The Gaia house

So yesterday I posted a picture of a rocket stove heated hot tub/bathtub with a group to open the idea for an off grid and sustainable way to replace their broken down 220v electric one. One gentleman asked the question, “Why not build an outdoor rocket MASS heater tub instead?”

Well here is my opinion.

A rocket mass hot tub would actually be less efficient over all and the bench would need a limestone plaster or concrete finish with special fabrication to capture heat and prevent leaks. The thermal conduction and radiation are direct with a rocket stove tub vs. passive conduction and radiation with the rocket mass heater tub. The rocket stove tub will heat faster in the short term using less fuel, but it will not store the heat as long. With the rocket mass tub it would take up to 2 days of continuous heater use to feel the desired temperature, but would store heat for the same amount of time. It could be done indeed, but the energy output of the human would be high and the overall use of the captured energy would mostly be wasted for short term use. Rocket mass heaters are also limited to about a 30 foot run of exhaust pipe before problems arise in "draft".

So, what a perfect topic for the blog! I am always trying to push my limits on the most efficient, affordable and sustainable designs and ideas. So I have created a design for just such a thing.

For those of you that are new to rocket heaters there are two basic types, a rocket stove and a rocket mass heater. A rocket stove is just a basic chamber and pipe design much like the traditional wood stove, small ones can be used to grill and cook on and larger ones to heat buildings. A rocket mass heater will use the exhaust pipe to run through a long “cob” plaster coated clay bench to store the heat in “thermal mass”. A good example of this is the Earth; She stores radiant heat from the sun in her mass and releases it over time. Good passive solar and Earth contact homes also use this strategy. 

                                                    Rocket Stove or Rocket heater

                                                  Rocket Mass Heater

                                                                            Above 

                                                        Inside look at Rocket mass heater

So in the design we would have a two story passive solar Earth contact home, this home would ideally be built into a south facing hill side. On our lowest level we would have our bedrooms, a bathroom, utility room and recreation room with attached but open glass house and garden. In the recreation room we would have our rocket stove hot tub.  The steel tub it's self would be surrounded with a cobbed body for heat storage and a cobbed exhaust pipe, the mass of the water and cob would heat the lower level along with the captured passive solar heat. On the upper floor we would have our Kitchen dining and living space and optional second half bath. The stove exhaust pipe comes through the floor and runs through the cob bench and riser built into the living space then finally exiting the house through the roof. The exit temperatures would only be in the very low 100’s at the most with the gases being mostly Co2 and water vapor. A greenhouse on the living roof above could be added and the exhaust gas to be utilized for plant production. Co2 is a main component of plant production and helps with rapid strong growth.  The remaining heat could then be captured in the greenhouse and lowered even more. Solar powered baffles would allow for controlled ventilation and temperature in the greenhouse. Temperatures in the house can be raised by adding more fuel to the stove and/or closing baffles, they can be lowered by opening the baffles in a heat riser system. To make sure we have utilized as much energy as possible our hot water pipes AND the greenhouse floor heat pipes would also be run through the cob bench as well.

Our greenhouse roof would catch rain water and store it in cisterns, our grey water fed into our indoor garden and solid wastes composted. Our surpluses from the gardens would help feed the tilapia fish in an aquaponics system. We can also utilize worms in our composting system to supplement the protein needs of our fish and the methane produced by their solid wastes and ours would be capture and reused for a cooking stove and emergency heat or sold. The house would also utilize solar and wind technology for electric needs and surpluses can be sold for a profit. In the warm season the house temperature is controlled by natural convection, heat rises into the heat tower and out naturally creating a draft. This draft then pulls cool dry air through earthtubes outside into the lower lever and creates a cool “cave” breeze.   

Because this design uses the rocket stove hot tub it would be seasonal in this manor, a solar hot water heater above the glass house could be added if a year round tub was desired. Temperature of the tub would be determined by the amount of burn chamber exposed to the water (more exposure the hotter the water).

