Our Sustainable Home

Getting Ready for AsparagusFest 2013

Asparagus! I just love asparagus! If I were to put aside for a minute all of the grand plans to be self sufficient, learn how to grow our own food, and teach Michael valuable life skills, I would have to admit that the thought of growing a bounty of asparagus was pretty persuasive in its own right.  There is no vegetable that I love half as much as asparagus, and I could probably eat it every day.  Steamed asparagus.  Grilled asparagus.   Baked asparagus with parmessan cheese. Asparagus soup.  Hot asparagus.  Chilled asparagus.  All good! 

So when we decided to start a mini-farm in Cottage Grove, there was no question of whether or not we would grow asparagus.  We would.  It was just a question of "when" and "how much".

Well, we at least know that the "when" starts now, and that the "how much" has a lower bound of 50 crowns of asparagus.   Note the careful phrasing of "starts now" and "lower bound".   Some books say that 50 crowns is a lot of asparagus and plenty for a family of three.  But one book I have suggests that serious asparagus lovers might want THREE times that much..... And who am I to argue with more asparagus.  So we are at least certain that we have completed our first planting of asparagus.

We have Denise, Alan, Maria, and Daniel to thank for our first planting of asparagus.  Our 50 asparagus crowns were a gift from Denise's family at Christmas 2009, and they were waiting on us to prepare the beds and be ready to plant them before Denise had them shipped out to us.  We just couldn't get it together in Spring 2010 to plant them as we were busy improving our soil at the time.  And we were just hopelessly too busy regardless. But this year we were ready.  Or thought we could be.  It turned out that we weren't nearly as ready as we thought, and it was a major marathon to get the beds ready to plant the crowns once they arrived.  Not only were there many truckloads of beautiful rough-sawn cedar lumber to pick up, but monstrous quantities of soil and compost to have delivered.  And even then, once all of the materials were onsite and the beds sturdily constructed, but then we had to move huge quantities of soil and compost to fill the beds.   6' x 10' x 18" beds take a lot of soil to fill up! And the tractor was no use since the ground was way too wet -- please do not ask me to tell any embarassing sunken tractor stories.  So it was real work to get these beds going.

The trick with asparagus, if newbies such as us are at all allowed to claim knowledge of such things, is to recognize up front that you are planting something that you want to thrive for 20 years or more.   When you plant asparagus you need to really prepare the bed well with lots and lots of organic matter and nutrients to last for many years, even if you plan to add compost and other organic matter every year.

Given the rainy weather here, many plants do better here in raised beds than planted directly in the ground.   So we built four large raised beds that are 6' x 10' and 18" tall.   Asparagus crowns are planted in trenches that you dig in the soil, and people dig those trenches anywhere from 6" to 18" or more deep.  So we built our raised beds tall so that we could dig the trenches as deep as we wanted.  And 6' is normally way too wide for a raised bed -- at least if you want to be able to reach to the center of it -- but it seemed like the right width for asparagus.   Asparagus rows need to be at least one foot from the edge of the bed and four feet from the next row, so this was the only width that would allow two rows of asparagus per bed.  And we needed room for at least 50 crowns of asparagus.

So, why is this post entitled "Getting Ready for AsparagusFest 2013"?  It's best not to harvest any asparagus for the first two years in order to allow the plants to get well-established.  So the first asparagus we will eat from our own plants will be in 2013.  It's a long time to wait, but hopefully it will be worth it.

 

Energy Efficiency Round 1 - Install lots of insulation

There are many different aspects to having an energy efficient house, but some of the key components are: 

1. 
   Figure 1 -  Rafter extensions to existing 2x4 rafters add an additional
   7.5" of space to install lots more cellulose insulation to the roof 
    
   Very tight air sealing to prevent conditioned indoor air which you already used precious energy to heat or cool from escaping to the exterior.
    
2. High insulation levels to prevent unwanted heat loss (or gain) from the walls, roof, and floors to the exterior
    
3. High quality windows that incorporate items 1) and 2) above so that they are as air-tight and well insulated as possible, while still providing excellent visual transmittance (light) and appropriate solar heat gain for the circumstance.   A really good window can be a net positive if it gains heat from the sun in winter time and doesn't create overheating conditions in the summer.
    
4. Energy-efficient and water-efficient appliances to save energy and resources for common household usages.  This includes clothes washers, dishwashers, stoves, faucets and more.
    

