Everyone who has a cistern looks forward to that day when they have to empty it and take the plunge into the depths of the earth to clean the gunk out. Even if you have a roof wash system, sediment inevitably builds up over time when your water comes from the sky.
I’m doing the dirty job of cleaning the cistern at Morel, one of the tiny houses at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. I’m pretty sure this cistern has never been cleaned, so it’s got some serious paleolithic buildup in the bottom.
I took little break from the mudroom when a local hunter dropped off a deer for me. It takes a little time to process, but it’s a bounty of venison for me and Banjo. This is another foodie video focused on all local food, which is not only more sustainable, but tastes so much better.
Heading out to the vineyard to plant a new bed of strawberries. Strawberries are one crop I can count on to always do well where I live, and I think they might be the best fruit crop you can grow anywhere. They flower and fruit so early in the year, there isn’t time for anything to get to them. They’re also easy to establish and they fruit abundantly a year after planting. In this video I give some tips for moving a strawberry bed and ensuring the plants get a good start in the spring.
Now that I’ve got the scratch coat of repair lime plaster on the addition, I’m returning the earth pigmenting to its former glory. This is a fun process and not as hard as you might think considering how good it looks. Fresco is a method of applying earth pigments to still wet lime plaster. It gives a deeper color than pigmented limewash, and is a natural way to color your lime plastered house. In this video, I walk you through the process.
In this video, I continue with my mudroom addition, this time demonstrating the repair of the lime plaster around the mudroom’s connection to the existing house. To connect the mudroom framing directly into the house framing I had to chip off some of the lime plaster on that north facing wall. Fortunately, lime plaster is easy enough to work with and I was able to chip off the exact amount that I wanted to, meaning the repair is covering a fairly small area. Still, it’s probably the most complicated part of this mudroom project. I love working with lime, and this video is a good taste of what it’s like to apply it on strawbale construction.
I attended the recent Mother Earth News Fair in Kansas, did a presentation about Dancing Rabbit, and got some new inspiration to do more with season extension. I also met Wranglerstar, another youtube producer with a very popular homesteading channel, who encouraged me to be more active with posting YouTube videos.
