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!

July 10, 2009 - Moving Large Things using Wheels?

Our portable garage, purchased last year for temporary storage (and eventually to be converted into a hoop-style greenhouse), had by necessity been placed too close to an adjacent property line. No one lives there yet so no one had complained, but we figured we'd better move it before someone did. Our lot came with very little flat land, and the garage ended up on what little there was. Early this summer, we took our winter's earnings, and were able to buy a neighboring lot that had much more flat land, thinking we would eventually build a home, shop and greenhouse over there. We cleared a driveway over to it, along with a small area to put the temporary garage and old moving van that brought us here, along with the someday-to-be-repaired VeggieJetta. The day we chose to move the garage, our few remaining neighbors (some were off working seasonal jobs) weren't around, and we decided to try to move it ourselves. We took the top off to lighten it and rolled it over, thinking we could carry it the 150 feet or so up a small hill to the new lot. It was too heavy even with the top off, so we strapped a hand dolly under one end, and tried picking up the other end. Still pretty heavy!

Next, we tied an old wooden wagon, that Jeanne had rescued from the bottom of Flagstaff Lake in Maine, under the other end. With Linc at one end balancing and pushing a bit, Jeanne was able to (almost single handedly!) drag the new garage up the hill to it's new location. Wheels are pretty amazing things.

July 8, 2009 - Farmstand and Garden

We had originally hoped to take the summer off to build things on our land, but were offered a sweet deal by a local organic farm to sell their produce for them at farm markets in the region. We took the jobs, but after two markets, found that we had misinterpreted how much money we thought they'd said we'd make, and mutually decided to stop the business partnership so that they could find someone willing to work for less than us and so that we could focus on getting things in place so that we could really start growing our own food. We may regret the decision this winter when jobs are hard to find locally, but really want to get a greenhouse built this summer. Small local farms aren't necessarily a huge money maker in today's world when they are up against Walmart Superstores and huge commercial organic farms that can grow food cheaply and export it all over the world using still relatively cheap fossil fuels. But, small farms support local economies (by employing us locals) and by keeping money circulating locally, and in my opinion, offer higher quality food (both riper and fresher than big out-of-state or out-of-country farms). Working briefly for these farmers started to give us a much better appreciation for what is involved in running a successful small farm, and since we're still friends, they'll still sell us their surplus produce for canning and drying to tide us over until our gardens are producing (next year?)

The second two photos are of our garden as of early July. In the foreground are the three sisters, corn, squash and beans. Then peas growing up a trellis, tomatoes hidden behind the peas, then a couple beds of parsnips and carrots, many of which didn't germinate, and then tomatoes in pots, plus a couple of pecan trees in a pot. The corn, peas and tomatoes are actually growing pretty well, squash and pumpkins are growing but late and a little slow, and the few beans that germinated are not growing very fast.

The second photo shows the other half of the garden, somewhat shaded by, and exposed to drippings from, two Ponderosa Pines and a few Gambel Oaks trees. In the foreground are potato plants coming up fast through a wheat and pine straw mulch, then a bed of onions, doing pretty well in the pine mulch, along with turnips and rutabegas, up and showing good color but growing really slowly, then a bed of beets growing even slower than the turnips, then a bed of swiss chard, mustards, radishes, mustard greens, kale and lettuces, all growing pretty slowly.

We talked to the agricultural extension office about the slow growth, and they think it is caused by our use of pine straw for mulch, which they say contains tannins and turpines, both growth inhibitors. We've grown in pine mulch before though in Maine, more successfully than this, and have read studies that indicate that once pine needles have turned brown, they lose the growth inhibitors and make a great, beneficial fungus attracting mulch. We suspect it might be that either there were fresher turpines and tannins in the soil when we planted (since we cleared an oak grove, sheet mulched it, and immediately planted seeds in it), or these compounds are dripping off of the trees overhead. We're getting slow growth in the carrots and parsnips and brussels sprouts in the other half of the garden that isn't shaded by pines or oaks, but was likewise planted in freshly cleared ground and mulched with old pine needles.

We're clearing a garden expansion soon, and will sheet mulch, add lots of manure, some rock phosphate and wood ashes, plant a cover crop of oats and clover, and then let it winter over and see how things grow in it next spring. It will be interesting to see what happens.

July 2, 2009 - Goats!

After feeding the chickens and eating breakfast with the turkeys while caretaking Jonni's farm, our next chore was to feed the goats, sheep and rabbits, and then milk goats. OK, for people who haven't spent a lot of time around animals, this was a stretch! Here are the goats. They are Nubians. Not sure what breed the sheep were - the goats were a lot friendlier than the sheep.

