Transcript of Hut Hamlet Work Project: Ferrocement Cistern Tank Gets an Upgrade

Good morning on the cusp of spring and summer.

Today is an exciting day. Not only is it my favorite little person’s first birthday, but also we’re having a neighborhood work party to continue building this ferrocement cistern which is where all of our beautiful water comes from so.

We all drink the spring water from this land which is just such a honor and a blessing and I really feel how you know to to bathe in clean water to like wash my body and wash my thoughts and you know drink and cook with clean water is like what a gift and what a privilege and so we’ve had to learn over the years how to take good care of that, you know.

There’s got to have be some systems it’s not like we just get to automatically turn on our faucet and then there’s water so.

This here this big tank which is burmed into the earth is a ferrocement cistern tank. So this tank was built um in the style of ferrocement like 20 years ago and then it didn’t get any maintenance other than just you know checking the water level and so on until about two years ago.

So it was 18 years old didn’t need any maintenance and had been feeding our entire neighborhood which was about 20 people for all that time and then we last or two years ago we got down in there and we cleaned it out and filled in some cracks and we drained the whole thing and like pressure washed it and took care of it but then now we have more people in our neighborhood and legally we can’t have more than 24 people on one one water source so we had to get creative and what we’ve done is come together to build a new cistern so that we can have that’s going to get filled from a different water source so that we can be you know following all the proper rules.

So today is us continuing to work on this new beautiful cistern so what happens with a lot of things in our neighborhood is that we have a sign up sheet we have a work party someone volunteers to cook lunch people volunteer for shifts and then we get together and make it happen so here we are this is the construction site we left some offerings here back in the fall before we started to dig this hole and now we’re building this new cement cistern how many gallons that is a cistern hold…

Hey Paul! Paul. Paul how many gallons is the cistern how many gallons is the cistern?

10 000 more or less.

10 000 gallons that’s a lot of gallons so now we’re going to have about 20 000 gallons of capacity in our neighborhood.

So how’s this go,,,,,Yeah so there we are so what you do is you put you put up some structure you pour it we poured a cement slab then we put up some structure of rebar and wire and then we just used cement to travel over that to make it the shape that we want so you could make I mean you can make really anything out of fear of cement at any shape sometimes people use cans like squashed cans to fill that in and so yeah yay for collaboration cooperation and learning what it takes to be able to take care of the water you know meeting us in the middle of where we where we are and where we’re going and yeah so this is the midway strategy so in a lot of gratitude also for the like intergenerational aspect of it like this brother Paul we wouldn’t be able to do without him he’s been here since the dawn of time helping us figure out how to make these things happen and you know and then all these laborers and you know all that has to come from somewhere and the children have been up here and it’s just been really sweet we’ve all been learning and having a really joyful time .

So celebrating that happy birthday to my favorite little person.

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(Transcript from video):

Courtney Brooke: Good morning Zev.

Zev: Good morning.

Courtney Brooke: What are you doing?

Zev: I just took the cover off our solar hot water panel. It was covered for the winter and now the sun is hitting it. I let water in and that’s going to be heating water up so that we have nice piping hot water in our sink throughout the warm season.

Courtney Brooke: So that water gets hot in there and then where does the water go?

Zev: Then it gets pushed by the gravity from our high spring cistern which is about 60 vertical feet above the house pipe down here. It gets pushed by that pressure back through that cover pipe and into our hot water tank which is on the second floor of the house . Then it just is stored there by gravity to feed down into our sink in the kitchen and the sink in the in the other bedroom

Courtney Brooke: So there’s no pump?

Zev: No pumps.

Courtney Brooke: no electricity?

Zev: Yeah that’s right. It’s not quite passive because water is moving but yeah it’s a solar panel called a pt50 which has these four inch diameter metal  tubes inside that have enough water that they can resist some freezing in the spring and fall  but also have enough surface area that they can get enough surface area to volume ratio from the sun to heat the water up to like 140 degrees or something.

Courtney Brooke: And is the water like hot all the time?

Zev: Not when the sun’s not shining.

Courtney Brooke:  Ohhh.