In the end this design along with the property creates a closed loop self sustaining system. The house is earth friendly and healthy to live in, the food is as local as it gets and completely organic and nutritionally dense. A home should nurture and protect the needs of the family living in it and should be efficient enough to run it's self. 

I would like to dedicate this blog to a very special and brave young man who is fighting cancer and to his family that has held strong through this battle. Jordon Geiser is a hero and inspires me to keep up my fight of making the world a healthier and more sustainable place for our children to live.

The wonderful world of compost

Building soil with black gold is as easy as 1 2 3! We will cover 3 easy ways to deal with our daily wastes that are compostable. What materials are compostable you say? Well anything you eat (veggies, dairy, meat, egg shells), paper and cardboard (shiny colored paper and cardboard are better recycled), straw, hay and manure (animal or human). First lets cover some basics..

Egg shells - important to replenish calcium in your garden, it is always best to crush them to speed the process. Tomatoes commonly have a calcium deficiency and can greatly benefit from this.

Dairy - Spoiled milk poured on the garden contains much needed enzymes for the soil biology

Browns - Leaves, straw, paper, cardboard, wood chips. These are high in carbon and low in nitrogen and typically are broken down by fungi

Greens - hay, grass, food scraps, manure. These are high in nitrogen and are typically broke down with bacteria.

Now we start!

Option #1
Make a 4' x 4' square or round using old pallets, blocks, wood or wire, make sure it is 4' tall as well.
We want to add a non PVC pipe with holes in it 4" to 6" x 4', this will allow oxygen in our pile.
We will now begin to layer our pile, we want to use a two to one ratio if possible but a 50/50 will work.
So we use 2 parts brown to one part green and we do this in layers adding a bit of soil each time, the soil contains the natural fungi and bacteria and will speed up the colonization process.
Make sure to shred your browns if possible, the smaller the size the faster it breaks down.
Keep the pile covered and moist.
Once the pile is full turn contents every week until materials are broken down.

Option #2
We will directly compost our materials, we can do this by using our paper and cardboard as sheet mulch, adding our hay and straw on top and putting our food scraps and garden waste directly under the mulch everyday. By doing this we let ALL of the natural goodness absorb into the beds, we lose some of the "tea" in our compost pile and the "tea" is very important. As time goes we create layers in the garden beds and the natural biology of the soil and our worm friends breaks this down into dirt. We must realize that it is actually the soil biology that feeds out plants, they are the ones that break things down into a usable form for the plants. Just because we think it is a fertilizer don't really mean it is in a usable form for a plant. Learn to grow soil and become blessed with the most healthy and productive garden.

Option #3
Worm tubes
Take 6" to 8" plastic pipe (avoid PVC) cut the length to 2', drill several holes in the bottom foot of the pipe. Use a post hole digger and dig a hole one foot deep and bury the pipe with the holes in the ground, next place a cap for the pipe on its top, this will keep bugs out. Put these tubes every six foot or so in your beds and each day you dump your food scraps and garden scraps in them. Again we want to make the size of material as small as possible for the worms to break down. What happens is the worms come in, eat and then carry the castings out into your garden deep into the soil, no fuss, no mess just fun.

ENJOY!!!

Gearing up for fall gardening

Prepare now for your new fall garden, there is a lot of work to be done and the early bird catches the worm!

As the weather cools and the leaves start to turn many gardeners assume the season is coming to an end. Nothing could be further from the truth, fall is one of the best times to garden, with the air cooling off and the thunderstorms coming to an end our weather is much more stable. In fact fall is my favorite time to garden, many of the bugs are done with their cycles for the year, moisture is retained much better in the soil and now you can grow many of the crops you wish you had in the summer when your tomatoes and peppers started fruiting. Fall is a time that merges summer hot crops with fall cold crops and kicks off the season for canning and colorful salads. In this I will lay out the foundation for making raised bed garden swales, what fall crops are, and how to plant them as well as using cover crops to improve the health of your soil.