We tricked the first goat, Feta, onto the milking stand with a handful of fresh alfalfa. Once there, Jeanne helped a kid named Mozarella nurse. It was difficult at times, because Mozarella was often more interested in trying to eat Jeanne's braid than nurse Feta, but finally she figured it all out.

The last picture, a little bit of a butt shot - sorry Feta, shows Jeanne working on her newest career as a professional goat milker (she decided to move on from her former aspirations of being a turkey dental hygenist when she discovered that a turkey's teeth are in its crop, not its mouth). She's actually quite good at it. When I tried it, I could do it, but my hands cramped up before I finished one side of one udder. Jeanne finished it and milked the other two goats. We took home a little over a gallon of fresh, raw goat's milk for our efforts, and Jeanne made goat milk yogurt from it right away.

June 28, 2009 - Turkeys!

We spent a night at a farm owned by a friend across town, milking the goats and caring for the chickens and turkeys while she got a night off to camp out and go fishing.

The turkeys were pretty comical. After we'd fed them in the morning, they insisted on following us up to the house where we had planned to eat our breakfast out on the deck.

The first photo is of Jeanne in training for her new, exciting career as a Turkey Dental Hygienist! I'm not sure the Turkey is as excited about this as Jeanne is...

June 25, 2009 - Earthen Plastering

We visited two friends in Hotchkiss, Colorado, who are building a home with strawbale walls covered in earthen plaster. We drove up to help them for a couple of days, plastering the interior walls. The first picture shows us mixing cob with our feet (more on that later, as my photos came in out of order, and I can't understand HTML enough to move them).

The second photo shows the builder who is assisting them (his name is Dave, but I haven't learned his last name yet), mixing a batch of cob by hand in a wheelbarrow. The cob was being mixed to stuff into gaps where bales met in order to seal up these thermal breaks before applying the plaster. Cob (in this case) is a mixture of straw and clay slip. Clay slip is just a mixture of earth that has a high percentage of clay (directly from their site) and water.

Mixing the cob in a wheelbarrow is a slow process though, so we learned two other methods. One is to spread the straw on a tarp, slop some clay slip onto it, and mix it with your bare feet (shown in first photo). At first, you get this "yuch!!!" feeling, as your brain interprets the warm, mushy mixture as if you were treading in a fresh cow patty, then you get used to it, and then it's just plain fun.

The third method, the fastest, was to take the mixture on the tarp, and roll the tarp back and forth, mixing it. This is often called the "burrito method", as shown in the photo below.

The last picture is Linc, really getting into his work. For plastering, we used a wooden float, which Linc is holding up.

June 21, 2009 - Logging and Fishing

So far we've opted against putting water cisterns underground. The ground here is clay and shale silt, and lots of rocks, so digging is a slow process. Backhoes can do a lot of damage to a landscape pretty quickly, and so far we prefer to move slower than that so we don't go too far in the wrong direction. But, above ground tanks freeze, and when transparent tanks are exposed to sunlight, bacteria grows in the water. We attempted to resolve both problems to a degree on our summer kitchen tank by covering it with a layer of Astrofoil (foil faced bubble wrap) insulation left over from insulating the yurt. We'll still need to drain the tank during the coldest part of the winter. Eventually, we'd like to build simple, insulated, passive solar heated structures around each of the larger cisterns.

One of the priorities for the summer, with time off from work, was to get a greenhouse built so that greens could be grown to eat during the winter, and for starting seedlings in the spring. We'd planned to build a peeled pole timber frame structure, with a rubble trench and earth bag foundation featuring shallow frost insulation, strawbale infill walls plastered with earthen plaster, recycled sip panel roof covered in recycled metal roofing, salvaged windows made from old sliding glass doors, thermal storage in the form of an interior light clay infill wall and water filled barrels, a masonry rocket stove with flue heated bench, and a sauna room, plus rainwater catchment. Whew!

We first started harvesting Ponderosa Pine for the frame from the hillside below the yurt. We selected trees that were crowded or ailing, felled them with a two person crosscut saw, limbed them with an axe, and attempted to drag the 9" diameter, 12' long trunks up the hillside. Couldn't do it! I got out the welder and some old bike parts and welded up a log carrier (photo). It didn't work well, and I ended up modifying it and attaching it to the solar dehydrator so that we could wheel that around and reposition it to follow the sun.

Finally, we got out the come-along, and took turns cranking the trunks up the hillside (photo of Jeanne cranking). We can also access the hill from a road at the bottom, so will be able to move some trees down the hill instead of up. We finally opted to get the remaining large poles from the national forest. For $22 we obtained a pole permit to harvest all of the wood needed for the frame. On the national forest, we were able to drive close to the tree, fell it, limb it and load it on our trailer, easier than cranking it up the hillside. Even so, after a few days of this, we realized that if we were going to get a greenhouse built for the winter, along with wood sheds, more garden clearing and other projects, we'd have to lower our ambitions a lot. We still want to build that earthbag/strawbale sauna/greenhouse, and will still keep gathering materials for it when there is time, but will put up something more temporary to get us through until the final building is ready.

