Chicken of the Woods

Last year, knowing how we love mushrooms, someone brought a huge chunk of Chicken of the Woods to Andrea after finding it while GPSing. (Thanks guys!)

She brought it home, we cooked a bunch, ate a bunch, dried a bunch, and I cut up the parts that still had pieces of bark on it and spread it all over the yard onto various dead wood and stumps.

Well this morning as I headed out to our remote garden I saw this on a stump at the end of our driveway.



 Plant your scraps. Plant everything. When you buy mushrooms from the store,  cut off the bottoms and throw them into media that they normally grow in... coffee grounds or wood chips or something, Throw it around the yard. Button mushrooms grow in fields, like agaricus campestris, so throw them in your lawn. Chicken of the woods and oyster mushrooms grow on wood, so throw them onto logs or stumps (like I did) - or in your wood chip mulch. Those mycelia might take hold and spread, and you'll have free food.






Update: 9/21/2016
It's starting to lose some color and is definitely growing, so I thought I'd harvest some of the edges of the larger pieces before they start to turn old, but I left enough to keep growing (in case it does) and I definitely want it to drop more spores.

So I read in Wiki:

 Testing showed an hour of UV light exposure before harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain twice the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's daily recommendation of vitamin D, and 5 minutes of UV light exposure after harvesting made a serving of mushrooms contain four times the FDA's daily recommendation of vitamin D.[13]Analysis also demonstrated that natural sunlight produced vitamin D2.[14]
Sooooo - I will leave them in a sunny spot today, and fry them up in vegan butter for my sweetheart and me this afternoon.
Yumm!

Great New Goat Hay-Feeder

So when we first got Cinnamon and Laverne, we'd feed them hay and the next day find it trampled, pooped in and peed on in their pen. Couldn't figure out why.

Then Andrea read on a homesteading website that goats won't eat their hay if it's on the ground. They're browsers, and like to eat things that are bush- and branch-level.

We talked about putting together some 2x4's and some netting or chicken wire or wooden slats to make our pygmy goats something to eat out of so we didn't waste hay. Since we haven't had a lot of time, we didn't get around to that yet, and the next morning I went out to let the goats out to browse and, looking over at our brush pile that never got burned, I got the idea....

The brush pile makes a great feeder. It keeps the hay high and dry, and any that falls out just gets caught by smaller branches. They eat every bit of their hay now, and run to the brush pile every time I let them out to browse.

(Shhh - Zion thinks she's a goat - don't tell her. She'll be out there eating grass right alongside them, when she isn't getting headbutted by Cinnamon.

Raccoon in our worm bin

How to steer a goat

Much to the disdain of our current cat population, we acquired a couple pygmy goats from Craigslist (separate listings) a week or so ago - $75 for Laverne and $50 for Cinnamon - and I've begun to familiarize myself with their habits while walking them around the yard to help 'mow'. I've never really met a goat before - only saw them from a distance. Right now we live in a traditional house on a cul-de-sac in the country - the house Andrea grew up in - while we set up Soulstice Homestead. Most of our neighbors are standard suburbanite types, though the folks across the street that our grandbabies play with have chickens.

We bought the goats mainly to eat up the plants that we want to reduce on our homestead and turn them quickly into rich fertilizer. We're vegan, and have no intention of breeding them or using their milk or eating them. They're there to eat poison ivy (we have a LOT), multi-flora rose and honeysuckle, and a few other things, and to enrich our soil, and our lives (they're pretty cute).

When we brought the two goats together for the first time they started to butt heads. Andrea was having none of it because Laverne is significantly larger than Cinnamon, and Cinnamon has the advantage of horns - and either one could get hurt (enough to generate a vet bill, too). So we decided to separate them at first for a while, especially since they've just been ripped from their homes and thrust into unfamiliar territory. We wanted to ease them into our Homestead gently.

Laverne stayed in the corral, which originally held a horse that Andrea used to have as a child. We repaired some tree-fall damage and cleared out the things Andrea's kids (adults now) brought back there for a fire pit.

