We’ll be working to transform one corner of our big shed, the beginnings of a larger retrofit.  We’ll be using multiple natural building techniques: dry stack stone, lime pointing, earth-bag/superadobe, cob, and setting bottle windows.

You can come for some or all of the working bee – it’s up to you. Attendance is free, but bookings are essential – go here for more info or here to contact us and register your interest.

Elliot is already a trained log-cabin builder and carpenter and you can see epic pictures of his builds on his website www.multicraftcreations.com. Including images from TerraGora Lodges in France, where he has been most recently employed. Elliot has a huge year ahead: he’s just about to begin studying for a Certificate in Sustainable Building and Design, plus his Permaculture Design Certificate at the highly-esteemed natural building school, Yestermorrow, in the US, this autumn. He’s also learning good land stewardship through soil and water conservation from the The Soil & Water Conservation District Technician of Ashland County, Robert Kerr. Immediately after Yestermorrow, Elliot will complete a short apprenticeship to gain arborist training with Aaron Tree and Lawn Inc. Lucky us, because with all these newly acquired skills, Elliot is coming to Tasmania, at the end of 2013 and will work with OzEarth for a good dose of 2014!

Training at Yestermorrow will cost Elliot a bunch – $7,299.00 to exact. This covers lodging, some meals and all classroom time; not his textbooks. OzEarth has committed to matching all donations toward Elliot’s training up to $1,500.00. Donations can be made through his GoFundMe account, and we’d love all you guys to chip in, pleaseeeeee!!! Help this gentle, fun, skilled, generous guy pay for his schooling – even if you can only afford 10 bucks – lots of contributions all add up to an awesome education and an awesome future!

http://www.multicraftcreations.com/GoFundMe.html

OzEarth is delighted to announce several upcoming courses.

on 18-22 April, we’ll be running a 3 metre dome build just outside our home town of Cygnet Tasmania, Australia.  Get in quick – places for this one are extremely limited.  Go here for more information.

Starting in late August, we’ll be building a barrel oven for the Okines Community Garden in Dodges Ferry, Tasmania, Australia.  Go here for information on the adobe / cob working bee (31 August) oven building weekend (26/27 October) and introduction to lime (Sun 17 November) courses that will be run to complete this process.  In partnership with the Okines community, we’re able to offer places for these workshops at a significant discount (the working bee is free!), so get in quick before they’re all snapped up!

We’re also very excited to be hosting a workshop being run by David Spicer and Danial Lawton of Permaculture Tools.  This workshop will run for five days in September, and will focus on Rural Skills and Sharp Hand tools.

Here’s what we started with:

(we attended the Channel Living workshops where the trusses were made, and another where the trusses and purlins were raised, so C and I are both happy and proud!)

In the week leading up to the workshop, we built four bottle cutting jigs out of timber milled from our land (with the generous technical and workshop support of lovely fellow Cygnetian, Graham), cut about 100 bottles for bottle windows, prevailed upon our friendly local tip shop mate (that’s you, Clare!) to find washing machine windows (she found – and donated – two!), harvested and prepared about 20 staves (the upright round timber in a wattle and daub wall) and 600 withies (the thinner horizontal bits in same), and, (on a day when, slightly to our alarm, winds reached 150km per hour) we drilled out and framed up the battens for all four rear wattle and daub walls, and wove one of the four panels of withies as a demonstration.

About 30 adults and between 5 and 8 kids attended the workshop. We gave the participants a taste of earthbag, cob, wattle and daub and bottle wall techniques. It was a fantastic, intense and highly productive weekend during which we managed to complete a 12m seating bench and raise all the walls of the classroom!

Structure at the end of day 1

Walls and bench nearing completion on day 2 – all hands on deck!

More photos can be found here.

We’re so pleased and proud, and (after another bit of prep this week) we’re running a lime rendering and pointing workshop tomorrow to weatherproof and finish the structure. More photos to come!

Here are some snaps; enjoy

If you’d like one of these of your own, or if you perhaps want to run a workshop at your property or business, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Garden Shelter

On Tuesday this week the Grade 2/3, 3/4 and 5/6 classes participated in a Sustainable Building Workshop to begin construction of the walls in the garden shelter. Tuesday’s workshop on ‘cob’ was the first of 3 workshops that will be held over the next few months.
The students had a fantastic time and all worked exceptionally well. Activities included digging the foundations for the walls, moving and laying heaps and heaps of rock, creating a clay pit and filling and positioning the first bags ready for the next workshop.