Today's topic is on how to achieve high levels of insulation in a 110 year old farmhouse that was never designed to be insulated in the first place.  BTW, there is a good chance that you will find the rest of this post super-dry, technical, and only fitting for a true energy nerd.  Apologies in advance.  You can always come back to this during an insomnia episode and it will fix you right up.

Figure 2 -  Rafter extensions in the attic 
 

There are lots of ways to build a super-insulated house if you are starting from scratch and building a new home, but it gets harder when you are retrofitting a building designed before we cared about insulation.  All of the walls and roof rafters in our 1900 Victorian farmhouse are made from 2"x4" lumber, and that doesn't allow us to install lots of insulation in wall or roof cavities.  One or more other approaches must be used.

Our approach is the following:

Build out our roof rafters to be close to a foot deep so that we can add much more insulation to the roof assemblies.  We designed what we will call an "insulation truss" or "rafter extension" to install additional 2x4 material in parallel to the existing rafters to add an additional 8" of insulation space.  See the two images on the right of the roof rafters in the master bedroom and attic. Our plan is to spray 4 1/2" of high-density closed-cell polyurethane spray foam insulation (at R6.7 per inch)against the roof sheathing to achieve a very tight air-seal and a high initial R-value, and to finish the roof insulation by blowing in cellulose insulation (which is made from recycled newspapers) (at approx. R3.8 per inch) into the remaining 7 1/2" of space.  The R-value of the closed cell foam is R30 and the cellulose is an additional R28 to achieve a total R-value of around R58. 

For our walls we are adding lots of insulation on both the inside and outside of the building. On the outside, we will install 4" of rigid foam insulation boards over the existing lap siding and then install new siding.  That's a gross simplification since there are about 5 other steps involved to also air-seal everything really well, but that's the basic idea.  The rigid foam boards are a material called polyisocyanate which offers a really high R-value per inch -- R6.5 -- while not producing any hardful ozone depleting gasses.  By installing these foam boards on the outside of the wall framing (i.e. studs), we eliminate something called thermal bridging, or heat transfer passing through the framing to the exterior.

Figure 3 -  Double-stud walls create 8.5" deep wall cavities, achieving R60 walls 
 

In addition to adding approx R26 to the exterior, we will also insulate the wall cavities with more cellulose insulation.   We hope to install the cellulose in the walls using a method called "dense packing" which means that the cellulose is blown in at high enough density that it can't settle and create uninsulated spaces.  Putting cellulose in our 4" walls would add an additional R15 to the R26 of the rigid foam to achieve more than R41.  We are also building many of the walls in the house to be extra thick by framing them as "double stud" walls, i.e. having a second interior wall inside of the original load-bearing wall to allow room for extra insulation.  Our double-stud walls are 8 1/2" thick and would allow R32 of cellulose for a total R-value approaching R60.

The floor needs to be handled just like the walls and roof and needs to be both very air-tight and well insulated.  We're doing pretty much the same thing under the floor as we are doing with the walls, which is to add lots of rigid foam under the floors and then fill the floor joist cavities with lots of dense pack cellulose.   We'll add 4" of rigid foam under the floor joists  and blow 6" of cellulose in the floor joist cavities to achieve approx. R50.

Since the house has had a number of different sections added on after the initial construction, each of these becomes a special case for how we insulate them.  We have walls that are old-style 2x4s (i.e. really 4 inches), 2x6s, and 8 1/2" double-stud walls, and roofs sections that are 2x4s, 2x6s, and 2x10s, and so on.

More on air-sealing, windows, and energy-efficient appliances down the road.

Tree Planting Extravaganza 2011

We're kicking off this years planting season with a bang, or at least a sharp blow to the head.  At least that's how it feels after a few weeks of tree planting.

We're busily laying the groundwork for our mini-orchard, and have planted about thirty trees and will eventuall plant around 75 or more shrubs to go with them.

We will have fruit trees, nut trees, nitrogen-fixing shrubs as support species for the fruit and nut trees, as well as dozens of fruiting shrubs such as blueberries, gooseberries, aronia, goumi, red and black currants, seaberries, cranberries, and more.