We snagged a 10'x10'x10' dog kennel (Craigslist again) for $100 and set it up out back, along with some block and a hay net. We stretched some tarp in each area to keep them and the hay out of the rain. Since we rent, we're limited as to how much we can build here, but everything will move with us to Soulstice Homestead and we'll work out rainwater harvesting systems there, or come up with something portable if we get time - but we're planning a busy summer with the build and all.

So since the pens are a little small, don't hold a lot of fresh greens, and since the yard isn't fenced, we can't really just turn the goats out to 'mow' for us. We hate to mow in spring because the yard is covered with beautiful flowers, many of which are edible, and we don't have to the heart to tear it all up and mow it down, so by summer the plants get pretty high. We do a little chop and drop,  and eventually break down and mow.

But now that we have the girls, in order to get them used to us enough to feel comfortable, part of our bonding with them is taking them out on a rope to chomp down some fresh weeds while we sip some coffee in the morning with them. That way we can observe their eating habits and general demeanor, and they can get used to being around us and see us as a source of something good.

One thing I learned is that goats hate to be led. They will fight you as hard and long as they can. We don't want to use force with them, so I thought I'd use a little psychology on them. Rather than pull their leads and fight with them, I decided to just limit their options. I'll pull the lead just a little taut, then hold it, refusing them any slack to go backwards, all the while coaxing them with "Hu uh" when they pull away - "this way" when I tug on the lead - and  "come on" as I turn my back to them and start walking away, using the same commands every time for each action. As soon as they start walking where I want them to go I loosen the slack completely and they seem to just go ahead and walk the direction I'm going. When they stop I pull up the slack a bit and say "come on" a few more times and turn away - still never pulling at them. No matter how hard they try to pull any way but where I want them to go I hold the lead fast - never pulling, just holding it so they can't go any other direction, giving them no slack. Eventually, the decision to go where I want them to becomes theirs.

Cinnamon already has a bit of a head start in learning this new trick, because she really doesn't like to be left behind, and seems to really enjoy our company. But if she wants to go somewhere she'll definitely put up a little fight.,

I'm hoping a few weeks of this little tugging routine will get them to stop fighting me - but maybe not. For now, I don't have to pick them up and carry them, so I'll take what I can get.

May 2016

This was a good month. We planted some fruit trees, a plum, cherry, apple and another peach tree, a pear tree (that died), some garlic around the apple, some grapes and loganberry and raspberry, some blueberries, and 2 persimmons (one of which died and the other doesn't look all that great). We also bought 2 fig trees and a Goji berry that we'll leave in pots for now, as I believe they're not cold tolerant.

We discovered that all the sticker bushes dominating the hillside were actually blackberry bushes (which takes up a good 50ft x 50ft area) except for a few multiflora roses. Looks like we'll be canning a lot of jam and making a lot of cobbler. We're going to keep them, and look for companion plants to add to the patch, maybe add a few pear, cherry, hazelnut and/or almond trees, or some bee balm (L.didyma for highest concentration of oils), or a lemon balm, mint, garlic and chives to confuse ground-based varmints. Maybe include strawberries - you can never have too many of those. If we add some sweet cicely and American vetch they'll add some nitrogen to the soil. Based on how much these blackberries have propagated, I'm guessing they've been residents there for a while, so they may need a little help nutritionally. The spring flowers from these blackberries make a great pollinator attractor, too. We'll probably put the beehives there when we move in.

We planted some grapevines along with the grapes that were there but there was a nasty late and unexpected frost, and since we are over an hour away there wasn't an opportunity to run down there and cover them. We noticed that all the grapes had been nipped pretty badly and were turning brown, but the last time we went out they seemed to be coming back. Not sure how our less hardy, more domesticated variety held out though. We'll try to help those and the grapes that are already growing there with some companion planting too. Geraniums, mulberries, hyssop, basil, oregano for pests. Peas and beans for nitrogen. The soil is kinda dry and lifeless, other than a bunch of big fat earthworms. As we scythe down the weeds we've been mulching around everything we plant.

Andrea snagged a bunch of tools off Craigslist for $40 that were rusty. Among that were 2 pitchfoks, 2 garden forks, a variety of hoes and shovels, a log roller and a scythe. We needed the scythe to clear the building area (we really don't want to take a mower down there) so we took it apart and soaked the rust-caked blade in white vinegar overnight, then in baking powder water overnight again and most of the rust flaked right off. After taking a wire brush to it and using a sharpening stone we got it looking pretty good for the weekend, but we'll probably soak it again. It works great.

