Farm Art 2: Crafts and Natural Building

Crafts

Garlic Braid with cayenne peppers.

Wreath made of mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), ironweed (Vernonia sp.), and cayenne peppers.

This braid and wreath as well as many other crafted itmes, herbal teas, and more will be available at the Alternative Gift Fair.  The fair is a great chance to fulfill your holiday shopping obligations with a good conscience by purchasing unique items from local non-profits, including the George Jones Farm.  It runs from Dec 13-17, 11:30-3:30 in the Bent Corridor of the Oberlin College Science Center on West Lorain Street.  On Dec 18 it will run from 1-4pm at the Oberlin Public Library on South Main Street.  I hope you'll come out and supprot the farm and other great organizations. 

Natural Building

Sprucing up the strawbale building at the farm with a fresh earthen finish.  Nanette Yanuzzi (in the blue sweatshirt), an Oberlin College Art professor, and Anna Wolfson (in the red vest), OC alum and head of Wolfson Earthen Finishes (see my Sources and Tributaries sidebar for a link), lead students in plastering the walls with a rich ochre mixture of clay and sand.

Adding deeper shades of orange and red along the bottom of the wall.

Thank you Anna, Nanette, and everyone who came out to brighten up the walls of the strawbale building!

My first exposure to permaculture came while traveling in Patagonia in 2008.  I volunteered for a week at CIDEP (Centro de Investigacion, Desarollo, y Ensenanza de Permacultura) and was blown away by the beautiful organic architecture that was possible with mud and straw and sand, not to mention the very special community that forms when a group of strangers step into a mud pit and work the clay and the straw and water and sand together with their feet by dancing.  This is a very special place I feel very lucky to have discovered.  My brief time there definitely caused a paradigm shift in the way I think about my work with/in nature and it will be a very long time before I truly see how much that week affected my life.  You'll find a link to their website in the Sources and Tributaries sidebar.

At the entrance, only another mile of hiking to go...

The main building: front

The main building: back

Community at play

The result of a day of adobe dancing

A harvest of adobe bricks

Dry composting toilet: front

Dry composting toilet: back.  The chimney faces towards the sun and is painted balck so that it heats up and creates a draft which whisks away any smells.  This bathroom was truly lovely to spend time in!

Shower room wall.  Note the bottles embedded in the wall.  They not only allow light in but their necks become towel hangers.

The kitchen.  Check out the use of the bottles embedded in the far wall.

Brisa!  CIDEP's resident sprite.

So imagine my surprise when I meet Eric at CIDEP, an expat American, who says when I mentioned that I had just moved to Oberlin, "Oh yeah, I helped build a strawbale house on a farm up there." Turns out to be the strawbale building in the pictures above where I now work as the farm manager. While at CIDEP I also met Eva, a wonderful woman from Portland, OR whose eyes gleamed with passion when it came to plastering and earthen finishes.

Now nearly three years later, imagine my surprise when I meet Anna, who has come from Chicago to do the ochre earthen finish on the building's walls and it turns out she knows both Eric and Eva quite well. It's a small world indeed and I feel very happy to have found myself linked in to this permaculture network of folks inspired to work dynamically with and in natural systems.