This past Wednesday (April 29), we enjoyed the orientation session with Tara Muenz, who is the Adopt-A-Stream program coordinator for the whole state of Georgia. Tara brought all the monitoring equipment to show us, as well as a projected presentation (help me here, was it a Powerpoint? Slide show? I dunno!) showing some of the different monitoring activities. We decided to learn the Chemical monitoring and the Visual monitoring for our first training here on Saturday. In Chemical, we’ll learn how to test for pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, and temperature. That’s the basic level; there’s another more advanced level of Chemical, but we’re going to wait till another training day to learn the advanced level. In Visual, we’ll learn how to measure the creek’s width and depth, and to evaluate the physical condition of the banks and creekbed.

Tara advised us to get started with just a few things, so that we can get our group organized and establish a rhythm of monitoring activities that works for the people involved. And then add more as we can.

There are two other main categories of monitoring to learn–Biological and Bacterial. The Biological consists of doing an inventory of the insects, mollusks, and crustaceans in the water body. Finding out how many of what kind of critters live in the water is a good way to assess water quality,  as some critters can only live in beautiful water, while others survive in polluted, oxygen-depleted water. Bacterial monitoring consists of sampling the water for the presence of E. coli bacteria, which are associated with biological contamination.

Well, I’m excited about tomorrow’s training. I think the Adopt-A-Stream program is terrific–it gives us a chance to really get involved in our natural environment and gives us some practical skills to understand more about what’s going on out there. Plus, it’s a great community-building activity, linking people together in enjoyable outdoor activities and at the same time, gathering important information that will help us to protect our water and our watersheds.

Many thanks to Tara Muenz, Adopt-A-Stream, and to all the people who are showing interest and getting involved in this program!

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written anything here in Blogland, but I warned you that I wouldn’t write just to be filling up time and space with trivial stuff. So we all had to wait until I had something really interesting to talk about, and believe me, now I do!

So let me tell you…about the amazing visit I enjoyed
recently with Tim Kring, who built a terrific rocket mass heater in
his basement. He’s a soil scientist by profession, and obviously this
goes deep into his psyche because he sure does like playing with mud
and clay and sand and rocks, which is one of the main activities
involved in building a rocket mass heater. He and his family live in a
subdivision up north of Atlanta; and over the years, Tim has been
going deeper and deeper into a variety of sustainable, hand-built, and
homemade technologies.

Besides the rocket mass heater in the basement, I should note the
earthen floor Tim built in the same room. It’s made of packed Georgia
clay, and sealed with linseed oil. And it’s really beautiful, both to
look at and to walk on. It’s strong, it doesn’t crumble or crack, but
at the same time it feels very comfortable underfoot, sort of like a
nice path in the woods. And, it doesn’t absorb water; Tim demonstrated
by spilling some water on the floor, and the water just sat there on
top, never soaking in.

In his backyard, Tim has built an beehive oven (which he wants to tear
down and do over again using some new ideas he’s come up with), and
another construction called a Rumford oven (or was it Rumford stove?),
which cooks and heats a big thermal mass made of cob, and lets you see
the fire, too, much as you would with an ordinary fireplace. Tim has
kindly provided the following explanation of the Rumford stove, as
well as some very interesting additional comments:

“The Rumford is a fire place, just an outdoor one. Count Rumford made
hundreds of experiments on fire places to improve their function. He
is the person who invented the damper, I am told. He outlined a set of
ratios and dimensions for building a good fire place. We have simply
followed the directions and built with mud. Jasper [Tim's son] and I
had a big fire in it Friday night, and slept out in front of it. It
will draw flames to nearly 6 ft. in height. This is quite a contrast
to the performance of the “insert” fire place in the house. Funny,
most insert fire places are really not designed for a hot fire, but
are better suited for the “fake” logs you buy at the grocery store- a
fire for visual effect, not for warming the place. I had tried to put
a quality wood stove in our home a few years ago but was told that the
a good wood stove would actually melt the chimney if we had a hot fire
in it. It seems the chimney was not rated for real use and I’ve come
to find out most are not in many subdivisions. This is one of the nice
things about building with earthen material. It won’t rot, won’t burn,
it’s free, it does not have toxic additives. No special skills are
needed. At the earth’s temperature and pressure, quartz and clay
minerals are about the most stable thing on the planet; as it’s
already broken down to its final form, it’s not going to break down
into something else- it’s done. As the old mud builders say, give the
house a good hat (roof) and a good set of boots (foundation) and it
will last nearly forever.”

