At some point over the winter, someone from TCNJ Magazine interviewed me about living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. (TCNJ was the college that I attended).
Here’s the article: Alumnus finds fulfillment living in a sustainable community
Posts from ‘May, 2008’
Interview in TCNJ Magazine
Latest cob house pictures
Ok, I think I was wrong about the 12-16″ of cob on the walls… it actually is a little more than that, it seems! Check it out:
Here’s the lovely 5′x4.5′ south plate glass, with work exchanger Adam proudly displaying the setup. I was nervous about sticking that large a piece of glass on the cob, [...]
First windows in cob wall
The past several days (or week) have been busy, quite busy, in fact. I feel like I’m just now catching my breath. I missed taking photos for a few days for whatever reason, but I was sure to snap some today of the progress on my cob house, of which there has been much lately. [...]
Rates of cobbing
Lately, I have been trying to estimate how long it will take to build the cob walls of my cottage. I haven’t been doing anything very scientific to make my guess, just figuring a number based on the number of batches stomped for Ironweed kitchen (another cob/straw bale structure here at Dancing Rabbit), which took [...]
Cobbing begins
Yesterday, I mixed the first batches of cob with the help of my new work exchanger Adam and my friend Sara from New Roots in St. Louis. We made three total batches and applied them to the foundation, getting about 1/3 of the way around the building perimeter. It felt pretty amazing to be stomping [...]
Urbanite foundation (mostly) complete
The foundation is now mostly complete with the addition of a third course on the west side of the building. The past few days have been spent trying to piece together that topmost course with the remaining urbanite, and stuffing additional nooks with a clay/sand mortar. The construction of the foundation has gotten funkier over [...]
Cobbers thumbs
The great thing about cob is its low-tech nature. You don’t need many fancy tools to work with the medium. Cobbers thumbs are useful wooden hand tools for pounding cob into place on walls, and “stitching” the material together. The fat, blunt ends are good for the pounding, and the pointed ends are useful for [...]
Hunting for morel mushrooms
The end of April through early May is the peak season for hunting morel mushrooms in this area. Morels are delicious little mushrooms that are short-lived and notoriously difficult to pin down to a specific environment. Generally, they pop up near dead or dying elm trees in cool, shady woods, or especially in recent wildfire [...]
Continuing work on urbanite foundation
Sorry, the blog has been problematic the last week, but now it’s working again. Whew.
Anyway, progress on the cob house has been continuing at a good clip. The second course of the foundation has been laid out. We started to run out of larger pieces of urbanite, and fell back on medium and smaller pieces, [...]
First course of foundation complete
The first course of the foundation is now pretty much complete.
Unfortunately, I had nowhere near enough urbanite that I thought I needed, and I made another trip to collect more over the weekend. This second time I played it safe and filled the trailer about twice as much as the first go-round, hopefully insuring that [...]
So, if you like those DRTV videos…
Not to like advertise or anything, but the Dancing Rabbit TV YouTube account has a new feature. We now accept donations!
One of the benefits of being registered as a non-profit on YouTube is having that ability. Interested folks can make donations on DRTV video pages or on the DRTV account page in different increments using [...]
Building the urbanite foundation
Two days ago, I went on a trip to collect urbanite (think broken up concrete from sidewalks and roadbeds) in a small town about twenty miles away. Thankfully, four willing folks offered their help in picking up the material. Urbanite is extremely heavy and you don’t want to move it more than you have to.
After [...]
