Water Management in Action – Sand Pond, Root Cellar & Orchard
Welcome back to Occupy the Land. After a few weeks
Welcome to Occupy the Land. In 115-degree heat we backfill and pack soil around the 20ft geodesic sphere, then mix our Calcrete (local soil + a small amount of Portland + basalt fiber) and apply the first coat to the bottom row. The test section from last week is already hard with no cracking, so we’re duplicating that mix. Next steps: finish the bottom run, level the floor, then start working up the walls. Also a quick look at raising the house pad and how one rain has started greening the desert. Slow, steady progress on food storage and water control. Peace.
Transcript:
So now we backfilled this. You got a little bit of time lapse of us doing that. Now what we’re doing is just packing, you know, the backfill and making that, you know, hard. And then we’re going to go ahead and mix our.
Cal, create whatever you call it up, like we did over in the test area. And then you slather it on there and get this bottom row done. Then we’ll go ahead and do the floor. And then we’ll start doing the walls and it’ll start going up. We’ll start attaching all that fence to it, put the fiberglass behind it and as do keep doing this.
Now what we did over here is this is the one that we did the test on now. It is hard. It’s not cracking. And this is what the rest of it’s going to be, you know. So as we do that then we’ll go ahead and get the floor done.
Rock and roll.
Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land. Today is some work in 115 ten, whatever billion degrees. It’s morning, nine, 10:00, and it’s already over 100. I mean, that’s just the way it is. So what we’re going to do is today, we’re we already prepped and backfilled the first layer of doing the back end. So we’re going to go ahead and start coding it like we did down here.
Now this down here is hard. No cracking. It’s got some dust on it from dumping some dirt here. But this is what we’re looking for. So we’re trying to duplicate the mix that we did last week. And that’s what we’re going to be doing now here. Over here we have seven shovel fulls of soil. Then we got one shovel full of Portland and we’re going to have some water.
We got to determine how much of that. Now these are basalt ropes. It’s stone and it’s done in like fiberglass. When you cut them into these links, I mean, it gets really fine and it holds a lot better. That’s why we’re using this stuff, because it makes it stick more. It’s like Play-Doh almost. So the basalt fibers helps with that.
So we’re going to go ahead and calculate how much water we want to do I think I know but I don’t want to make a mistake. So we’re going to use this mixer now. Hopefully this will mix it well. We were doing it by hand. But we’ll try and do this. I’m sure it’ll be fine. Then we’re going to go ahead and spread it around.
But we’re not going to do a lot of time lapse or video or anything because it’s so hot. The cameras can’t make it, you know, then five minutes, they just get too hot and go, she’s holding the ice pack on this one. So we’re going to go ahead and show you at the end what we’ve accomplished. But we’re going to get on it piece.
Okay. I wanted to show you. This is the first batch. It’s about this consistency. That’s about what you want. But it does this.
See all those hairs?
That’s what makes it Play-Doh. And it works really well. So that’s why. When did you see seeing a little bit.
Okay. We’re cleaning up. We did half of the bottom, and this is what it looks like.
Then we’ll do the floor.
Well, we’ll do the floor like this, and then we’ll do concrete. Now these to answer two over that and it’ll go up to side here. But now we’ve got a laser level the floor. Once we get done with this bottom we still got more to do yet. But it’s hot. Clean it up. I keep bringing down more dirt because we need that.
But damn. Well, at least we’re in the shade.
Welcome to occupy the land. Occupy the land.org. Now we’re getting to where when the weather starts turning nicer, we’re going to be working a lot on the prototype dome there and a lot of special building techniques and so on that we’ve already had experience with, and we’re going to put them all together now. The water control we haven’t had but one good rain and that rain showed us what a little bit of rain will do.
So it also helped us understand how we’re going to make the crossings on the road, and we get it flooded where we want and not where we don’t. Now this is the house pad and the reason we’re building this up. This is up like two feet. I need to go like another foot. And we have plenty of soil to do that with from the sand pond.
And this is where the main house build is going to be. And that’s what we’re doing here. While we’re doing everything else, we’ll go ahead and just keep prepping this and it’ll be ready for when we want to do that. It’s just beautiful out here. No. My goodness, we have some clouds, but probably no rain for a while.
It’s early in the morning on well, in the August. I know what the date is. I had 28th or something, but yeah, you kind of lose track of days. It’s like days a week you might remember, but you can see the house pad here. The wash is on that side and on this side of it. And this is why we need to raise that up.
So all the drainage that comes off of these mountains, you know, bypass around the home so it doesn’t flood. Now you’ll start to see because of just that one rain, you know, all of the creosote has gone green, where before it was kind of like this dull olive green. And it’s starting to really green up. And it happens in like a few days and all of a sudden, boom, the desert turns green.
Now we have some building stuff over here helping us with that. But this is Donna’s raised garden bed, and she’s prepping that for doing potatoes. She’s learning how to get the fuck. Just right. And so on. Now these buildings are semi-permanent. You know, they’re going to be domes in the future. We want to do it because you’re going to have a big dome that’s going to be on top of the root cellar here.
