cob Archives - Midwest Permaculture

Natural Building Workshop Successful

Hello All. Our natural building workshop this weekend was a great success.

Hassan Hall, our natural-builder friend from Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage, taught a great hands-on class this past weekend here at Midwest Permaculture.

Hassan in building flanked by Justin and Will

Everything was ready to start the next phase of construction on the first of 9-small earth shelters we have planned for EarthCamp Village. It was now time to put the rough coat (or base coat) of earthen ‘plaster’ on to the walls of clay-slip-straw that had been packed in last fall. Continue reading “Natural Building Workshop Successful”

Dry Brick Rocket Stove Maple Evaporator

Greetings…

At the last minute this winter we decided to tap our mature maple tree (just one tap) and boil off some sap to make a small amount of maple syrup. I was equally interested in building an experimental rocket stove as an evaporator with the materials I had on hand. It worked great!

With some landscaping bricks, a dutch oven and a bit of home-made cob we had our stove chugging along in about an hour… maple syrup in 5 hours. 3+ gallons of sap made 1 cup. of syrup. Here are some pictures:

Built by stacking the dry bricks into a chimney and burn chamber. Sap is boiling. All smoke is just the steam from the dutch oven evaporator.

I built the stove by dry stacking (no mortar) the bricks to form a chimney and burn chamber. We nestled the dutch oven in to serve as the top of the burn chamber so it would receive direct flames for a hot, rapid boil.

Continue reading “Dry Brick Rocket Stove Maple Evaporator”

EarthCamp Village

Why ‘EarthCamp’ Village is part of This Permaculture Design

In William McDonough’s book, Cradle-to-Cradle, he talks about the importance for us as humans to reexamine the way we build our homes and other structures/buildings. The big question is, how much waste and pollution is generated while building, maintaining and finally demolishing our structures? It is about 40% of the entire waste stream of “civilized” cultures.

Our objective in building EarthCamp Village is to see how close we can get to creating structures that last a very-long time but create and generate very-little waste or CO2.

Timber Framing Done -EarthCamp Village - Aug.2013

The timber framing for the cob cabin is up…!!! The first structure for EarthCamp Village

Click Here for Picture Summary of the Building of Earth-Shelter #1

Continue reading “EarthCamp Village”

Pictures from our July 2012 PDC Completion Course

You can see and read more about our PDC Completion Course in an awesome blog post by one of the students in the course: These Light Footsteps – Permaculture Design Course Completion.

Wayne & Bev’s rocket stove mass heater

Continue reading “Pictures from our July 2012 PDC Completion Course”

The Chicagoland Permaculture Meetup Builds a Rocket Stove

This Labor Day weekend the Chicagoland Permaculture Meetup traveled to Woodstock, IL to build a rocket stove. Here’s a time lapse video I made of what went on the first day.

In case you it went by too fast for you in the video or you, I’ve pulled out some of the pictures from the video and posted them below.