking down the feed barrel into the start of the masonry burn passageway.  The loose brick atop the burn passageway opening is used to control the amount of draft to make sure you don't get smoke coming back up the feed barrel.  When the stove is operating, there will be several pieces of wood stuck down into this barrel.  The wood burns at the bottom where it sits in the burn chamber below the brick.

Unlike regular wood stoves, which often control the rate of burn by restricting the combustion air, a rocket stove burns wide open, with as much air as the wood needs to burn efficiently.  Restricting stove airflow causes the wood to burn less efficiently and produces pollutants.  A hot fire with plenty of oxygen produces very little pollution and burns more efficiently.  The 55 gallon barrel releases heat instantaneously, and any excess heat is absorbed from the horizontal chimney by the mass bench.  By the time the flue gases get to the vertical chimney, they've cooled to the point that you can easily put your hand on the chimney without burning it.  The mass bench then stores the heat, and releases it for hours after the fire has burned its way out.

While we were there, we fired the stove for the third time since they'd built it.  We only ran it for about 30 minutes, but an hour or two later we could feel the bench surface beginning to warm as the heat slowly conducted out to the surface, long after the fire had gone out. 

I think what we like so much about this stove is that it is entirely experimental and completely owner built.  If you build it wrong, operate it wrong, or don't use common sense, the results could be harmful, to you or to your home.  If you work carefully, test things as you go, and use common sense, the result is a heating device that costs a few dollars to build, pennies to operate, is beautiful, and offers performance on par with custom built masonry stoves that cost upwards of $10,000.  It requires a different mind set than the conventional one a lot of us are used to, where we're dependent on others for expertise, and as a result, pay others to meet our needs for us.  Rocket stoves rock!

Sustainable auto repair?

Having caught up on summer construction projects, we decided to try and repair the engine on our Toyota moving truck.  Sustainable living to us involves meeting as much of our needs as we can through our own efforts, and as cheaply as possible.  Buying, and then repairing, this truck, was done with that in mind. We bought the truck from UHaul in Boston in the spring of 2008, to use to move ourselves and Linc's mother out west, and to use as a lockable, moveable storage unit here in Colorado.

Uhaul probably never sells one of their trucks unless it's about to expire, but it ran OK during our test drive, and other than a rough idle, it seemed to be good to go, so we bought it for a little over $2000.  The UHaul maintenance records on the truck were extensive, and even claimed that both the engine and the transmission had been replaced in the last 15,000 miles.  The plan worked in that it got us out here for less than the cost of renting a truck, and then has served as a storage unit on our land since then.  But, the rough running continued, the truck began to leak a lot of oil, and the truck seemed to have very little power.

Linc took it apart, replaced some leaky gaskets, replaced a fuel injector on one cylinder that seemed to not be firing, and put it back together.  No oil leaks, but otherwise the same.  A compression check indicated that one of five cylinders was low on compression, and that the problem was in the right cylinder head.  We took it back apart, and quickly got over our heads.  Dawn, our Apache heritage neighbor, and a great auto mechanic, offered encouragement, advice and specialized tools (like an engine hoist if needed).  In exchange, we spent a few afternoons helping Dawn pull a good engine and transmission out of a wrecked Toyota 4Runner and install them in place of the bad engine in transmission in another 4Runner.  We enjoyed working with Dawn, and through workshare-bartering, we all gained a lot, including new friendships.  Fortified by Dawn's energy and reassurance, we continued tearing the motor apart on our own truck, until we were down to the engine block.

We discovered that whoever had rebuilt the engine had neglected to adjust the valves.  As a result, most of the valves were two tight, and three of the intakes weren't even able to completely close, resulting in the loss of compression, rough running, and poor power we'd experienced.  With Dawn's digital micrometer, we were able to determine the correct shim sizes needed and order them.  Meanwhile, Linc pulled out all of the valves, cleaned them up, measured tolerances and checked heads for flatness, and hand-lapped all of the valve seats.

When the shims came in, we put it back together.  Reassembly took most of two days as we were working outside and had to wait each day until it was warm enough to be able to work on cold metal.

