Jesse Martin

I live in an earthbag house near Utley, Tx.  The walls are about 16-18 inches thick with the plaster on.  Our winters are generally pretty mild (this last snow historic snow storm excepted), and our summers are brutal and miserable.  Think  90% of the humidity you would associate with Houston or New Orleans but without the regular afternoon showers to break the heat.  I would have to say that my earthbag home is very comfortable in my climate.  
For summer cooling:  The house is sunk into the ground on a slight hill.  The bedroom is about three feet below grade, the other side of the house only about a foot.  The ceilings are over ten feet high, which helps a lot as well.  A great deal of our warm season cooling comes from keeping the front door open (sometimes with the screen sometimes without depending on the bugs) all night whenever the night time lows are going to be below 65 or so, which will happen often enough up through May or so.  The cool air passively pours into the house which is the lowest spot it can go, and cools the walls and tile floor in the process.  I also have a box fan that I hang in front of the front door, it definitely looks silly but I can blow the hot air out the south less bermed side, and open the bathroom door on the north side and draw cooler air from the perpetually cooler back porch.  All that being said I still have two window unit ACs, one for the whole house minus the bed room, and one just for the bedroom.  With some lifestyle and ventilation adjustments I think we could get on without them if we really had to but when the low for the night is 80 degrees and the humidity so high it'd be a stretch.  Think an 80 degree fog, yuck!
For winter heating:  There is a greenhouse attached to the front of the house, inspired by earthships but not quite as integrated as that.  Most of my windows face out into the greenhouse.  During the heating season I simply turn my fan around and blow hot air from the greenhouse into the house.  It doesn't work as well for heating as it does for cooling since the heat wants to rise, but it still makes a very appreciable impact with very little electricity usage. The other form of active heating we have is one little space heater and one electric blanket.  The bedroom is tucked into the earth deep enough that heating it has never been too much of an issue.  When we had our historic winter storm last month we lost power for three days in temps ranging from 5-25 degrees with no sunshine and six inches of snow on top of the greenhouse roof.  That was easily the toughest test our home as a survival tool has ever faced.  It was not uncommon for it to be below freezing inside the homes of people in our neighborhood, but when the electricity finally came on briefly and I could turn on the space heater to see what it's thermometer read we only got down to 49 inside!  Still unpleasant, but no broken pipes.  As a bonus, our water tanks are higher than all the end use points, so once I thawed the one foot of pipe that was above ground the water gravity fed through the filters and we had water again too even when the electricity was still spotty.  
There are two things I would say that have limited the comfort level.  The first was humidity.  I was advised by people on this site to not put any sort of vapor barrier or plastic in, under, or around my earthbags, even below grade.  I am very glad that I listened!  The house was unfinished when hurricane Harvey dumped a foot of rain on us and blew all the tarps off, but everything dried out just fine in the sun.  Another time before the floor was finished and everything was graded outside a pile of dirt for construction blocked a drain in the driveway and caused a waterfall to come flowing down the steps and left an inch of mud near the stairs.  Still very annoying and prevented me from tiling the floor until everything could dry out, but not a disaster because everything could freely drain into the rubble and french drain underneath.  All that being said there have been some humidity issues, especially in the back, north east corner with the bedroom so far below grade.  At one point our furniture in there started getting moldy!  The house is square, and the straight walls have five foot buttresses, which means that I already had at least five feet of overhang on all sides.  I added an extra 8 feet of porch on the north side and an extra four on the east and that has all but solved the humidity issues.  We still have a dehumidifier in the bedroom but it's almost never used.  The second thing that has limited the house's performance is draftiness.  It all comes down to how well you build those window and door forms at the beginning of the build.  The windows were very easy to install, and if something wasn't quite square, just cob it up!  The doors however, were a different story.  Have you ever tried to fit a rectangular object into an opening that is just a touch of a rhombus?  Our door forms shifted during the build, not enough for us to notice at the time, but painfully obvious when it was time to put the doors in.  There are three normal doors and one sliding glass door into the greenhouse.  The glass door I had to chip and chop away at the earthbags to get into place, and the other three I had to frame up and are still very drafty.  It's bad enough that when the weather is a touch warmer later this year I'm just going to take two of the doors out completely and cob up the openings.  Done with the drafts!
Hope some of this helped!

