Finishing the cob bench

August 14, 2014 - Backtracking a couple of months

 The cob bench served as an experiment for us first-time cob-makers. It's about as thick as the walls we plan to make for our house, which is now in progress. This post is mainly a photo gallery as I go through the steps of plastering the bench, to protect it frm the elements and make it prettier.

Gathering subsoil from an area of our property that will eventually be a fish pond.

Sofia and Guy sift sand to add to the soil/sand/straw plastering
mixture. The sand is left over from the construction of our first house

Sofia mixes the cob.

Water to wet down the bench that has dried out completely, and scraping
to prepare the surface for the new cob plaster to adhere.

Testing the plaster mix by flinging it from a few feet - if it sticks it's good.

Guy and Greta start applying the plaster.

Sofia and Greta pat on the plaster.

It's a sensual earthy experience.

Guy and Sofia adding final layer of plaster.

Smoothing it down. We added a significant amount of fresh cow dung to the final
mixture for increased strength and added impermeability.

Here it is! It had to dry for a few days. It's as solid as we hoped and we feel confident 

about the walls we'll be making for our cob house.

My son from the States and his son (Zeke and Luke) came to Brazil for the World Cup in June and early July. Along with my daughter, Sofia, and other son, his wife and their daughter (Victor, Ana Claudia and Camila), they spent a lot of time on the farm where we watched most of the games together.

Family gathered on porch of farm house.

My grandchildren enjoying the bench.

And where was Fofo during all this? Just hanging out, paying attention.

Working on the Cob House

July and August 2014 

Traditional earth dwellings of the Pueblo Indians, Taos, NM

Vernacular buildings record lifestyles of the past, when people had to find a sustainable way of life or perish. Just as we will have to now. The new importance of vernacular building is that it has vital ecological lessons for today.  Building with Cob: A Step-by-Step Guide, David Pearson, Earth & Spirit  Weismann, Adam; Bryce, Katy (2006-02-01). 

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Would you like to spend a few months in Brazil this year? We’re looking for one or two people to live with us for a while and work alongside us on a variety of projects - permaculture, gardening, bio-construction, advanced composting, and working with bamboo. We offer room and board in exchange for a few hours of work a day. You pay your own round trip fare to Brasilia, we pick you up at the airport, show you around, assist you with practical matters, help you learn Portuguese if you wish. If you’d like to know more, please email me at gretabrowne@gmail.com.    

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Rocks

Bit by bit we’ve been building the foundation for our cob house. Guy dug the trenches and lined them with gravel, placing rounded tiles along the bottom of the trenches to provide a conduit for rainwater to drain. However when he tamped down the gravel it appears that the tiles broke. We believe it won’t be a problem here since the earth drains well, but we do plan to make a second ditch about a meter above the house to draw excess water away.

The trench digger

Fofo inspects the trench

Since we’re trying to build as much as we can with local materials that can be had for the taking, we’ve been collecting rocks along roads and streams within a 3-mile range.

White rocks along a sandy road, at 4000 ft altitude.

Sparkling creek and smooth well shaped rocks.

Building those muscles.

The rock pile grows.

Building with rocks is new to both of us and we’re learning as we go along.

The first puzzle-like layer.

Greta's second layer

Guy's second layer.

Mixing the sand/lime mortar.

                                 

The Cob House

Building with Cob

“Building with cob is a powerful political action, greatly reducing the need for the mortgage systems, lumber and construction industries, and petrochemical companies. Cob builders spend less of their lives working to pay for all of the above, and more time living. Making homes with natural materials gathered gently from the earth improves the likelihood of the survival of life itself.” (The CobBuilders Handbook, by Becky Bee)

“Cob is gentle on the planet. Using cob reduces the use of wood, steel, and toxic building supplies.” (The CobBuilders Handbook, Becky Bee)

Resources we're using:

The Handsculpted House, by Ianto Evans, Michael Smith and Linda Smiley

The CobBuilders Handbook, by Becky Bee (free pdf download)
The Tao of Cob, by Dorethy Hancock

We’ve cleared the ground, outlined the walls with stones, built a model more or less to scale. The shake tests of four different soil samples suggest that the dirt under our feet will make fine adobe or cob, with a good proportion of sand, about 50%, and perhaps 25% clay. We think we can gather grass stalks from Guy’s scything to use as straw to help bind the cob. Today we plan to start a trial wall, something small, to see how the cob mix holds up.

Location of new house, just a few yards from the first house we had built in 2012.

Stakes and tape outline the walls of the projected house

Soil from four sites. Bottom line indicates where sand settled within 5 seconds.  Next line up indicates where silt settled after 10 minutes. Above the second line the clay separates more slowly from the water. 

Here the water has been poured off - a good ratio of sand to clay.

Sofia starts clearing the area. Fofo, the cat, wants to help.

Hard work but nice as the afternoon cools off.

Greta finishes the clay model of the cob house.

Front door - two bedrooms, a living area and the bathroom.

First experiment making cob.

Third attempt with a larger amount of earth. This came out well.

