Trees for the high desert

I’ve been thinking a lot about what kind of trees to plant around our new house. The high desert is a tough place for trees and we will be asking a lot of ours, so I am quite excited about having found some good prospects.

 

Building green and cheap means small and simple

Our house is going to demonstrate a lot of sustainable systems and is designed to be affordable. Apparently there is a major perception out there that green homes are only for people with deep pockets: after all, to have a green home you need low-e windows, Energy Star appliances, and solar panels, right? While those things are helpful, being green means having a light footprint on the earth… that comes from simplicity and smallness more than anything.

 

Finishing outdoor wood

A coworker recently asked me about finishing wood for outdoor use. I’ve gone round and round about this but have come to some conclusions I think are worth sharing. Here are some things that I’ve discovered that have helped me make decisions in this regard.

 

Camping and the Potty House

We went camping on our property this weekend. The weather was typical for an Arizona spring: highly unpredictable. After a week with highs in the low 80s, it snowed on us and got really cold Sunday so we had to come back to Tucson early (we had planned on staying through to Monday). But Saturday was fun… we had friends and a fire and s’mores, and we saw our first sunset (stunning!) and our first starry night (equally stunning!).

We were able to test out our latest project: the Potty House—christened so by our two-year-old. We built it in pieces at home out of salvaged lumber (total cost less than $200). Wifey’s dad and I took it to the land and put it up Friday. It worked extremely well, even with twelve people using it!

The Potty House, by the way, is a sawdust toilet. It is not a pit privy, and no it does not smell or look bad when you lift the lid… it looks and smells like fresh pine sawdust. All deposits are composted into safe fertilizer in a separate compost bin (which does not smell or look bad either). It does a great job of taking what is often considered waste and turning it into a useful resource.

Wifey’s comment to her skeptical mom: “We’re saving the planet, one poop at a time!”

For more information about sawdust toilets and how they work, check out the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins.

 

Canelo Project

Wifey and I left the urchins with a friend and drove to Canelo this past Saturday. Canelo is a small community in southern Arizona where Bill and Athena Steen (straw bale construction gurus) direct the Canelo Project, a place where magical things happen with clay and straw. It was a fun time. We got to tour all their little straw bale cottages and outbuildings and learn a little about how it’s done. Bill and Athena looked at our home plans and we came away feeling pretty good about the direction we’re headed, at least as far as what we are building is concerned. Check out their site, there are lots of pictures.

 

What’s up?

So it’s been a little while since I posted last. I am going to use the holidays excuse. So here’s what’s been up lately…

 

Garden gumption

On Saturday morning I was playing in the yard with our elder urchin and looked at the largely fallow vegetable garden I had started a couple years ago. We have a few pepper plants, one eggplant, a baby grapevine (the only one of seven cuttings to survive since I took them this past winter) and a rather depressed cherry tomato plant, all in pots. None of the garden beds are in use because of our otherwise lovely mesquite trees. Gardening tip: never plant anything with any water requirements whatever under or near a mesquite tree unless you use containers. The mesquite will aggressively take all the water.

Anyhoo, I decided to try gardening again. Partly to experience the struggle of working the earth after the fall. Partly because I realize that the only way to really fail as a gardener is to stop trying, to be unimpacted by all I have learned from my past failures. Like, ‘Don’t plant a garden near a mesquite.’

 

Space conditioning without conditioners

I spent entirely too much time this afternoon trying to figure out why our furnace wasn’t working. Was it plugged in to the wrong outlet? (No.) Was the fuse blown? (No.) Did the furnace need servicing? (No.) Was the thermostat broken? (No.) Turns out the batteries had died in the thermostat, even though it was displaying its settings just fine.

This all got me thinking, as I spent about an hour climbing up and down a ladder, removing and replacing service panels and whatnot, that our next house should have a heating and cooling system that didn’t need so much maintenance, use so much fuel (gas or electricity), didn’t dry my skin out or drench us in humidity during the summer without actually cooling… okay, a pipe dream? Maybe not.