Walls a Plenty

My daddy always said a house aint a house without walls. Dont know if wall frames constitute walls, matter of fact they dont. But daddy would be proud I'm sure. The point of which is, um, We put the external wall frames up. Thus, with the addition of interior walls and appropriate fixings, a roof becomes a possibility. Which I would be far more likely to constitute as the defining feature of a house. However I have already stated that it is the working crapper which truly constitutes a house, and I shall stick to that. 

But it is nice to see what the view out of the windows will be, even if such windows are yet to be inserted. Actually it was pretty easy, the wall frames are really light and tech screw together easily. So... Onward, Avante!

Naked Lady VS Blast Furnace

Once I saw a lady with no clothes on, so my blast furnace in operation is not the coolest thing I have ever seen. However I have provided a couple of images for your  comparison and perusal, and I reckon you will have to admit the blast furnace is pretty danm cool. On the left is the blast furnace, and the lady with no clothes on is on the right. Just give the blast furnace a chance. Go on.

I fired up the furnace to fire the lining in order to finish it. It's called a blast furnace because you blow air in the bottom to force the fuel to burn feircly, and a jet of fire bursts from the top. Sparks fly two meters into the air. It took the thing twenty minutes to chew through a whole bag of heat beads, and when I looked in after that the interior looked like a depiction of hell. Red hot and glowing! Thus I was inspired to name my furnace as below:

The air blast was provided by a matress inflator attached to a length of thin walled tubing. The furnace will allow me to ment aluminium and zinc aluminium alloy, an in turn this will allow me to do green sand casting, which means that I can cast in metal of a similar strength to steel, anything I can make a pattern for. The benifits to an unplugger are pretty obvious, as we want to have the ability to bootstrap, or build ourselves up to an advanced level from nothing.

If you want to build a fire breathing devil, read David Gingery's "The Charcoal Foundry". Just be careful, "furnace" means "heat"! It aint called Lucifer for nothin'. Now get blasting and mind your eyebrows!

Good enough to eat

Here is the lid for my blast furnace cooking in the oven. Love those fancy handles! I need to fire this lid (metal hoop filled with refactory clay mix) so that I have it to sit atop the furnace when I fire it up for the self-firing run. This will allow me to get into greensand moulding and make my own bits for various projects.

Horay! beans are up and producing! Much less annoying than shelling peas, broad beans are definately the go.

Low Loader in the Land of Plenty

Went up to the Land Of Plenty to unload the latest shipment of house bits. Here are the steel wall panels. Also roof framing, windows and exterior doors amongst the shipment. Hmmm. The road ahead is long.  The deck is in a sorry state because I covered it with black plastic to protect it from the sun, but succeeded in creating a solar kiln which has caused the decking to heave and warp (aaaugh!) I am hoping that some decking oil will rectify things. We covered the new components in plastic and marked out on the floor where the walls are going. It's getting plenty hot in the land of plenty, and it's almost time to have local radio on (groan) to monitor bushfire warnings. Onward!

Peas to the world

My world at least. Have started to harvest the peas, got enough in the first harvest for a good family meal. Will not be challenging the pea industry just yet but it's a start!

Onions now clearly distinguishable from weeds which is nice.

Beans continue to grow, will be forming actual edible beany beans very soon

What a difference a bit o water makes. These critters show up every year. I assume they're hanging out somewhere we cant see in winter but tis spring here so they're getting more visible ATM. Great for eating flies (Australia, mate) and generally showing the health of the garden, frogs are a litmus test for life friendly gardening. Western Green Tree Frog, or motorbike frog, if you're interested. Here we have Him and Her, respectively.

Big Deck Man

Progress on the kit home: I shot up to the land of plenty with Bret and got most of the deck done in three days. The character of the house is starting to emerge. It is slowly starting to dawn on me that after all this building is done I will have an actual house here. Here is Bret as we near 3/4 of the deck down and dusted. Looks bonza I reckon. There's a man who's earned some beers on the deck in the Land Of Plenty. Pretty hard to get started on a job like this with one row (or less) of decking 2 1/2 meters off the ground, but it would've been an absolute horror show doing it alone. I'm right on track for the rest of the house to be delivered and that will be a milestone! Had the compost dunny(toilet) delivered a couple o days ago. Once that dunny is in I'm calling it a house. Pretty hot in the Land Of Plenty, which makes decking thirsty work, but the solar system will lap it up. Of course we could also burn fallen timber in a steam engine for power: Check out this post from factorefarm about modern, open source steam: http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/2010/09/cyclone-technologies/  

                                                           
Wandoo View.  Good venue for a summer get together I reckon. With the addition of a railing. And a house.             

The Evil Beak Bird

Ok so here I am wondering, like a poor naive fool, what kind of rodent is burrowing into my corn mounds (see previous post). It's really getting to me and I'm contemplating what kind of small rat or large mouse is doing it and thereby causing all my mounds to dry out. Secretly I am blaming the unseen plague of super-rodent on the non germination of my three sisters corn crop which has put out one measly seedling. But I am unprepared for the horror of meeting my nemesis, the Evil Beak Bird, from the swamp down he road, who is shoving his satanic beak into my garden beds to get at the buggy and wormy compost within. Shouting at him works temporarily, and he flies lazily away, not even respectful enough to put up a good show of flight response. To my shame he returns within an hour with a mate, to feast upon my soil life and disturb the innocent corn seeds within. That night I am awoken by the taunting honk of the Evil Beak Bird as he  and some hanger-on relative devour my compost critters. I resist the temptation to run outside in my underwear, yelling in a shrill feminine voice. But I do not forget. I plot. I scheme. Deep in the recesses of my shamed and troubled mind I hatch a plan to protect my corn. The next morning I erect this brilliant scheme, an invisible force field made of fishing line, designed to freak the freak of that freakin' Evil Beak Bird. I imagine him swooping in for a free feed, graceful until he is rebuffed by my scheme. Perhaps he gets his foot stuck and flaps pathetically, the laughing stock of bird life throughout the neighborhood. I can sleep easily now, awaiting the germination of my corn safe in the knowledge that evil is at bay.