So we begin our journey with making raised bed garden swales. Wide row beds have many advantages  Soil temperature is important for seed germination as well as vigorous plant growth and is one of the big keys to early or late gardening. Root growth is also very important, the larger your plant root system is the more water and nutrients it can gather, this not only will allow your plants to grow bigger faster but it also makes the fruit contain more nutrition for you.

To make raised bed garden swales you start by using a surveyors transit (rent one step 1) to mark out the "contour" of the land, we don't want a straight bed necessarily but instead we want them level with the land. By making raised beds level we not only make raised beds but we stop the flow of water through the garden, this eliminates erosion and captures the water in the beds and it will self water until water is all gone. We begin to make our garden drought resistant and pave the way for a future natural spring down hill. After we have the swales marked out the length we want we will measure from up hill to down hill 3 or 4 ft (depends on how wide you want them) and pin or mark that. This will give you your bed layout and you are ready to dig. You will want at least three shovels wide between beds (1 shovel full on first bed then 2 on the next) and then you begin to pin the next swale. At the end of the swale you want to curve the ends slightly up hill to hold the water in, not too much or the water will pour over the top and not around the ends. We can use this to move water however we want, we can dump it out one end or dump it out both. After you have your swales marked you are ready to dig, we will start on the up hill side of the first bed and take two shovel wide of dirt and place it in the bed. After we are done with the up hill side we will move to the down hill side and take one shovel wide and place it in the bed. After this is completed we will repeat this for all the beds and go over them with a shovel or hoe to smooth them out.   once this is done the beds are ready to either be seeded, cover cropped, or mulched. Some seeds we will direct sow in the dirt, other plants and bulbs are better transplanted than seeded. We will now water the soil good and begin to mulch in layers or a term called "lasagna gardening", we start with black and white news paper or brown cardboard, we wet it as we go and lay it down over the sides and top. Now would be a good time to add some compost if you have it, if not we will make our own. Next step is to cover thick with spoiled hay or straw, it is always best to let chickens pick through it to eliminate unwanted seed, if you cant we will just pull them and use them for mulch as we go. Now we water again! We want to vary our layers of "green" (hay, grass, manure, veggie scraps) material" and "brown" (straw, paper, leaves, cardboard) each time we plant a new crop, this will build out soil and its biology. Everyday as we empty our kitchen scraps we will simply just lift the mulch and place them under it for the worms and bacteria or we can put in worm tubs to fill ( I will cover worm tubs later). Keep in mind typically greens are broke down by bacteria and browns are degraded by fungus, a trick you can use for disease control as well (future blog).

Now on to plants!

For simplicity for our beginners crops will be divided into families, we do this for crop rotation, crop rotation is important to minimize plant pests and diseases. Later we will discuss bio intensive gardening and permaculture.
We will split our plants into these families, Gourd (squash, cucumber, melon ), Beet ( beet, spinach, Swiss chard), Cabbage (collard greens, arugula, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, choi, kale, kolrabi, radish, turnip, rutabaga ), Carrot (carrot, cilantro, parsley, parsnip ), Legume (peas, beans,
alfalfa, hairy vetch, clover), Onion (onion, garlic, leek, shallot, scallion), Sunflower (dandelion, endive/escarole, lettuce, mustard, mache ). Now I know someone out there is going to say Farmer Z, mache is in the valerian family and mustard is in the mustard family isn’t it? Yes it is! But for our garden use we will put it in the sunflower family to make things simple. So we have our 7 families now you need to plot them out for a proper rotation, each family needs its own space and should not be mixed unless you are very experienced in and intensive gardening practices. It is up to you how many beds you have or how they are divided, we just want to keep the families together and separated.

