We'll be visiting again at Easter

Winter walking round Wakefield

Yay, tickets are booked and we're on our way back to our land this Easter for two weeks. Sadly the we doesn't include Kasia or Maia this time, but I do have a couple of friends coming with me so it should be a good trip anyway - we'll be looking for some live folk music!

Most of my time over the last few months has been taken up with family life. Kasia's started working Tues-Thurs (and other days sometimes) so I get to look after Maia all this time which has been great for both of us I think. I've been singing to her so much I've ended up joining a choir, the Merrie City Singers. This will be good in those dark isolated Polish winter nights when we have to create our own entertainment...

I've also been doing quite a lot of shelf building, decorating and other bits of DIY and being a handyman. Managing to pay the rent and bills at least and get some good practice in for building our new house.

A slightly more interesting project has been making some flyers and a website for an arts festival in Frome called Celebrate Women (www.celebratewomen.org.uk) for my friend Linda King.

Hopefully will get on with more research for OrchardyHaven soon and I'll post it on here.

Ecohouse lesson 2 - toilet maintenance

Apparently the seal on the toilet outlet pipe only lasts a few years. Even the best ones are only guaranteed for ten years! So potentially every time we flush a toilet more than say 8-10 years old we're letting some moisture out into our home (and let's not think about what else...)

So the lesson is, learn to install your own toilet, and then replace the seals every 7or 8 years. Lovely. Thanks.

Ecohouse lesson 1 - Build Tight, Ventilate Right

A while back I borrowed a book called Ecohouse: A Design Guide from my friends at Pennine Camphill Community. I opened it at the beginning of the chapter on ventilation, and read:

The control of ventilation is one of the most subtle and yet the most important concerns of the building designer. How to make air move about the building in a way that satisfies, and even delights, the occupant.

I really liked this idea, and the suggestion that you should let the wind do the ventilating - and design your house around the prevailing wind conditions. I have heard however of things like the German Passivhaus standard where the house is completely sealed and airtight (and they say you can heat a whole house in the cold north for a year for £25 and the indoor air quality is excellent - there's even less dust!). So before I start thinking too carefully about ventilation it seems my first lesson is in an earlier chapter of the book, called 'Pushing the building envelope'.

Sure enough, on p.94 we read 'a sustainable building must be an airtight building'. Further:

It is apparently normal for up to 50% of the heat loss from new buildings in the UK to come from uncontrolled air leakage (Ecohouse p.92 quoting research from 2000) 

air passing through the external envelope - walls, floor and roof - of a building carries moisture with it. This causes significant damage in buildings, particularly to timber, and can substantially shorten the life of a building. 

Infiltration is the technical term ... for the uncontrolled movement of air through buildings. ... Excess air movement through infiltration:

• Makes heating systems inadequate
• Gives rise to cold draughts and discomfort
• Increases fuel bills and CO₂ emissions
• Allows potentially damaging moisture to penetrate our building fabric
• Reduces the effectiveness of insulation

The biggest pollutant we have to deal with in our dwellings is moisture - plain old H₂O. Minimising the build-up of moisture helps prevent condensation and mould growth, and discourages dust mites. ... If we have open-flued appliances, such as wood-burning stoves, we need more ventilation for safety...

Mainstream UK construction has become much more aware of airtightness over the past five years, and the latest revision to the Building Regulations (England & Wales), which came into force in April 2006, will accelerate this trend. ... Anyone interested in sustainable construction should appreciate that the targets for airtightness ... are very lax. [They] set a maximum air permeability target of 10 for all new buildings... [A]ll you have to do to meet this Building Regulations target is to build a dwelling where heated air remains inside for 7 minutes in the hour when a 20mph wind is blowing! this is neither energy-efficient nor sustainable, by a substantial margin. Hence the advanced energy standards set by the Association for Environment Conscious Building, AECB, of an air permeability of 3.0 for their silver standard and 0.75 for their gold standard. The first of these is the lowest air permeability we would recommend for naturally ventilated buildings, whilst the higher gold standard is comparable to the German Passivhaus standard...

There's a lot more in this chapter. There's a lot about insulation (use 500mm in the roof and 300mm in the walls - or 'think of a number, then double it'; insulate the roof, not the top ceiling), about cold bridges and special constructions for avoiding them (window frame designs, nylon wall ties, timber sub-frames around doors and between lintels, etc), and about condensation (ideally install a vapour barrier on the inside wall and a breather membrane on the outside).