In Print

Hey I'm published. On paper, that is. You know, the fibrous stuff that your printer spits out. The Zine is Loose Leaf, and you can get it here and read my article here. Unplug the masses! get them yanking their pins out of the wall!

green shoots and greensand

Corn's up! Course just the one plant, the other 40 or so are no shows. Too early? Inappropriate planting for climate? Who knows. We shall overcome, I'll dig a mound up tomorrow and see if I can find any seeds. maybe they rotted. Also I have been constructing a small charcol furnace: here's me ramming the refactory lining into the bucket I'm using for the furnace body. This should fireproof it and after I've made the lid out of the same fireproof furncace clay I should be able to fire it up to fire the lining, then melt some aluminium and do some greensand casting, a useful skill for unpluggers everywhere. Slowly though, I have to do this in between building a  house!

New Life!

Hazzah, spring is here, and with it the new peas. Don't they have beautiful flowers? More new life soon, tis the season. Still waiting for my corn to come up! Time to get your vegies in here in the southern hemisphere.

The weedy truth

Want to unplug? It  means unplugging from all sorts of things, including the agrochemical industry. That means no weed killer, not a  bad thing considering the junk that stuff may leave in the soil. Feel some permaculture coming on? Fair dinkum. Here's the space between the beans and the peas. Weedy as all getout. Now I could weed the area and clear it, but blank real estate just invites more weeds.

In organic growing you have to think differently.  You need to stop excluding the weeds from the garden in your thinking, because the weeds are  a part of the garden's ecosystem. Then you need to consider them as separate elements and consider what inputs and outputs they have. Well inputs are sunlight, space, water, nutrients and outputs are foliage, thorns, and seeds. Ive chosen to leave most of the weeds but pull the bindi because it's the one which spreads and has the output of thorns whereas the others don't. The other stuff actually has some useful outputs: it occupies real estate to muscle out the bindi, sucks sunlight to shade out any bindi which might  get in and actually provides some green manure for the soil when you uproot it and dig it in. In addition, funny enough I have been whinging about not having enough vegetative matter for my compost whilst whining about having too many weeds in the garden. A classic permaculture solution is to mate the two problems to gain a solution- foliage for the compost.

Of course this is not a perfect solution, the diabolical onion weed (boo, hiss) is still a problem but use of poisons (inputs: chemicals, industry, lots of energy, outputs: waste, money for fatcats, poisoned soil, interrupted eco systems) is just going to kill everything and leave the ground blank for more weeds to invade and, of course, necessitate more poison. Seems to be how it usually works with corporate agriculture, or corporate anything. Silly fatcats are too fat to get out into the garden and discover that nature is more interesting than money!

kit home

Here's me working on the house. I drive up to Toodyay every week and work, eat, work, work, work and sleep. And work. It's taken three months to get to here, working three days a week. I have now finished the floor and tomorrow will do the decking timber.It's called platform construction: first the floor and floor coverings then the walls and roof. So all that should be done tomorrow or soon. Then it's waiting for the rest of the house to be delivered in October. Hopefully I might get the roof on before summer and 40 degrees arrives. Eventually it'll be a three bedroom house with 50 square meters of deck at bird level in the forest, 130000 liter water tank and compost toilet.
 I'm loving the experience and its going to be a pretty, strong house. Really well insulated against hot Toodyay summers and it'll look great. The problem is it's really expensive, unnecessarily complex and quite toxic. Floor coverings, adhesive and insulation contain formaldehyde, steel conducts heat necessitating full on insulation which is plastic, and you need a whole bucket of completely different skills from foundation placing to plaster boarding. It's no different from any other contemporary housing in terms of expense, complexity and toxicity but I think I can do better with earth construction, and that's what I will be looking at for my ultimate unplugging experience in the future. Much cheaper, like a twentieth if the cost, non toxic, sturdy and beautiful. But one thing at a time, for now it's the steel kit. Bonza!

Look what I found on the roof

Just had these installed. An unplugger classic, and you can't get any more classic colouring than black. Australia had an $8000 rebate on panels so now we're generating and selling power back to the grid, no batteries needed. Only generates 1.36 likowatts which is 1/3 of our power but solar panels are a good thing to have in an emergency, (not so good without batteries but there you go) and we could always haul them up the hill to the uncompleted house in the land of plenty (toodyay)   Good-o!

The big little picture

Here is a wide shot of my main garden space. Chickens up the back on the right, peas trained on the fence.Beans next to the chickens, garlic on the right up the front, and two beds of onions  which are a bit hard to see, one next to garlic in the front and one in front of the beans. New three sisters planting on the back left. Went out and did a bit of weeding this morning, just a couple of rows to keep up with the little buggers . Good-o!

Virgin Post

Prepared a bed and planted the corn for a "three sisters" crop today. Yes it's not pretty but its about food not garden shows! under each hump is a good shovel of compost. I have grown all these before- corn, pumpkin and beans- but never in this companion planting context so it should be interesting. They're supposed to help each other along when planted together, I'll be putting in the beans when the corn is 4 inches high.

I have a feeling that the raised beds are more appropriate for clay soil and that the humps will actually make evaporation a nightmare here in Western Australia, with sandy soil and 45 celcius in the summer. As I ws finishing I thought next time I'll do the opposite and bury the compost in holes: we will see.