Chloe and Helen who run the workshops both commented (several times)
on how impressed they were with the student’s efforts. Some of the students thought it was the ‘best gardening class – EVER!’. Others asked (several times) if they could ‘please come to the next class’.
A big thanks to Helen and Chloe for their great work with the students, and to Zoe Magnus who came along and helped for the day.

St James project

The structure of the pizza oven at St James is almost complete (just waiting on doors from the welding shop); then it’s a matter of filling in the gaps to the benches on either side, rendering / mortaring our little hearts out, and: job done.

Albums of the St James project can be found here, here and here

Power from the sun

It’s been a long process with a lot of course changes and a HUGE amount of learning, but our tiny solar array is finally up and working. What this means is that we no longer need to visit Cygnet to charge computers or phones, or buy perishables. We are stoked!

Our heartfelt thanks to Joe of Joe’s Greenhouses, Alan Marshall our lovely neighbour, Matthew at Eastern Shore Batteries, and Gerard (more than just a gun guitarist!). Thanks also to Dave Holland, who has given us a small, very good 12v DC fridge on long loan.

Polytunnel

Joe, as well as solar-empowering us, has also put up a 9m polytunnel at OzEarth HQ. It’s a thing of beauty:

You can find a whole album of the process here

NEIS

OzEarth now has a business plan: we hadn’t really thought a huge amount about it, but we got the opportunity to enter the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, and being shepherded through the process of developing a business plan is part of the deal. Once complete, the business plan is assessed for quality, as well as believable and healthy financial projections, and if it adds up, you earn both a Certificate IV in Business Management and a place in the Scheme.

So we’ve done that, and OzEarth was accepted onto the scheme last Monday. For a year we get various kinds of mentoring and support – it’s really going to help get OzEarth off to a great start.

The flip side

It hasn’t all been plain sailing: rats ate our car, which was a bit of a shock, but again, we’ve been able to call on a neighbour for help, which makes us feel great about the resilience of our life up the Hill – so many cool resourceful people up this way!!

“Look at all these bricks!” the teacher said to me, and, unable to resist temptation, I said mournfully, “Yep, we made every single one of them all by ourselves.”

“Really!” she said, shocked.

“Well, no. We had a working bee and fifty people showed up to help.”

She went from looking gobsmacked to awed. “Fifty,” she repeated.

“Yep, amazing isn’t it?”

“Wow. But you know, that really speaks to the yearning that people feel for this, for community.”

Check that out: she said yearning. How could I respond except with “True!”

“I really think the tide has turned, don’t you?”

What an excellent person!! As to the turning of the tide: at least in Cygnet and surrounds, it has. I can tell, because I have this kind of conversation at least a couple of times each week with the gorgeous people we’re surrounded by here

10-Week Women’s Earthbag Dome Building Apprenticeship in Canada

Lillooet, British Columbia, July 28-October 6, 2012

Kleiwerks International’s Women of the Americas Sustainability Initiative (WASI) is hosting a 10-week, hands-on natural building Apprenticeship that brings together a group of women apprentices with an experienced team of earthbag builders and native St’at’imc community members. Their project is to construct a Healing & Cultural Arts Centre near Lillooet, BC. This training immersion provides participants with the opportunity to learn construction while building a dome from start to finish, develop leadership skills through facilitating local groups, work side-by-side with a community that is creating culturally appropriate local solutions, and document the story to share with wider audiences.

Ideal participants are women who have follow-up projects, intend to share what they learn, want to work in the natural building trades and be part of the growing natural building movement. “This apprenticeship is a unique opportunity for participants to delve into earthbag construction while building the envisioned creative cultural community commons with the people of T’it’qet and Lillooet who are engaged in proactively creating a vibrant future by combining traditional St’at’imc culture and values with refined sustainable and ecological solutions,” says Susannah Tedesco, local Program Coordinator.

