Jonathan Alspaugh

If your going for soil bacteria count I'd say consider inoculation. There are ones you can buy but who wants to buy? I like to take soil from various places like the woods, organic gardens, and wherever seems good. I mix that soil into my gardens by simply throwing it about before or during sheet mulching. I'd imagine it could be mixed in a potting mix also. Hope that helps, I don't do many plants in pots yet, I mostly just try to concentrate "energy" by putting whatever I find as far as biomass together.

Depends on if she has been growing up with tv or not. I find that kids who grow up on tv don't tend to like to read. Does she have interest in cooking?  If not I'd go for something to inspire interest in cooking. Maybe a story of a cook. I read a book on Pho once, it was in story format and kept my interest till the end.

So we were building a bathroom. We used bricks, cement/mortar for the foundation but didn't dig the trench deep or anything, mostly just did it right on top of the sand. So for the walls we were mixing straw with mortar and that works great. We ran out of mortar so we switched to clay/sand/straw in various ratios. Mostly clay and straw. We were sandwiching this mix nicely between chicken wire. About 2 inches thick with the intention to coat it in a nice layer of clay at the end. Weekend goes by and we go back out to work on it to find mold and sprouts on our wall. We don't know mold was a cob issue and opted to halt all production for a moment till we figure it out. Should we remove all the portions of the wall that contain clay and just stick with the mortar and straw mix? Also it should be noted that the 8 by 8 structure has 4 4by4s as the corner posts and a few horizontal 2x4s as cross beams. Some of the clay/straw is just resting on horizontal 2x4s as the base. This is our first earth build. Is the mold a temp problem or a long term re occurring nightmare?
Would it be bad to connect the clay to the foundation or just have it suspended on the 2x4s and build with mortar up to it?

The earth it's on is sand.
The weather can be as high as 100 in the summer and down to the 20's in the winter, most other days are 70s and 80s.