We also got a building permit a couple weeks ago. $20! 

I told them we were building a weekend cabin/greenhouse. We thought that would be the best way to hold off the "water and septic" approval we'd need to get the residential building permit, and just go ahead and create a working model to show them that this works. It's pretty much the truth, since we won't be moving in for a while, and there's a lot to do, and we'll basically be staying there on weekends. we figure if we go into the health department office with a few 3D models and a promise they'd likely throw us out of there. If we build it first, test it out, then go in there with data proving it works and show that it protects the surrounding streams, keeps the waste contained and off the ground, and converts it all to fertilizer we can apply to bamboo plants for building and not for garden food, we'll more likely get it approved. We may also need to prove our water is safe for drinking - at least what we'll be drinking from. That would be filtered more so than our bathing/washing water. We wrote a blog on it last year but will probably rewrite it soon to illustrate what we actually plan to do with these new water tanks and the new root cellar.

We snagged a worm bin off Craigslist from a guy in Columbus, and while we were bagging up the worm-rich soil we noticed a trash can full of Osage oranges being devoured by black soldier fly larvae. He said the Osage orange attracts them, and all he had to do was fill up the can and they came. We have gobs of Osage orange in our woods, so one of the next trips down we'll gather them up and toss them in a can and wait. That tidbit of knowledge led to updating the Minimal Effort Compost Toilet blog today.

Behold the eleven 275 gallon food grade water storage tanks we snagged - also from Craigslist - for $60 each...

(That's the scythe blade soaking in vinegar next to it in the brick and plastic trashbag tub I made for it.) These tanks will line the walls surrounding our root cellar we just designed.

We plan to cut a 4ft deep section out of the north wall and line the edges of the excavation with 9 water tanks resting on the grade, then build the walls behind that and berm the excavated dirt up to the roof. It'll suck the heat out of the room and it'll keep the water tanks from freezing in winter, and give us easy access to them for cleaning. It'll also keep them out of the sun so we don't get too much algae build-up, though some algae actually cleans the water. 

The other two water tanks can collect water from the uphill roof over the bedroom and gravity-feed water to the front (south side) of the house as either irrigation or additional access to water for drinking (filtered) or washing up in the morning.

So once we have this all set up, and a water filter in place for drinking, and we've stayed in it over a long enough period of time to show it's all safe and all works properly, we'll take our results to the health department and show it to them for approval and to see what we need to do to maintain it. If we get approval, we can move in and purchase another $20 building permit. If not, we buy a $5000 composting toilet.

We got 7 chickens that we're keeping at a friend's house, to bring down with us when we start prepping for the gardens this fall. We just got 2 pygmy goats last week, Laverne and Cinnamon. We are keeping them at our house until the homestead is built, but may bring Cinnamon, the smaller one, down occasionally to eat poison ivy and multiflora rose bushes. We snagged a 10x10x10 foot chain link dog kennel for $100 off Craiglist just after we got Cinnamon. She stays there and Laverne stays in the corral out back here, til we move to Soulstice Homestead.

Last time we went down we hit a barn sale and snagged a garden rake for $3, a clear hose for $2 (to use as a long distance level for swale siting), and a sickle and sharpening stone for a few bucks each. Used the sickle and the scythe to clear the building area, which we pegged off the weekend before... 36ft per room, 2 rooms. 

We'd been considering renting a backhoe and doing the excavation ourselves, which has been one of the more stressful parts of this process for me personally, as I've never operated one and I was concerned about the liability of tipping one of those babies over and having to tow it back up. Andrea has operated one before and didn't seem as concerned about it all. But so far we've found that renting one for 4 days, which is what we figured it might take for us to complete the digging, along with an auger would cost around $1200. We're meeting with a guy Sunday who has so far quoted a rough estimate of $1000-$1500. It might be worth the extra $300  to not have to take the extra time it'll take to learn to use it and to do the digging, especially given that he can probably do it in a day. Also if we do it ourselves and it takes more than 4 days we have to pay more to rent the machine an extra day or so. Then there's the possibility that one of us topples that puppy over and there's another grand to tow it out. There are a few local excavators out there. We'll scout around for pricing and see how it goes. But once the hole is dug, it's on.

