Strawbale/Cob Homes

Before I get into the specifics with what I'm learning in this internship at Strawbale Studio I thought I might give an overview on what exactly a straw bale or cob home is and why they are important.

First off, both of these are forms of natural or green building. What makes something a natural building depends on the embodied energy it takes to build the structure. Embodied energy being the total amount of energy consumed in the process of production from mining and processing of materials to the manufacturing and delivery. So a green building would be something with low construction impact, resource efficiency, should be long lasting, non toxic, and beautiful! Straw bale and cob homes meet all of these criteria. The literal definition of cob is a "lump" or "mass" but basically, cob is a mixture of soil containing clay and sand mixed with water and straw. One of the reasons building with cob is so great is because these materials are available almost everywhere, they are inexpensive, and can very often be found on-site. Cob can easily be made with your feet, a tarp and some friends!

Cob building is pretty straightforward since it requires no formwork and very few tools so it isn't surprising that one third of our world's current population are living in unbaked earth. It is most commonly found in Africa, the middle east, India, Asia, Europe and south and central America. There is evidence that cob building began as far back as 800 years ago deriving from Europe. Because building with cob reduces the use of wood, steel and toxic building supplies it can cost as little as $10 a square foot to build! Once you have your foundation all you basically have to do is start piling it on! Although there are many cob homes out there, the major disadvantage to building a strictly cob home is that it provides very little insulation. Insulation is measured as relative resistance to heat flow or better known as the R-value. R-value requirements for building varies through the different states and climates, however it ranges from R-13 to R-21. Building with cob alone only gives you about an R-6, however, cob walls do have a lot of thermal mass. Thermal mass is the ability a material has to absorb and store heat energy. So in places that have a big fluctuation in temperature from day to night it's great because the cob's high thermal mass absorbs in heat energy through the day and then releases back through the house at night to provide warmth at night once it's cold outside. (Check out the link for visual descriptions) This is where straw bale homes comes in. Straw bales are extremely insulative with the R-value being about 1.5 per inch when laid flat and R-2 when laid on edge. Even though this is still less than commercial cellulose insulation per inch which would be anywhere from R-3.1 to R-3.8, the fact that straw bales can be anywhere from 14 to 24 inches is what makes the difference making a bale around R-28. A straw bale home is built by stacking straw bales on top of each other and then plastering over using a recipe very similar to the cob, the only difference being you will generally use more water and a shorter fibre such as chopped straw no longer than two inches. I will eventually do a separate blog on natural plasters.                                                      

So, why should you consider building a straw bale or cob home? If you are someone who has any interest in the preserving our environment then you should be interested! Today we are living in a world where people have no direct connection to our homes unlike the Eskimo's who built their igloos using the thermal mass of the ice to protect them from the cold or the ancient Egyptians who used an intricate system of screens and ventilation to protect them from the desert heat. Homes that are built today are designed to be able to work in any climate or environment by being plugged into adjustable life-support systems that provide light, temperature and air circulation as well as provide water and flush out waste. Although these all seem beneficial, it doesn't allow us to have that intricate interaction and connection that humans once had with their homes, also meaning that our survival is completely reliant on our system not failing. More importantly, much of modern housing is dangerous to our health as well as our earth. With the off-gassing of synthetic materials, chlorine in drinking water and the damage that is done to our planet to create the materials used to build are only some of the negative effects modern housing has. There is also a huge amount of erosion, loss of wild life habitat from forest clearing, pollution from burning coal to produce electricity, and wasteful resource depletion that ends up in our dumps. If we continue to live the way we do we will destroy our beautiful planet ending life as we know it. This is what makes straw bale and cob homes so great! You not only save money, but you get to connect with your living space and people around you by working with others to build your own home in a way that minimally effects the environment and allows you to learn and grow as a person, as well as contribute to a better world. Not to mention, the finished product is incredible!

Deanne's straw bale home at Strawbale Studio in Oxford, MI

Click HERE for some more fun images of cob homes. I hope you enjoyed this post and have a better understanding on this type of natural building. The information provided in this post was collected from a mixture of Deanne Bednar and the books Building Green by Clarke Snell & Tim Callahan as well as The Cob Builders Handbook by Becky Bee.

Biochar

I am currently doing an internship with Deanne Bednar at Strawbale Studio in Oxford, Michigan. While here we a had a couple of guys come and do a biochar demonstration open for anyone in the community. Here is a summary of what I took from it along with a little extra research.