Zev: Yeah, but it’s there. Our hot water tank stores the hot water for a good 12 or 18 hours hot enough for washing dishes. So, it’s only if we run into two or three days of rain that we have to worry about having enough hot water. Yay!

Courtney Brooke: Happy spring.

Zev:  Happy spring.

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Transcript from video:

Courtney Brooke: Good morning, it’s Courtney Brooke here. I wanted to show you another exciting plant in our landscape which is called an Alder. It’s a tree; it’s these trees here. This is a baby one. It was planted about …maybe two years ago. Here’s one that was planted three years ago; it’s the taller bigger tree there.

What’s going on here is that we have an existing muscadine arbor.  Just here… behind me is an existing muscadine arbor, which is made out of logs to hold it up and then it grows muscadines which are a wild grape. They make a lot of food; they’re just really delicious. They’re native to this region.

The scheme here is that we are growing these alders. At the base of each one of these, each one of these trunks, each one of these, what would you call it,…whatever the thing that’s holding up the arbor is. An alder that we planted to replace the pole, the post when the alder gets bigger.

Alnoculture

Nitrogen Fixing Living Trellis

The alder is a really cool plant. It’s actually fixing nitrogen. It’s a nitrogen fixing tree that’s non-leguminous. So, it’s not a legume. It doesn’t make a bean pod. Alder fixes nitrogen with its roots so it improves the soil. It helps to put nitrogen, which is part of what the plants need to grow and be well, into the soil.  Then you can see here this alder here and there’s a grape here. So this grape will be trellised up the alder when the alder is a little bit bigger.

This is not something that we came up with on our own. There’s a whole beautiful way of growing grapes that’s called Alnoculture because the latin name of this of this older tree is called Alnus. There’s this whole thing from up in Europe where people grow a lot of grapes for a really long time called alnoculture. They use these plants to trellis, as living trellises. So we’re not gonna cut the tree down. We’re just gonna let it be living and it’s gonna be a living post.

Pollarding and Propagating

Then you coppice it, you know when you pollard it. We don’t want the alder to get really big. We want to cut it and let it stay as a trellis. When you cut it releases nitrogen into the soil so this is an old thing. Tried and true. Especially out in Italy there’s all these old vineyards where they are practicing alnoculture.

Then another thing about the alder is that you can do something that’s called stooling. So when… let’s see if I can find an example… if you pack dirt around the bottom of the tree then it will make another baby tree. So you can see here that that is what has been done we just mounted the soil around the original tree here. It has made a whole bunch of other little babies. Then we can cut those off and have vegetatively propagated older trees to be feeding our grapes… yay!

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Transcript from video

Paul: I’m Paul Caron and I’m a resident of the Earthaven neighborhood which is called the Hut Hamlet

The reason why it’s called the Hut Hamlet… It was originally called the neotribal village, there’s a story behind all that that I’m not gonna tell right now.

Basically when we bought the Earthaven land we had an agreement not to all go off and build our own houses. First, build some community infrastructure and do a site plan and be responsible for our land. So, this started taking a lot longer than we thought it was going to take. People got antsy. They were like “but we have to be on the land how will we ever develop anything if we can’t be on the land?”

So we made a compromise with ourselves. We picked an area and decided to build a kitchen and house for everyone to share. Then build huts around that kitchen and bath house so it’s like a big house with grass and trees in between all the rooms basically. As things went on, we thought “Oh well build these huts and we’ll live in them until the community center is built. Then, we’ll move on to our all on to our personal sites.” Some people actually did that. Then the huts will be available for rental that’s what we thought. But most of the huts got bought up by other people who just wanted the hut style of life, including me.

So what it is, is it’s kind of a prototype, of a unique solution to the affordable housing crisis. That is the way that I put it. Like this house that we’re that I’m sitting on the front porch of is a is a 16-foot yurt. It was a canvas yurt and the canvas sat around for so long that it rotted off and the frame was left.  I covered the frame with insulation sheeting which was industrial waste and put some permanent windows and such in it. I’ve been living here since 2003. Basically I think maybe I spent five thousand dollars counting my own time to build this house. So that’s affordable housing eh?

