Podcast – Page 37 – Regenerative Skills

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Earthen Plasters: The healthiest and most beautiful way to finish your home

No matter what material you build your house with, the finishes will always be the most visible part both inside and out. For thousands of years people have used natural materials to improve the appearance of their buildings, to protect their buildings from the elements, and to hide the rougher qualities of their walls. Despite advances in technology and industrial methods of production, most houses are still finished with natural plasters and renders. In this article we’ll explore the three most common types of plaster, discuss their benefits and limitations, and talk about why they’re the best option for home […]

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Articles

Three simple ways of testing your soil

Soil testing is a task that seems daunting to many people who are new to earth restoration projects or even folks who want to start a garden. Maybe you’ve read that you need to take samples with special equipment and kits, or you have to send your results to an expensive lab to get accurate results. The truth is that the most important information you need about your soils can be learned within a few minutes and with a couple common tools, so let’s start by deciding our objective. In this article I’ll cover how to find out three main […]

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Natural Building

Adobe: The Tradition and Techniques of Mud Bricks

Our current culture’s desire for new and innovative ways of doing everything has created many technological and lifestyle improvements, but as a result, many perfectly good and well suited technologies have also been abandoned to the detriment of our culture and the environment. For example, modern and industrial construction techniques are taking a huge toll on the world ecology by producing staggering amounts of CO2 emissions and toxic waste, and by consuming resources at unsustainable rates. What if we could look back on the development of construction materials throughout human history and find ways of creating the structures that protect […]

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Natural Building

Cob: Getting to know one of construction’s most ancient and versatile materials

Since the beginning of human history earthen building methods have been the primary forms of construction. Even today it is estimated that between one third and a half of the worlds population still lives or works in earthen buildings. One of the simplest and also strongest of these building methods is called “Cob.” Though it goes by other names in different places, cob refers to a mixture of clay subsoil, sand, straw, and water that is mixed together to make a malleable mud that is formed into monolithic walls. When the cob dries it becomes hard and creates incredibly durable […]

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Natural Building

Interview With a Natural Builder: Jan Afton

One week before this interview Carole Crews introduced me to a friend of hers she thought I’d be interested to meet. We met Jan Afton on a tempestuous afternoon as the three o’clock thunderstorms started to roll in. she invited us into her small adobe home which looked like a feature in “Dwell” magazine. Even more impressive, as it turned out, Jan had built almost the entire structure, from foundation to roof, with her own hands. Immediately I was awash with questions. Though we only had a limited time to visit that day, I asked Jan if she would indulge […]

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Natural Building

Natural Building: An Intro to Ecological Construction

Shelter is at the core of human development, and our ability to survive. The variety and adaptability of our structures have determined where humans can live, and how we continue to evolve. Despite this deep connection that we have with the buildings we inhabit, construction has become an industry that causes a lot of destruction to our planet, and even to our own health. In order to build more conscientiously, we need to rediscover the methods and materials that have protected us since the beginning. Natural building has been the default system until only a few decades ago (and still […]

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Interview With a Natural Builder: Sigi Koko

Here in the adolescent stages of the natural, building revival there are few architects or builders that have more than a handful of years of experience. Sigi Koko, owner and operator of Down to Earth Design, is one of the most established and prolific architect/builders of natural structures in the United States. Her company, founded in 1998, predominantly serves the mid-Atlantic region of the US and designs strawbale homes and residential-scale commercial structures for their environmentally minded clients. For almost twenty years now Sigi has been pushing the boundaries of the construction market towards sustainable and environmentally conscious building. She […]

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The Value of Poo: A short guide to composting toilets

Toilets and poop are always the uncomfortable and squeamish topics that we try to keep away from pleasant conversation, but are also two of the things we should really start talking about, because both are incredibly important to the home and garden systems of anyone hoping to live more sustainably. Only in the last hundred years have flush toilets become the norm in developed countries. This system, while convenient for the user, is an incredibly energy consumptive system that requires perfectly good drinking water to be mixed with your poop and pee, and then sent, sometimes many many miles away […]

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bamboo

Interview with a natural builder: Charlie Rendall

In May of 2016 I was fortunate enough to visit Charlie Rendall at his home in San Marcos la Laguna, Guatemala. Charlie is the owner of “Return to the Forest,” a natural building and education company that specializes in bamboo and local earthen building techniques. On a sunny Friday morning I hiked up to his property, which would have been impossible to find without directions. A little scramble up a meandering dirt path through a narrow alley and dense tropical foliage to a framed bamboo gate that opens into his lush but bustling homestead. I dodged my way around the […]