Although his house already has a conventional water system and toilet,
Tim also installed a small composting toilet, a Sun Mar. But realizing
that this type of composting toilet doesn’t really work in terms of
making actual compost, he wants to replace it with one like mine (a
Phoenix). Then there’s the nifty little greywater system that filters
the water through a very pretty mini constructed wetlands just beside
the house, and then drains into an irrigation system for some trees in
the backyard. And as if all that were not enough, he’s got a space
excavated in the backyard in which he plans to build a small earthen
cottage, which will make use of most or all of these technologies.
This cottage will have a living roof (a roof covered with
specially-chosen live plants), and be seriously earth-bermed on the
south side, with the windows mostly on the north side–the exact
opposite of the regular passive solar concept. But Tim did this on
purpose–to stay cool in summer without air conditioning. He says that
with a rocket mass heater built into the cottage, heat during the cold
months won’t be an issue.

Tim’s two sons, one in his teens and the other who seemed to be around
10, like to help with many of these projects, and it’s great to see
kids coming up learning all this stuff. It seems they set a lot of
store by these achievements, too, because they get worried when their
dad talks about tearing out his creations so that he can rebuild them
to try out new design improvements! Well, for sure he is all about
doing and learning, and preserving past works comes second.

And basically, almost nobody in Georgia is aware of what this guy is
doing! To really talk shop Tim has to go to Oregon and hang out with
the originator of the rocket mass heater, Ianto Evans, and the other
folks there at the Cob Cottage Company. They give workshops
periodically; I wish I could go!

So, by now you are no doubt itchin’ to know, just what is a rocket
mass heater??? Well, it’s a kind of wood-burning stove designed and
installed to capture a lot more useful heat for a dwelling than is
possible with an ordinary fireplace or woodstove. With a conventional
fireplace, most of the heat just goes up the chimney; unless you sit
very close to the fireplace and the fire is roaring, you won’t get
much benefit. And even if you do sit close, it’s mostly your front
side that gets warm, while your backside stays cold. And across the
room, pretty much the only benefit will be the cheerful sight of the
homey hearthside with its fire merrily crackling away. Sometimes this
situation can be improved by adding fans to circulate the hot air away
from the fireplace and out into the room.

Then there’s the woodstove, which is usually somewhat better in terms
of efficiency in putting heat where you want it. A woodstove is
usually a heavy metal box of some sort, iron or steel I suppose. So
when the fire inside gets going, the metal heats up and radiates heat
all around itself. After awhile this radiant heat can warm up most or
at least some of your house (depending on the size and configuration
of the house, and the size and placement of the woodstove in relation
to the these features). But, even with an “efficient” woodstove, like
mine, that has a catalytic combustor (a device which increases burn
efficiency) in it, I still go through quite a lot of firewood. My
house is so tight and well-insulated that running the woodstove can
get me temperatures into the upper 70′s, throughout much of the house.
So I usually don’t fire up the stove except in really cold weather.
Even so, this winter season I’ve gone through a lot of wood; I can’t
tell you how many cords, because we split it here (around the first of
December) and just stacked it up along the inside wall of the barn and
never measured the dimensions. But it was a lot, and I estimate that
at least half—maybe two-thirds–of it is already used up.

My stove pipe is very tall, going from the woodstove on the main floor
on up through the second-story ceiling/roof. Since most of the
stovepipe is inside the house, the stove’s heat has a big surface area
from which to radiate into the indoor environment. In contrast, most
ordinary chimneys are outside the house and therefore can’t contribute
much of the fireplace heat to the living space.

