Sustainable Desert Living: Workshop Setup & Water Filters!
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we take advantage
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we tackle monsoon water retention by stuccoing a check dam with a mix of Portland cement, fine sand, and chopped basalt and fiberglass mesh, testing its durability for future dome applications. After recent rains confirmed our drainage strategy, we strengthen the dam to saturate six acres of soil, creating a sponge-like effect with augured holes. We also prep for the next layer of hyper Adobe earthbags, organizing wiring and supplies for the dome build. Despite Arizona’s 110°F heat challenging our cameras, we share our progress and plans for a greener desert homestead!
Transcript:
00:00:46:05 – 00:01:25:06
Hello. Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land, dawg. What we’re going to be doing today is we have the retaining check dams of the retaining the water as it flows across the land. And we had enough rain now. It confirmed what we thought we needed to do. Now, right here, you’ll see. This is the height that we need to be able to keep the water retained to, so that it floods all the ordering holes that we have in this plane back here.
00:01:25:09 – 00:01:44:17
Now, it’s pretty big. It’s going to be that at least six acres or so that we want to have the soil be penetrated with the water, and the clay just kind of saturates and it sucks it up like a sponge. So what we’re doing now, we had like some extra cement that we had and doing building into the floor.
00:01:44:17 – 00:02:01:24
Some Donna would just come over here and kind of spread it out and dump it on this check dam. But now we need to do it for real. Now we had a fire where we had some stuff stored in, May, and we’ll go over that and what was lost and replaced and how why at a later time.
00:02:01:28 – 00:02:27:15
Later time. But positive ways. Positive ways. So what happened is we had basalt rope. Now basalt is stone. It’s like fiberglass. But instead of glass they use basalt rock and it makes this mesh. Two now this is fiberglass mesh. The fire, didn’t damage the basalt too much, but it did melt it in some areas. I’m like, whoa, man, it must have got hot.
00:02:27:17 – 00:02:49:23
Well, because we weren’t here when it happened. Now the, fiberglass mesh, it kind of destroyed its integrity. And I’m going. Okay. Oh, there’s that now over there, you’ll see one of the rolls that we unroll, see how much good there is, and so on. LA is going to do is just kind of cover this check, dam with the mesh and then see what.
00:02:49:27 – 00:03:14:06
But it was such bad condition. They were just going to chop it up and put it in with the mixer, with the Portland cement and the gravel, and you just put it on. Now we’ve done that before with this. Now I want to show you up close. This right here is in the sun. And this right here is basalt fibers.
00:03:14:06 – 00:03:39:27
And when they are cut about two inches long, they turn into angel hair. Just really, really thin. You can barely see it, but when you use it in a stucco mix and put it on, it makes it really strong. And it and it holds. It’s like a, you know, thick paste mud. It does. This stuff works great. I haven’t done it for a couple of years when we were first testing this.
00:03:40:04 – 00:03:57:28
So we’re going to go ahead and test that today too. But I wanted to try it with the fiberglass mesh just chopped up thrown in there. Put it on. It’s a check down. You know that’s good to experiment over here because we’re getting to the point where we’re going to have to start, stucco in the dome that we’re building over by the bus.
00:03:58:00 – 00:04:14:23
And I wanted to go ahead and do some testing here. And this is a good thing to test on because we need to, put stucco on it for permanence. Anyway, make a nice curve, maybe some seating areas or so on. It’ll be nice. So we’re going to work on that today. And whatever we learned we’ll share with you.
00:05:27:23 – 00:05:55:11
Well, we just finished putting the, stucco coating on the earth bags. The hybrid hyper Adobe bags. That is for this. Check them. Now we this is one of the first projects that we did early on using these bags, just to see if, it was going to hold the water the way we wanted and it worked and everything it did.
00:05:55:17 – 00:06:20:14
So we go, all right, we finally had a rain. So now we’ll coat it with stucco. Now, what we did was with just Portland cement and the fine sand that we have here. And we put in the salt fibers and some fiberglass. Actually, we had just cut it up, threw it in there and I really I’ve done that before and it makes it go on like Cobb, like mud with straw.
00:06:20:16 – 00:06:37:13
And it just stays up there. It doesn’t fall, don’t run even when you got it thin. And it does a really good job. So this is kind of a scratch coat. We just, you know, put it on and try and smooth it too much because we’re going to put another coat on and we’ll leave the stuff out here.
00:06:37:13 – 00:07:04:26
But I wanted to let this dry. We’ll keep it kind of damp. Hosed down one more time. And I wanted to see if it cracks, because this is an experiment for doing the domes, too, with our material here. And, we just put it on there. Now, when we do the final coat, which is what we’ll be doing for the dome, we’re going to put it over with a finer sand and kind of smooth it out and see how it how it holds up.