And I just want everything kind of be the same. And I’m liking this building technique. And I got the chickens are going at it. Now what we’re doing this is going to have a bridge a little bit lower down than what the tractor is here. That goes over this to give access to the chickens and the garden area and the big 30ft dome that we have over the community area there.
We’re going to bring over here and be a big greenhouse. Now, the reason we did this is one, we needed to have a root cellar so that we can get cooler temperatures to put our coolers, freezers, refrigerators and whatever in down here. And we have place to store food that we’re preserving and production and buying. And we just negotiated it looks like in Oklahoma, we’re going to be purchasing a cow and have raised for the next seven months or so, and then we’ll go ahead and have it processed, and then we’ll put that here, and it’ll give us a chance to go visit our oldest daughter and her family and go and pick it up.
Now the fencing goes around the dome. It’s been when we were constructing it. We put it underneath and then this will wrap around and you can see that we put on the first run here, the fiberglass to kind of hold back the soil. Now as the soil comes in or we dump it in it back fills that. And that’s what we put the panels that we’re building up against that.
Now, I had the compactor down here because we’re going to be using that to compact the soil after we get this bottom run done. So we did this yesterday halfway. Now this is the prototype. We just tested the technique on this one little thing here, but it’s a scratch coat. So we just put her fingers in it and gave it some scratches on it.
And for the next layer to stick to this, because the next layer is going to be cement, and that will be after we get the floor done. Kind of like that. You know, we’re using, you know, the basalt fibers to put it in. It really makes a difference, you know. And we’ve only used there’s still half a bag of Portland in there.
We only take like a half a shovel full of Portland to put in. And it makes it hard. I mean, it’s just, you know.
Already hardened. And I’m sure the Portland has something to do with that. But so this is working as well as I hoped. So I’m happy with that. So we’ll go ahead and get the floor level. And I don’t think we’re going to put the concrete on the floor and melt it up into the wall until we get it all the way up to halfway.
But we’ll have a nice, you know, earth and floor like this pounded down and level and so on to work on and make it a lot easier for us. But I don’t think we’re going to do this cement until later, you know, we’ll see how that goes. But we’re on it. This is starting the process here by which to enclose this.
And then we’ll put the Joyce up top for the floor for the next level of this, and then for the ceiling down here. So that is the plan. Now this here is going to be, you know, we’ll ramp into this door and we’ll have a door wide enough here that we can put in refrigerators and so on and craft this.
So crafting this wall here with the door in it is going to be fun. You know, we got a lot of different options. And I just want it to look cool and be permanent. So you know you’re learning with us. We’re doing it. I don’t know anyone else that’s ever done it this way, but there’s no reason why we can’t.
And it seems to be working. So we’re going to continue this process. But we have so many other things to do. And that’s, you know, constant, you know, we have like I got to go in and I did a show already this morning. I gotta do another radio show this after morning afternoon. And then we might get time to come out here and do the other half of that bottom run.
Just keep making daily progress and things work. But, you know, the problem is a lot of people don’t see you got to be able to develop and build with your time faster than you have to have your time on maintenance. You know, every time you know, you have a rain or something, you got to repair stuff that’s half a day.
You know, you got like, I got one of my bicycles, got flat tire, you know, that’s going to take a while. Then you got, you got, you got, you got. And I really got to get to that trommel. Donna keeps going. You keep talking about it and you’re not doing it. Well, you know, it’s getting to the point that, you know it’s time.
So all these things take time. Now, on the that dome over there is just going to be picked up by the tractor and put over here somewhere. It’s going to replace that garden there. I, you know, these are functional. We need to get started. But you know, that’s not really what I want as a permanent structure. And a lot of time is spent over here on the orchard part, having that flood, getting the pond liner.
I got to drive up the northern Arizona to pick up pond liner they’re going to be using over there, and there’s just all kinds of things that need to be done. But we’re making progress on the root cellar, and that’s going to have we have the struts over there for the top part. That’s what that is. So we’re going to go ahead and start.
When we get to it. We can build the dome there. It’s going to be cool. It’s and it’s starting to pick up speed. I mean all the other stuff that we were doing to build the struts and dig the hole and get it positioned and start in 115 degree weather. Oh my goodness. So we’re trying to get a lot done that we can get to the fun part when it starts to cool off a little bit.
And at the same time we’re fixing all the drainage and doing the, you know, ditching that we need to to get the water to flow where we need to. And of course, every chance we get to keep building up the house pad because we can’t get started on this till we get the house pad built up and it starts to solidify and compact and we keep compacting it and so on.
So there’s so much stuff to do, but in the long run, we know what we got to do and we’re making progress. That’s all we got to do. Just keep making progress. And then you can see now the desert is starting to green up one rain. It does that every time and especially if you can slow down the water.
This is going to our property here is going to be a big green postage stamp from space. And it’s like this every day. Well, some days better than others of just how beautiful it is out here and peaceful peace.
Welcome back to Occupy the Land. After a few weeks
Welcome to Occupy the Land. In this episode we visit
In this episode of Occupy the Land we visit Mike