The post The Hut Hamlet Neighborhood at Earthaven Ecovillage. An Origin Story. appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

When you fall in love with community-mates, over time and through all kinds of circumstances, you develop a relationship very much like family. When they leave or die, it’s an amazing loss and also a treasure trove of meaningful connection and nourishing memory. We can’t say enough about them, but we try….

Susan (Suchi) Lathrop lived and created sacred space at Earthaven for fourteen years, and was stricken with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), a disabling encroachment on natural body movement, not long after her best friend, Kimchi Rylander, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

It’s hard for us to accept and yet when it faces you square on, it challenges us to rise to the situation and lift things to their highest level. And rise we did, with Kimchi (who died in February) and again with Suchi.

Both women wanted to live their final days in the community they loved and so a large contingent of Earthaven members came together to do whatever was necessary to see these beloved women through their end-of-life transitions.

right: Suchi & Kimchi greet firefighters last year.

The following obituary is about Suchi’s life within and beyond Earthaven.

———————————————–

Susan (aka Suchi) Lathrop passed away in peace at home in Earthaven Ecovillage on May 17, surrounded by beloved friends. She had been suffering with a quickly declining condition of ALS. A wake and funeral were also held at Earthaven.

Suchi was a beloved leader in her community, not just at Earthaven, but in and around Asheville. She was outspoken and generous, and was the innovator of many community functions that have since become Earthaven traditions, including the weekly Coffee & Trade event on Tuesday mornings. Her guidance and determination made a huge difference! She was the Earthaven Firekeeper (like a President, only more so), and had a voice in many key committees over the years.

right: Suchi at the Trading Post.

As a core member of the Hut Hamlet neighborhood, Suchi co-owned the Tribal Condo with her beloved friend, Kimchi Rylander, for over a decade. She was an ardent gardener and filled her greenhouse with food all year round.

Suchi grew up in upstate New York, focusing her academic studies in psychology and library science. She has been a dedicated supporter of the Palestinian cause in Israel, and a leading member of the local Friends group in bringing attention to the issues. She was also Clerk of the Black Mountain Friends Meeting for several years.

Suchi’s hope is that people who want to honor her life donate a day or two of volunteer support to local non-profits in her name and the name of her community, Earthaven.

The post Letting Go Slowly appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

The Hut Hamlet’s kitchen/bathhouse — central distribution area for the neighborhood’s Microgrid.

In June, twenty-two residents of the Hut Hamlet neighborhood became owner/users of the first electric Microgrid at Earthaven! Chris Farmer of SunWorks Electric installed an 8.16 kW solar array and power system to serve 11 huts, and the neighborhood kitchen and bathhouse. The system will produce, on an average day, 31.5 kWh of electricity, which is what the average American house consumes.

After Chris and fellow valley solar electrician Brandon Greenstein had to troubleshoot, fix, or upgrade too many small, old, self-installed systems, they decided that to install one new, state-of-the-art system wired to code for the entire neighborhood.

One of the greatest obstacles to creating a shared off-grid power system is the different levels of electrical needs, as well as levels of consciousness around usage, people have. How does a group deal with this fairly? The Microgrid has a metering system that records different users’ true impact on the system, and charges users accordingly. Earthaven resident Jake Ferina wrote all the computer code for the weighted metering system, as well as for an Automatic Generator Start program better suited to off-grid solar than any offered on the market.

One perennial question in off-grid solar design is how big a battery to install. Too small, and it’s almost useless. Too big, and without an appropriately sized array, the batteries will not adequately re-charge after cloudy spells, But if the array is large enough to keep the batteries well charged, during sunny spells much of the energy from the panels will go to waste. We avoided this conundrum by installing a Diversion system that diverts excess electrical production to a conventional electric hot water heater. This 1) protects the batteries while 2) providing a freeze-proof solar hot water system.

Before the Microgrid, some residents had enough power for a light and a laptop, while others had upgraded to power refrigerators. The new plan, which took many minds over many months to work out, plus weeks of disrupted phone lines and paths, has been running smoothly for a few weeks and the future of power in the Hamlet looks, well, …brighter!

For the list of components in the Hut Hamlet Microgrid, see this entry in the Earthaven blog.

