Free Farmer moves to Word Press

After a couple of months of going at this first blog, I've found a better format! Free Farmer is now going to have a Word Press home:

http://freefarmer.wordpress.com/

See you there!

Villa Sobrante: Weekend 2

Second weekend at Villa Sobrante. Sasha guided us through adding a window to her cob structure - so satisfying and beautiful! We had to trim bits off of the dry cob to fit the window in the space, and I could see why it is such a great structural material - it was incredibly hard and very difficult to trim. Ron, our trained furniture maker, guided us through cutting and sanding a piece of salvaged redwood. We ended up with an arch that will serve as an aesthetic detail and will hold the soon to come bamboo rafters. The idea is to make this into a living roof afterwards.
There was a great party in the evening with many alumni and friends from the Solar Living Institute. Homemade porter, guacamole and tasty BBQ!
Today, Massey showed us her design plans for an experimental building that will be composed mostly of clay and annually renewable fiber - ie, straw & bamboo mostly. Her inspiration came from a picture of an Iraqi teahouse constructed purely of bound reeds and molded into a dome shape. We spent a few hours doing some labor heavy recycling. Massey is taking lots of old stucco from the old house on site and pounding it with a heavy hammer until it breaks into small cement gravel pieces. This is going to be reused in the foundation. Lots of work, but very respectable that Massey had the imagination to use this material on site instead of taking it to the dump. We also began splitting bamboo and forming it into a kind of bond beam for the foundation. We'll be filling it with heavy clay straw and building it up with a straw waddle later on. To be continued . . .

Robyn Francis: Regenerative Design Institute

I just spent five days in Bolinas, CA at the Regenerative Design Institute with Australia's Robyn Francis. Robyn is one of the pioneers of Permaculture and permaculture education in Australia. She has her own education center, Djanbung Gardens, and consults all over the world on various development projects, ecovillages, legislative issues related to deep ecology and much much more. There were 50 people in the workshop and they had 30 on the waitlist. I was in the presence of some truly amazing people and feel inspired and changed by the experience. I took away a lot from the workshop, but most of all I could feel that this way of living - care for earth, care for people, share of surplus (permaculture principles) - is dynamic and growing. We had attendees from across the United States, all ages, and most were quite experienced with farming, natural building, greywater, architecture, permaculture and much more . . .
I walked to the beach each day - only twenty minutes away - and saw some of California's beauty in its natural setting. Many people played instruments and brought them out for some impromptu late night improvs - drums, fiddle, accordion, mandolin, recorder, guitar and lots of singing!