So here's the overall final plan, after lots of alterations...

Due north is up in this overview map.

Note the contour lines in pink to blue - every 2ft in elevation.

Uphill is the top right (NE) corner.
Click here for a full size image

• We'll take out the NE pole and rails of the current fence and put in a double gate. That'll be our driveway. 
• Excavate a 4ft deep floor area in 2 circles (kitchen on the West, bedroom/living room on the East) connected by a greenhouse hallway to the south. Each room has a 36ft diameter. The excavated dirt will berm up against the north wall. An additional 12ft excavation in the kitchen's north wall will be for the water tanks and root cellar.
• Cut a french drain around the northern and eastern/uphill perimeter of where the excavated dirt will be bermed up against the back wall
• Dig out 2 temporary holding ponds for the resulting runoff, to use for cleaning while working, mixing cob, etc... one at the NW corner holding the northern drainage and one to the SE holding the eastern drainage. These will later just be expanded into ponds for wildlife and gardening.
• Cut another french drain along the inner wall under the windows at the downhill/south side to drain any water coming from the indoor garden under the windows.
• Auger out pole holes and set poles for the roof.
• Dump and spread gravel along the floor and through the french drains and driveway
• Set up and cover water tanks and set up a temporary rainwater harvesting system.
• Use earthbags against the walls with the bermed earth and against the 4ft deep excavated walls, infilling with gravel (for drainage to the gravel footers) and maybe a moisture barrier between, though if the bags are plastic we may not need it, cuz water will run off into the gravel footer..
• Dig out a greywater system on contour with a slight grade, eventually leading to the south hill to supplement and irrigate the terrace garden. Line the outside greywater treatment system with reeds, cattails and bamboo.
• Use strawbale and cob on all walls that don't hold back dirt.
• The kitchen is the lowest part of the house, and will hold the rocket stove. Heat from there will rise up to the bedroom and mudroom. Not sure about the rocket stove exhaust layout yet, but part of it needs to go to the shower to heat water, and to the compost toilet area to heat the pipes venting the methane and odor from the composting poop. Coiled pipe outside the heat riser of the rocket stove will heat part of the water coming from the tanks to feed the sinks and shower, so it only takes a quick hot fire to warm the water.
• The shower/bath will be located next to the kitchen so it's near the greywater system. That's the lowest part of the building area and will prevent greywater from entering the house in the event of backing up.
• The compost toilet will be on the other side of the bath, elevated for easy access to cleaning underneath and moving the poop around the composting bins, adding extra worms and black soldier fly larvae if needed.
• The mudroom on the north side between the bedroom and kitchen will be above the excavation and on ground level and serve as the front entrance from the driveway. It'll have separate doors to help keep out the cold, and it's elevation will hold heat from the rocket stove in the lower kitchen to help dry coats and shoes. A sink can be added to clean up hands and shoes, and one or both of the two extra water tanks can feed that sink from the bedroom roof.
• The windows will line the south wall and will all be at a 63° angle from horizontal to get full sun on Dec 22nd, which at noon is at 27.3º. Some sun will hit the window garden in summer too. If it gets to be too much sun and too hot inside, we can strawbale over the windows, or plant grapes and gourds and viney edibles to cover in summer and drop leaves in winter. There'll be a small, vertical window on the west kitchen wall for sunsets.
• We'll snake some pipe through the berm of the north wall to use for cooling air, and include a hatch at the highest peaks of the roof for venting off heat. When the hot air is released that way, the cool air will be pulled in from the cool air pipes for natural A/C.
• An outdoor kitchen will be just outside the kitchen door to the south and will likely need to be built up to be level, probably with earth-pounded tires.
• Here's a quick and dirty model from the inside showing a very rough version of the roof. The ledge under the window to the left will be the actual ground level outside at the bedroom. Bunnies and deer could walk right up to the window. The far door would lead to the hallway. If this model were of the kitchen that far door would be at ground level, as it would be downhill, and the ledge would have a small berm building up to it outside.
• I've worked out a roof configuration that would minimize the amount of poles we would need. But I still need to adapt it to the most recent layout that we're going with. It'll basically be two of these with a basic shed roof connecting them. We've compromised on going with a metal roof because the roofing material I originally wanted to use hasn't been tested, and we'd like to not have to rebuild the roof for a long time. I'll just need to test it out on one of the animal buildings, which BTW, we won't need permits for. Anything agricultural in that township doesn't require a building permit.
• I'm sure a lot of the details will change as we build, mostly because that's how you build these kinds of houses. You sort of make it up as you go along, while you're walking around in it.

