TerraSante: Sewing With Wire, Playing With Fire, and Kitchen Stuff
I decided not to build the evaporative cooling chamber.
Partly it was because I want to do it right, and that means an extended stay with daily measurements, and partly because, well, I overheard a conversation among the longtime locals here about how anything that needs maintenance has to be someone's particular responsibility or it will be neglected to death. I would have to fully automate it, so that it would take care of itself, and that will take more time and more design oomph than I can muster in this short a stay.
Besides, there's been so much other work to do.
TerraSante is building itself a new water tank with about eight times the capacity of the current water tank (which will be repurposed for rainwater catchment once it's no longer needed to hold water pumped up from the well). The process of building a ferrocement water tank involves many layers of the “ferro” part, the metal (mostly iron) skeleton and connective tissue, ending with a metal mesh that is basically sewn onto the structure with 16-gauge baling wire. There's a lot of unskilled labor involved in that sewing, pushing the wire through the wall, then going around the other side and making a stitch by pushing it back an inch or two away. It's not strenuous and doesn't require any particular amount of skill. It is therefore perfect for unskilled and unathletic volunteers like me. After all the metal is on, the structure will be power washed (because birds will not leave a thing like this alone) and then sprayed with the same kind of fine-grained cement that in-ground swimming pools are made of. The way it looks now, the new tank may be finished by spring.
I have taken it upon myself to improve kitchen storage. I spent my first Saturday here going to garage sales. For practically no money I got racks for the open shelving that allow more dishes to be stored in the same space and also allow freshly washed plates, bowls, and lids to be put away wet and air dry in place. The racks were not adequate for the cookie sheet and the two glass baking pans, which are very wide and flat, so I spend a morning finding suitable plywood in the Boneyard and building (with the help of a resident who fired up the table saw and sawed the boards) some vertical storage.
I've also been cooking for the group. I try to use the solar oven every sunny day. (Which is not every day. According to longtime residents, this has been the wettest October since the founding of the place.) I made sauerkraut (with the help of a member who brought out her food processor) and found that the calcium in the water keeps it crunchy even after several days of fermentation. Everything I make gets eaten and I get lots of positive feedback for it.
There was one day when I was on loan to Harmony and Health, TerraSante's neighbor ecovillage across the street. Legally, the two are separate organizations, but in daily life they tend to flow into each other. People at Harmony and Health seem to have full access to The Boneyard, Dishes disappear from Terrasante's main kitchen and turn up at Harmony and Health's, and vice versa. Bruce, TerraSante's main building guy, designed and was the lead builder of Harmony and Health's rather impressive wood-fired sauna, and TerraSante members and guests have been attending the weekly community sweats held in it ever since.
The project I was part of for that one day at Harmony and Health was the construction of a new bathroom building out of rammed earth with transparent beer bottles embedded to let in light.
(Right now, those attending the community sweat have to use a porta-potty, which is the opposite of sustainable.)
The core of the construction crew was three guys from an outfit called Natural Building Works. They are pros, but they are used to volunteers. Just the previous week, they'd had a bunch of teenagers in from a program called YouthBuild, but the program had ended and now they were working alone and were quite happy to have me show up. The main volunteer wrangler gave his name as Jake. He had me doing sho sugi ban, which sounds like a martial art but is really more like pyromania in a good cause.
Sho sugi ban literally means “burned cedar board” in Japanese, because it was in Japan that someone noticed: if you slightly char the outside surface of a board, it will become more durable, water-resistant, and insect-resistant. In other words, it acquires some of the advantages of pressure-treated wood without the nasty chemicals that are usually involved in pressure treatment. Furthermore, the technique works quite well on wood other than cedar. The wood set out for me to process was worn-out shipping pallets, otherwise destined for a landfill. So double environmental good news.
The environmental bad news is that this method involves quite a lot of propane. Imagine a standard 20-lb steel propane tank with about ten feet of orange hose coming off it, ending in a something like a baby blowtorch. My job was to walk among the pallets laid out on the sand and apply just enough flame for just long enough to get the desired surface effect. (There was a bucket of water with a cup in it for those boards that refused to stop burning when I took the flame away. I only had to use it a few times.) The charred boards are being used in the ceiling.
TerraSante just got in its biggest squash harvest ever. The gardeners here piled it up on the table in the main kitchen (along with some other things like the trays of sprouts and the pomegranates and so forth) to take this photo.
Then they just left it there because nobody knew where to put it all. So I decided to take this on myself as my last project. I asked around until I found a suitable spot, planned out some shelving, expected to spend Saturday and maybe part of Sunday making it... and then I spoke to the same resident who cut the boards for my previous kitchen improvement, and he just made it. In about three hours. It was like magic.
So that's what I've been up to while I've been here. Tomorrow is Tucson's famous All Souls Procession, which I plan to attend, and the day after that I will be packing and driving away. I have two turkeys to pick up on the 19th in Barre, Massachusetts.