First off, what is biochar? 
Basically, it's just charcoal that is used for soil amendment. It is created from the burning of wood or biomass (a renewable form of energy) under the exclusion of oxygen and is composed primarily of recalcitrant carbon which means that it stays in the soil for hundreds to thousands of years unlike labile carbon that will rot in matter of weeks to years.  (Labile carbon is usually root residue or plant debris, also known as compost, that provide an important source of energy for soil microorganisms) Biochar has a long history for being used as a fertilizer but in the last thirty years research and use has accelerated. Recently, production of biochar is being suggested as a strategy to remove global-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of it's ability to produce oil and gas byproducts that can be used as a fuel providing renewable energy, thus meaning it could possibly help alleviate climate change. 

How does it work?
Biochar has a microscopic composition of countless small channels that can absorb water and nutrients up to five times it's weight. This is helpful through dry spells allowing it to moderate drought. These microtubules can store important bacteria and fungi which are what transports nutrients from the soil to the plant increasing the biological life of the soil and creating soil fertility. The important thing to know about biochar is that because of it's ability to absorb minerals if you don't charge it prior to soil application it will steal nutrients from the soil and harm your crops. Charging your biochar means loading it with nutrients, this can be done in many different ways. A few of the most common ways to charge biochar would be mixing it with compost, manure, or compost tea and the duration of your charge should be at least fourteen days. Specific instructions on charging your biochar can be found here. Once this is done you should crush your biochar into grain sized material making your biochar ready to be added your soil. We did this by putting it into a five gallon bucket and crushing it with a board. This is going to help improve your plant growth similarly to compost. However, as stated above, because biochar is a recalcitrant carbon it will continue to provide the nutrients you are needing in your soil basically indefinitely unlike your labile carbon compost which you will need to continue to add over the season because of the rate in which it breaks down. If you would like a more in depth and scientific explanation of how biochar works click here. 

Why biochar?
Biochar can reverse soil degradation reducing the leaching of nutrients and creating a reliable source of fuel and food production enhancing plant growth in places with severely nutrient depleted soil. It can be helpful in places with limited resources or fertilization material and lack of adequate water with it's ability to retain water and nitrogen and raise soil PH level. It can make farm lands more fertile reducing the leaching of nutrients and fertilizer requirement for extended periods of time, provide thermal energy for cooking, and with the addition of an engine could produce kinetic energy for making electricity. Here is a more in depth list of benefits. 

How do I make my own biochar?
Easy! Biochar can be bought, but it's way more fun to make your own! The method we used in the demonstration was the Hawaiian luau pit. I am going to copy and paste the instructions from http://hawaiibiochar.com/biochar-burn-demonstration/ because they explain it better than I can. 
First, a fire is started in the bottom of a pit, then dry wood is then added as fast as the fire will allow – you must always push the fire near to the point of smothering it, yet without actually smothering it.  It is important to always keep a clean burning fire – no smoke.  If it becomes a bit smoky, back off, let the fire catch up.  If it is raging, add more wood to choke it out a bit.  In this way you
are constantly covering the char that has been made with fresh layers of wood, which become char, which are soon covered with fresh layers of wood, which become char, and so on. When you near the top of the pit or the end of your wood supply, you finish with small diameter wood.  This chars quickly.  Let the flames die down a bit, then voila – a large bed of red hot glowing coals.  By this point, if you have done it right, the 
entire pit has turned to char.  You can either hos
e it down immediately, or cover it with soil to snuff it out.
We hosed it down which seemed to be the most efficient. I was told that using soil you risk the chance of the fire restarting and turning everything to ash. We were instructed to use wood no more than two inches in diameter and once it got going the moisture content didn't seem to matter much as our wood was pretty wet. There are many different methods to making biochar, more can be found here and The Biochar Solution was a book recommended for learning about it more in depth. 

I hope this post was informative and if you had little to no knowledge on biochar previously then you learned something new. Have a beautiful day!