Minimal effort compost toilet

I saw something like this on a Youtube video that I can't locate now, so I adapted it, along with some other ideas, to turn it into something that I think will work for us. We're hoping to use a thrown-away HVAC duct, but if we don't find one we can maybe make it out of old dryer shells, or maybe even incorporate some washer bins towards the end of the cycle.

We visited a few intentional communities that use composting toilets and we were amazed at the fact that they just had no foul odor to them at all. I always expected at least a little outhouse fragrance but there was none! That's what really prompted me to focus on a workable composting system for our natural home.

One of the great attractions I have to permaculture is that instead of creating extra work for you, it prompts you to let the natural laws of nature do the work for you. You could spend a thousand bucks on a little Biolet or a Sun-Mar or a Nature's Head, but you still have to empty it every time it gets full and you still have to dispose of the waste frequently, because all you're really doing is pooping in a prettier box. Composting your waste should be as easy as it is ecologically sound - just using a little gravity, sunlight, and natures critters.

When I saw this guy's video I wanted to learn more but there was nothing else out there that I could find on it, so I dove into my 3D modeling programs and started designing my own.

This is basically how it works, and how the guy explained it in the video. He had 3 compartments. I made my first compartment bigger and added another because there'll be 6 of us - and we'll likely be moving the poop more often.

The poop box is indoors BTW. I took away the walls and floor on this first illustration so you could see the workings more clearly. Basically the poop hits the floor of the bins and slides downhill as it piles up, gradually pushing it aside.

Now granted - there are 6 of us - so the time frame will depend entirely on the poop-to-internal-bin-volume ratio, but I plan to make big bins. I'll just need to think on how much poop we produce in a day and do a little math before I start detailing measurements and time-frames. Not something I want to contemplate before dinner :-\

We'll be heating our house with a rocket mass heater in colder weather. Note the exhaust pipes from a rocket heater - by the time it reaches another room - would likely not be warmer than 120°

To aid in that negative air flow I applied some simple physics...

Another concept I've entertained came from Michael Reynolds' poop-cooker idea and another idea I saw on Youtube where a guy built a septic tank to appease the local authorities, then put windows over it and used it as an underground composting pit, adding PVC vent pipes, and letting the sun shine through the glass, onto the poop, thereby drying out the poop to kill off the bacteria and heating the compost so it could break down faster even in cold weather. Shoring up the sides with strawbales can help keep things warm also - and if the poop still looks too wet we can toss a few pitchforks of straw into the mix to dry it up more.

So I thought I'd incorporate that guy's solar cooking concept into this design by adding glass (maybe double-pane for better insulation) to the top of  bin #2 to help dry everything out before introducing it to the cooler, darker bins 3 and 4. Granted it won't be a pretty thing to look at, but it'll do the job.

When you're dealing with all this poop, you have to be sure your final 'product' is clean before you let it out into the world. Redundancy is a good thing. My research suggests that 2 years of composting humanure is best, so we may finish the job in another bin if it doesn't test clean and free of pathogens when it comes out of that 4th bin. So we'll be adding worms to bins #3 and #4. Vermiculture can really speed up the decomposition process and really enrich the compost with all kinds of nutrients.

One last, and hopefully redundant, course of action to make sure everything is properly re-introduced to the circle of life came from our last (2014) trip to the Mother Earth News Fair. We attended a couple of classes on the wonders of mycoremediation. Mushrooms are amazing things. They can clean the most toxic chemicals and make them harmless. We can inoculate the sawdust we initially use to cover the poop with king stropharia spawn, which devours E.coli

So the quick and dirty version is we separate the poop into 4 bins, each with small openings along their ceilings venting gasses up to the previous bin and out the warmed ventilation pipe.

