A photographic update

Here's some of the latest around here...

Marbled purple stripe garlic

Sanding the floor in the granny unit

Quinoa in bloom

Working on Massey's bamboo and lime roof

A local grain infrastructure?

The flour in these bags comes from wheat that was grown 65 miles from the Bay Area in the Capay Valley. It was milled and packaged in San Francisco by Giustos, a family run milling company that is amenable to processing and storing the currently rather small amounts of this local wheat, and came to our house by way of a woman named Monica Spiller who has been working to connect local farmers with appropriate grain seed for our area, and the wheat itself to bakers and eaters.

We are so accustomed in the Bay to hearing about local food and growing our own greens and tomatoes and knowing where our eggs and cheese comes from. However grains, a large proportion of our diet, are mostly still part of a large system these days, and even in this mecca of local foodism one can't necessarily find local grains without a bit of a search.

Our current grain system, from the growing of wheat, to the processing, shipping and eating of it, compromise and degrades soil health, uses many fossil fuels in growing and transportation, and lacks the nutritional benefits in the final product becoming a food that no longer is full of the health giving properties it once had, but now makes us sick.

I recently learned that the protein content of wheat is directly proportional to the health of the soil it was grown on, and thus the 12-13% protein of this Sonora wheat, compared to 7% of conventional white flour these days, is an interesting figure to consider.

It's quite exciting to have this pile of flour bags sitting in our living room, ready to be distributed to a number of friends, neighbors, and a restaurant, because it's the sign of an infrastructure of an appropriate size being rebuilt.

And of course, the thought of delicious bread to come...

If you are interested in becoming part of a regular buying club of local organic flour and pasta, or want to start your own, email me at trilibite (at) hotmail.com

The Whole Grain Connection is a wealth of information including recipes, history,

and lots of information about various wheat varieties: www.sustainablegrains.org

Permaculture Design in Lake County

Villa Sobrante resident Massey Burke has been working in Lake County for the last several years, bringing natural building to the community through public projects.

This spring, Villa Sobrante resident Lindsay Dailey will be working in Lake County as well, teaching a Permaculture Design Certificate (PDC) course. Permaculture offers the framework, tools and methodologies to work with and within natural systems to create beneficial change. Those who learn these skills have the potential to transform a garden, a farm or even a community. Many have found this course to be one of the most beneficial courses they have ever taken and the skills are invaluable.

Transition Lake County, Dancing TreePeople Farm, LakeFuture, and Edge Ecology will host the PDC in Upper Lake this spring over 5 weekends:

April 16 &17
April 30 & May 1
May 14 & 15
May 21 & 22
June 4 & 5

For more information, email Lindsay@EdgeEcology.com or visit http://www.lakefuture.blogspot.com/.

The newest pod

Somehow 2 months have gone by since I've written a thing. I'll start with the newest structure that has popped up in the backyard village. It all started with a lot of these:

I believe around 700 to be exact.

These adobes- just soil, sand, straw and cow manure- were made to go into a structure called a Nubian Vault, which is a style of earthen vault building revived by the Eygptian architect Hassan Fathy that does not use any formwork, and therefore can be done without any wood. Our friend Stevan who studied the technique with masons in Burkino Faso was looking for places to build some of these vaults where they could be observed over time, and we gladly gave a portion of our yard for the purpose of vault research, and to make a stylish new home for our expanding flock of poultry.

Here we are looking through the front door to the back kick wall. These two kick walls were built prior to the workshop and are the walls that the adobes will lean against to make up the vault. The little box is the future chicken door.

Here the plumb bob is being used to transfer the dimensions of a catenary arch onto the kick walls. It is the shape the vault will follow, and is the inverted shape of a chain hanging between two points. Guide strings will be strung along the length of the building between the traced out form on both kick walls.

Stevan demonstrates the angle at which to lay the first adobes that will make up the vault during the workshop.

You can see the walls growing as the process gets further along. It was an extremely graceful structure to watch emerge.

And more still... you can see the angle of the rows of adobes clearly here.

Here you can start to see what happens in the middle when the different angles from the two ends come together in the middle.

Meanwhile the girls are checking it out from their old coop next door. They've started laying eggs, we're getting 6-7 a day from 10 chickens, ranging from tiny "practice eggs" to larger double yolkers. Unfortunately they've also started eating the duck eggs...