Anyway–and here we should bring in the horn section!–enter the
rocket mass heater! It’s based on the rocket stove, a nifty cookstove
originally designed to help low-income people in developing countries
to conserve their forests, to protect human health from ongoing
exposure to the particulate matter and gaseous products of inefficient
combustion, and to save time, energy, and/or money they were
accustomed to spending to obtain adequate firewood. Briefly, a rocket
stove usually consists of a vertical “feed” tube, into which small
pieces of dry wood are inserted; a horizontal burn chamber, where the
combustion takes place; a vertical heat riser (heat exchange barrel),
where heat from the burn chamber heats up a metal drum which is
considerably larger than the feed tube; a long, usually horizontal
(and often serpentined or doubled-back) flue pipe which carries the
hot gases from the vertical heat riser through a heavy mass structure,
often a bench, bed base, or floor, made of cob and/or a mixture of
materials such as stone, firebrick, clay, and cob. These heavy
materials slowly absorb the heat passing through the flue pipe, and
then slowly radiate this heat into the room.

But unlike the dangerously high temperatures of your metal box
woodstove (the touching of which equals a serious burn; don’t let
little kids loose in a room with a fired-up woodstove!), the
temperatures of your rocket mass heater bench or bed or floor are safe
and comfy. You can sit or lie or walk on them and pleasantly warm your
body. And this heat is retained for long periods, even several days
after the fire has gone out. (While the feed tube and the horizontal
burn chamber are also normally buried in cob and/or other heavy mass
materials, the heat riser barrel can be left partially exposed to
generate quick radiant heat into the room, and the top of the barrel
gets plenty hot enough for cooking.)

After the hot stove gases pass through the entire length of the flue
pipe, they have given up almost all their heat into the mass, and exit
through a vent or exterior stove pipe at temperatures often less than
200 degrees Farenheit. There is virtually no smoke produced with these
rocket mass heaters, and the amount of wood required is only about a
fifth to a quarter of what you would use in a woodstove! You can run a
rocket stove or a rocket mass heater on small dry branches, the kind
of deadwood easy to find and pick up in many forest areas. So fueling
a rocket requires little or no cutting down trees. This is great news,
especially in places where the demand for firewood is causing serious
deforestation.

Actually, I found out about Tim Kring through Cob Cottage Company.
Recently, after rereading their book, Rocket Mass Heaters,
Super-Efficient Woodstoves You Can Build (and Snuggle Up To), it
occurred to me that I should get in touch with them and see if there
were anyone in the Atlanta area who was into this stuff. So I called,
had a wonderful conversation with a guy there named Max Edleman, and
voila! Plus, Tim Kring is good friends with another soil scientist,
who lives…guess where? Around here, I’m not sure exactly where,
either in Carrollton or in Bremen, I think. And they talk to each
other practically every week. So Tim and his family visit Carroll
County from time to time. And I even met this local soil scientist
once, when I did a program on intentional communities and the
Brokenfoot Ranch project, last June at the Carrollton library. Anyway,
small world!

To find out more about rocket mass heaters, assorted other rocket
stoves, and cob construction, check out the website of the Cob Cottage
Company at www.cobcottage.com. There are also sites that show how to
make a simple rocket stove, such as
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=797446823830833401 and
http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Rocket_Stove#Audio_and_video. The
stoves have attained considerable reach in Mexico and some other Latin
American countries, where they are variously called Lorena (a
contraction of lodo, mud, and arena, sand —indicating the materials of
which they are built) stoves or Patsari stoves. If you “google” the
term “rocket stove”, you can find other sites in both English and
Spanish about these stoves.

And, last but definitely not least, you can reach Tim Kring at his
e-mail address, tkring@bellsouth.net. He says he is happy to talk to
people who are interested in these technologies. Thank you, Tim!