• Bin #1 - fresh poop with compost-able materials being added daily, urine separated to minimize moisture content
• Bin #2 - sun dried poop, heated by the sun to jump-start the decomposition process
• Bin #3 - black soldier fly larvae to break it down further for a few more months
• Bin #4 - the oldest compost - once the previous bin is ready to move down, we empty bin #4 and test it with the Health Deartment for pathogens and decide then if it's safe add to the soil

I'd like to test each bin after 3-4 months just to see how it's coming along and whether or not I'll need to add a 5th bin. I'm guessing it'll decompose more slowly in winter, but maybe burying Bins #3 and #4 in strawbales will help. The goal is to show that the un-composted poop will never touch the ground, as the system is all self contained, unlike those little store-bought $1000 composting toilets that they actually approve of. Also that there is "minimal to no" handling of the un-composted poop, unlike those approved compost toilets. Those are the main things the health department are concerned about. If it fails, there's still the option to just have it all hauled away.

UPDATE 9/24/15
After attending Tradd Cotter's workshops at this year's Mother Earth News Fair we decided to add king stropharia spawn to the sawdust we use to initially cover our poop.

UPDATE 6/9/2016
After further research we're planning to add black soldier fly larvae to one of the chambers. They're voracious poop eaters, turning poop into castings, and when they become adults they don't eat - they just fly off, mate and make more larvae. So I'll add a screened in box over the vent so they don't leave the area, with some sponges along the chamber for them to lay their eggs, and their larvae can drop right back down into the poop.

UPDATE 6/21/2016
Per Wiki:Captive breeding has been observed in a cylindrical chamber measuring 46 cm (18 in) diameter by 56 cm (22 in) tall for 99 litres (3.5 cubic feet). "Mating under artificial light did not occur but did succeed with natural sunlight." ^[8]
I need to design a chamber to capture adults for breeding and for them to lay eggs whose hatchlings will drop back down into the compost bins.

on Designing Swales

I learned a little something about designing swales and while I was working on my Google Earth layout noticed something I'd done wrong in my previous design.

Swales work with water levels to slowly release water into the soil and/or gently direct water towards hillside ponds. Once those ponds fill up, the excess water has to go somewhere, which is always downhill. So you make the spillway just below the level at which you want your pond to peak, then when your pond(s) hit that level, the excess water runs down to the next swale to spread and fill any ponds you may have at that level.  Like this...

View from the side

My current design just had water drain down to the next swale level using a simple open drain. But what I learned is, that water running down the hill in a tight path created silt-laden erosion, taking soil with it and dredging up more and more earth, making a deeper channel and increasing the amount of erosion over time.

What should be done is that the drain area should be spread out widely, and should be placed on the ridges, as opposed to the recesses of a hill, so when water overflows, it does so in many directions, spreading into the soil. Then only the excess will start filling the swale below.

View from the top

Ponds should always be located in the recessed areas where it can be held like a cup, like you'd normally do for a dam. But if you drain from there, you'll weaken the dam. So drain from a horizontally level spot along the ridges - a place along the contour of the pond. Like this....

Ponds in the recessed areas of the hill, drains out in the ridges

Also, when you drain a swale into a pond, always have a silt trap on either side of the pond to catch any debris that may be carried during a really heavy rain. Like this...

View from the front

iew from the front

This slows the water flowing down your land, spreads it out, stores it to capacity over time, creates many diverse ecosystems for biodiversity and saves you tons of irrigation and wasted water.

This video is great at explaining this...

Google Earth and Sketchup as Permaculture Design Tools

It's been a while since we posted to this. Not that we haven't done anything - we're still paying on the land and still exploring various building options. Many ideas went out the window, some got brought back in, some didn't. But so far I'm glad we didn't start too early. I think we need more observation time, but this last weekend we implemented a little of what we observed into what we accomplished, which was planting and laying out where we want to build.

We want to use some strawbale for this first room/yurt/shack mostly for the speed at which the walls go up. We want to move in ASAP, even if it means a small space, because once we're in we can build every day. What's delaying our start is that the land is an hour and a half away and we can't spare a week to start digging just yet. But spring is coming and we want to give it another shot this year.

This is the basic design we seem to keep coming back to.

