Rain!?!

It actually rained today, pretty early in the morning and again late morning, not for long and not hard but it is really late in the season to be raining around here. It has been super hot and yesterday it was a bit cooler, somewhat cloudy and quite humid, also rare in the summer, but it is still quite warm, especially in the sun when it is out. When it rained shortly before noon it was sunny the whole time too.

Garlic Harvest

We are beginning to harvest garlic this week. A lot is grown here, it is braided and given as gifts as well as cooked with here. (The picture of unharvested garlic was taken on the sunny side last week when it wasn't quite ready to harvest, it gets more brown and fallen over before it is harvested.)

This morning we harvested two half beds of it on the shady side. We will also be harvesting it on the sunny side soon. A couple weeks ago I harvested a Chinese variety which is an early garlic. Today we harvested Siberian and Romanian garlic. We are trying to keep the different varieties separate. We will be drying it in piles in the shade so it doesn't cook while drying then cleaning it and braiding it.

I wonder if the Romanian garlic was specially bred to be better at keeping vampires away.

Visitors and Animals

I have had a number of friends visit so far (more are welcome) including Ron, who among other things had fun tormenting the community cat, Happy Cat. There are two other cats here, but they are not particularly tame, one doesn't let people touch her at all, the other tends to mostly hang out at Michael's.

As long as I am introducing pets, Deleha's dog, who is kind of a community dog too, is named Big Dog. The story is she was named by a young girl who also had a Small Dog, but Dehela got her after she was named. She is not really very big at all, except her ears.

And here are some wild turkeys I saw below the sunny garden. There were 4 adults and a bunch of chicks. The chicks are faster at getting away so by the time I was taking pictures most of them had run/flown into the bushes and out of camera range. You can see a few of the chicks in the first two photos. We all hope they don't come into the garden and make a mess of it. A few deer did get into the shady garden recently because gates were left open. Big Dog knows how to open all the gates, but not close them.

As for other wild life, saw a large gopher snake a few weeks ago and I have seen quite a few smallish striped snakes in the garden, and two rattle snakes have been seen around.

(You can click on the photos to make them larger.)

Strawberry House Update Mid-June

I took a bunch of photos of the housesite June 13th (the first 4) and 20th and thought I would finally get them up to show all you. First the posts had notches carved out of them since they are round, unmilled tree trunks which need to fit into square brackets, they also had notches cut out of them for the crib, then they were put up in place, you can see one being put up in one of the photos. The crib is the bottom portion of the exterior walls to keep the earthen parts off the ground and away from moisture and is made of milled redwood boards. It will have two 2" by 8"s on the inside of the posts and two on the outside one on top of each other and lava rock in between them. Most of the notches were cut before the poles were put into place but a few were cut afterwards. In the third photo Brent is marking on a pole where to cut a notch.
In the second group of photos used feedsacks had been filled with gravel and laid out to make a foundation for a semi-interior cob wall. The sacks were stacked on top of each other with barbed wire tied around the posts and run between the rows to hold the bags together. Cob needs a foundation to take it off the ground so it doesn't get wet and suck water up into the wall. The bags are to do that, the cob will cover them in the front which is inside so can go down to the floor, and in the back, which will be under a raised bedroom floor and so outside, rocks are covering them. You can see a portion of the crib boards up at each end of the earthbags.
The bottom picture is of a clay pit made of strawbales laid out in a square with a tarp laid on top of them and filling the hole between them with clay rich soil being soaked to make the clay wet all the way through so it can be mixed up into cob. The wall of soil behind it is sub-soil which was dug out to make the housepad and is going to be used to make the walls. The stack of 5 gallon buckets in front are to be used to measure proportions of sand and clay, which get mixed together with some water, then straw gets added and mixed in.

The Launch of Pato Palace

Yesterday after lunch we had a duck house launching party. A procession carried the duck house and tools out to the pond. The flotation system was attached to the bottom of the structure. It was christened Pato Palace, champagne was drunk. The house was set afloat and hauled to a floating bottle (attached by rope to the end of the microhydro system pipe) so it would be in the middle of the pond away from marauding critters. The ducks had watched the whole thing, not only the launch but the construction over at the workshop. They checkout Pato Palace after it was tied in and circled it a few times before entering.