History of my life

Believe it or not, a brief summary of my life to explain why I am on this path.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of fourteen. Having two doctors for parents and being raised in an upscale city outside of Houston, Texas, this caused my relatively normal life to turn into anything but. I was put on depression medication in the seventh grade as a result of me cutting myself, and by the eighth grade I had begun to hear voices which after having my first "episode" as my parents called it, I was hospitalized for my first time and given my diagnosis. Growing up my parents were devout Christians and took me to church every weekend, I was waiting for marriage to have sex, I had never seen anyone use drugs much less done them myself, and I had no idea what was really out there. I remember the first day in the psych hospital we were informed someone had AIDS so we shouldn't be sleeping with each other which I remember being very surprised was an option for us. Afterward, I saw a girl pass out in the hallway from a heroin overdose, then after the nurses carried her to her room and put her in bed, I watched one of the boys I was in the hospital with go in her room and rape her. The other kids laughed at all of this and one of the other guys even proceeded to give him a high five once he returned. The same guy later came to me and pulled out a condom trying to convince me to go back to his room with him, me being a virgin at the time quickly said no. It was at that mental hospital that I tried a drug for the first time, visitors could bring in food and weren't searched when entering the building so the kids would have their dealers bring them in their drugs and the boys gave me some sort of pain killer that they were all taking. Meanwhile the staff read their magazines, and talked on the phone paying no attention to what was going on. We got no actual therapy, we couldn't go outside, and no one cared about us in anyway whatsoever. That is what our mental health care system is like in the United States, and no one is doing anything about it. After being hospitalized for my first time I was taken out of the eighth grade, luckily I only had a few months left of school and since I was a straight A student prior, they let me pass. My mom took six months leave off of work to take care of me because I was wildly psychotic. My doctor told my parents I needed to go to a residential treatment center. However, they called every treatment center in the United States for teens and no one would take me because everyone said I was too sick and not well medicated enough. There was only one place that said they would take me but it was $30,000 a MONTH. My psychiatrist could give my parents no other solution other than more hospitals and more meds. Hospitals made things worse, and my meds turned me more and more into a zombie. So over the next 6 months my mother patiently cared for me the best she could. My episodes would happen when the voice I heard (named Adam) would get angry with me and start screaming, in turn I would start screaming at him to stop and I remember he would hold me on the ground and send shocks of pain through my body that was the most unbearable thing I had ever experienced. All my mom could do was cry and watch me scream for about five minutes or so until he would release me and let me rest. During that time my behavior dealing with the constant mania and depression was very odd. I would get on what my mom called "missions" where I would decide all of a sudden that I was going to be a photographer, or a model, or an artist and would require the tools I needed for this and feel very passionate that this was my calling in life and beg my mom to get me what I needed. She would sweetly provide me with the things I wanted in the cheapest way possible knowing that I would get bored of it within a few hours. Every time I realized that that wasn't my calling in my life it would put me into a depression where I would be wanting to kill myself until I came up with something new I wanted to do. My parents took me to 5 different psychiatrists and multiple therapists trying to find someone who could give them a better solution because nothing was helping me get better. Doctors told them that if I lived to be 30 then I might be able to get a job at something like McDonalds and that I might get lucky enough to graduate high school, but that I would probably never go to college or live on my own. I remember even when I was at my sickest I knew in my heart that that wasn't my fate. I knew that I would be ok one day. When ninth grade started I wasn't mentally stable enough to go to a regular high school so my parents put me in this little one room school house for "troubled" teens. This is where I met my first boyfriend and lost my virginity which sent my parents over the top and caused them to decide that it was time to send me somewhere, ANYWHERE to get more help. My dad ended up having a conversation with a psychiatrist that worked in his office building about what I was going through and he told my dad about a boarding school called Excel Academy (the link will take you to an article a student wrote about her experience with the place just so you can get an idea of what kind of place this really was) where he was the psychiatrist and informed him that it was a place for troubled teens. According to him most of the kids were bipolar and he was positive they would take me. My parents thought this was a miracle and immediately went to check it out. It wasn't long before they got me in the car and drove me to this horribly deceiving place. The story of my time at Excel I won't get into but long story short, it was an extremely abusive place where I was unable to inform my parents of what was going on. Fortunately, the psychiatrist who knew my dad lowered my medicine which caused me to start having episodes and after three days of being manipulated, verbally abused, and threatened by the owner of the place she contacted my parents to let them know that she was transferring me to a wilderness program in Utah. Of course my parents immediately came and got me and took me to yet another hospital until they could get me somewhere better. I was only at Excel for about 3 months but I had nightmares about the place for the next 6 years. I went on to a treatment center in San Marcos, TX where they ran a number of tests on me including a IQ test on which I scored 156 much to everyone's surprise. Slowly I began getting more and more medicated and once I returned from San Marcos my voices were relatively controlled and I was able to function somewhat normally. When I returned home it wasn't long before my boredom and lack of emotions got me mixed up with the wrong people and I ended up on drugs. Ecstasy was the first real drug I was able to get my hands on and I remember