More pictures and updates coming soon!

Visitors from India

Last week we had the opportunity to host two men from the western state of Gujarat, in India, at our house.  It was their first time to the states, and we were honored that they chose to spend time at our house in El Sobrante of all places.  It is a long story how they ended up here, but the short of it is that Massey and I met Himansu briefly in India this winter, and told him to stop by when he came to the states.  Himansu was traveling with Ramu, an artisan from a tiny rural village who makes quilts, to an international craft fair in Santa Fe.

Himansu runs a textile business that employs Ramu and other quilters and embroiders from Gujarat, but does lots of other things too, like record tribal folk music in earthen buildings in Gujarat and Rajastan.  Ramu is also skilled at many things.  He declared our site soil to be a wonderful clay and proceded to show us how to do Lipon- the traditional Gujarati way of doing decorative earthen work on walls.  He dosnt' speak English (save for a few words) and we learned limited Gujarati in the past week so communicating was a delightful challenge, and mostly done through Himansu, who translated.

Below is Ramu, in our clay soaking pit, processing our site soil, and horse manure, to make Lipon with.

This became a great opportunity to work on the wall-- that has been sitting rather unfinished out front for a very long time-- so an early morning plastering session turned it red, from some clay soil somebody brought back from up north.

Next, Ramu showed us how to do Lipon, by rolling snakes out of a careful mixture of clay soil, screened dried horse manure, wood glue and water, and pinching them tightly to the wall.

Over the course of about 3 or 4 days, we had lots of helpers, and lots of gawkers, and met more of the neighborhood than we'd previously met, because pretty much every body who passed by was compelled to stop and comment or ask questions.

The pattern was drawn by Massey and inspired from a bed sheet with an old Mogul pattern she'd originally picked up from Himansu in Gujarat.  Himansu calls it "nervous elegance" referring to the drooping flowers that are scattered throughout Mogul designs.  I liked his description.

We removed some of the bamboo and used base plaster to sculpt designs in the openings, a method also inspired by Gujarat.  Mirrors are often embedded in the design, though for our wall we decided against mirrors and instead used mica, which was traditionally used before mirrors.  It looks beautiful.

More pictures to come.  The roadside is now complete as well, and the roof is next to protect all this fine work...

Thanks to everybody who helped with this intricate work and a big thank you to Ramu and Himansu as well.

Oh and one last picture for your amusement... the bamboo trailer wasn't quite up to the bicycle rickshaw standards of India, but we thought we'd give it a go for airport transportation :)

Exciting Harvests

Summer... The days have been chilly and windswept as the fog rolls in and out.  Ah the Bay Area.  Today was hot and sunnny, and it was a lovely reminder of what summer means some places.  Here are some pictures of exciting harvests we've had lately that I just have to share:

There are so many dried favas. Plenty to have for planting this winter, and some to eat too.  I've never cooked dried favas before.  

Potatoes are sooo much fun to harvest.  These were pink inside too, large and delicious and there are more out there.

Also, three kinds of citrus.  Only a few fruit per tree at the moment, but they are young trees, and guess what?  They are delicious!  We sampled this navel orange, and a mandarin that were sweet and juicy and sun-warmed scrumptiousness. 

The bittersweet harvest was the beehive.  After all that crazy swarming this spring, looks like our hive didn't make it.  So lots of beeswax to clean, honey to drain, mead to ferment, pollen to pick out of the comb.  Glad we caught one of the swarms.  Now to figure out what happened.

And there is loads of garlic.  About 5 different kinds, currently, hanging in the unfinished closet in my house in the back yard drying as it's a relatively shady/cool/out of the way spot.  

Interns at the Villa

Back in May we were lucky to have 2 amazing highschoolers working with us.  They'd come initially on a field trip and decided they wanted to do their senior project here, so they came back for the month of May and contributed loads of hard work and enthusiasm doing everything from processing tons of material for plasters and earthen mixes, building compost, putting irrigation in the garden, pouring a floor (along with their moms who came for a day too!), shelling fava beans... a lot was done for sure.  Thanks Cora and Hailey!   Here is a sampling of pages out of the book they put together for their presentation at school: 

And the really awesome thing is they liked us enough to come back! So we get to have them around helping out some this summer too.