greenspree.ca at The Sietch

It seems the straw bales will be cut by the middle of next week as long as the weather cooperates! If the long range forecast is correct we’ll be getting our bales before Wednesday!

That means we’ll be starting ssome bale installation on Wednesday with the main bale raising and stucco party happening on the weekend of the 22nd and 23rd.

All are welcome to come out and help or just watch and learn, or just hang out! There very well could be snacks, you definately should bring your own chairs, beverages, and work clothes/gloves if you want to get hands on.

Check out these links for what a bale raising entails:

http://stonehousestrawhouse.blogspot.com/2006_09_01_archive.html

http://heatkit.com/html/strawagb.htm

http://www.mhc.com/Maine/

http://www.firstraven.com/sstowell/House/house.html

http://www.everdale.org/index.php?module=Everdale&type=user&func=displayMenu&menuId=20

The event is not structured, there are no set hours, we will be working essentially first thing in the morning until the light fails every day for the entire weekend (and the week before and after for that matter!) No need to call before hand (we won’t have a phone on us at the site anyways) just show up!

The Sietch Blog » The “What I Did This Summer” Giveaway Contest

The Naib over at The Sietch is giving awaysome amazing books and a $25 top prize for letting people know what you did to save the world this summer!

Last week I was on vacation and we started framing work on the house. We started Saturday morning (Sept 1) with this:

And ended last night (Sept 9) with this:

The framing of the house was planned so that a 18-19 inch straw bale stacked vertically will fit snugly between the studs spaced at 19.2″ centers. We also lined up all structural elements from the trusses to the studs and floor beams for a direct transmission of forces through to the ground.

The second floor was made of 4×8 spruce beams spaced at 19.2″ c/c and topped with 2×6 T&G v-joint spruce with the v-joint pointed down to become the ceiling of the first floor with exposed beams and the flat side up to be the finish floor of the second floor. All boards were toenailed and then set through the tougue so there are no exposed fasteners.

We have the roof up and sheathed, and only have the gable end walls on the second floor left to frame. With a week or two left before the straw is baled we are busy busy busy!

For a full pictoral of the foundation and framing process please visit here: http://greenspree.ca/?p=584

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated the status of our house project, one of the reasons being that we have been very busy!

As of Tuesday, we have our septic system and well installed, temporary power installed and foundation formed/poured c/w air circulation ducts and coloured hardener.

Some communication and weather issues have left us about a week or two behind, but we are hoping that won’t affect the straw bale raising date. The weekend I was to start forming the slab on grade, I went paintballing with my wife’s younger brother and severely sprained my ankle. The ER doctors the next day suspected a torn ligement or ruptured tendon and it was nearly a full two weeks before I could walk again or spend any time on my feet.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night my wife and I spent three hours trimming the interlocking teeth of the ICF’s that will make up the perimeter form of our slab on grade. This task was supposed to have been completed on the weekend along with a major chuck of the slab forwaork itself however fate has decided to throw us another curve ball!

Saturday afternoon the family was together for a gam of paintball at a local field for my brother-in-law’s birthday and within the first 5 minutes of the first match I twisted my ankle in some mud bad enough to tear a ligament or two! Ouch. It left me immobilized that day and medicating with some beer at my father-in-law’s cottage. I had hoped that the sprain would feel better enough for me to get some work done on Sunday, alas it only felt worse. So after feebly attempting to do some work on the site, I relented into letting my wife take me to the ER. 4 hours later (wait times are an issue here!) I had clean x-rays and advice to take it easy, walk on it a little every day to strengthen the ligaments, and that it should be better in a couple weeks.

So I am suddenly behoven to ask friends and family for more help than I wanted to burden them with. Last nights chore of trimming the ICF’s was an easy chore with very little walking and no heavy lifting on a level smooth floor, it still left my ankle swollen and throbing by the end of the night and me exhausted!

We are still hoping to pour some concrete within a week or so, I’ll be posting photos when we get some more progress done.

Some photos of the pad, new power poles and layout of the septic field.  This weekend the formwork will begun and (hopefully) finished, with underslab plumbing, temporary power and concrete pouring happening next week!

This view is from the Shire Lane, the private road off of which our lot is located. The Shire Lane itself is on a quiet country dirt road called the Peters Road and surrounded by farm and woodlots. You can see our driveway branch off to the left and then head west as the Shire Lane curves right. In the foreground is our new puppy Rosie and in the mid ground my in-laws dog Caleb!

This view of our building pad is from the small parking area at the end of our driveway, in the background (south southwest) you can see the high tension power lines that skirt our property. They are a bit obtrusive but not too overwhelming and certainly carry a lot less power than most high tension lines entering big cities.

This view looking back at the house lot from the other side and pointing east northeast towards the neighbouring horse field. In the background you can see our little 12′x14′ deck we made last year before our wedding. you can clearly see the stakes and building lines that are set up on the pad.

This view looks back almost 180 degrees from the first shot and shows our new power pole on the left close to the trees. The power lines will enter underground from this point to minimize the amount of visible wires on the site. It also shows our view to the east where the sun rises over the spruce woods on the other side of the Peters Road and the acre and a half horse field between our lot and it.

This final shot of the house site is taken from the deck mentioned before. The hedgerow to the north of the building site will protect the house from cold north winds in the winter time. To the left of this photo, not visible is our 20′x20′ vegetable garden which is just starting to take off. We have had fresh salads which buttercrunch lettuce, radishes, spinach and lambs quarters all week long and can’t keep ahead of the lettuce!

This is where our septic field will be at the crest of a gully on the south east corner of our hectare lot. This is stitched from three photos so the perspective is a little off, but you can see where the high tension power line tower pointed out in the previous photo is. 2 feet of premium fill will be placed between the stakes to provide adeqaute filtration as we are sitting on a shelf of brick clay on our site.