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In June, residents of the Hut Hamlet became owners/users of the first electric microgrid at Earthaven! Chris Farmer designed the grid with help from Brandon Greenstein. Code for mastering, monitoring and metering usage was written by Jake Farina. Earthaven members produce electricity from sun and water, and are not tied into the Duke Power grid, so this is especially significant to folks choosing simplified lifestyles. Now bigger and smaller users alike will be able to meet their needs, each paying according to usage, the rates differing between peak- and low-usage times. The Hamlet microgrid is solely solar-powered at this time.

Before the microgrid, some Hamlet residents had barely enough power for a light and a laptop, while others had been able to upgrade their systems to power refrigerators and freezers. The new plan, which took many months and many minds to work out, and weeks of disrupted paths and phone lines, has been running smoothly for a few weeks and the future of power in the Hamlet looks, well, …brighter!

Microgrid Technical Points, courtesy of Chris Farmer (SunWorks Electric, 828-707-5551).
The MicroGrid presently powers 11 Huts, the neighborhood kitchen, and bathhouse. The system is touted to produce 31.5 kWh (kilowatt hours) of energy on an average day. (Note: In 2013 the average American home required 29.9 kWh of electrical energy per day.) All of the power available is not yet being utilized.

Hut Hamlet Microgrid Components

• An 8.16 kW Solar Photovoltaic Array (32 individual 255 watt Kyocera panels
• A 48 volt 950Ah (Amp Hour) flooded lead acid battery (HUP Solar One) that weighs 3500 lbs.
• Two MidNite Solar 200 charge controllers
• Two Schneider Electric XW6848 Inverters, each capable of 6.8kW of continual conventional AC power output. One inverter is asleep ~90% of the time, awakened only when the Master inverter needs help.
• Excess electricity produced is diverted to a 105 gallon, 240 volt AC, electric hot water heater.
• Each connection is individually metered. Capital and operating expenses of the system will be determined by users’ weighted impact.
• The system is backed up by a super quiet Honda EU7000is generator.

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Luka (left) and Max (right).

The post Photo of the Season appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

This past fall, we harvested a beautiful collection of fruits and vegetables. As any harvester knows, Ma Nature produces bountiful amounts of food and there’s always enough to share.

One morning, Suchi and I were walking in the Hut Hamlet neighborhood and came upon a Crabapple tree that was dripping with fruit. . . 45 pounds, to be exact. We dashed for our buckets and harvested the tart apples, noticing that there was hardly any insect or mold/mildew rot. This tree was one of the early perennials planted at Earthaven about 12 years ago. Some folks believe that crabapples are the only wild survivors of our domestic apples.

After 20 pounds, we decided to carry our harvest to the kitchen and find a way to preserve these “mini-apples”. We decided to make “Spiced Crabapples” by placing the cleaned fruit in a crock with apple cider vinegar, honey, and spices.

After a few days, on a cool fall evening, we heated up the crabapple brine and packed it in 24 one-pint jars. What a fun way to warm ourselves and appreciate our fall harvest!

Here’s to your happy harvest!

 Tribal Condo Clan is a co-housing exploration dedicated to simplicity and preservation of the commonwealth. Currently, Kimchi Rylander (pictured left) and Suchi Lathrop (pictured right) live there with three other residents

The post Ode to Crabapples appeared first on Earthaven Ecovillage.

A video by Will Rogers:

hht from will rogers on Vimeo.

Transcript of Hut Hamlet Trampoline

We assembld the HHT.

The Hut Hamlet Trampoline.

And we did not call on Aura, the seven year old boy most excited about the toy who lives in a house in the background.

Instead, we loaded the brand new thing with over a quarter ton of US!

Testing the 250 pound recommended maximum.

The thing held up wonderfully.

The thing made from fossil fuels and extracted metals will not last forever.

The same is true for all of us.

The villagers and the trampoline enjoy each other’s qualities for the present.

Which lasts forever in it’s own sort of way.

And the boy, Aura, comes running out of his house as soon as this video is over.

For now, we anticipate his arrival, ensuring the trampoline is ready for a dozen more kids his size.

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