Best wishes to everyone,
Myra Bailes

Well, I’m finding that adhering to a regular writing schedule in this here blog just doesn’t work for me.  I don’t always have something I consider worthwhile saying to a public audience. And I surely don’t want to post a lot of styrofoamy, bubble-wrap type material that will bore all of us to tears. So you are not going to hear any profound meditations about how I brushed my teeth this morning, or how I burned my dinner when I forgot it was on the stove while I was obliviously writing garbage nothings on my blog!

That said, please take note of the following information–which really IS worth broadcasting!

The date for our first Adopt-A-Stream water quality monitoring training has been set for Saturday, May 2. With a “rain-date” of Saturday, May 9, in case of stormy weather on May 2. Assuming we do have good weather on May 2, we can also use May 9 for the 2nd training, if we like.

It seems my initial take on the trainings was a little uninformed; I
had thought there were three testing parameters: chemical, biological,
and physical. Well, it turns out I was partially mistaken. Apparently
there are four testing parameters:  chemical, bacterial,
macroinvertebrates, and amphibians. Our first training session will
cover the chemical testing, and one other parameter of our choice.
Tara Muenz, the state coordinator of Adopt-A-Stream, suggests the
bacterial or the macroinvertebrates. Then when we have the second
training, we can do whichever two parameters remain to be learned.

Also, although the trainings are free, we will have to purchase our
own testing equipment in order to continue our participation as
water-quality monitors in the Adopt-A-Stream program. The idea of the
program is to certify ordinary folks to do on-going monitoring of
their “adopted” body of water, at regular prescribed intervals
throughout the year. Chemical and bacterial assessments are done
monthly. Macroinvertebrate assessments are four times a year. I don’t
know how often the amphibians are assessed.

Tara says that if we like, she could come out for a brief introductory
session on a weekday evening between now and May 2. She would orient
us as to what’s involved with the four parameters, and inform us about
the equipment needed for each kind of testing. This session could help
us decide which parameter to choose for our second one at the May 2
training. Also, it would be helpful for beginning to organize our
on-going water-monitoring activities. Please let me know ASAP if you
would like to attend this introductory session, and tell me some dates
and/or days of the week (Monday through Friday) you could come.

Tara also needs a “head count” of all the people who will be
participating on May 2 (and/or May 9). She will have to know well
ahead of time so that she can be sure to bring adequate materials for
everyone in the class. We need to have at least 6 people. So, if you
want to participate, please confirm with me as soon as possible!

I’m excited about this terrific opportunity to learn a real skill that
will help us all to become more capable stewards of our precious
natural world! Also, this is a wonderful way to build community around
our watersheds! I look forward to seeing you all soon!

Best wishes,
Myra Bailes
770-258-3344
404-895-7057

“I’ve been busy as ever. Just got my house insulated completely every single cavity filled with cellulose, even the interior walls and floors…And passed all my inspections!!

“Finally I feel a big AHHHH, knowing that I did every little thing that needed to be done before I start finishing the interior. There’s even a solar circuit to an outlet in each room that can be entirely on DC…

“…It’s so hard trying to listen to your intuition, your heart. The more we try, the more we find how many layers have been piled on top of one another, obscuring our true feeling. But I find that often there is a story underneath it all, a certain “meant to be” aspect. Sometimes we are in tune with that, and sometimes not. But I think we can always come back to that. We’re like astronauts. Sometimes we float very far from our ship but there’s always that tether that we can follow home. And we find that even though we thought we were lost and going nowhere, that actually this ship has been pulling us on to new things all along. That the ship is on autopilot, that there is a planned trajectory after all. And we can even get inside the ship and look at the map, have that feeling of knowing what’s happening and needs to happen.

“It’s always been difficult that balance between caring for myself and caring for others. But I think they can go hand in hand. The best way to care for yourself is to care for others, and the best way to care for others is to care for yourself. I think the most important thing is the state of mind you have. Its much more important than the physical reality in any situation. I think the physical reality follows the state of your mind much more than we think it does.