With a snowstorm coming the next day, signaling the last of weather warm enough to do auto repair for awhile, we got the engine together and turned the key.  To Linc's amazement, it started and ran smoothly for the first time since we'd bought the truck.  Yay!  But, then he noticed a huge puddle of oil forming underneath, leaking from around the timing belt cover.  Too dark to do any more, we called it quits for the day.  Linc figured it was a camshaft seal that he might have not gotten seated well enough, and figured two full days of work to pull it apart, fix the seal, and reassemble the truck.

In the morning, the clouds had the icy gray of an approaching storm, and we both felt determined to see what we could get done.  Jeanne thought we could get it all done in a day, but I (Linc) thought it impossible.  It's amazing what is possible when you have energy, determination, and this time, the knowledge from experience to know exactly what to do and how to do it.  In three hours, the coolant was drained, radiator, power steering pump, battery, air intake components, timing belt covers, fan bracket, timing belt tensioner, timing belt, and camshaft pulleys off, loose seal found, pushed back in with sealant, everything reinstalled, and refilled with coolant.  Haven't been that good at auto mechanics since 1995 when we removed an engine in a VW Camper in a rainy campground in Whitehorse, Yukon territory, stripped off all the components, installed them on a spare longblock, and reinstalled the motor, in about six hours.  A few minutes after we finished, it started snowing.  We left it to sit overnight so that the sealant could dry.

The next morning, Linc walked out through the snow, turned the key, and it started it up.  No leaks.

October 10, 2009 - More Food for the Simple Life

First photo is the greenhouse as of the beginning of October, a month and a half after planting. We eat large salads at lunch and big helpings of cooked kale, collard greens, swiss chard, spinach and beet greens from this little hoophouse every day. We're completely amazed at how well things grow in here. The green 50 gallon drums are filled with water to store heat and add humidity.

We headed out one day on a wild foods foraging trip. We gathered about 1/4 bushel of wild berries (Hawthorn, Rose hips and Sumac berries) to be dried for winter teas. All three are high in vitamin C, and Hawthorn is a cardio tonic, good for moderating blood pressure and increasing vascular circulation.

The second photo shows the half bushel of Gambel Oak acorns that we gathered (took about 2 hours). We roasted these in the wood cookstove oven for 30 to 40 minutes, then pounded them with a wooden pole in a large canning pot to crack the shells, then rubbed them over a 1/2" mesh metal screen (hardware cloth) to separate many of the shells from the nut meats, hand shelled them (we're halfway done after spending quite a few hours at this), and will grind them into flour to use them in sourdough whole wheat pancakes this winter. Jeanne thinks we still need to leach the tannins out in boiling water, but in my opinion they aren't bitter at all, being a white oak, not a high-tannin red oak.

Third photo shows the seven bags of wild roadside apples (stored in the yurt root cellar) gathered so far this year (we may go out one more time, just because). We use them whole, slice them and dry them, can some as applesauce, and will grind and press the rest into cider for drinking and to age into cider vinegar.

Fourth picture shows tomato slices drying on racks in the new sauna. We found that the clay in the earthen walls holds moisture so well that drying things in here is slow, so we reverted to using our solar dehydrator, as well as a large screened rack covered with a recycled glass door (best option for drying tomatoes and fruit). Our main garden didn't produce well this year, so we ended up buying 100 lbs of tomato seconds from an organic farm in Paonia. We spent days slicing and drying them, cooking them down and canning them as tomato paste, as whole tomatoes, and Jeanne made a bunch of canned salsa.

October 9, 2009 - Pallet Woodshed - Sauna

You can click on any picture to see a larger version.

The first photo shows the back of the new structure with diagonal bracing in place (and garden tools hanging up). The roof was formed by laying pallets across the two timber purlins. The pallets were tied together by nailing them to 2x4 lumber between each row of pallets. The overhangs (needed to protect the earthen plaster on the sauna) required additional bracing in the form of peeled oak diagonal poles between overhang and wall. This structure does not even begin to meet code, especially for snow load roof capacity, so it will be interesting to see how it withstands the weight of winter snows. Peeled whole timbers (used for the purlins) are much stronger than the sawn lumber in an equivalent size. Finally, the structure was covered with recycled roofing metal. Eventually, we'll get a gutter on it to collect the rainwater.