00:07:05:03 – 00:07:30:24
So now we’re just going to let it dry. And I want to see if it cracks because it has it’s not a real thick coat. It’s a little bit over a quarter inch probably. And the the seams between the hyper Adobe bags, you know, it gets quite a bit more. You just slap it in there and smooth it and then put it over it so it may be up to an inch in some places they’re at the thickest part.
00:07:30:29 – 00:07:48:09
So we want to see how it holds up to here. Clean it up now getting ready for show. Say goodbye daughter. Pace.
00:07:48:09 – 00:08:14:04
Hello. Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land org. What we’ve been doing is just kind of showing you highlights of a lot of things that we’ve been doing. And building and crafting on the land, because we were really busy in the beginning. Just didn’t have time for that video thing. So we would give you a little bit of an overview and then, when we were actually doing the hyperlapse or doing construction, we give you a little bit.
00:08:14:09 – 00:08:36:02
But the problem has been the temperature here in Arizona. Ambient temperature in the shade underneath of everything. Under the vehicles, under, you know, the tarp under the shade is still 110 degrees. And these phones and cameras are showing. Don’t like it. So we’ve done our best to try and give you some stuff. But today we woke up.
00:08:36:07 – 00:08:56:16
Man, it was a low 60s at night. Now we’ll get up to almost 90 or something today. But it’s it’s not oh my god hot. So now we’ll be able to start using our other cameras and equipment and microphones and all of that. And we’ll start practicing with that today. So we’ll show you what’s up. Now we went and got a bunch of supplies yesterday and, you know, groceries and so on.
00:08:56:16 – 00:09:15:06
But every couple of weeks we go and we get supplies so that we can be busy for the next couple of weeks because we really try not to go into town, you know, more, you know, every week or so we wind up going more than we probably should. But, yesterday we had to go to the dump, which was kind of cool.
00:09:15:07 – 00:09:36:13
I’ll show you that in a future video. I mean, it’s not so freaking hot. And, you’ll see that out here. They call the transfer station, and it’s pretty clean and well organized and mechanized. And one guy takes your ten bucks or whatever, and you go take care of business, which Donna’s been doing. This is the first time that I actually went, and, I was impressed.
00:09:36:13 – 00:09:52:27
You know, this is, you know, you got it going on. Now, it’s not really close by, but it’s on the way for us going, you know, to, big box stores and so on. Now, what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be unloading a lot of the supplies that we got here. Show you some of the other projects that we’re doing.
00:09:53:03 – 00:10:16:18
But the big thing today is we’re going to put a dress coat, final coat on the check down. And since we kind of got a bead on what we’re doing with the, Samantha mortar, that however, we mix it along with the basalt fibers and so on, we’re going to go ahead and give you a little bit more close up, show you what we’re doing, because we’ve done it before.
00:10:16:22 – 00:10:35:09
And I think, confirmation on this check that is kind of probably what the outside of this dome over here, once we put that on top of the, earth bag walls. Now, there are some that I’ll show you some of the other equipment we got. Yeah, we got a tire that we got a, Yeah. Donna’s getting that out now.
00:10:35:16 – 00:10:52:10
We got a tire that we got to put on the ATV over there. We just had an old one, and we replaced one of them, and, then we got an identical one to go, and that would be mat set, and it won’t be all messed up. And I would get it and carry it over there for.
00:10:52:14 – 00:11:20:08
But Donna showing off she wants to do it. Heck, she could probably put it on, you know, maybe I’ll let her do that. I keep talking, so what we’re going to do is kind of give you a little bits and pieces of what we’re going to be doing today, and a lot of it is just prep, right? We finally got all of our wiring in our outlets, different things that we need to put on the next layer of the hyper Adobe Earth bags and building the wall before we put the dome on.
00:11:20:11 – 00:11:50:22
Well, when that dome goes on, of course you’re going to need the tractor for that. And we used our concrete mixer to do the, concrete covering over the hyper Adobe, bags that were there for the check dam. We’re holding back the water. Well, we have a bunch of those. We have probably one, two, three, four, 5 or 6 of these that we can do to make out a lot better, easier, hold it back, give us a lot more water that will soak into the ground.
00:11:50:29 – 00:12:14:12
But we needed to have this first test one. This is the the biggest one, the longest one that we did initially. So I’m really happy with it. It’s not cracking. It’s not doing. I mean it’s working pretty well now. I could leave it the way it is now, but, it’s a good experiment for us doing different mixes and kind of showing you what we’re doing and probably what the outside of the masonry on the dome is going to look like.
00:12:14:14 – 00:12:30:25
So we’re going to do that. And we may not tint it or anything, you know, right now, but well, we’ll show you what’s up. Now. What are the other things I’ll show you here real quick.
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we take advantage
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we push forward
In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into