Other notes:

• you need to really closely supervise builders if you want to eliminate air leakage as standard workmanship accounts for lots of problems (even simply dropping excess mortar inside wall cavities)...
• ...so self-build has advantages here :-)
• need to carefully construct and seal every point where a cable or pipe goes through a wall or ceiling
• draughts get in behind dry-lining, so better to apply wet plaster
• pay particular attention to insulating corners: there are illustrations that show how teperatures drop more rapidly in corners; and additionally it's harder to insulate them because of inaccessibility - need to ensure any insulation properly installed - could think about thickening walls at corners...
• use thermalite blocks between concrete floors and walls to avoid cold bridging

Weather in OrchardyHaven

Thanks to the Permaculture Association for this link to Weatherspark.com. You can get all sorts of information, but I didn't expect to be able to find weather data so close to Sadowo (it's actually from Grodno airport, 50km away).

Here's a graph showing the average temperatures through the year, in comparison with Wakefield:

A few things jump out. First, I've stupidly cut off the x-axis, but it starts at the beginning of January and ends at the end of December. The Wakefield data is is blue, and the Sadowo data is grey. The thicker horizontal grey line is zero. From the beginning of December to early March the average temperature in Sadowo is below zero, in fact for two months the average high never gets above zero! By contrast in Wakefield the average never gets down to zero. From the beginning of April to the end of September though the average temperature in Sadowo is higher than Wakefield.

There are also graphs of wind (much higher on average all through the year in Wakefield), humidity (higher in Wakefield all through summer, similar in Winter), and cloud (seems much cloudier in Sadowo).

To have a look for yourself, here's a link to the weather data charts for Sadowo.

Lammas Eco-Building Course

Back in September, just before we went to Poland, I went off to Lammas Eco-Village in Pembrokeshire to get some practical experience, meet a few like-minded people, and get more prepared for all the building work ahead of us...

I went on one of the Eco-Building courses run by Nigel & Cassie Lishman at Plas Helyg ('Willow Mansion'). We designed and planned and put together a roundwood timber frame for a barn, and we built part of a cob greenhouse, finishing off the foundations and building up to above window height. Here are a couple of photos (thanks to Jenny for taking much more artistic photos than me!):

 

It was a great week. I felt really welcomed and all the other people on the course were very friendly. It was great getting my hands in the cob mix and practising roundwood framing. I felt I learned quite a lot, and I came away feeling much more confident about our project.

Highlights of our first proper visit

We went to visit in late September for three weeks, partly to introduce Maia to her Polish family, and partly to make a start on our new future home. Here are the highlights of our visit:

1. Walking on to the land for the first time:

From the NE, our land starts with the trees

Another new view from the SE 

We did walk around quite a lot when we first looked at the property last Easter, but it was great to know that we're actually going to make it our home. Also, all through the three weeks it seemed like every time we stopped and looked around we got a new perspective, saw something new and beautiful again...

2. Getting the rubbish cleared:

We spent about five days clearing rubbish. It was quite a sad experience: apparently this house was the grandest in the area when it was first built, but it's last owner didn't manage to live up to this legacy and the rubbish everywhere told a story of things being lost and broken all the time and a family life in some chaos...
Here's one of the trailer loads of rubbish ready to go, and it was a huge relief to be able to walk around and find empty spaces and piles of wood instead of plastic.

3. Planting

This happened quite late, and it was too dry and early to plant trees as we'd hoped, but we did plant some walnuts - eight pairs, here with my nephew Adam doing the honours - and we also planted some calendula seeds and some green manure seeds (sunflowers, flax, peas and clover). Fingers crossed for some growth through all the weeds and the hard winter ahead...


4. Wildlife

We saw this pile of sand and went to investigate. I'm peering down a large hole and thinking about badgers...?

We also have an owl living in one of our barns (behind the trailer full of rubbish above) which is fantastic, except we'll be worrying about disturbing her when we start work properly...

Of course there were deer, buzzards flying overhead, frogs and crickets everywhere, loads of varieties of colourful bugs, woodworm and mice and voles and moles. Not a great many birds, but I think that will change once we start working more on the land and create better environments for them.