The second photo is a front view of the building. The entire structure cost about $200.

Third picture is of the back yard with garden (some beds covered due to frost), yurt on left, then woodshed/sauna, greenhouse in back, garden expansion area in front of greenhouse.

Last photo is looking inside the sauna. Linc made the sauna wood stove from an enormous old heavy equipment air cleaner housing that we found abandoned in the weeds. It's controlled with inlet and outlet dampers, but if run wide open will glow red-hot in a matter of minutes. We added metal shielding spaced out from the earthen plaster walls after this picture was taken to avoid torching the new sauna. The sauna works really well.

October 1, 2009 - Veggies, Hwy 550, Sauna Construction

We have a fairly slow internet connection consisting of a weak wireless signal emanating from somewhere across the canyon that we're perched on the edge of. The blog photos are very slow to load, so I've started just typing the text part while the photos load. As a result, the photos could come in anywhere on this page.

The first photo shows the sauna, in the new woodshed building, in progress. We insulated the pallet walls of the sauna with a light straw clay, formed by mixing straw with a clay slip (created from clay soil mixed in a 5 gallon bucket with water), installing one foot high plywood slip forms on either side of the wall, then stuffing the wet straw-clay tightly into the pallet wall, mashing it down and against the slip forms. The forms then get moved up and the process is repeated until you reach the top. The straw-clay dries hard and solid. Next, we applied an earthen plaster inside and out (we even plastered the ceiling, which is also insulated with straw clay). You can see the earthen plaster on the lower half, and the straw clay waiting to be plastered on the upper half.

The second photo shows the size of the radishes that are coming out of the greenhouse now. They've been growing since mid-August in a horse manure and clay-silt soil mix, with lots of sun, warmth and water, so they are huge, but still taste great.

The third and fourth pics were taken from the interior of the trusty Tercel as we traveled over Red Mountain Pass between Silverton and Ouray on our way to visit friends and talk with organic farmers up in Paonia. It is one amazing road. It's not that they don't believe in guardrails in Colorado - there just isn't room for guardrails on the edge of this road. The pavement goes right to the edge of a several hundred foot drop. People on the edge side tend to hug the center line (us included!)

Sept 8, 2009 - Pallet Woodshed & Water Treatment

With the first woodshed filled, it was time for another, larger woodshed, and a wood fired sauna for keeping clean in the winter. We also wanted to experiment more with pallet construction, as well as explore other alternative building techniques, such as light straw clay insulation and earthen plaster. Not having had any income since May, one priority was to keep the cost down, and not spend too much time on the project (so we could go find winter jobs soon). So, we embarked on a new building project.

The floor was constructed of pallets covered, and tied together, by screwing sheets of OSB down. Each pallet was supported on drystacked stone piers located at each corner and at each midspan. The stone piers were laid on gravel, and the gravel on excavation down to mineral soil. A quicky foundation, not guaranteed not to heave with frost, and not tied down to the earth (as we plan to weight the building with firewood and we're pretty protected from wind here).

Pallet walls were then erected, screwed down to the floor, and tied together with middle and top plates of store-bought lumber. A timber frame was then put up to support the roof. The timbers along the sides and back were also lag bolted to the pallet walls to prevent buckling. We then added diagonal braces on both the pallet walls and on the timber center posts to prevent racking.

About the same time, our 500 gallon cistern in the basement of the yurt, that we'd filled last autumn with city water, finally ran dry. We decided to put in a water filtration and treatment system before we pumped rainwater collected from roofs into the yurt basement cistern (which we use for drinking and cooking water).

The first photo shows our new water treatment system. It consists of a 5 micron cartridge sediment filter (blue), then an ultraviolet disinfection light (in stainless steel cylinder to left of the cartridge. The UV light runs off of 12 volt DC power from our solar system, and kills or sterilizes any viruses, cysts or other organisms that manage to get past the cartridge filter. We only use this system to fill the yurt cistern (which it looks like will happen maybe once every three or four months). We use a hand pump at the sink to pump right out of the cistern for drinking and cooking water.