July
Planting! We are going to actually start our fall crops in mid July, we want to plant our longest growing crops first 70+ days to harvest. The crops we are going to plant now are Kohlrabi, Rutabaga winter squash, cucumber and corn if you wish (must be 70 days or less to harvest "Alaska" is 55 day). The kohlrabi and rutabaga will go in our Cabbage bed and can be sown directly into the mulch or started indoors. Plant seeds at a rate of one per square foot and keep the soil moist until the seeds have germinated.  Our winter squash and cucumber will go in our gourd bed, these crops can also be direct seeded and it is best to use T post and 6 ft fence to allow them to climb, after all they are a vine.
Corn, we want to put the corn in the legume bed, the legume bed will serve 4 purposes, #1 a cover crop bed to add aeration to the soil as well as organic matter. #2 this is where we will grow our peas. #3 our cover crop is living mulch, shading the soil so it can stay moist and also acts as a weed barrier robbing light from the weed seeds and choking them out. #4 legumes collect nitrogen from the air and store it on their roots; this feeds the nitrogen hungry corn and is a perfect companion plant. So we start the legume bed by spreading red clover seed over the bed , then we plant our corn, one per square foot. Later we will plant peas next to the corn stalks. If less than one inch of rain falls each week you will need to hand water your beds, it is best to water at a depth of one to two inches to promote deep root growth.
August
Mid August is the time to start the major planting, we will start with some of the root crops. Carrot and parsnip should be planted in the carrot bed, the carrots will be ready in late fall and the parsnips should be over wintered and harvested in early spring. The cold weather during the winter makes the parsnips sweeter. Plant onion bulbs in wet straw mulch in the onion bed, plant as many bulbs as you can(about 9 per sq ft), in about 30 days
green onion are ready to harvest and in the later part of fall full size onion will be ready for harvest. Garlic, leek and shallot should also be planted in mulch and over wintered for a spring harvest. Beet bed, beets and turnips can be planted all at once or planted in weekly intervals for a continual harvest. Plan the beet harvest so that all of the beets are harvested before first frost, cold snaps tend to make beets bolt. Broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage (red is best for winter storage) go in the cabbage bed and should all be started in soil blocks or pots, I prefer and use soil blocks for many reasons and I will get into that in late winter. After your starts have sprouted and have grown several inches transplant them into the thick mulch and give a good watering with fish emulsion tea or compost tea. Direct sow radish seed in one week intervals until the first part of October, radish are a 30 day crop and can stand a light frost. Now is also the time to start your kale, chard and collard greens, kale is a leafy green similar in taste to cabbage and chard is similar to spinach in taste. We also want to plant our peas now, we will plant 2 pea seeds at the base of every corn stalk, and the peas use the corn as a trellis and also release nitrogen for the corn to feed on.
Late August
Now we start the remaining crops, these crops can be direct sown and all are fairly fast growers. In our carrot bed we will plant our cilantro and parsley, both of these prefer cooler weather. In our cabbage bed we will now plant arugula and choy, there are many varieties of choy and Chinese cabbage and are all equally yummy, bak choi and pak choy are two great picks. Arugula loves cold weather and can withstand a pretty good frost. In our beet bed we will now plant spinach, again, there are many different varieties of spinach, bloomsdale is my top pick. In our sunflower bed we start our Italian dandelion, endive/escarole, lettuce, mustard and mache, all of these are very cold tolerant and a few of them can withstand most mid and southern Missouri winters.
September
Keep sowing your succession seeds for a continual harvest, many of your plants will be ready for harvest in mid to late September, most lettuce are 45 day crops. When you harvest your greens cut them above the dirt several inches, by doing this they will just grow back for several more harvest. Also your beet, radish and turnip leaves are edible, radish have a peppery flavor to them and beet and turnip are yummy in a stir fry or salad. Make sure you don't cut all of the leaves off, keep some of the smaller ones to keep the root alive.
October/November
These are the months for many harvests, your beets should be done and after a frost your turnip will taste the best and your rutabaga and kohlrabi will too! Your carrots should be a good size and your cabbage ready as
well.