Our strawbale home is moving forward! We ended up getting our mortgage approved through our broker without going through CMHC but had already started shopping elsewhere by then. We went to a bank and got a better deal and lower downpayment requirement and are going in today to sign the paperwork. We knew we were approved last week so went ahead and started the construction process rolling.

Monday the driveway and more importantly house pad were place and compacted on our lot! This seems to be a good time to go over the foundation construction to be used on our home.

We are going to install a Frost Protected Shallow Foundation (or FPSF) as both the base and finish floor of our home. The site was prepped by removing the top cover of topsoil down to the substrate level of indegenous undisturbed layer of brick clay. Then a layer of shale or crushed sandstone was installed level with the existing highpoint of the land and compacted with a vibratory roller. This is where we are at now, the next step will be to form a foundation, using the FPSF Guide developed by NAHB Research Center, Inc. and using Canadian AFI values found in US Army Corps Of Engineers AFI maps.

Our foundation will also be 8″ thick at the main section for two reasons, as a thermal heat sink, and to allow us to run 5″ round duct work in the slab which will be connected to a high level return plenum at the top of the second floor for redistributing rising heat from the wood stove and passive solar radiation.

I will add some photos and detail sketches on the weekend to this post, stay tuned!

How much land do you need to be self sufficient? Again inspired by Red State Green’s recents posts I decided to do some research on my own. Prior to this, in a comment on “A matter of national security”, I used some somewhat high output figures I found on another site that basically said about 0.11 of an acre would be all that is required for a family of four. I decided to find some better numbers and also instead of just going by 2000lbs of food per year per preson, use the recommended portions of the CanadaFood Guide.

Assuming everyone followed Canada’s food guide, and using chicken for meat and dairy alternatives and/or trading or somehow offsetting the cost of purchasing some of the food, this is how I see it breaking down (weights of food taken from http://www.stambaughfamily.com/equiv_1.html):

Food Guide per adult male:

10 servings (1/2cup) of vegatables and fruit. Lets say your servings are 1 cup of tomato, 1 cup of spinach, 1 cup of carrot, 1 cup of cabbage and 1 cup of potato. That corresponds 74kg of tomato, 50kg of spinach, 55kg of carrot, 110kg of cabbage, and 83kg of potato per year.

8 servings of grain products. Lets use 4 servings of oats and the equivalent in flour of four servings of bread. That corresponds to 21kg of oats and 20kg of wheat flour per year.

2 servings of dairy. Lets assume soy drink, 1 cup ea. or approx. 23kg of soya beans per year.

3 servings of meat and alternatives. Let’s use chicken for all three (75g ea.) That’s 82kg per year.

More after the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »

Red State Green » Blog Archive » A matter of national security

Fellow The Sietch blogger Red State Green has posted an interesting article on self sufficiency and food supplies.  She has garnered a lot of attention on the post with dozens of comments ranging from support to abject scorn.

Most of the scorn seems to be coming from folks who are saying things like:

Uh… don’t want to rain on your self-sufficiency parade or anything, but do you also intend to build a fortified castle around your Victory Garden? Because if you don’t and civilization collapses because we can’t get Big Macs anymore we’re heading straight for the homestead that has all the chickens, pigs, and home-made preserves.

Mmmm. Jellies and jams.

And:

Are you serious? This is the most ridiculous idea I have heard yet. Oil embargo equals starvation? Give me a break. For one, you aren’t right in saying most of the food is produced in other countries. Yes, most of what we eat is made in other countries, but we export far more food than we import. The breadbasket of the USA (you have heard of the entire midwest, right?) could easily support the entire country. Also, higher food costs aren’t really a big deal, given that we already have some of the lowest food costs in the world.

But let’s take a step back and assume that this absurd principle could work. No gas in the cars? Uh oh… I guess that means walking or biking are out of the question. I bet people would kill each other over gardens before thinking about, I don’t know, walking to the store.

Let’s take the other scenarios. Terrorists bombing all our pipelines is not only unreasonable (since the United States is in anti-terror mode), but given that this country runs on oil, it would probably take only a few days to fix, causing at most a small spike in prices. A flu pandemic is an unlikely but possible occurrence, though I think the flu might be slightly more concerning than plans for food. Come on. No quarantine causing starvation would be placed into effect — the starvation could kill far more than the flu.

Victory gardens were a wonderful way to make people feel involved in WWII, but they weren’t the difference between life and death for Americans. This situation isn’t any different.

And I have to wonder if these people really think it is better to not have any means of self sufficiency at all then learn how to garden and provide at least a portion of your own food?

Another common theme was “aconomies of scale” and the great myth that commercial agriculture is the only efficient way to raise crops and livestock.  I don’t even know where to start with that notion, I suggest those that believe that do some serious research on traditional and third world farming practices and let me know what they conclude.

I came across this discussion in the comments section of Peak Oil Debunked’s post on the chest fridge idea from the famous mtbest article. The gist of the argument, and I have posted the relevant parts of the argument against the chest fridge, was that the orientation of the cooling device would make no difference and that the original author was sacrificing a large amount of food storage. Seeing as the original post and discussion took place two years ago I doubt I will get a response, but have decided to post my thoughts on it here.

My take on the subject is that you can buy two 15cf deep freeze’s for the same price as one side by side refrigerator freezer unit and have one set up to be a fridge and use the other as is. In my research, the standard 25cf fridge/freezer has a 15cf fridge side and 10 cf freezer side. My research also shows that similarly sized chest freezers use less energy than upright refrigerator only models. So you can in fact have more storage and pay less in utility bills for it!

More after the fold.

Read the rest of this entry »