Inner City Farmer

I have a small section of the Man Cave that I want to insulate in a more traditional way than using light clay straw, but I still don’t want to use fiberglass insulation. More than one person has recommended that I try the more environmentally friendly cotton insulation which is made from recycling jeans, but guess what? Not even the greenest building store in Austin, EcoWise, carries the stuff. To get some I would have to have it trucked in from another state, which is not only energy-intensive but cost-prohibitive. And now you understand my frustration at how slow the Green Revolution really is. In Austin, Texas, the so-called Green Building Capital of the World, I can’t find a more environmentally friendly option for insulating my walls than the pink crap sold my Hope Depot. We got a long way to go, baby, and a short time to get there.

Lester, the oddly named hen that I raised from a chick, died sometime last night. She was nine months old.

My best guess is that the cold got to her. I babied my other hens during their first winter, but I neglected to to the same for poor old Lester. I should have shut the door of the chicken house the last couple nights and perhaps even put a space heater in there, but I forgot and now my best layer is dead. This one is on me. I don’t feel good about it at all.

I have tried to keep politics separate from the happenings on the farm, but I will admit to being very excited about the possibilities promised by the upcoming Administration. Will we actually experience real change or was that all political rhetoric? We will soon find out.

Many are hopeful that real change will come to the way our food in this country is grown and distributed. I am one of them. If you would like to support the cause, you can visit Food Democracy Now and sign the petition.

Like just about everything I have done around here, my using light clay straw to insulate the Man Cave has taken far more time than I had originally envisioned. The work goes much faster than cobbing, but it’s a lot slower than tacking up rolls of the pink fiberglass stuff. It hasn’t helped that I’ve never done this before, that I am basically following an amalgamation of several descriptions of the process I found on the internet.

One person advises to lightly coat the straw with clay slip, comparing the amount of slip needed to the amount of dressing you would put on a salad. The thing is I like to put a lot of dressing on my salads. In fact, lettuce is simply the vehicle I use to get salad dressing into my mouth. This predilection definitely affected my work in the past week. Most of the light clay straw I stuffed between the studs couldn’t be classified as “light” at all as large clumps of clay appeared throughout. Because the straw was so thoroughly soaked, some mold appeared on the outside of the straw. Supposedly, this is nothing to get alarmed about, and in fact as the straw has dried out the mold has disappeared. Shoots of green grass have also started sprouting out of the straw in places, but once again this is supposed to be a fairly normal occurrence.

And so I keep plugging away at it. It’s exciting to think that one day I might actually be able to work and play in this room and realize that it wouldn’t exist if not for the many hours, days, weeks, of labor I devoted to making it happen.