MULCH,MULCH, MULCH!
This is a word I want to pound in your head; mulch protects the soil from so many things as well as gives it health. Now that our beds are established we will never till them again, tilling actually harms and compacts the soil, crop rotation and the use of cover crops will keep your soil in tip top shape. All cover crops should be mowed or cut down in the spring and either composted or left to lay on the beds. Before next spring I will cover more in depth the subject of using cover crops and permaculture, once you get this full circle bed system going it creates it's own eco system in the dirt and on top. It takes care of itself using plants to replenish soil nutrients of all types as well as attracting beneficial bugs to kill destructive bugs. Many of the plants also put off scents that these bad bugs don’t like and they just move on to you neighbors "seven dust, miracle grow row garden". Your garden becomes sustainable and produces a much higher yield and food that is extremely dense in nutrition. Keep this in mind, sickness is caused from a imbalance in personal nutrition, you are what you eat!

NOTE these planting schedules are for a mid Missouri climate adjust accordingly please

Email questions to manitoudesigns@yahoo.com

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Slave based debt system

So we the people of the world have been fooled into slavery, we have given up our power and wealth and do as the Master says. We own our labor yet we give it away for pennies on the dollar, we love our families yet we send them away to spend time with others. Does this make sense? Is this really how we wish our lives to be? Of course not! But here's how it goes down.... We wake up each day and stumble to the coffee pot, we put our fake smiles on, send the kids on the bus to the cookie cutter school, kiss our spouses and we leave our cookie cutter home to go work for "The Man". We all know "The Man", he is this corporation that holds our wealth, He is the corporation that tricks you into debt and the corporation who makes you a slave.  We trade the labor we own free and clear to a "job" (just over broke) AKA a corporation, in return for our valuable labor this corporation trades us a debt base paper fiat currency. We then take that deflated fiat currency and trade it for things we need (electricity, gas, food, housing). These companies that we trade our paper money for are most likely owned by the same corporation you work for, this is called the company store. There are several historical accounts of this with the early coal mines, like then we come out of the company store owing "The Man" money! This is how we become slaves, we just keep repeating the same monotonous mistakes over and over until we are absolutely bankrupt, exhausted or dead. You see our labor when used wisely is worth far more than what the boss man is paying for it, the "things we need are produce much more efficiently and at a much lower cost than what "he" is selling it to us for. This inflation of cost is caused by to many middle men, and if we would just use our labor to produce the things we need our self the value of that labor goes way up and the time spent working goes way down. That head of lettuce you just paid two bucks for, well it cost me 5 cents to make, that two hundred dollar electric bill you paid this month is all it cost me to make two wind turbines and your monthly house payment over the next six months is all it takes to build a sustainable house using materials gathered right from your land and salvaged from others. You can work 20 hours for the man to pay your electric bill or you can produce it yourself, you can buy your food at the store or just grow it yourself. You see when we use our labor for our self we not only have a ton more time for our family but we end our debt and slavery to the Master. We can now raise our children at home not at the day care, we can school them ourselves and we can begin to rebuild our communities that have been lost to people chasing money. Going back to the land and back to common sense is the only real form of sustainability there is, it makes us happier, healthier and wealthier. So when you wake up tomorrow make a goal to cut out your middle men!

An Introduction to a Looming Crisis

As a sustainability designer and engineer I see everyday the train wreak our society has created, we can be compared to a heard of Bison running out of control toward the cliff and nothing in our way to stop us. We have become parasitic zombies that roam the Earth and suck Her resources until we hear the slurp of the straw reach the bottom of the glass. We have created endless mono-cultures not only in farming but in work places, schools, finances, and health care. We spend our days roaming around in the same daily routine like cattle going to slaughter and the masses are fine with this. History has taught us one very valuable thing and that lesson is that ALL mono-cultures and all unsustainable things END in collapse and the Earth will resume Her business without them and return to homeostasis. We have poorly used technology in the way that we have actually created more work for the masses rather than less, we have used our technologies in a greedy selfish way, a way that is only beneficial to it's creators and the benefit is profits and the cost is lives and damage to the earth. Our species has to make a change and has to do it now!

