Phil Stevens

Flint corn and pinto beans produce well for me here, and all the better because they give me a tie back to the foodways of the place I came from. We're just getting into the cool part of the year, with two light frosts earlier this week, so it's officially soup season and I think I'll cook up a big pot of posole this weekend. I can just about live on that stuff. Complete protein, nixtamalised corn so no niacin problems, and I can just let a pot of it simmer on the wood fire all day. A good crop of chiles ripening in the glasshouse, too, so I can get the heat levels right.

Earthbag or hyperadobe is a possibility for creating a domed roof. Make a form in the shape of a catenary arch to guide the placement and the result is a very strong, durable structure. As long as it has a good weatherproof coating, of course.

Keep in mind that the temperature ratings of the different classes of wire will change if they're run through conduit, or underground, versus in free air or a cavity (plenum), and as Allen pointed out, a single cable dissipates heat more efficiently than two, three, or four in a bundle. The tables should guide you on this.

I've dabbled in cereal grains (wheat, oats, barley) and at the scale I could produce them on the land I'm working, they're just too hard for the yield. I did get a nice accidental barley harvest this past season from a load of straw I used to mulch the pinto beans. I'm guessing there will be enough at the end to make a couple weeks' worth of breakfast gruel, plus a pot or two of split pea and barley soup. But the grain that I've gone all in on is corn, especially flint corn. My mainstays are an eight-row which I think comes from a Painted Mountain line, and kaanga māori, a grunty white corn that has been grown for generations in the east coast region and looks almost exactly like Mohawk white corn (and I've got Mohawk ancestors so that's a seed line I'd like to maintain).

Corn works for me because it likes our cool summers. I do have to fend off predators at the beginning, middle, and end of the season...blackbirds will demolish every single seedling if I don't net it, sparrows eat the pollen packets off the tassels, and ripening ears are an attractive treat for rats. But in spite of these hassles, I can usually get a decent harvest. It's also easy to store and process via nixtamalisation, versus the threshing and winnowing required for wheat and similar grains.

That's the best expression of a sound and ethical model for intentional community I've seen in quite a while.

I just did two burns in the past few days using prunings, deadfall, and coppice wood that I've been accumulating since last winter. I went through about 4 cubic meters of material and got one cube of very nice biochar. Lots of willow, eucalyptus, some box elder and mimosa, and  the usual mix of natives, fruit and nut wood. Everything was nice and dry, all under 75 mm cross section and just waiting for a couple of fine days with little wind.

Since the beginning of the year I've also done eight batches in my big kontiki at a portable sawmiller's yard on the other side of the village. I'm working my way through an enormous pile of pine offcuts and have made a bit more than four cube.

Have a look in section 2.1 (Case Study):

The structural scheme is reported in Figure 2. The base structure comprises a 40 cm thick external layer of dressed limestone blocks, a 30 cm thick internal layer of similar stone construction, and a 40 cm thick core of rubble stone with lime mortar infill. The conical roof system utilizes a different configuration with external covering of chiancarelle (thin limestone slabs 3–7 cm thick), structural cannele forming concentric rings of shaped stones, and core filling of mixed stone fragments with organic materials including straw. The construction technique demonstrates remarkable sophistication in managing structural forces through geometry rather than material strength, with the conical form distributing vertical loads efficiently while thick walls provide lateral stability.

Also see passages in section 3 where they discuss the model development, particularly this bit:

The core material properties were estimated based on the heterogeneous composition documented through endoscopic analysis, with reduced stiffness values reflecting the composite nature of rubble stone, lime mortar, and organic materials

And this part of section 4.2:

Void detection within the core material revealed approximately 8% void content distributed non-uniformly throughout the structure. Higher void concentrations occur in the upper cone sections where core material consists primarily of loose stone fragments and organic matter. The base sections show lower void content due to the presence of lime mortar that provides better consolidation of rubble stone core material.

Apparently there's quite a bit of mortar down low, and then as they went higher it turned more to grass, leaves, and twigs mixed in with the rubble.

Jay Angler wrote:
I also wonder about the video's claim that the people were miserably cold in the winter. Unless wood was unavailable for heating, I would expect that the stone walls acting as thermal mass would have a very positive effect at keeping the building warm in the winter. Humans have known how to stay warm for thousands of years.  

The article talks about the thermal break provided by the infill layer, and also suggests that the organic matter incorporated in the rubble helps insulate as well. The verdict seems to be that they're comfortable enough in a Mediterranean climate. I don't think they would work in a place with serious winters.

Since I don't really have a lot of confidence in this particular Youtube channel as a primary source, I went looking and found this:

https://www.mdpi.com/2075-5309/15/17/3195

Evidently, these buildings do use lime mortar and organic matter in the infill mix. That would make them a lot more resilient when they start to shake.

Horse manure can have something even nastier and you won't know until it's too late: persistent broadleaf herbicides. Some farmers use this toxic gick on hay paddocks to kill things like dock and thistle but not grass. The hay ends up full of the stuff, and then it goes through the horses (can't be good for them either), and you can probably guess the rest of the story. I saw a friend's garden last summer after she used some free local horse poop on her beds. The plants were pretty much a total loss...it looked awful.