Inner City Farmer

Until I started this latest project, I forgot how much I enjoy working with wood. All building materials have their pros and cons. As much as I hate concrete, I readily admit that for certain jobs it’s perfect, and as much as I love cob, I’ll also admit that it’s got its drawbacks, namely how labor-intensive it is. But wood? I can think of very few negative aspects of building with wood other than the lack of foresight involved in its harvesting and the wastefulness surrounding its use on a typical construction site. If you use wood that has been harvested in a sustainable manner, i.e. only cutting down trees of a certain size and then replacing them with saplings, and find a use for every bit of the tree, you’re not going to find a better building material.

As much as I can, I try to use building materials that are locally sourced, which here in Texas means using mainly oak, cedar, and mesquite. Ideally, I would be felling and milling the trees myself. Cutting out the middlemen, in this case the lumberyards, would cut down on the total amount of embodied energy expended in the process as well as the monetary costs, which is how Matt was able to trim his entire house several years ago. His uncle harvested thousands of square feet of wood from his property in Ohio and gave enough to Matt to allow him to redo the trim on all 44 windows inside his house. Oh, what I would give to have such an uncle right about now.

On the Austin Permaculture listserv I did hear of a woman in East Texas who was offering to let anyone come to her property and harvest trees that had been downed by Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately, hauling that much wood to Austin would require the use of an ungodly amount of gas. Would the procurement of that much sustainably harvested wood offset the amount of energy I would spend hauling it all the way to Austin? I don’t know. When it comes to building materials, there are no easy answers.

Up to this point, I’ve done nearly everything that needs doing on the farm on my own. But once summer hit in earnest (it now hits 100 degrees pretty much every day) I started spending more and more time working on the interior of my house, which involves using skills I don’t fully possess. My latest project has been creating a serving window between my kitchen and dining room. I had a hunch that simply knocking a hole in the wall would improve life inside my house immeasurably, and I was right. There’s more light in all the rooms, and my small house now feels much bigger.

Making the hole was easy. Destroying something always is. All I needed was a sheetrock saw and a Sawzall. Making the frame for the new window was much trickier so I gave my friend Matt a call. Initially, I thought I would only be borrowing some of the many saws he owns, but in the end I discovered that I needed his expertise even more. Simply put, he knew what he was doing, and I did not. Without his help I wouldn’t have been able to do the job correctly.

This project didn’t require the use of any of my natural building skills, but it did demand that I use an ability that’s been gathering dust during my quest for self-sufficiency, and that is the willingness to ask for help. It’s much harder for me to do this than you might imagine, and I know I need to get over it. For the farm to reach its full potential it’s going to need many hands pitching in and helping out. It seems counter-intuitive, but I think seeking help (from friends, not paid laborers) actually improves my self-sufficiency. Now I just need to start asking.

Ever since I moved into this place, I’ve been stockpiling my old used batteries. What do you do with these toxic time bombs? How does one properly dispose of them? In the good old days we used to just blithely toss them into the garbage and hope some future generation of smarter humans would figure it all out. Admit it, you did. We all did. But now we know better.

Through diligent research I discovered that in Austin you can drop off your spent batteries at the Household Hazardous Waste Facility, which is open noon to 6 p.m. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and 7 a.m. to noon on the first Saturday of each month. The problem for me is that the Facility is in way South Austin, which, the way I drive, might as well be Africa. So I called up the Facility and found out that you can also drop off your old batteries at pretty much any Radio Shack or Batteries Plus. I took mine to the Radio Shack in the Hancock Center and simply handed them to the guy behind the counter who dropped them in the plastic tub you see in the picture above. Easy, simple, done.

Are you looking to buy a “green-built” house? Does this sign entice you? Well, don’t be fooled. Slapping “green-built” on a new housing project is the marketing tool of choice for shady real-estate developers these days. These condos just down the street from my house are about as green as a slimmed-down Hummer.

The builders started off with a very noble and environmentally friendly idea. They tore down the old inefficient condos that once sat on that lot with the idea of building fancy new condos on the existing concrete slabs. But then a problem arose. The old slabs were falling apart and didn’t pass inspection so the builders had to bust them up and start anew, which required the use of an unfathomable amount of cement. I don’t want to rehash the argument against our society’s overuse of cement here. Suffice it to say that it is one of the most energy-intensive materials around while its production is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

In my book, as soon as the builders poured new slabs they should have lost any right to be called green-builders, but if you’re still not convinced just take a look at the industrial dumpster the builders are using. I’ve watched it get filled and emptied at least three times in the past several months. While that might be standard practice in the American construction and demolition industries, which produce 140 million tons of waste each year, over a third of the country’s entire solid-waste stream, true green builders pride themselves on producing as little waste as possible.

And then there’s their use of Tyvek, a Dupont-produced “housewrap” that is one of the most controversial building materials on the market today. While it does make a house “tighter” and therefore more energy efficient, it has also been linked to mold growth and rot inside of walls. Its long-term impact on the environment is also largely unknown. Does it break down in a landfill? Can it be recycled? No one knows for sure because the material hasn’t been around long enough for its life cycle to be studied in the real world.

This is not an isolated case. This is trend. People are growing increasingly aware of the detrimental impact our houses have on the environment and so more and more are happy to pay a little extra for a green-built house. Just make sure that if you’re the one doing the buying that the house was made green by designers and not by a marketing department.

Free at last, free at last. I finally let the broody hen out of her cage yesterday afternoon. Her time in confinement was brutal for all parties involved… but it seems to have done the trick. When she exited the cage, she was far more interested in scratching the ground and pecking at bugs than sitting on eggs. Egg production isn’t quite what it was before, but I am getting at least one or two eggs a day. I anticipate the next big develop in the coop to be the day my youngest hen, now four months old, starts laying eggs. That will probably happen towards the end of August…