“It’s so important to clean out our minds. More important than our homes even. It’s the original and true home, really. We have to be so careful about the words we use and thoughts we think in our mind. They are SO powerful. Sometimes I catch myself repeating the same negative mantra to myself over and over, and I don’t even realize it until one day I’m like: “Why am I seeing it this way?”. And I take those negative thoughts out and focus on the present moment and suddenly I am free and happy. Happier even than anyone who has everything they could possibly want.”

For several years I’ve been receiving the newsletters from the Adopt-A-Stream program. Thinking about one day actually participating in their trainings to learn how to analyze the water quality of a creek, river, lake, mud puddle, bathtub….

Well, finally it hit me–what am I waiting for? So I contacted the director, Tara Muenz, and she told me that even though currently there are not any Adopt-A-Stream trainers working anywhere close to Carroll County, I don’t have to go to Gainesville or Augusta or Athens to participate. All that’s needed is to get five or more people together who want to do it, and she will arrange for a trainer to come to us!

They teach you how to measure three parameters of water quality: physical, biological, and chemical, and they provide the testing and monitoring supplies and equipment. And we can start right here with the creek that flows through Brokenfoot Ranch! Sometimes they teach one parameter at a time, and sometimes two or even all three on the same day. Tara also told me that there are other people in this area who have received the training at one time or another, so if we have a training here, she can send them an e-mail in case they want to get involved with the program again.

So what’s to lose? This is an incredible, free opportunity to learn something very useful and powerful. With this knowledge, we will always be able to know if our water is safe for humans and other living creatures! And not only know it, but be able to explain it in verifiable scientific terms.

Besides, we can make a fun day (or days) of it, camaraderie, lunch, a little hiking, etc. If you’d like to participate, please send me an e-mail at verdolagas05075@gmail.com. Usually the trainings are on a weekend day but not always; let me know some dates that would work for you!

Best wishes and hope to hear back from you soon!

Myra Bailes

Here I am trying to move forward a little with this blogging adventure.  I may have made some technical booboos, I don’t know. Today I’m trying to create links, so that people can find this blog.

Things are continuing much as they have; that is to say, a race whose objective seems to be who can go the slowest–the turtle, or the snail. One “runner” being the effort to create the Brokenfoot Ranch Ecovillage Community, and the other being the competing effort to simply sell the entire property. Both are brewing something, but nothing has come to a full boil, the race has been neither won nor lost by either contestant, i.e., nothing conclusive has happened. So we are still trying, still hoping. Still welcoming your questions, inquiries, visits, offers, ideas, conversation.

It’s a beautiful day and Spring is starting to spring. The forsythias are blooming, the wild prunuses are blooming, the yellow buds on the Cornelian Cherry trees (these are in the Dogwood family, actually, and I’ve got two of them in my backyard; they are irrigated by the greywater system) are swelling. Time to start all kinds of activities on the farm, such as:

1)cultivating and fertilizing the blueberries and muscadines

2)planting new blueberries and muscadines (in the spaces where the first ones were killed by the drought in 2006 and 2007)

3)finishing the new drip irrigation systems

4)starting a gadzillion vegetable seedlings in the greenhouse

5)odd jobs such as clean-up and repairs around the farm and house

6) mowing and trimming

7)cultivating, fertilizing, and pruning the fruit trees.

The idea of the community is to do all of these things, and more, in a group, with a spirit of joy and cooperation. And to have lots of fun doing them. And when we’re finished each day’s work, or each task, to celebrate.

Best wishes from Myra Bailes

That last post was WAAAAAAYYYY long. I kinda lost track of it while I was writing. But now I see….sorry!

Yesterday was nice and warm and spring-like, so  I invited a few friends over to help put the new plastic sheeting on my little greenhouse. First we had to remove a lot of staples from the pieces of wooden framing to which the previous iteration of plastic sheeting had been attached. And then we struggled a bit to get the new piece in place. Unfortunately, I had unwittingly ordered one foot less of sheeting than we needed (13 feet instead of 14 feet). So on the front end of the greenhouse, we have enough sheeting to reach the wooden frame so the sheeting can be stapled to it. But on the other end, we’re short, so we have to tape on an extra piece of plastic (which we certainly have because the material is six feet wider than necessary. This is not ideal, but keeping the overall objective in mind–get the greenhouse covered so we can start growing seedlings ASAP–I know it will be okay.

