From Earthbags to Clay Pots: Desert Construction Insights!

In this episode of Occupy the Land, we dive into our Arizona desert homestead as Donna tackles a solo earthbag-laying session using a stand mixer, proving it’s possible but time-consuming compared to the tractor method. We continue building our utility dome, reinforcing doorframes with concrete-heavy mixes and planning for electrical boxes. Meanwhile, we work on converting a shipping container into a workshop with framed shelves. We also showcase a terracotta pot experiment to demonstrate how clay retains moisture for desert soil, aiding our water management plans. Join us for a mix of construction, experimentation, and off-grid life!

Transcript:

I’m going to be laying out bags this morning using the stand mixer instead of the tractor, which is what we would normally use. And I’m just going to be laying one short course from one door frame over here, all the way around to the other door frame, which is about half of the circle of this dome. So we’ll see how it goes.

All right. So I did some of the earth bag laying by myself using the stand mixer. And it didn’t get as far as I like for the time that I put into it. So definitely the bottom line is, yes, you can do this by yourself. But it does take quite a bit longer to do. Just doing it one buck at a time.

Using the stand mixer. So I don’t know if you can see this, but what I got done is just this section here. And what I really wanted to do was get all of this.

Part of the semicircle. So wasn’t able to get all that done, but I was able to do it myself. And that was the whole goal.

So yesterday I tried to do at least a half of a circle of earth bags, and I only got this section done. Ernie and I are always busy doing different things, and I wanted to see what I could do by myself. So it took me about three hours in total just to do this little part, when it would normally take maybe two hours to do, maybe a semicircle and maybe half a day to do the full circle.

So but I wanted to prove that you could do it. And it was a lot of set up and bringing the equipment over and making sure I had enough water and enough power to go, with the stand mixer that I had over here. And it can be done if you have nothing else to do, and you’re just kind of playing around with it.

Then it’s something that you could just do and eventually, you know, you get all your earth bags laid. But for me, time wise, it was just such a time suck that I didn’t continue with doing the other part of the circle. So. So we’re going to go ahead and do it the traditional, traditional way much, much faster, much more efficient.

But but that being said, I think if we have workshops out here in the fall or any time really that set up would be okay to do with a couple of people, one person mixing it in the, the stand mixer, where, where others are lay in the bags. And so while some of these lay in the bag, somebody could,

Yeah, it’s a slower, more deliberate, get used to the material and how to spread it and do different stuff. And this is a good area for her to do because we had two cleats, you know, one for this door frame and, one for that one over there. And they used more of a concrete mix to make sure that they get solidified in.

Now that’s what we’re going to be doing today is we have, you know, that cleat, include in between the bags and that one. And then we go around and that one, you know, so it’s, it’s preferable that we’re just so busy doing, you know, radio shows and, working the site and family stuff and other projects on the land.

I want to show you maybe even later today, I might do it. The shipping container in there, I got two by threes that you take a grinder, you rough up, go down to the metal on the inside of the indentations in the vertical indentations, and you press in with their cargo, retainers. They’re like eight foot long and you spread them across to hold boxes in and so on when you’re shipping.

And I got three of those and pressed both sides of those two by threes with liquid nails. Now, good friend Bob Anderson had done this with two containers, 20ft containers and showed how you can frame it and go, oh heck yeah. So that’s what we’re doing in there to build shelves and workstation and all kinds of stuff.

And I’ll be showing you that. And that’s kind of, you know, while a show is processing, you know, I do a show and I got to process it and post it and all that kind of stuff, and I’ll run out there, jump on the ATV, and I’ll go out and do a little bit of work there and then come back ten minutes, you know, because you want the glue to set.

So I’m getting stuff done in between stuff and there’s always stuff and we got a bunch of other stuff going on. But today we scheduled it off. Donna needs to go into town later today for a couple days, and then, I’ll be out here and she’s getting everything ready for me to do the shows, and I’ll be working out here mostly on that shipping container, when I don’t have her help.

And we’ll do that. Now. I can do the concrete in the bucket or the Adobe or, you know, the hyper Adobe. Structured Adobe Mix and, do this myself, but me, probably not. So we’ll be working on the shipping container, finishing the storage, and turn it into workshop. And, I’ll bring you along for that. But today, bags.

More and more bags. Now, when we get done, you can see this level. We’re starting to get to the point where we start thinking about electrical boxes. You know, where the outlets and stuff go on. We may do one more level, but after we get this level done, then we’ll start thinking about the wiring and such. And, so it’s a step by step process.