We dig 3-4ft below grade (depending on the est-to-west slope of the land), use the dirt to berm up about 4ft to the north, east and west sides, leaving the South face open to the sun. Surround it with french drains that flow east to west downhill. Use gravel and vapor barrier under an earth floor, and use either a dome or a shed roof. Leave a 3ft shelf at grade level before adding the wall and berm so it's not so hard to hold back the earth - sort of a step-up instead of trying to hold back an 8ft wall. The back shelf can act as a countertop, shelf base, beds, etc. The front under the window can be garden - directly planted into the earth. Can walls or posts and boards can shore up the 3-4ft wall. Earth rammed tires can support strawbale walls along the bermed areas. Posts would support the roof, though maybe the back/outer section of roof can just rest on earth-rammed tires right on the ground.

Here's another roof frame concept I came up with that distributes the weight of the beams  to form a dome. The square in the center would be the hot air vent to outside. The smaller logs would be used for rafters, and the outside rafters would rest on the ground or berm.

my roof frame concept

We'd build 2 of these and connect them using a greenhouse hallway. We'd start out with a basic sleeping area and a huge kitchen. I'm still kicking around ways to make the whole thing 36' across using a minimum amount of posts. The first model above is actually designed for 22' across with a 16' floor, but we want larger. We'd like to either select cut some trees from the property to make room for forest gardens, or see if we can snag some elsewhere.

We're also considering using earth bags instead of strawbales if we have the time, because straw doesn't play well with 'undergroundedness' :-\ Might get too damp. But we would have a moisture barrier set up (blue lines in the top illustration) next to the straw, and a gravel gabion wall between the moisture barrier and the berm. Hopefully it'll keep the bales dry, but it's a risk. Even though they're not support walls, there's a lot of dirt behind them.

Here's a more recent model showing how we'd have to excavate.

from the west

from the south

view of the north berm

from the east showing the french drain

I actually pulled our property off Google Earth using Sketchup then exported it as an OBJ file to make it compatible with other 3D modeling programs. I then imported it into a 3D program to 'dig out' the excavation site and created geometry to show the basic structure. There are a lot of free programs you could use instead, like Sculptris and Blender. So starting off with Sketchup's terrain importing tool was really valuable in making sure I could get that terrain right. It's hard to model accurately when you're only guessing at the grade and slope.

Here's how you do it....

Open Sketchup and go to the File menu and choose "File>Geo-location>Add Location...."

Find your location. You can also for a search for the address you want to use...

When you find the general area, click "Select Region" and it'll give you some handles to move around to zoom in on the exact area you want to create a model of....

Click on the "Grab" button and wait. It'll plop own a flat version into your scene...

Then go back up to your File Menu and choose "File>Geo location>Show Terrain" and there you have it...

Now you can either build your model in Sketchup or export it as an OBJ for another 3D modeling program...

Hit "File>Export"...

... then when the dialog box appears to ask where to save it, click on the little arrow to the right of the Save as type box and choose whatever file type you want to use. OBJ is the most universally used for most 3D modeling programs.

Now you know exactly how your terrain looks. If you need more detail you can zoom in closer when you first add your location. You can also add onto your location by hitting the "File>Geo location>Add More Imagery..." button after you've added the first one, but when you add more imagery, you'll have separate models, which makes it difficult when it comes to digging into your terrain. Also, you can't really dig into the terrain in Sketchup, which is why I'd import the OBJ file something like Sculptris for digging, then export it as an OBJ file again and Import it into Blender to make the geometric shapes.

There's a learning curve in all this, but worth it if you want to plan. I already work in 3D as my business, so my stuff's a little fancier than Sketchup, but even Sketchup can be useful by just plotting the shapes right through the terrain...

... but Blender will give you polygons that you can select and move around, and Sculptris is like modeling clay. You have way more freedom and control with those programs.

So that's that. Now onto planning our space...

There's an existing rail fence around the north and east edges of the property but we'll have to either take out the northeast corner post and rails (shown above) so we can drive inside the fence, or use the existing 10' bordering the east side of the fence and park there (shown in the images below), only taking out some rails farther from the road. We're leaning more towards the latter. We'd really like to utilize as much land as we can strictly for growing food.

