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!

Quick snapshot of the front-back yard...

Oh its looking so good in the backyard... snapped some pictures on my way to get kale in the drizzly rain tonight.  Over the tops of the kale and the lush bed of ripening strawberries is Sasha's cob house with its new plaster from the work party back in April(a belated thank you to everyone who helped!)  My favorite is the little nicho in the buttress behind the door...

And here, inside, is the second layer of earthen floor that was done last week with the high school interns and their mothers, complete with tubes laid throughout it to carry solar heated (and maybe occasionally fire heated) water and make the floor cozy and warm.

High School Students Plaster the Oven

We had a great group of high school student from Marin Academy spend a day at Villa Sobrante last Sunday. After showing them around, we made pizza in the wood fired cob oven, then plastered the oven with an earthen plaster. I have never had a such an enthusiastic group of teenagers. It was fantastic. It was day one for them of five days of hands on permaculture, after here they headed out to RDI. How wonderful it would be if every teenager had the opportunity to do that, and if even a small percentage wanted to.

Progress in the Building Department

The pace has been quick around here, and the end of summer busy, both on the home front and in all our various travels away from here.  So I suppose it's not surprising that a common comment from neighbors is that we look like ants- or bees- always moving about outside, busy and doing something, what, I don't think they are always entirely sure.  

Some very exciting information came in today.  Massey and Lindsay have been working hard to put together an extensive proposal on the natural building system of light straw clay, in the hopes of being able to get it permitted for use as an insulation system in the granny unit, the building out back we are currently retrofitting.   Today, the news came in from our new friend at the building department.  They are going to give us the permit, and they are interested in watching the building's performance over the next few years, with the idea of creating an ordinance if all goes well.  YEAH!

Otherwise new here?  We finished the earth bag portion of the walls of my pod today, Sasha has rafters on her pod, and a ceiling on part of it, we have a new earthen oven that is about to be fired up for some pizza, and the sound of the dehydrator lulls us all to sleep as we try our best to can, dry and preserve the mountains of food that piling up on the kitchen counters and floor from our garden(tomatoes and more tomatoes) and other places (big apple and pear harvest recently).  

Pictures of Pod Progress

Some more long-awaited pictures- the backyard is transforming rapidly this summer. 

Click here for a slideshow on the 4 (!) buildings we have been working on.  And check back soon for updates and pictures on the garden and the bees.  

Natural Building Workshop at the Villa

Another successful workshop here at the Villa has just come to a close. We had twelve amazingly wonderful people here for the last week taking part in a hands on natural building workshop, taught by Massey and myself (Sasha). We made great progress on three different small mostly earthen structures in our back yard. This workshop group was very dedicated and got the award for the the most on-time group ever. The group was diverse in origin with people originally from Venezuela, Greece, Czech Republic, Canada, and all throughout the US. Other than occasional smiling and nodding, we all (mostly) managed to communicate.
The workshop focused on earthen building, and we managed to cover an amazingly large array of techniques. In Sasha's pod we came close to finishing the cob, did the first layer of earthen plaster on the walls, and poured the first layer of earthen floor. In Massey's pod we started with some heavy straw clay, some simple bamboo, clay wattle, and a small strawbale wall topped with light straw clay. An earth bag foundation was done on Trilbys pod.