Inner City Farmer

The photograph above shows the gazebo I made last fall entirely out of natural and recycled materials. The project started as a simple earth oven, the design of which I copied from Kiko Denzer’s book Build Your Own Earth Oven—I also watched Kiko construct a simple one at last year’s Natural Building Colloquium in Kerrville, Texas. The foundation of the oven consists of “urbanite,” large chunks of concrete that, before I took a sledgehammer to them, used to be a set of crazily titled stairs leading outside my kitchen. The clay I used came from a pit in my own backyard and the sand I got for free from someone on craigslist who just wanted to get rid of it.

Once the oven was finished I needed to figure out a way to protect it from the elements other than the ratty old tarp I’d been using. That’s when I decided to make a living roof nearly identical to the one I’d seen Sun Ray Kelly make at the Building Colloquium. For those unfamiliar with his work Sun Ray’s modus operandi is basically to smoke a joint, take a walk in the woods, gather the coolest looking materials he stumbles upon, and use them to build houses that make adults feel like kids. He’s a genius.

The four corner posts of my gazebo are tree limbs. I drilled holes in the bottom and each and then placed the limbs over rebar I’d set into the ground with concrete. (The very small amount of concrete I used was the only material I had to buy in a store.) The tree limbs I found at a park alongside the river on the east side of Austin. No one ever stopped me and asked me why I was hauling off these enormous pieces of wood so I kept going back.

To make the gazebo’s roof I laid a latticework of bamboo across the cross beams. The bamboo I found at a fraternity house on the University of Texas campus. The Delta Tau Delta house (the most famous member of which is this guy) spent all of January preparing their courtyard for their annual Delt Freedom Party (what used to be known as the Mekong Delta Party) and after one glorious night spent drinking cheap beer they completely dismantled it. Fortunately (for me as well as the local landfill) they put an advertisement on craigslist, telling anyone who might be interested to come and haul off the mess they’d produced.

What caught my attention was the mention of free sand because the principal ingredient of both the earth oven and the cob bench I’d built beside it was sand, and I had many more such projects I hoped to embark upon in the future. Last fall I did things the normal way and paid for a dump truck to come and unload a pile of sand in my driveway. This cost me a little over a hundred bucks, cheap relative to the number of things I would be able to build with it, but then I realized that the sand itself had only cost like ten bucks—the other $90 had gone to pay for use of the dump truck!

When I arrived at the Delt house I couldn’t believe how much sand they had, a huge mountain their pledges had methodically placed in sand bags. Envisioning all the things I could build, I started hauling them back to my place. In the end I managed to take seven van loads, enough to build the toolshed I’ve been talking about for a while now. I probably saved about $500 hauling this sand myself and afterwards I felt strong as an ox. Here’s a picture of the sand bags piled in my yard:

Self-Sufficiency Meter: 30%