Today’s building industry uses half of our planet’s resources, yet healthy, time-tested, affordable and soulful construction alternatives exist. These alternatives are based on reclaiming and refining the use of local and recycled materials. Coupled with indigenous knowledge and Permaculture design systems, natural building plays a profound role in creating a way of life that is good for people and the planet.

Instructors Fox McBride and Chloe Wolsey are teaming up for the first time, combining their extensive and global earthbag dome construction backgrounds. WASI Delegate Christine Jack is a Nlaka’pamux First Nations leader who resides in St’atimc Territory near Lillooet, BC. Guest Instructors, The Mudgirls are a network of natural builders from BC. WASI Coordinator, Susannah Tedesco, is devoted to rural grassroots initiatives that empower communities to create viable local living solutions.

Women of the Americas Sustainability Initiative (WASI) is an alliance of women leaders who construct, educate, organize, and advocate for strong and empowered communities through ecological design-build practices with the aim of creating a socially and ecologically resilient world.

For details or to apply visit: http://www.kleiwerks.org/wasi-canada-earthbagdome-apprenticeship-2012/. There are 12 seats available. The fee is $3,600, including tuition, meals, lodging and field trips.

A cast of dozens

60 members of the local and even international community turned up at St James College in Cygnet to be part of our working bee. We had babies, toddlers, kids and adults; people came from Cygnet, Franklin, Ranelagh, Lonnavale, Hobart, Italy and from as far as Auroville, India! This amazingly willing, jolly and hard-working bunch plunged into mixing and sculpting cob immediately – at one point we had seven mixing tarpaulins in use simultaneously! It was incredible.

It’s a muddy job, but someone’s got to do it.

The exercise was successful beyond our wildest hopes – the weather was absolutely gorgeous from 15 minutes before kickoff to 15 minutes after hometime. everything we hoped to do got done and then some: we finished the final short-straw cob render on the 7.5m curved seating bench; we built the entire prep bench from long-straw cob; we made 102 adobes for the construction of the pizza oven; and, because we had such a huge and enthusiastic turnout, Marcus (the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden co-ordinator) raided his own stock of foundation stones so that we could put up a 3m stone and cob retaining wall behind the 7.5m bench.

Penny Milburn, local Permaculture guru

We met some amazing folks (a natural building architect in training and a hydroelectric and offgrid solar specialist were among them – how much do we love networking?) and hung out with some lovely friends (including past workshop participants Penny and Kate, Permaculture afficionado / cob expert respectively), Zoe Magnus, one of the authors of the outstanding Channel Living vege box scheme, and Matt and Sadie of Gourmet Farmer fame – to name but a few).

Kate

In case we haven’t mentioned it before, we’ve been making a cob pizza oven, two huge cob / stone / earthbag seating benches and a foodprep bench at St James’s Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden. The pizza oven is inspired by Firespeaking’s innovative design: it uses a 55 gallon drum as the oven. The fire is underneath and separate, meaning it doesn’t need to be moved or removed from the oven before baking; it also super-heats the oven to baking temperatures in 20 minutes or less. That will make baking fresh pizzas, sour-dough bread, cakes and even roasts far faster and far safer than many earth oven designs.

Roy and daughter Boe

We got involved because we love the idea behind the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden scheme – educating kids about great, fresh, local food. It fits right in with everything OzEarth is about – building local resilience, food-security, enjoying and helping each other in fun, community-building ways.

The area will soon be under a beautiful timber roof, so that whatever the weather, pizza parties can be taking place. Sour-dough and yoghurt-making workshops are already in the pipeline… can’t wait! There’s also discussion about using the area on Market days and during the Cygnet Festival – so with any luck, the whole area will end up being a great community resource.

Nathan

Our particular thanks go to Anne Foale, Headmistress of St James, Marcus Hamilton, Garden programme co-ordinator, Nicky Crane, garden teacher, Simon Perigo, who welded the arch forms for the prep bench, and (last but not least) Keegan and Jesse, two students at St James who have been working like troopers side by side with us for weeks, and Saturday was no exception. All the staff at St James have been incredibly supportive and trusting, giving us pretty much free rein and helping us in any number of ways.

The crew: Roy, Nicky, HT, CW, Anne, Alistair, Marcus & Keegan

We also want to say a huge thank you to everyone who turned up and made the day a huge success – what an amazing place Cygnet is!

More photos can be seen on our Facebook page.