At some point I’d really like to be able to cover this greenhouse with a more durable material. The 6 mil polyethylene is rated for 4 years, but the first go-round only lasted 3 years before it started to crack along the PVC-pipe arches that form the main part of the greenhouse structure. Maybe those flexible Solexx panels would be good; they are rated for 10 years. Also, someday I’d like to build a bigger greenhouse, and a separate shade house for summertime. But I think it would be nice to keep this little one, too, as it’s right close to the house.

So, here I am, still hoping that Brokenfoot Ranch WILL become the small agrarian ecovillage community we have envisioned. We being myself and Village Habitat Design, Inc. They are a small Atlanta-based team of architects and community designers who drew the conceptual plan for the community.

Something that may interest you is the annual Greenprints conference put together by the Southface Energy Institute in Atlanta. This year it’s going to be on March 25 and 26. Village Habitat Design will give a presentation there about Brokenfoot Ranch and how its design will foster a sustainable way of life in a rural area. I’ll be there, too. You can find more information about the Greenprints conference by going to the Southface website at www.southface.org.

And here’s a very important acknowledgement and big big thanks to Elyse, who out of the kindness of her heart and her enthusiasm for the vision of Brokenfoot Ranch, was not only the first person to make a website for the project (see it at www.treebeds.com/brokenfootranch.html), but also set up this blog page for me! So I am very grateful and very much indebted to Elyse. Please join me in sending her a barrelful of thanks and best wishes!

Well, that wraps it up for the moment. See you next time!

Myra Bailes

And now it’s getting late, time to post this. Thanks for listening, see you next time!

Anyway, WELCOME to the Brokenfoot Ranch blog! First, an introduction is in order. What is Brokenfoot Ranch?

Well, it’s the name I’ve been using for the place where I live.  Sixty-six acres of mixed hardwood and pine forest and open fields in Carroll County, Georgia. About 50 miles west/southwest of Atlanta. In the Piedmont–overall, the topography is a gentle north slope, but with lots of variation in terrain from the highest part on the south side, which faces the road, and the north side, which contains a clear, year-around creek and some very pretty bottomland fields.

I moved here in the summer of 2003, into the house my then-husband and I built. You can find out all about the house at two great websites: www.spiveysellsgreen.com and www.energyvanguard.com. Both of them have lots of good photos, and the first one also has some of the land. Briefly, for those of you who don’t have time right now to check out these websites, my house is a passive-solar, energy-efficient (and Energy-Star rated) structure, built out of structural insulating panels (“SIPs”), with central air and heat provided by a heat pump (although I need to use this system very very little), a high-efficiency woodstove, a Phoenix composting toilet, a branched drain greywater system that irrigates four fruit trees in the backyard, and a rainwater catchment system. It’s also a very attractive house, with big south-facing “cathedral” style windows, a balcony second floor, a full basement, and several  kinds of wood–pine ceilings and stairs, hickory cabinets, and oak flooring recycled from the old Whitesburg school auditorium, which was torn down in 2002, if I remember correctly. The kitchen and bathrooms have tile floors, with a tiled shower and countertops. The tile work in the upstairs bathroom is not completed, but when it is, it will be a very luxurious bathroom indeed! On the outside, the house has a metal roof and Hardiplank siding, a large covered and screened-on porch on the north side, and a smaller open porch on the south side. And there’s a double-car carport on the west side.

Since I started this entry a couple of days ago and it’s been hanging out in “draft” until now, I think I’ll go ahead and post it right now, and then continue on with my story another day. They tell me that with blogging, one should try to write a little something every day, or at least at predictable intervals, so that’s what I’ll try to do.

Myra Bailes