Here we go. Okay, as we stated before, the first thing you want to do is the concrete mix so that it solidifies and really locks this in. The rest of this is going to be structured Adobe, which means just dirt with a little bit of Portland in it. And you don’t even have to do that. But we mix it up.

We just take, you know, the scoop and put her in there, and then we start bringing it out, and then we’ll start doing the mix into the, concrete bucket here and do the structure in Adobe and just start going around and we’ll be done here directly. Now, will you put a hyperlapse on this? But here in Arizona, you know, oh my God, it’s only 100 degrees.

Well, it’s usually get like 110 even with shading and so on. These cameras just get so hot, they just stop working. So we’ll show you the end result. Well, Donna is taking a break. She’s going over there cooling off and only takes a few minutes. A man, you’re ready to go again, but you got to do it, you know, get your core down.

All of a sudden you get heat stroke. Now, what we’ve done is we’ve used a bag on that. And now we got to, you know, scrunch up that bag on there. I’ll take freaking in 15, 20 minutes. Just do that now. It only took us about, I don’t know, half hour, 40 minutes to do this part. So we’re we’re rock and roll and whatnot.

And what we want to do is get the soil. This is Adobe. You know, you do this about this moisture here, get a little clod, but it can break. And that gives us the ability to tamp it down. Now we had an eight inch tamper we’ve been using. But Donna was like, oh, we need a bigger tamper. So we went ahead and got a ten inch.

And between the two we can get this done pretty quick. So it’s a we try and get it level, you know, width wise and level lengthwise. And you do the best you can. You get it pretty good. I mean it’s a big long brick so it doesn’t really matter. I mean you once you get to the top you’re going to do a level cement kind of a, binder block, you know, on top that will encase the bottom of the dome.

So this will set on these bags and then you’ll have probably, you know, six inch, let’s say, and the EMT is the reinforcement. And then you put up, you’ll see, I had, oh, prototype a couple of years ago that we had done. And you cover this with fans and you put the mesh on and so on, and hopefully you’ll be able to see that what we’ve already done, we didn’t do a lot of other things, but we did experiment with a lot of things that we’re going to be doing here.

And there’s new stuff and new techniques that we want to do. But later I’m going to be working on the workshop and the shipping container. I want to get that ready for when the weather gets nice, and we can do a lot of work over there. And, it’s just lots of project. It all parallels and comes together eventually.

And what we’re hoping to do is by the holidays that we can have friends and family over enjoy a beautiful desert out here and just go exploring the grandkids and everything and have enough infrastructure. So they got, you know, power and, you know, bathroom and, you know, stuff. We got the bus to kind of be a hub, but we want to build a outdoor shower and bathroom over there.

And then of course, there’s going to be a bathroom in here. I don’t know if it’s going to be ready by then, but, we can keep it going. And we had a little bit of rain and normally I would be out carving the desert, but it wasn’t enough. And then we’re going to have to go over to the Sam Pond over there and start getting more soil that we need for doing the dome, and then also for the, house pad over here.

We just gotta keep raising that up. So it’s just a lot of things a little bit at a time. And depending on when both of us are available, because this takes two people to really have efficient use of the time. So that’s what we’re doing today.

Okay, I just finished doing a show and I wanted to show you this. This is a terracotta pot that I got yesterday when getting supplies to demonstrate, unglazed, just raw clay, and I call it terracotta, I think, very popular here in Arizona. And one of the things that they use them for is this the clay saturates with moisture.

Now, what you can do is you take and you put this upside down.

And you just take an.

A glue gun, glue that together. And you go around and you just fill these up every week or so. The reason is, is because this absorbs water and it bleeds it out into the surrounding soil. Now what happens is this keeps it wet wherever for, you know, go week days at least. But it demonstrates how the clay in the soil out here is what it’s made of.

You know, here in the southwest, the clay goes up. This is just a little bit in the bottom. You know, I didn’t put you know, fill this up or anything or just blow over. Anyway, this will just keep going up and it’ll saturate this clay. This is what happens to the soil out here. It goes up as fast as it goes down.

So that’s what we’re doing with the berm and swales that we’re creating out here is to have. And a lot of the water penetrate the clay and it does this. And then you can also get the like the neck bands that we use or absorbent things that they put in diapers and so on. You can buy those little beads and they soak up the water like this and keep it available for plants.

So I just wanted to show you that I just did this a couple hours ago, and it just sucked it right up.

From Earthbags to Clay Pots: Desert Construction Insights!https://t.co/GXWPaO4lVk

— occupytheland (@occupy_the_land) August 29, 2025