September 5, 2009 - Nature

Just a few neat picture from the past few weeks. The first was taken from highway 550 between the towns of Silverton and Ouray. It shows the full moon nearly centered in a notch in the mountains that has a waterfall coming out of it. If I'd only managed to get there 30 seconds earlier, and a little to the side it would have looked like the moon was the source of the waterfall. Pretty neat. The second was the sky at sunset as a thunderstorm was approaching.

A long horned beetle, and I mean LONG HORNED!

An orb weaver spider, one of several that we have living around us. They retreat to a corner during the day, but will jump out onto the web if a fly lands in it. This one lives right outside the door of our yurt. She is about an inch long, and seems to like to hang out in the center of her web at night, the better to feel which strand an insect has flown into, I think.

August 30 - Homemade Hoophouse!

We had hoped to build a permanent, timber framed, strawbale walled, glass front greenhouse and sauna building this summer, but as we were collecting the materials (trees for timbers, stone for rubble trench foundation, salvaged sliding glass doors for glazing), we realized that there was no way we would be able to have the greenhouse ready for getting winter greens started at the beginning of autumn. So, we decided to put up a temporary cheap, quick, hoophouse covered with polyethylene plastic. We ended up deciding on a 20' long by 12' wide by 6' high structure. The hoophouse materials cost $320, plus $40 for automatic vent operators. We got the general idea of how to make this from Eliot Coleman's great book, "Four Seasons Harvest". The frame took a couple of afternoons to put up. The hoops are spaced 24" apart, and are made of 9' lengths of PVC pipe joined at the apex with 4-way cross tees, with 20' lengths of 1/2" steel rebar threaded through. The rebar is stuck into the ground at either side. We added ridgepole of 3/4" PVC pipe, then tied 20' lengths of rebar along each side (using pieces of cut up bike tire inner tube to tie the rebar onto the hoops), and also added diagonal bracing using 10' lengths of rebar. At this point, the frame was strong enough to do pullups on, but we can get a huge amount of snow here, so we then installed 2'x4' supports under every other hoop. The 2'x4's just sit on rocks in the ground but are attached to the greenhouse hoops with plumbers strapping. The doors are made out of 2'x 6' boards, ripped to desired widths and all joints are lapped. Here's a picture of the finished hoophouse. We dug shallow trenches along the long sides, laid the plastic in these, backfilled them with rocks and directed the trenches to a common trench at the low end, then into a pipe and on down the hill to the 1100 gallon rainwater collection cistern. That way, the greenhouse adds another 240 square feet of collection surface to the ever-growing rainwater system.

The next picture shows the automatic, temperature-activated vent operators that we installed so that the greenhouse will self-vent when we're away. Happily, they work, and are well worth the $40 spent on the two of them (one at each end of the hoophouse).

The last photo shows the inside of the greenhouse in early September, four weeks after planting. Jeanne planted several kinds of lettuce, kale, mache, several mustard greens, dandelion (from seeds she saved), claytonia, spinach, chard, beets, parsley, carrots, scallions, marigold, calendula, sunflowers, collard greens, radishes, garlic, brussels sprouts, and turnips. Wow! We also have some nice looking purslane, amaranth and pigweed (lambs quarters) coming up as volunteers from the horse manure we mixed into the soil for raised beds, and we've got some plantain and stinging nettle seeds that we saved to put in. We're already eating greens and radishes a month after planting - things grew fast!

We usually water by hand with a watering can, takes about 15 gallons a day, but have installed a drip irrigation system and automatic watering valve so that the plants will get water if we're away for a few days.

July 20, 2009 - Earth Plastering Pictures

We went back up to Hotchkiss, Colorado to help friends continue with their strawbale, earth plastered home project. It's coming out great, and I thought I'd post some pictures of the outside. The plaster shown will get a lime wash finish at some point, but it looks really good as is, especially considering that it was done as a single step, 1-1/2" thick earthen plaster. With seven of us plastering and one person mixing the plaster in a big tractor-driven cement mixer, we plastered about half of the outside of the house in two days.

