Mon 5 Apr 2010
Posted by Marcin
A week ago, the first signs of food plants appeared as winter passes away.
The pictures show: (1), lettuce from last year self-seeding; (2), garlic; (3), stinging nettles – a great salad green when steamed, or eat fresh after rolling to rid of stingers; (4), yellow currant; (5), raspberry; and (6), onion.
The 2 beehives totally died out, so I harvested about 80 pounds of honey. (more…)
Sun 4 Apr 2010
Posted by Marcin
The fruit propagation workshop went well. Two people showed up. 2 weeks later, these cherry trees are already budding out:
We got a donation of 50 more EMLA 111 apple rootstocks, which can be obtained from Willamette Nurseries for under 70 cents each. These are rooted branch cuttings, and look like this: (more…)
Mon 1 Mar 2010
Posted by Marcin
We will be holding our annual Plant Propagation Workshop on March 20. See the documentation from last year’s workshop – blog post and announcement.
This year, our workshop will feature more raspberry propagation, plus grafting of apple, pear, peach, apricot, plum, and cherry. We will be using root stocks and scionwood from our nursery plantings. The workshop will take place at Factor e Farm from 1 to 4 PM on Saturday, March 20. We will start with a brief overview of the open source agroecology program that we’re pursuing, to set a context for our plant propagation efforts. The admission is free for True Fans, and $40 for others, and you may be able to take some plants home with you. We will also give a brief tour of our facilities. Email us or call to sign up or for more information, and if you are signing up, payment must be received by March 13. See other details from the announcement above.
Thu 4 Feb 2010
Posted by Marcin
This winter, we had 1-2 feet of snow, and the cover lasted for about a month. This was harsh on the orchard – because an army of rabbits thus had a 1-2 foot pedestal and could reach above the existing tree guards. There was significant damage, but the trees will grow back – from below the damage at the very worst. Here is an example, which I covered with chicken wire after the damage was done already:
The rabbits, which for some reason exploded in population this year and kept the crockpots busy – were not the only issue. Subterranean creatures exploded, too. Look at these tracks, which to my guess, are voles or moles:
How could this happen if the ground is supposedly frozen during this colder-than-normal winter? (more…)
Sun 31 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
William Cleaver will be joining us at Factor e Farm on May 1 for a Dedicated Project Visit. He’s coming from across the big pond – from the United Kingdom – and we are planning for a 3 month stay.
William is not a novice to creative dexterity – he’s involved in repair and demolition of industrial chimney stacks and natural draught cooling towers – at heights. See for yourself:
He has experience with various tools, welding brickwork, ropework, woodwork, and general shop. He’s traveled the world, studied Romance languages, taught English in Chile, and is certified to teach high ropes courses. He is now showing great interest in the deeper message of post-scarcity, resilient community creation.
We discussed the following tentative plan, with both of us working in the shop and as needed:
May – Work on finishing or building Sawmill/LifeTrac II/MicroTrac II/ anciliary implements for construction – all in preparation for building.
June – begin building autonomous, zero energy housing with solar space. Experiment with CEB floors, CEB masonry stove and chimney, stabilized bricks, stabilized reject lime bricks, stabilized brick walkway and driveway, stabilized retaining walls, and others. We plan on winter food garden and sprouting in the solar space. If progress on the steam engine goes well, we’ll aim to install combined heat and power on the masonry stove.
July – continue building until comfortable accommodations for the winter are ready for several people.
We’re looking at building zero energy homes that look tentatively like this:
(Credits: Aigars Bruvelis in Blender)
Here is a CEB floor example from Abe at Vela Creations:
See more of his photos here.
Other than this, William is learning Kdenlive on Linux for movie editing, as well as and QCad for CAD work. These are staple tools now at Factor e Farm. William will begin preparing some of the technical drawings for the sawmill, so we can collaborate on making that happen over distance until his arrival.
We do want to consider bringing in additional help from the CEB general contractor, Floyd (see last blog post). We will consider hosting a CEB workshop if progress is good. If the CEB fabrication is going well – there could be resources generated to really get things moving forward, and continue to build more structures. I think now is the beginning of really settling into the land – and getting the place to look half-way presentable. We’re open to all kinds of ideas, such as the proposed CEB vault construction and others – but we’d need other people to get involved to push those projects forward. Otherwise, we’re sticking to basics and all types of experiments in the process.