Building The Duck House

I helped build a cool duck house. There was an old one which had half sunk. Diana and Ben dragged it out of the pond, and took the old walls and roof off the platform. I helped build the new one on that old platform. Ben did most of the design work and spent the most time but I help lay out the shakes and screw them into place. We used unmilled round redwood and madrone branches and split old growth redwood shakes. We made 4 rows of shakes, two of longer pieces for the bottom rows and two of shorter for the top, trying to slant the bottom of the top row artistically. Each row was screwed onto a redwood branch, the bottom rows at the bottom, the top rows at the top. Then the tops were attached to the bottoms and the A-frame was screwed into the deck. (Admittedly the photo of me was taken in the evening after I had finished working, showered and changed, so I posed.)

Bird on Hops

The image is a little blurry but I thought the bird perched on top of the hops trellis looked cool.

Purple Flowers

Brent was pointing out to me how many purple wild flowers there are around here now. I took a bunch of photos so everyone can see them, sadly the Wild Iris's are past their prime now. There are more out there too, I didn't get photos of all the varieties.

Garden Buddha and Foxglove

Strawberry House

When I got here a little over a month ago the housepad was almost done. It was all hand dug and the dirt was put into wheelbarrows and dumped pretty close, some not so close and down hill a bit. Most of the dirt which was dug out will be used to make the walls, some was hauled over to a near by housesite for use there and some was used to make a level terrace below the house. I helped dig the last bit to make a flat area to build on, then we started digging holes for footings, then mixing concrete to fill them and pouring it, then digging a drainage trench around the outside of the walls but under the eves to catch any ground water, and sloping the ground just inside it toward it and away from the house. (The first photo is from May 24th. The second photo is from today and you can see the first four posts have been put up and the trench is mostly full.)

Filling the trench is what we worked on today, it got filter fabric put in it then a three inch plastic pipe with perforations so water can get into it and flow way, the trench slopes down and drains away from the house, then lava rock was added on top of the pipe to fill the trench with a material water can easily drain through, then the filter fabric was folded over and more lava rock was added on top until it was about level with the dirt. The filter fabric is to keep excess dirt and silt from getting into the lava rock and clogging the air/water ways between the rocks. It was a bit of a workout, most of the lava rock was down the hill and over a bit so we shoveled it into wheelbarrows and pushed it up to the site, luckily it was lava rock so not so heavy but I was still out of breath by the time I finished wheeling it up each trip. We also tamped it into the trench with a heavy metal tamper, a long pole with a round piece of metal on the end which you lift and drop to compact dirt or rock or whatever, it helps move things around to eliminate extra air pockets

The Apprentices

Emerald Earth has an eight week Natural Building in Community apprentice- ship. It started Monday so there are now five new people living here. There are six apprentices but one of them was here for a few weeks as work trade before the apprenticeship started. They and Darryl and Michael, who are teaching them, have taken over most of the building on Strawberry House, along with Liz and Brent, whose house it is going to be and who have been doing lots of work on it all along. They build/learn five days a week and have one afternoon when they have a sit-down lecture/discussion class, and one evening with slide shows/videos about natural building. Work Traders used to work on Strawberry house two mornings a week, starting this week we are instead working there Wednesday afternoons while the apprentices are in class.

The apprentices all seem like very nice people, although we have mostly been too busy to hang out. This weekend we should have more time. Of the six apprentices Anne is from Canada, Stephanie is from Ireland, and Anastasia, Mojo, Steve, and Justin are from the US, although Anastasia's mother is from Colombia and she has spent a lot of time in Guatemala. This is the third year they have taught a two month long class and in the past it was mostly men so they started a scholarship fund for women, to try to even out the gender balance. It seems like a great program with lots of learning from people who know what they are doing, focusing not only on how and what to do but why so in other circumstances you can know what to change.