Here are some of the trees we have planted:

European Pear:    Bartlett, Ubileen, Conference

Asian Pear:          Chojuru, Shinseiki, Hosui

Plum:                  Early Laxton, Brooks, Early Transparent

Apple:                 Gravenstein, Hudson's Golden Gem, Wynooche Early, Chehalis

Peach:                 Avalon Pride, Oregon Curl Free, Q1-8, Charlotte

Nectarine:           Kreibich

Apricot:               Puget Gold

Asian Persimmon:    Nikita's Gift, Early Fuyu, Early Jiro

Cherry:                Lapins, Bing, Ranier, Montmorency

Fig:                      Stella, Desert King

Chestnut:            Colossal, Maraval

English Walnut:    Manregion, Franquette

Heartnut

Stone Pine:        Italian Stone Pine, Korean Stone Pine (2), Siberian Stone Pine

Arbequina Olive

Once all of the trees were planted, we spent another three days trying to protect them from the various animals that will want to nibble on them.   We might have gotten carried away building fortifications against animal invaders, but we wrapped the base of most trees with 1/2" chicken wire to prevent our friendly-neighborhood beaver from chomping them in half and wrapped plastic deer fence around the rest of the tree to prevent deer from eating the tender shoots.

To the right and below are pictures of us and our friends Abel and Tao -- who helped plant most of the trees with us, our field with the newly planted trees amidst our glorious fall cover crop, and finally one of Christina protecting our apricot tree from animals.

We still have more work to do, though, as shipment #4 of trees and shrubs should arrive any day with more to plant.  Most of what remains to plant are more of the nitrogen-fixing support plants and fruiting shrubs.  We will be filling in the spaces between the (eventually) larger semi-dwarf fruit trees with these shrubs.

 

 

Holy Hay Bale Batman and Other Adventures of a City Slicker In The Country

My Oregon weekend has been full of eye opening adventures for a city boy.

First, despite a lifetime of driving in the Bay Area, I had never before encountered a hay bale in the middle of the freeway, let alone run one over at 50 mph. As someone who has heard a number of disturbing car meets deer stories -- which by the way don't always end well -- I was pleased to have survived my first hay bale collision largely intact. My rental car looked like it had been foraging in grassland all its life afterwards and complained of various oil and engine related maladies, but otherwise was perfectly drivable and intact. But it did spoil a perfectly good evening, and required that I swap out out my hay-mobile for a car with fewer enthusiastic warning lights.

And then there was my second misadventure involving wayward cows. That had to do with the transient cows that are grazing on our future property. There are 4 free-range cows that are helping to trim down the long grasses on the property in some supposedly well-contained areas. That would be pretty good, in concept, but these cows have a bit of the wanderlust in them and have been touring the full property and then the neighborhood.

That wasn't ideal, but was at least tolerable since other people were minding them and keeping things relatively under control. But yesterday the caretaker for our property had to go to Oakland CA of all places, leaving the cows without a chaperone. And that's where my fun stared, when I found them roaming around the non-fenced part of our future property in search of gastronomic treats.

In the end, I got to test out my best human imitation of a border collie, which thankfully was not recorded on video. And then I got to re-test this new found skills a few more times.

The trip, which ends tomorrow morning, was otherwise a great success. More on the productive part of the trip in a future post.

The Journey Begins ... and the engine just blew a gasket ... ;-)

Did I really just say "This week it all comes together"? Perhaps I got ahead of myself.  It turns out that perhaps we were ready to close our sale this week, but not everyone else was... I was talking to my loan agent at 11:15am this morning about funding our loan today so that it closed tomorrow, and he needed to receive everything back by around noon for that to happen.  And when I talked to our escrow person, she told me that a bunch of things were missing that essentially meant that there was no way it could close today.   We still needed proof that the secondary mortgage holders (for the seller) had agreed to get "nothing" from the sale.  The primary bank had approved the sale and had already negotiated that with the secondary mortgage holders, but had not provided any documentation of that to escrow.  And nobody thought to tell me, which was surprising since I was going to be hopping on a plane soon.

A small temporary delay in our plans... I'll still be flying to Eugene tomorrow...

The Journey Begins -- Buying our home in Oregon

This week it all comes together.  After a year of trying, we are only hours away from owning a new home in Oregon, where we will begin a long-term effort to create a sustainable home.  We realize that this is just the beginning and that we have a lot of work ahead of us to renovate the home, put in place renewable energy and heating systems, and to transform the land into something that will help sustain us with food, a place to play, and a place to learn.  But that process can only begin in earnest once we have a place, and we're almost there.

Today we signed the papers to purchase our home and we expect our purchase to close within a day or two from now.  And then the place will be ours.   And on Friday, Rob will fly up to meet with architects, solar installers, and permaculturalists to start the design process.