Sorry it's been a minute, we've been cranking out rows and happy to be away from the computer. We manage to update our facebook page more often, here's our latest post:
Boy what a week, the charts topped a hundred degrees so we called in reinforcements. We've been working with the Aquinas Chapter of the National Honor Society for months as they've been gathering tools and supplies for the build, and now finally they got to take a little vacation and we got to see what a sixteen person crew was all about. Of course they outworked the rest of us, which left plenty of time to hop in the river and beat the heat, and it seems that some of them just didn't get enough digging done so we may be seeing more of them soon.
We reached the top of our first door form with bags, so we built another section which is cantilevered into the dome to accommodate the inward shifting wall. We also needed to dig some more clay, so we started excavating the foundation of the next twenty foot dome and we're kinda thinking it'll make a nice firepit in the meantime. The NHS folks brought tons of bags, wire, cans, buckets, nails, windows, a kitchen tent and all the rebar we needed to reinforce the walls and buttresses around the door and window. We're all set up to put in another row today, but somehow we're thinking it might be tough to transition back to a skeleton crew, you should probably just head on out whenever, plus we have pie!
For further information on earthbag building just do a simple google search, there’s a vast catalog of resources available from an active online community. Our favorite website for this kind of stuff is www.earthbagbuilding.com, our favorite YouTube channel is My Little Homestead, and here’s a beautiful photo gallery of another earthbag village concept.
Or if that’s too much homework for you, then you can check out the fictional novel Liberation’s Garden, a free download featuring earthbags, activism, and life on the reservation. Authored by one of our core members, it holds a vision for the future as we take the first steps toward bringing that vision to life.