that was the first time in the past year I had felt emotion. It was then that I decided I wanted to try more drugs so that I could feel more emotions. That was the start of my drug abuse which eventually led me getting caught with an eight ball of cocaine and an ounce of weed and putting me in juvenile. I remember that knowing that I had to be sober was the most devastating thing I had ever felt. I was put on a year of probation which made me want to kill myself, yet again, and I felt like it was the end of the world. However, that year of probation only taught me self-control. I managed to pass all of my drugs tests while still using and knowing what day I needed to stop so I could pass a test. By the time tenth grade came along I was prescribed to 23 pills a day and was still using street drugs. I attempted to go back to high school but by this time because of my medication I had gained a huge amount of weight. At fourteen I weighed 110 pounds, and by the age of 16 I weighed 200. My high school was full of gorgeous, stuck up rich girls and I was bullied to the point of tears every day. I was overweight, strung out on drugs and extremely weird, also everyone knew that I had been going to mental hospitals so everyone made it a point to let me know just how much of an outcast I was by calling me a "fat bitch" and a "freak". After coming home crying to my parents every day for a couple months and more threats of suicide my parents let me be homeschooled again. Eleventh grade I tried to go back again only to receive the same horrible treatment except this time the senior boys in my AG class thought it would be hilarious to throw me out of my desk and laugh. So again, I became homeschooled. Over the summer of eleventh to twelfth grade my parents got me weight loss surgery because they felt so bad for what I was going through. I ended up spending my senior year at an alternative school where I managed to graduate and because of my weight loss, was not bullied and made a few friends. However at this point boys became interested in me again and after all of the bullying that caused my self-esteem to completely disappear I ended up in some pretty awful relationships where I was abused and manipulated. I became pretty promiscuous in the attempt to feel good about myself, which of course in the end only made me feel worse. After a couple failed attempts at going to community college my mom met a guy at a medical meeting who owned a farm in upstate New York and invited me to come out and work on his farm. My mom thought that might be good for me and decided to send me for a couple weeks to see if I would do ok. At this point I was almost 21 and had no direction in my life whatsoever. I immediately fell in love with the animals and befriended an 600 pound pig named Ralph who I would take naps with and read children’s books to. I ended up returning to the farm after my couple weeks were up and later on decided to find another farm to intern on which led me to Oregon. I interned for this old hippie couple who didn’t believe in western meds. I remember the woman of the place telling me that she didn’t think I would need to be on medication forever and that was the first time that thought had ever crossed my mind. Upon my arrival the owner of the farm told me he needed a new calf and took me to a cattle farm to pick one out. I picked one that had only been born a few hours prior to my getting there. I named him Texan and it was my job to bottle feed and raise him. After a couple weeks Texan got very sick and needed antibiotics, however because the couple didn’t believe in western meds, wouldn’t give him any. There was a baby lamb who had the same illness and while the lamb died with no special attention, I was able to nurse Texan back to health by giving him an extensive amount of love. I held him and sang to him, talked to him and slept with him. I refused to leave his side, and over time made a slow but sure recovery. It was then that I realized the healing power of love. I decided that if I could love myself enough, I could heal myself and be free from my medication. When I returned home I got off all of my meds cold turkey without telling anyone and began a five month long process of withdrawals that included vomiting, fever, chills, and extreme lack of appetite. I made a whole new group of friends and stopped coming around my parents so that no one would know what I was going through. Then finally, after a long grueling five months of constant illness the withdrawals stopped and I felt like I had awoken from an eight year sleep. I was finally alive again, I could feel everything and I was ready to be led down whatever path was presented in front of me. After a slight detour in the wrong direction and getting pretty heavily back into cocaine for a few months, I met who is now one of my best friends who introduced the idea of “finding yourself” to me. I sobered up and took my life in this new direction. I spent the next year traveling to music festivals and being on the journey of figuring out who I was and what that even meant to find myself. I began the process of the opening of my mind. My beliefs and opinions and the way I saw the world began to change, my spiritual journey and my path to enlightenment had begun. I slowly started realizing that I wanted to do something that could make a difference in the world and the idea of wanting to build a self-sustained farm school for mentally ill children started to form. I presented the idea to my parents and they loved it. They offered to support me financially so that I could everything I needed to. I did some research and found a bunch of internships and was soon on my way to building Earthships. So this is where I’m at now, on the journey to make a difference in the mental health world. People don’t realize how messed up our system is and I am determined to do something about it. I am so grateful for my diagnosis and everything I went through because it brought me to this beautiful path I am on today and I have a pure form of happiness that a lot of people will never experience because they are chasing after it in the form of material items, money or drugs. The happiness that comes from having found purpose, that comes from doing something for someone knowing that you will receive no benefit other than the joy of seeing them smile,  that comes from knowing you are contributing to something positive, from being surrounded by uplifting people in a positive environment where you can express yourself and live a healthy lifestyle, that is the happiness I get to experience every day and my dream is to create a place where other teens that are going through what I was going through can have that too. So this blog will document everything I am learning and the adventures I am having along the way on my path to turn my dream into a reality.