Having decided that, we got up early the next morning and went fishing. We didn't catch anything this time, (still learning a lot about fishing) but had a good hike. On our next fishing outing, we camped at a lake, and following a friend's advice regarding lure and technique, caught six Rainbow Trout (the score so far is Jeanne 4, Linc 2). So far, fishing isn't a sustainable living skill for us. We're spending a lot more on fishing licenses and gear than we are getting in fish, but we're learning!

Wow! As I was writing this, sitting outside at a small table, I saw (in the reflection of the computer monitor) a cat approaching me from behind. I turned and saw a large Bobcat! He turned and ran off slowly. I went around the yurt to tell Jeanne, who was sitting below the garden, and there he was again, between us. He turned and ran off into the woods. The birds and Chipmunks are alarming like crazy. That cat was a beautiful site to see, and I've never heard of a Bobcat attacking a person, but it's a wake up call for us to keep aware of what the birds and chipmunks are saying as we work around here. We're not the only predators here.

June 19, 2009 - Simple Laundry, More Rainwater Catchment

One of our priorities for the start of the summer was to get more rainwater collection and storage capacity in place. We figured that with a garden, we'd need a lot more water than before. Before the garden, we were using about 5 gallons/day for all of our drinking, cooking, dishwater, and shower needs (I know, we probably don't bathe enough!) So, we added another 500 gallon storage tank, purchased used from a friend, and tied it into a homemade gutter added to the 200 square foot roof we'd built last fall over our old leaky storage camper trailer. This brings us up to about 2500 gallons of cistern capacity, with 700 square feet of collection area. We get between 1 and 2 inches of rain/month here. With 1" of rain, we collect somewhere around 500 gallons of water. We use close to 15 gallons/day of water now, and it all goes onto the garden eventually, either as first use water, or as graywater. Nothing is wasted! So, unless we get a severe drought, we have already achieved water self-sufficiency from rainwater alone, at least until we make a bigger garden. This feels really good. When it rains out, we feel wealthy, watching water pour into our various cisterns, and watering the garden. When the sun comes out, we feel wealthy again, because the plants are growing and our solar electric batteries are charging. It's nice!

This last picture is the High Tech Simple Living Home Laundry System. This system will clean your clothes like you wouldn't believe, really! OK, here's the secret. Take one cooler (does multiple duty as a yogurt making container, food cooler, and now, as a clothes washer!) Fill it halfway with hot water (heated for free on your wood cookstove of course), add clothes and biodegradeable soap, plunge a few times with your toilet plunger (which is clean as a whistle because you hopefully are using a composting toilet instead of one of those nasty things that flushes human fertilizer down a hole in the ground with drinking water), and close the lid. Let is sit for the day (plunge a couple of times as you walk by if you think of it). After a few hours of soaking, open it up, plunge for a minute, pour out the water (save it for the garden), lightly ring the clothes, add cold water, plunge to rinse, and repeat once more if necessary. Wring your clothes lightly. Your cooler now becomes a laundry basket! Carry your clothes to the outdoor clothes line, and hang em up. I hung mine in the evening, and they were dry by morning, but we live in dry Colorado. This is so much quicker and cheaper and environmentally less harmful than driving to a laundromat and paying $7 or so to wash your clothes, or even paying for the electricity to wash them in your own machine. Best simple sustainable living invention we've come up with yet (although I'm sure hundreds of other people have already thought of this)!

June 14, 2009 - Food for the Simple Life

Food! When you spend all day running about outdoors, food becomes a very important part of life. Appetites increase, and things taste better. Our goal is one day to be able to grow, hunt, or gather all of our food from the land around us, although I think we'll always be buying some things, like olive oil, or Nicaraguan organic dark chocolate... The first picture is part of our weekly harvest of Dandelion greens. We can usually find enough from the meadows in the rural development we live in, but we'll also bring some bags when we're out fishing, hiking, or visiting friends, in case we see a good Dandelion field and have the time to gather them. We chop them, wash out the grit, and dry a bunch in our solar dehydrator for winter soups and infusions (a strong herbal tea). We almost always keep a quart or so to make some Dandelion Pesto: 1 quart Dandelion greens, minced 1/4 cup of Olive Oil 1 or 2 teaspoons black pepper (really!) 3 to 4 cloves garlic 2 handfulls toasted Sunflower Seeds (or almonds, or Pine Nuts, or ?) Grated raw cheddar cheese Serve over your favorite whole grain carbohydrate, which brings us to the next photo: I had some extra time one day and made up a batch of homemade whole wheat pasta, dried by hanging on one of the ladders to the loft (that's why the pasta tastes like bare feet!). It was delicious served with Dandelion green pesto.