Modern farming technology plows the ground, burns mass amounts of fuel, sprays chemicals and only TAKES from the land. Plowing does fairly severe damage to the soil and soil biology, we think we are aerating the soil and doing good but what we are really doing is creating a hard pan under the loose soil and we are over oxygenating the soil so much the soil biology eats up the organic matter (or whats left) at break neck speeds. When we plow we disturb the natural biology and ecosystem, we break up natural "holes" left by worms and rotted roots, we loosen the soil and create erosion from air and wind and we allow the land to be exposed to the elements which causes water evaporation and sun damage. By forgoing the plow and returning organic matter to the soil with cover crops we create a natural and sustainable system, one that retains water, one that is full of biodiversity and one that takes a whole lot less work and fuel to maintain. We let the worms and decaying roots create aeration and we allow the bacterias and fungi to break the organic matter down into usable forms for the plants. You see chemical "miracle grow"  fertilizers work just like steroids, they give a huge boost for a short term but then run out, this creates peaks and valleys in growth and causes the pocket book to run dry. A natural system consistently feeds and waters the plant and creates a stable environment for it to thrive. In the unnatural system the plants are stressed, this stress is what causes "bugs" and disease to come in, and when you have hundreds of acres of the same "crop" it is a gold mine for these things. When a plant or animal is stressed or sick it sends out indicators to "predators" to come end it's life because in nature only the strongest survive and are allowed to reproduce, this is natural selection. This monoculture makes it easy for the "bugs" to find, one color and one smell. In a natural system we have a poly-culture (multiple crops), we may have wheat with clover and plant beneficial bug attractors within the system, or we may have rye and field peas or corn, clover and beans.  The point is we confuse the predators and we attract the defenders, we shade the ground and leave some for the earth. We spray "weeds" to keep them out of the monoculture, these "weeds" are not weeds at all but a pioneer plant there trying to fix a problem. Thistle, burdock and dandelion are all indicators of a compacted soil and a soil that is deficient in minerals, looking at the weed will usually tell you the exact deficiency in the soil. Every plant has a job, some fix iron, some fix compaction, some hold the soil together, the point is we no longer OBSERVE what Mother Nature is telling us, we only give our monoculture plants the three basics to live (N-P-K) and pay no attention to the colloidal mineral content or the health of the soil. Natural systems however work together, they are companions, ones strength helps the others weakness, we end the need for chemical fertilizers and biocides that pollute the Earth and contaminate our water and bodies.

Our healthcare system is not a healthcare system at all, it does not promote health nor does it promote cures, what it in fact promotes are quarterly profits. For thousands of years the indigenous people used food as medicine, they knew the real key to health. Like the chemical fertilizer we're only covering up a problem not fixing it, we create a mono culture in our health. Using good diet and great foods we create a polyculture health care system and one that is sustainable and proven over tens of thousands of years, no ill side effects, no costly prescriptions and nothing that is invasive to our bodies, just good health using a fuel we need anyway. Sickness and disease are caused by malnutrition and toxin build up in the body, fix those problems and find health.

Our children's education and our finances are handed over to another monoculture, we put full faith in corrupted and overloaded systems and then expect big results. We rip our children at age five from their Moms and Dads and shut them in a room full of children their own age like mice in a cage. We give them a cookie cutter education when in reality each child has his or her own way of learning and their own needs. It is not natural for a child to be torn from their parents and sent to school, it is natural for the child to stay with the parents and be around a diverse group of people. I know many reading this will say but how do we not do this, we have to work and we have bills, the answer is simple, you live an unsustainable life that causes you to have DEBT, this debt is what causes your need to be a slave and leave your children at the  cookie cutter house. Return to a sustainable life and return your family to a natural polyculture!

As our opening post We just wanted to open the eyes of our audience to the current crisis and make them aware that there is another way, there are those who can help and there is a way out. We will get into great detail of the problems and the solutions, we will learn how to work smarter and not harder, we will learn to work together and create a natural system called community. Welcome!