The second photo shows the contrast between unplastered strawbale walls and those with plaster.

The porch posts are local Juniper that they cut on nearby NFS land (with a pole permit), peeled and finished with tung oil. The house is coming out great.

July 16, 2009 - Painting the Family Car, with a Brush

With all of the planned construction and gardening projects for the summer/fall, Linc realized we probably wouldn't get around to rebuilding the engine on the Veggie Jetta this year. We have a pickup truck, but it's getting old and doesn't get the best gas mileage. The 1983 Tercel wagon has been a great car, but with 280,000 miles, had developed several mechanical problems (brakes not working, throttle sticking and steering binding up, a really bad combination). Plus the body was beginning to rust badly, and our last paint job (done in 2004 with paintbrushes and some old house paint) had faded from a nice glossy red to a dull pink. It was a dangerous and embarrassing vehicle to drive. Having more time than money, Linc decided to try and restore it again. He found an online 4WD Tercel group and got some assistance with troubleshooting some of the mechanical issues, and found that, except for the brakes, the fixes were very cheap. An afternoon with a grinder on the drill and another morning with long-strand fiberglass bondo and a sanding wheel on the drill repaired the rust. Jeanne helped mask the car for painting. We'd opted to change the color to white since the AC has never worked, and painted over the pink paint with white primer, then three coats of gloss white paint. We tried to find the paint we wanted at the local Habitat for Humanity Re-store, but ended up having to buy the paint new. For a $50 paint job, it's great. For all of you simple-living folks out there driving old rust buckets, get out those paint brushes!

From twenty feet away, it looks like a new car. We even had someone in a $30,000 brand new pickup hit us up for gas money when Linc stopped on the road recently to fix that still-sticking throttle cable. The newly painted car is shown there pulling our other trailer (not the Agway warrior), with another rainwater collection tank that we found cheap on Craigs list when visiting Linc's sister and mother in Flagstaff, AZ.

The latest rainwater tank will eventually be part of Linc's idea for installing gravity-flow sub-mulch drip irrigation on an automatic timer to water the garden beds when we need to be away for a few days. A neighbor watered for us last time, but there was some misunderstanding that resulted in his picking our only harvestable crop so far this year, the peas, so we're going with robot garden watering from now on! All right, we've got to work on the community side of sustainable living a little more...

July 15, 2009 - A Woodshed built out of Pallets?

So, without jobs, we downgraded our expectations as to how much we could spend on construction of woodsheds, a greenhouse and a sauna this summer. What we had was a free supply of pallets, many made of oak, from the local hardware store, a free supply of used metal roofing, lots of rocks, a bunch of leftover nails and screws, a scrap piece of corrugated pipe and some free steel barrels. Our first project was to build a small, open woodshed/roofed storage structure. We laid a pallet floor, raised up off of the ground and leveled with rocks, then proceeded to attach walls, then roof supports, roof and roofing, and eventually a gutter and rainbarrel. The total cost was under $25 (assuming we'd had to buy the nails and screws, which we hadn't) which included three store bought lengths of strapping which we ripped in half and used for diagonal bracing. It's amazingly sturdy, and Linc is confident that once he loads it down with some firewood, it won't get blown into the yurt by the first winter storm. The entire building took two days, but might have been quicker if Linc hadn't stopped to threaten to eat an enormous long-horned beetle that flew onto the axe handle for a visit. The structure has an 8' x 4' x 7' high front area for firewood storage, and about the same area roofed over in back. We eventually put our bulk foods storage box (shown at left in the last picture) under that back roof to get it out of the weather. Some of our friends might remember that box from our journal of a 1995 trip around North America. It spent that summer riding on a little $300 4'x8' Agway trailer up to Alaska, and back down the next summer. It still lives (as will the trailer, once I finish welding the frame again).

Encouraged by our progress on the pallet woodshed, we next intend to build a pallet greenhouse - stay tuned!