Our next photo shows the solar cooker that we just built. The box is a large, heavy duty styrofoam cooler, purchased for $10. We lined the box with aluminum foil, glued on with diluted Elmer's Glue, cut out a piece of glass to fit the top, made reflectors out of cardboard lined with aluminum foil (glued on). The reflectors have tabs that insert into slots cut in the styrofoam, and are glued and/or tied together on the corners. Inside, we put a small baking pan. We prop the cooker at the correct angle to point generally towards the sun, put a dark colored pot in (we use a dark blue enamel-ware casserole pot with lid) to soak up the solar rays. This thing works great! We can cook a casserole meal in three hours. Jeanne even cooked a whole chicken in it! If we want soup for lunch without heating up a wood stove, we just stick the pot in the cooker and have hot soup in 30 minutes. It produces so much heat that the styrofoam box is starting to deform, and that makes us worry about fumes from the polystyrene, so our next cooker will probably be made out of wood. For our first try though, we're really happy with this one, a $10 cooker.

Here's the solar dehydrator that we made. This is what we use to dry both medicinal and edible herbs. It will dry herbs in 2 or 3 days of good sun. It will work for some vegetables and fruit, but we need to increase the efficiency as sometimes we end up with moldy dried food.

June 12, 2009 - Fishing, and Grow Domes

We recently visited with Jonni McAteer, who has an organic farm on the other side of town. She is planning on creating a learning center here where people can learn about sustainable living techniques, including geodesic growing domes, rainwater catchment, solar electricity, organic gardening, dairy goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits. If you search for "Heaven On Earth: Learning Farm of Pagosa Springs", you can see a video about what she is doing on her land.

We joined a group that was touring her farm, and took a couple of pictures from inside one of her geodesic growing domes. The dome is 40 feet in diameter, and is just filled with flowers and edible plants. In the second picture you can see a Kale plant growing that has become a tree. It is over six feet tall with what looks like a woody trunk, and is covered with kale leaves and flowers.

We ended up returning to Jonni's a few days later, and learned to milk her goats, then spent the night sleeping inside of the 40 foot dome, on a trampoline! She had baby chicks in a pen there with us, and they happily started peeping at about 5 AM, so we got up and helped with the morning milking. We hope to see a lot more of Jonni. She's an amazing woman with an incredible amount of energy, which she needs in order to run a multi-faceted homestead like this one.

This last picture is from one of our weekly fishing expeditions, this one to Williams Reservoir, at the southern edge of the Weimenuche Wilderness. As usual, we didn't catch anything (we're really new at fishing), but enjoyed the scenery and all of the wildlife that flocks to water here.

June 10, 2009 - Garden, rainwater, welding

The picture below shows our revised yurt roof rainwater collection system. We figure the roof, being plastic, isn't the best place to collect water for either drinking or gardening, so we run it straight into a scavenged (and washed) 55 gallon steel barrel. A few tenths of rain on the roof will fill that barrel though, so I welded a steel pipe nipple high on the side of the barrel to thread an overflow hose onto. The overflow hose goes to a spot at the bottom of the garden where we intend to create a small garden pond to attract butterflies, birds and maybe an amphibian or two. When we are desperate for water, we can route the overflow hose onto the rainwater collection roof that we built on the ground, and from there it goes to recharge our 1100 gallon tank down on the hillside.

The next photo shows my off-grid, portable welding setup. I have a small 2000 watt (about $400 at Sears) gas generator on a wagon (until I find better wheels for the generator). Then, a wire feed welder that I bought a few years back when our trailer frame broke (about $350 on Ebay with the welding hood and gloves), and an electric drill with wire brush wheel to clean up any metal parts that I'm working on before welding (welds take better when the metal is clean and bare). I'm a lousy welder, but I'm getting better every time I use it. I've repaired our trailer, welded exhaust pipes a couple of times, and miscellaneous other small projects. I think I've paid for the welder by now and have been learning a new skill.

The next two photos show our garden prepared for planting. It's a nice thing to be able to look out the window of the yurt while you're preparing a meal or doing dishes and see the garden with plants coming up. It makes you feel more connected. Our kitchen wastes and all waste water is saved for either the compost pile (you can see the compost bins in the background of the last photo), which eventually will become part of the garden, or for direct application on the garden (liquids).

Indigenous people have a lot to say about how life is a circle, or a spiral, and how everything is connected. When we garden, compost, save and use our wastes, we don't have to read about the circle, we are the circle, and it feels right.