Foundation for a cob bench - our first trial project.

Working in the cob.

Bench is about a third done.

We have an offer from an architect from Panama who currently lives in Brasilia (about 70 miles from here) to help us for a day or two. His father, also an architect, will be visiting from Panama and has expressed interest in what we’re doing. What a gift! We hope they’ll look at our plans and the tiny progress we’ve made, and help us with their observations, especially regarding the roof, which we haven’t been able to envision so far.

Will it work? No one around here makes cob houses - there isn't even a word for cob in Portuguese. In the past adobe bricks and wattle-and-daub were common materials for farm houses, but now baked bricks and cement prevail. We would love to show that we can build a very nice house for next to nothing. We hope it looks something like the house pictured below, thought the Kansas grandmother who built this house spent quite a bit because she paid for a lot of labor and purchased really nice extra materials and fixtures. 

Photo from the cover of The Tao of Cob, by Dorethy Hancock

April - our autumn

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Would you like to spend a few months in Brazil this year? Even if you’re not a soccer fan, 2014 promises to be an exciting year to visit the land of Pele, samba, Rio, the old capital with its lovely beaches, and Brasilia, the new capital in the tropical central highlands – which is where we are.

We’re looking for one or two people to live with us for a while and work alongside us on a variety of projects - permaculture, gardening, bio-construction, advanced composting, and working with bamboo. We offer room and board in exchange for a few hours of work a day. You pay your own round trip fare to Brasilia, we pick you up at the airport, show you around, assist you with practical matters, help you learn Portuguese if you wish. If you’d like to know more, please email me at gretabrowne@gmail.com.   

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April 13, 2014

Another two months have lapsed without a new post. We completed our part of the video that Guy helped produce for the eleven-year celebration of my son’s language school in Brasilia (http://www.naturalenglish.com.br/11anos.html). The video comprised part of the March 21 party, an elegant affair with gourmet finger-foods, an amazing array of beverages – from tropical fruit juices to bubbly wine, beer and Johnny Walker Red Label. In addition to the video there were skits highlighting the various languages and activities the school offers, a learning-oriented bingo game, prizes, and finally informal ballroom dancing, a sine qua non for Brazilians.

Fofo on the roof

Some of you already know about Fofo, the kitten that showed up the morning after we turned over the video for final production. We’d been working 10-12 hour days and weren’t sure what to do with ourselves next. So a sweet playful kitten was just the ticket. We have no idea from whence he came – we live in the country, tucked away and hidden from the road, with no neighbors closer than half a mile. He likes to climb on top of the house to watch birds and stay safe when we’re not around, and he’s a good mouse-catcher, a real benefit here in the country.

Quaresma flowers announce the dry season.

In the meantime the rains picked up after the semi-drought in late January and early February, and we’re now secure in our water supply for the next few months, as the dry season arrives later this month and lasts until October. The creeks are running full, and here and there the water table has broken through the surface of our hilly plateau, at the northern lip of the La Plata watershed. Already the quaresmeiras blossom along the borders of the woods. The dirt road that connects our land to the asphalt road about five miles away is full of huge puddles and deep ruts but still passable.

Two siriemas (roadrunners) on the upper corner
of our property

We have begun to prepare for the second phase of our house-building project. This time, instead of hiring a local crew to build in the current squared-off manner, with hollow bricks, concrete, a wood structure, and cement-tile roof, we want to build the house ourselves, with the earth components we have in abundance on site – clay, sand, water, straw (perhaps some cow patties mixed in), stone, and bamboo. We’re considering cob, a material that even a small seventy-year-old woman can wield, and we‘ll build only one or two rooms to start out, since it’s easy to add on. The hand-sculpted house: a philosophical and practical guide to building a cob cottage, by Ianto Evans, Linda Smiley, and Michael Smith, is the main resource for our planning, so far.

Clearing the area, just above (west) the current house, where we will build our cob house.

Ipê tree stripped by ants - just a thin stem left.

Pocã tree stripped by ants.

The two last nights red cutter-ants (formiga saúva) have decimated two of our young trees, stripping them down to bare branches. One was a volunteer native plant, an ipê, that I was thinking of sacrificing anyway since it was too near the path and didn’t fit into my orchard scheme. But the other was a pocã, a large loose skinned tangerine, that planted last year. I think it will survive but I suspect we’ve lost a year of fruit from it. Tonight we’re prepared, with ant bait to lay by the side of their path. They should ‘discover’ it and carry it back to their lair instead of the targeted leaves – and it will destroy them. We’d avoid the carnage if they weren’t such a menace to our orchard, but all our sources tell us that we must get rid of them. Fortunately the ant bait is organic so we don’t have to use a chemical pesticide.

Cut leaves left by ants who work mainly at night.

This little ant is finishing up during the day.

The entrance to the ant house we hope to de-activate tonight.

Loufa gourds.

Welcome.

Babaçu trees.

Squash.

Guy and his carrot - destined for a stir-fry tonight.

Avocados, lemons cherry tomatoes, red bode peppers, bishop hat pepper, carrot ...