Greetings,
I have some suggestions on how you could do your earthbag house a bit cheaper.  I live in central texas and did an earthbag build that took almost three years from foundation to move in, and I can definitely say I learned some things along the way.  First off, the bags:
https://bagsupplies.ca/products/tube-netting-rolls-hiperadobe-superadobe/
I used these bags, and I believe that the cost for one km of bags after shipping (from Canada to TX) was just shy of $200 dollars and I ended up needing one and a half rolls for a 25x25 ft house with all the necessary buttressing etc.  
Below is a picture when the build was getting close to finished.

I would highly recommend using those bags as 1) you can make a run of earthbags as long as you need without seams, 2) cheaper than solid bags, 3) much easier to plaster, 4) no need to buy barbed wire.  Because the bags are mesh they allow the earth to extrude a bit, so one layer locks into the one below it naturally when you tamp it.  Another upside is if something goes wrong you can easily tear into the bags, dump out the dirt and redo it.  Hurricane Harvey dumped about sixteen inches of rain on my earthbag house before it was plastered and blew off all the tarps I tried to use to protect it.  Because of the buttressing none of the main walls fell or slumped, and only a few of the buttresses partially failed.  All in all it was probably $10-15 worth of bags and one days worth of solo labor to fix it all.  So I highly recommend.
I have three eastern red cedar trunks holding up the interior of the ceiling and roof, and all the interior rooms were made with cordwood that was stacked with the same earth mix that made the house plus some added straw.  I found doing cordwood inside was very fast and cheap.  Because the cordwood is not load bearing I could stack it as fast as the cob would dry, and within three days I had all my interior walls built for a truly negligible amount of money (probably $20 worth of purchased mixed dirt and straw).  

Things I did that made the build more expensive:
1) Going underground.  Its very hot in my part of Texas (a wet heat but without the regular thunderstorms found further east) so we went three feet underground to try to deal.  It's wonderful on the first cool days of fall to open the doors and have the cool air come pouring down the steps into the house.  However, that meant that I had to pay for excavation, and I had to add lime to my first three and a half feet of earthbags to stabilize it against moisture.  That ended up adding a lot of time to the build process and as they say time is $$.  The lime wasn't free either.  
2) High ceilings.  There is no municipal water where I live and the well water is known to not be the cleanest or smell the best, so I have a rainwater system.  However, that meant that the lowest point on my roof had to be higher than the highest point of my rainwater tanks, which meant I had to build my walls higher than I had first planned by an extra two feet or more.  Lifting those heavy buckets of dirt above your head all day will give you some great shoulder muscles but it is also time consuming drudgery.  

If I had to do it all again, I would build much smaller, not set it in the ground as deep, and do it in stages so there wouldn't have been such a rush to the finish.  Hope this helps!

I have planted several pecans and walnuts, as well as encouraged several volunteer hickories in my budding food forest in central TX. Some portions of my soil are shallow and rocky, and the heat is ubiquitous throughout most of the year; so heavy mulching is a necessity. During the fall months there are more bags of leaves waiting for me on the side of the road than one could ever use, so I have my choice of what types of leaves to mulch with during this time.

My question then is whether I would be better off mulching with leaves of the same species (or family) that I will be putting the mulch around? That is vs the cedar elm, hackberry, and live oak leaves that are also commonly available.

I see a few distinct advantages as well as some drawbacks to this strategy. On one hand all these leaves can be assumed to contain at least a trace amount of Juglone, which would be helpful in inhibiting weed competition if only a small amount. The other advantage is that it stands to reason (rather unscientifically) that if these leaves fell from pecans then they must contain the nutrients that a pecan would need in order to build leaves and thrive.  The downside to this method as far as I see it would be that any diseases found on these mature pecans would be brought and hand placed right where they would need to be to spread to my saplings.

So what have y'all found on this issue?

A nitrogen fixer could always be helpful, though 1/10th an acre limits the choices. I would just caution you to be mindful of the plant's natural habitat. Citrus and figs both being tropical and subtropical will appreciate a lot of sun. That being said, neither of those plants have evolved defenses against juglone, which the pecan is producing. I have read that persimmons are tolerant of it though. So I'd steer clear of that pecan as much as possible.
Best of luck!