David Grizzle

We have two types of bike trailers.
The black one shown is about 25 years old. This same same model is still sold and costs around $60 on sale.  The great thing about this one is that the attachment bar is the right height for it to be comfortably pulled by hand so it's often used by itself for moving material around the garden or on the beach when we collect seaweed. The wheels finally rusted out last year so I've now replaced them with wheels from a kids bicycle.

My favorite trailer was made by mounting a wooden flat bed to a child carrier trailer chassis.  It has the original child carrier "hitch" that is secure and easy to connect. It is the main one I use now because it is very stable and can carry longer material.  I have a Sketchup drawing of it if anyone is interested. The long roll I'm carrying in the photo is a swimming pool cover I bought at the used material store, it will be the thermal curtain in my greenhouse.

As far as free camping, you can find 100's of free camp spots in Denmark on the website udinaturen.dk or with the app shelterapp.dk. Many of the places have a small shelter that you can sleep in and some even have water and an outhouse.

I have talked with a natural builder from Northern Germany that has used radiant wall heating in many projects. His company has lots of construction photos on their website, here are a couple of the projects where the  PEX tubing can be seen.

http://www.naturbau-angeln.de/stamer/
http://www.naturbau-angeln.de/kaehler-friedrichsstadt/

The plaster the PEX with clay so there's no need for the heat spreading fins.

Hi Christian,
I just ran across this thread and thought I'd tell you about my experience/ observation.
My garden was originally a mill pond but around 10 years ago it was filled in with in very heavy clay soil and thus the drainage is terrible and the ground soggy much of the year. I'm in the process of building a small house with attached greenhouse in my garden and was very worried about drainage. Therefore I dug a 70 cm deep french drain (with 100mm perf drain pipe and gravel) all the around. The french drain can drain away from my garden to lower ground. The area under the house is dug out to a depth of 40 cm for insulation and I was concerned it would fill with water but it is actually staying very dry there. Now I'm even considering skipping the capillary breaking gravel layer. I had expected the french drain would also drain the water a certain distance outside the drain but not so. Even 0.5 m outside of the french drain is still just as soggy as before.
I'm using a point foundation with precast cement carport stolpers (posts?)  sitting on top of 40x40 cement fliser (pavers). Not very green but I was concerned with wooden posts rotting. Now that I see how well the french drain is working, I think a rubble trench foundation with embedded wood posts might have been OK and would certainly have been less expensive.

On a side note, when I moved to Denmark 8 years ago, the $50 and up book was one of the dozen books I brought with me. Even though I'm not building so cheaply and simply on my current project, it has been like a roll model for me and helps me remember to think about how I can build with less. And when I have B&B guests that are interested in natural building, debt free living, green transition, and similar, Mike Oehlers $50 and Up book is one that I often show them.

Regards,
David  

Hi Skandi,

Sorry for the late reply. I was looking through an old stack of papers today and ran across a pamplet from the forening Frøsamlerne , which means "the seed savers association". I had visited their booth at a permaculture festival back in 2014 and on the cover of the pamplet I had written the word "Yacon". They had a table at their booth with various interesting produce, one of which was yacon. I was and still am interested in yacon but haven't yet taken the effort to get it yet.

I just had a quick look at the frøsamlernes website and see that they had two members offering yacon in their 2017 list.
http://www.froesamlerne.dk/sites/default/files/%20%20Fr%C3%B8listen%202017%2C%20uden%20udbydere.pdf

There's also an article on yacon in the book "Permakulturhaven"  and on the havenyt.dk site is some info and nice photos.
I'd be interested to hear if you find a source. I'm on the island Als so quite a ways South from you (I'm at 55 deg N).

Regards,
David  

Hi Jocelyn,
When I said shoveling, I was referred to how I imagined they did it years ago when this building was still in regular use.  But that was only a guess based on how big and deep the pit was. I'd also guess that that particular outhouse had been sitting unused for at least 20 years or probably much longer.  When I visited that area i August, I saw other compost toilets that were in everyday use. I even had the privilege of seeing a person carrying and dumping poo buckets from another nearby outhouse onto a compost pile. I was only there for a 3 day festival so don't  know anything more than that about their system.

Hi,
This is my first post on Permies. After I read the posts about 2 holers, I felt compelled to share photos of this one, a 18 hole outhouse I encountered in rural Finland. It's at a school that's still in use but the outhouse hadn't been used for who knows how long.
In the photo, you can only see 4 seats, there are another two to the right just out of view. The red thing on the left is a urinal. Sharing the same large pit are another 12 holes on the other side of the building, which are divided into 3 rooms. In earlier times, all the goodies fell into the pit and then would be shoveled out when needed.  For me, it was a moving experience to stand in the pit, look up at all the holes, and think about how it must have been when they all 18 holes were in use.
When I was there in August, the pit was amazingly clean and was being used for storage. We set containers under 3 of the holes so it could be used as a composting toilet during a festival. Along the front edge of these three holes, we added a common urine diverter. The diverter was made from some scrap metal formed like a rain gutter.