The water levels are exaggerated in the french drain, and optimistic at best for the ponds surrounding, but being in Ohio it's not all that unrealistic an expecation. We get almost 38" a year. The fence won't run through the french drain, that's just bad sculpting on my part :-) It's just to show the concept. The northeast corner is the highest part of the building area, flowing southwest. The french drain should catch any water coming into the property and direct it around the house area, stopping it in the upper, plastic-lined ponds (preferable pond liner, but we could also use old hot-tubs or above-ground pools). If it should reach a certain level it can overflow into lower ponds. The plan is to use them for irrigation and possibly aquaponics, as well as creating microecologies for more plant variety. Any excess house runoff can flow into these catchment areas also - but we'll likely get more barrels if that happens.  you can never have too much water.

So on to Google Earth. From here, after working on the 3D model some more, I imported a rendering of it all from the top into Google Earth and fit it into position on the property. I saved a KMZ file so I can access it from anywhere. Not gonna make it public yet because the location is private til we can actually go and do something with it.

You can see 2 more possible roof frame concepts I came up with on those models. Here's a cleaner shot of those from above...

I've been kicking this roofing idea around a lot, and is the main reason I'm glad we haven't started yet. I'm not a carpenter, which is the point of doing this without knowing carpentry. I want to do something that anyone can do. I'm still doing some research. I want round timber. I really want to tie them together with rope or bailing twine because it's a stronger bond. But Andrea wants the timbers bolted together. I trust her judgement :-) I'll wait and practice on the critters' houses and see how they hold up in storms.

We brought the grandbabies out the weekend before last and kind of plotted out where we wanted to build. We went out there last weekend again by ourselves - just Andrea and me - and planted more stuff - mostly fruit trees and bushes. It was nice and sunny and warm and a great day to work outside. There are lots of thorny bushes where we planted, and it looks like we'll need some goats. We had already planted one peach tree there last fall, so we planted another one, a different variety, about 10 ft from it. Spacing the others 10ft apart, we added a cherry, space for another cherry, an apple, space for 5 more apples, and a pear tree. There were already some wild grapevines growing around the fence so we build a tripod trellis for them and draped them up them to help them grow. Then, since those grapes were doing so well there on their own, we planted the 2 varieties of grape we brought with us on their own trellis. We planted a loganberry bush near some blackberries and made a long trellis to hold them up. Loganberries are a lot like blackberries, so mingling them together should be interesting. Andrea planted some garlic around the apple trees because we'd read they're good companion plants. There are a lot of multiflora roses around too, so we planted a tripod of pink knockout roses with them. The first blueberry bush I planted died - probably because I planted it in partial shade at the bottom of a hill along a swale. Found out later they don't like wet feet. I should've planted it on a mound if I was going to use the swale at all. So this time the 2 blueberry bushes we planted were up at the top of the hill near the pear tree, but with lots of pine needles and coffee grounds to acidify the soil more to their liking. Near there we added the persimmon trees we had from last year that wintered in pots in our front yard. Not sure they were alive but they did have a touch of green on them so we'll see.

Then it occurred to me last night while I was thinking about what a nice day we had planting all day, that I could go back to this KMZ file and keep a standing record of what, when and where we planted. I labeled what we planted and put more detailed info under the properties, so when you right-click on the icon and hit properties it'll all be in there.

Yeah - what an awesome way to keep track! I'll replace the icons with some I'll make myself when I have time - make them available here for download in case someone else wants to use this idea. But from here, I can now keep detailed records of each thing we plant and everything we build and every swale or water feature we create and it's progress (or failures). You might also note in the above screenshot that you can also add links and images to the descriptions. That can come in handy for storing photos of the actual plants or features, as well as for storing links to websites that have valuable information we need to keep on hand for when we actually implement whatever plans are created in the models. For instance, companion plants for that particular plant, or craigslist ads for maybe a hot tub shell we can convert into a pond, etc.

You can also work in layers in Google Earth, so if it gets too busy we can break up everything into plants for one layer, swales and water features for another, critter huts for another, kid's houses, tools (like solar dehydrators and windmills), proposed changes.

So this started out as just mentioning that we planted stuff, but the last couple days have been days of discovery for me. Google Earth is proving to be more useful than I had anticipated.