Thu 28 Jan 2010
Posted by Marcin
Hats off to our collaborators from Poland for open-sourcing a manual, dual-block CEB press. It is in the pre-alpha v0.1 release stage.
Open Source MANUAL CEB PRESS beta I from Cohabitat Platform on Vimeo.
You can download the existing CAD files here. The files are in Polish, so they still need to be translated for the broader audience.
Meet your developers from the Co-Habitat Platform: Pawel Sroczynski and Remik Karbowiak.
These guys are pretty good. They also developed a model open source, prefab, straw-bale house design, and they will be buildng it this year at a budget of $7k. I always thought that straw bale is too exotic in practice because of the huge labor requirements, but these guys are showing otherwise with OpenSTRAW:
Here is the building sequence. Click on the following images to enlarge:
Both the manual CEB press and the straw bale work are a major contribution to open source economic development – and to humanity. See their website for more information. Congratulations to the Co-Habitat team. We’d like to add the manual CEB press to the Factor e Farm product line as soon as the machine is tested in the field, and we may end up building some straw bale here after all.
Sat 21 Nov 2009
Posted by Marcin
In general, half of OSE technology work focuses on RepLab, and the other half focuses on open source agroecology. Both are connected, and one feeds the other.
Effective food production is critical to post-scarcity, resilient communities. We are doing an experiment to show that it takes 12 hours per person per year for an 8 person community to feed itself.
The basic program involves setting upwell-designed infrastructure. In our temperate zone, this means several parts:
Here’s the plan for the garden – the central part that could eat up all of your time if not done effectively. Mulch it deeply, and you have weed-free, water rich environment for microbial life and plants. Stake it, fence it, cut lines for planting, plant and walk away until harvest. Can we do this:
(slide from here)
The promise of the above is full diet, year round. Fruits, nuts, and vegetables; grains of all types; animal feed; eggs and milk; cheese and meat. Fruit drinks. Honey, ketchup, mayonnaise. Seasonings. Popcorn and butter. Fish? Of course, one can still go to the store if some luxury food item is missing. (more…)
Fri 24 Jul 2009
Posted by Marcin
MicroTrac achieved zero turn motion. If one walks around rapidly, one can turn the walk-behind tractor around in place. MicroTrac is turning out to be a beautiful freak:
To do this, we added two small, freely-turning wheels to MicroTrac. This replaced the rigid wheels from the first test run. In that test run, we discovered that we want a greater degree of turning flexibility, because MicroTrac is so long – hence the zero turn wheels. (more…)
Wed 22 Jul 2009
Posted by Marcin
A bale spike comes in handy in many situations. It’ typically used to move large, 2000 pound hay bales around. With the rainy weather here, some farmers were not able to keep their hay from rottings, so we got our hands on 18 additional hay bales like this. First, we’re mulching the orchard with these. The bales may be used for pyrolysis oil production later. We will use the large bales for site remediation after CEB building this year. The spike itself can also be used for lifting large objects with a chain, or it can be stuck into the ground as an anchor if we are winching heavy logs in future lumber production. It can be a toothpick for Godzilla.
The bale spike is pinned on the main quick attach plate finger. The two stabilizing spikes are quick-attached with small attachments on the secondary quick attach fingers. See the video of fabrication and use:
Open Source Bale Spike from Marcin Jakubowski on Vimeo.
Today is Day 1 of CEB 2 fabrication. Metal and parts are here, PowerCube and MicroTrac are in order, and the soil pulverizer is in place. The PowerCube will now run the welder. We have yet to show the PowerCube powering LifeTrac itself – which requires only a minor adjustment on the hydraulic plumbing. Inga is getting ready to come to the States, and we’re still negotiating with Dittmar on the CEB Vault workshop – for which we need to get out our first formal announcement within a week.
Mon 15 Jun 2009
Posted by Marcin
Here is the natural history of Factor e Farm just at the beginning of plantlife leafing out – May 1 prior to my Austria trip. We go through the wild areas, garden, orchard, and greenhouse. This is a major contrast to what the place looks like right now. I will blog about that in my next post – showing both the full greenness of the place and the permacultural developments that happened in the last month since Ben arrived.