Partly it was because I want to do it right, and that means an extended stay with daily measurements, and partly because, well, I overheard a conversation among the longtime locals here about how anything that needs maintenance has to be someone's particular responsibility or it will be neglected to death. I would have to fully automate it, so that it would take care of itself, and that will take more time and more design oomph than I can muster in this short a stay.
Besides, there's been so much other work to do.
TerraSante is building itself a new water tank with about eight times the capacity of the current water tank (which will be repurposed for rainwater catchment once it's no longer needed to hold water pumped up from the well). The process of building a ferrocement water tank involves many layers of the “ferro” part, the metal (mostly iron) skeleton and connective tissue, ending with a metal mesh that is basically sewn onto the structure with 16-gauge baling wire. There's a lot of unskilled labor involved in that sewing, pushing the wire through the wall, then going around the other side and making a stitch by pushing it back an inch or two away. It's not strenuous and doesn't require any particular amount of skill. It is therefore perfect for unskilled and unathletic volunteers like me. After all the metal is on, the structure will be power washed (because birds will not leave a thing like this alone) and then sprayed with the same kind of fine-grained cement that in-ground swimming pools are made of. The way it looks now, the new tank may be finished by spring.
I have taken it upon myself to improve kitchen storage. I spent my first Saturday here going to garage sales. For practically no money I got racks for the open shelving that allow more dishes to be stored in the same space and also allow freshly washed plates, bowls, and lids to be put away wet and air dry in place. The racks were not adequate for the cookie sheet and the two glass baking pans, which are very wide and flat, so I spend a morning finding suitable plywood in the Boneyard and building (with the help of a resident who fired up the table saw and sawed the boards) some vertical storage.
I've also been cooking for the group. I try to use the solar oven every sunny day. (Which is not every day. According to longtime residents, this has been the wettest October since the founding of the place.) I made sauerkraut (with the help of a member who brought out her food processor) and found that the calcium in the water keeps it crunchy even after several days of fermentation. Everything I make gets eaten and I get lots of positive feedback for it.
There was one day when I was on loan to Harmony and Health, TerraSante's neighbor ecovillage across the street. Legally, the two are separate organizations, but in daily life they tend to flow into each other. People at Harmony and Health seem to have full access to The Boneyard, Dishes disappear from Terrasante's main kitchen and turn up at Harmony and Health's, and vice versa. Bruce, TerraSante's main building guy, designed and was the lead builder of Harmony and Health's rather impressive wood-fired sauna, and TerraSante members and guests have been attending the weekly community sweats held in it ever since.
The project I was part of for that one day at Harmony and Health was the construction of a new bathroom building out of rammed earth with transparent beer bottles embedded to let in light.
(Right now, those attending the community sweat have to use a porta-potty, which is the opposite of sustainable.)
The core of the construction crew was three guys from an outfit called Natural Building Works. They are pros, but they are used to volunteers. Just the previous week, they'd had a bunch of teenagers in from a program called YouthBuild, but the program had ended and now they were working alone and were quite happy to have me show up. The main volunteer wrangler gave his name as Jake. He had me doing sho sugi ban, which sounds like a martial art but is really more like pyromania in a good cause.
Sho sugi ban literally means “burned cedar board” in Japanese, because it was in Japan that someone noticed: if you slightly char the outside surface of a board, it will become more durable, water-resistant, and insect-resistant. In other words, it acquires some of the advantages of pressure-treated wood without the nasty chemicals that are usually involved in pressure treatment. Furthermore, the technique works quite well on wood other than cedar. The wood set out for me to process was worn-out shipping pallets, otherwise destined for a landfill. So double environmental good news.
The environmental bad news is that this method involves quite a lot of propane. Imagine a standard 20-lb steel propane tank with about ten feet of orange hose coming off it, ending in a something like a baby blowtorch. My job was to walk among the pallets laid out on the sand and apply just enough flame for just long enough to get the desired surface effect. (There was a bucket of water with a cup in it for those boards that refused to stop burning when I took the flame away. I only had to use it a few times.) The charred boards are being used in the ceiling.
TerraSante just got in its biggest squash harvest ever. The gardeners here piled it up on the table in the main kitchen (along with some other things like the trays of sprouts and the pomegranates and so forth) to take this photo.
Then they just left it there because nobody knew where to put it all. So I decided to take this on myself as my last project. I asked around until I found a suitable spot, planned out some shelving, expected to spend Saturday and maybe part of Sunday making it... and then I spoke to the same resident who cut the boards for my previous kitchen improvement, and he just made it. In about three hours. It was like magic.
So that's what I've been up to while I've been here. Tomorrow is Tucson's famous All Souls Procession, which I plan to attend, and the day after that I will be packing and driving away. I have two turkeys to pick up on the 19th in Barre, Massachusetts.