Inner City Farmer

One MRI, three cortisone shots in the back, and countless hours of physical therapy, and the Inner City Farmer is back! Sort of. To finish up the the earth floor in the Man Cave (or Brandy Library, if you prefer) I needed to employ the services of Frank Meyer, and I am so glad that I did because Frank is simply the best. He’s easily in the top three or four out of all the earth floor makers in the world. Think about that. It was like having Michael Jordan stop by to help me work on my jump shot.

Frank took care of applying the first coat of linseed oil to seal the floor and left me to do the rest. He heated the oil up so that it could be spread thinner. Even so the clay was “thirsty” and the floor drank up four gallons of the stuff. For the successive coats the oil hasn’t needed to be heated, but I have thinned it by adding some Citrusolv, which I got at EcoWise. The Citrusolv helps the oil dry quicker and it makes it smell better, like oranges!

I have added four coats total at this point and plan on adding one more. It’s taking about two days for each coat to dry. But soon–within a week?–the process will be done, and we’ll be able to start using the room! For those interested in learning more about earth floors, a good article was written about them in the New York Times several years ago, and, of course, Frank is one of the main people featured in the article.

Guess who’s back playing in the mud? After staying indoors for what seemed like an eternity away from the summer heat, I have emerged from my summer hibernation. Several weekends ago, I was given a metal tool shed that will finally give me some place to store all my tools. It came with a roof and four walls, but, alas, no floor. Most people would have simply poured a concrete slab and called it good. But, as you surely know by now, I hate concrete worse than I hate Nazis.

So I started digging a square hole in the ground.

Then I dug trenches on the outer edge of the square hole so that water would drain away from the future floor.

Next I filled in the hole with all the septic gravel that was left over from making the earth floor in the Man Cave.

After erecting the tool shed, I then starting digging clay from my pit/future pond in my back yard. Thanks to the drought, the clay was rock hard so I soaked it in water, let it dry a little in the sun, then sifted it through a wire screen.

Just as I did on the previous earth floor, I used two parts coarse gravel and one part clay for the first layer. It’s like slicing cold butter into a flour mixture when making a pie crust. All the little bits of butter/clay should get completely covered by the flour/sand. I then pounded this layer with a tamper.

I’m going to let it dry a little–the clay was still quite moist when I mixed it with the sand–before I start on the next layer.