Summer ends

Summer came and went, and with it a bunch of our volunteers. Thanks everybody! We put up some walls, making it look something more like a building inside. The glass bottles added a nice touch and some much needed light in the back library room (perhaps better as a movie room… we shall see). The floors got leveled and tamped, insulated with foam, topped up with some sand, and then leveled and tamped again. They look great and we had a dance party in August to help tamp them down some more (not sure if we just made the cob walls dustier, but who can really tell?)

The rocket mass heater is pretty much finished thanks to Martin, our rocket engineer. More on that to come.

We have a solar pump now which pumps up water from the pond to a tank on the hill that gravity feeds the garden, and soon to be hugelculture beds. Lots of rotten logs were collected and loaded up in our little quad trailer for the hugel beds, as well as lots of manure from our generous neighbors next door. The quad trailer suffered a little from the heavy loads and mishaps on our driveway, but with some care it shouldn’t be fatal.

Although the soil in the field is nothing to be ecstatic about, our garden did fairly well, and we had lots of squash and hopefully lots of onions and carrots for the winter. We used the earthship greenhouse and just put everything in large pots since we don’t have greywater beds yet. The cucumbers were fruitful although short lived, and the tomatoes seen to still be going strong.

Chris is proud of his sea serpent for the building above the rootcellar. Some nice chainsaw artwork there. We had a volunteer carpenter, Tom, who did a lot of work on that building, occasionally assisted by others. The building is meant to be a woodshed with a pulley dumbwaiter to lower bulk items like wood and potatoes into the rootcellar hallway.

Kale wrote a grant for an earthship greenhouse in the nearby reserve of Glen Vowell or Sik-e-Dakh and has been working hard on that all year. With some help from local volunteers in Glen Vowell and others, they successfully demolished an old hall that sat on the site and are reusing a lot of the materials for the greenhouse. Some more tire pounding and seven stories later, they are ready to start framing. With any luck, there will be all sorts of food growing in there next year for the community of Sik-e-Dakh.

And on the wild food end, we jarred another winters supply of salmon this year and managed to clean out the smokehouse of garden supplies in time to smoke a few fish. We also got oodles of blueberries and huckleberries, and chose to freeze and dry a lot rather than just have jam, although we made a lot of jam too 🙂

And now the mushrooms are out, mainly pines, and we’ve been finding, eating, and selling them.

There are sure to be more things we did that aren’t mentioned, but that’s about the jist of it.