The Lumber Yard Gets a Design Upgrade at Earthaven Ecovillage

Written by Courtney Brooke on May 1, 2021. Posted in Natural Building, Permaculture.

Transcript from Video:

Paul: Then the trailer is going to be over in there next to the tree.

Zev: Oh, OK, Good.

Paul: So, Yeah, if this is sloped enough, there will never be any wet pools.

Zev: Yeah, it looks kind of like there needs to be a little more digging out right through here to get a little hump coming from that low spot up there.

Paul: But is it really a hump? See that’s the thing…

Zev: Yeah.

Paul: Because if it runs downhill, it’s going to run wherever it needs to run. I don’t really want it to be like a ditch. It just needs to be more or less sloping away from everywhere except….so there’s going to be this open yard, which is never going to have anything except a pile of firewood logs…

Courtney Brooke: We’re in the Earthaven lumberyard. This is where we take the logs. Different people’s logs, different colors. That’s how we know whose are whose. And then when the machine comes, every now and again, we mill it up into lumber and also bust it up into firewood, as you can see over there in that firewood stack.

So we’ve rented this excavator to give the firewood lot an upgrade so that the moisture is going where we want and it’s more sorted out.

Then this is the final product of lumber. Milled Lumber. It gets stacked up like this so that it can dry properly and then we can use it for building material. This is the lumberyard rocking chair.

What are you doing Zev?

Zev: We’re using this transit to kind of check the micro deposits here to make sure the water isn’t pooling up where we don’t want it in this…

Paul: Ok, this says, six feet… a quarter inch go like, 10 feet that way.

I think this is higher.

Courtney Brooke: Is it?

Paul: Six feet and a quarter inch.

Courtney Brooke: It’s the same?

Paul: It’s level.

Courtney Brooke: LEVEL!

Paul: Now go another 10-12-20 feet. Whatever.

Zev: Yeah, it’s definitely lower. It’s definitely lower here.

Paul: Okay. See, I can take a little out of that hump. This says six feet. 7 and a half.

Zev: What about here? Right next to it?

Paul: It’s probably six feet. 8 and a half. No, it’s six feet.

Yeah. Six feet 8 and a half. Just a little humping there.

Zev: Okay.

Paul: Well, Let’s see. The hump is right here. Yeah.

Zev: Really?

Paul: It’s 7 inches from there to all this new stuff can be pushed out, smoothed out.

Zev: And what about what’s happening over where the trailer is going to be?

Courtney Brooke: And now, you know, that’s going to be under the inner workings of the firewood lumber yard.

Lumber Yard, Milled Lumber, Paul Caron, zev friedman

Courtney Brooke

Courtney Brooke (she/her) is an ancestor who was a Social Ecologist, Regenerative Designer, and educator whose work aims to reconnect people with a sense of belonging to place. Her work in the world aims to address the root cause of today’s overwhelming ecological challenges – that humans are starved of a sense of belonging to the places they live. Courtney Brooke was raised on a small farm in North Georgia, and has been guided by a lifetime of living close to the land. Her greatest teachers have been the Appalachian Mountains, the land of Aotearoa, and Selu, the Corn Mother. She holds a degree in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology, University of Georgia, and has 10 years of experience facilitating earth-based education, ecological landscape design, women’s rites of passage, and cultural healing. Courtney Brooke has taught and facilitated environmental education curriculum, Deep Ecology, Permaculture Design Courses, hands-on craft and farming workshops, and Holistic Management to a wide range of audiences in nine countries from toddlers to adults and everyone in between. Deeply committed to spreading the healing that comes from belonging to the places we live, Courtney Brooke is passionate about designing learning opportunities that celebrate life. She lives at Earthaven Ecovillage where she tends the land, raises food, participates in communal ritual agriculture, swims in wild water, enjoys the mysterious blessing of being alive, and tends her own wild Hearth. She loves cooking home-grown and wild foraged foods, playing her flute to the sunrise, running on mountain trails, making compost piles, crafting from natural materials, and bringing people together to create beauty that feeds the holy.