5. Flora

It was pretty late for most flowers, despite the Autumn sun still keeping me hot at work. As I walked from the SE though I found huge patches of all sorts of flowers that were resisting the thick grass from the rest of the land. Loads of evening primrose, loads of wild strawberries, lots of signs of cultivated strawberries further on, and lots of patches of other things that I can't identify yet, like this picture.

A friend of a friend does expert reports on the ecological value of land, and we're hoping he can come and have a look next summer. It certainly looked to me as if we had an exceptional habitat worth maintaining and supporting, but maybe that's just because we've been using so many chemicals for so long in the UK, and this could be common in Poland...?

6. Trees and woodwork

I always want to do more green woodwork, but it's hard (or expensive) to get the materials and the space to work them in Wakefield. In our orchardy haven there are so many trees we need to cut some of them down and it seems a shame to simple burn them. It was great stripping the bark and creating a frame for our treebog, although we ran out of time in the end. My first job was to build a saw horse from recycled planks from a barn, which was good. I found that nailing through green sycamore was very hard though!

7. Autumn harvest

8. Farm work

This is an 'arfa' or winnowing machine. Unfortunately my brother in law had an accident at work and cut his hand. Fortunately helping him out meant I had to use this thing which I found fascinating. A very simple machine, the electric motor turns a wheel which turns a fan. There's also a simple lever mechanism on the other side that moves a series of four big sieves from side to side. You pour grain into the top, the chaff get's blown out of the back (right of this picture), grit falls down the funnel at the bottom, and the cleaned grains come down the shoot on the left. More pictures here.

The only little thing was he needed 900kg, in eighteen 50kg sacks. In Poland, like in the UK, you're not supposed to lift more than 25kg at a time. Luckily there's a simple work around - just tell farmers to use two people to move the bigger sacks... Needless to say this doesn't happen in practice, and I changed some fat into muscle. I also got to drive tractors and use a chainsaw and do other things that exercised my health and safety instincts :-)

9. Art work

I was asked to help dig a foundation trench for a new shed, and the first thing was to dig out a large stone. What they didn't realise was that only about 5% of the huge boulder was visible above ground, and that I would take on the task as a kind of Goldsworthy-esque art project and dig a nice neat trench all the way round. Someone then came and blew it up with explosives, and still it was a huge struggle involving borrowing stronger tractors and trailers to get the pieces out, but we did manage to get a few pieces delivered to Sadowo where we may do some granite carving in the future...

10. Forest walk

One Sunday we went for a walk, including venturing together into the huge neighbouring forest. I love forests, and this was almost as magical as when I went in April. No elk this time, but mushrooms and flowers and calm and quiet and dappled light and visions of many more visits in the future as Maia gets older...

11. Star gazing

The skies are really clear and there is hardly any light polution. I saw in Wales a discounted little book of the night sky, and I was able on a couple of nights to learn more about what I was looking at, identify a few more constellations, and find the Pleiades.

In Greek mythology, Maia was the eldest daughter of Atlas and Pleione, immortalised in the Pleiades star cluster, or seven sisters. I was very pleased to be able to find this in the sky too, although we could do with some binoculars to see them more clearly.

It was quite a hard trip in many ways, but there was a lot to celebrate and we're looking forward to the future.

Notes about surveying - house and land

I started the day early today and took the opportunity to do some quick research about surveying this new property. I'm off to see my friend Martin and I'm trying to be prepared for our conversation.

He's already given me some tips: check the foundations mainly, look for damp patches, look for diagonal cracks running from foundations or from window or door lintels, look at the roof, etc. Especially useful - take a long straight piece of wood to check for straight walls... I also found some advice online: for example how to survey old houses for renovation. Finally I hope to take my dad's advice and ask three local builders for their suggestions - with no specifications, what would they do to make it liveable? Could help us identify problems, give ideas, and get a feeling for potential costs. Of course I hope to do a lot of the work myself, and I expect our eco-house will be renovated quite differently from most local properties, but all this should be useful.

Then I got on to land surveying, or more particularly soil analysis. Not so much luck here in my initial searches - I'm surprised that the Soil Association website doesn't have more info. Of course I can do a pH test and hope it comes between 6.5-7, and I can hope for good loamy soil (although I expect it to be more sandy). Happily my conclusion was that my plan so far is ok, and I can dig some pits and do some investigating and all will be good.

Also this morning I came across this old film again of Ruth Stout's garden, which I find quite inspiring. Simple methods, little work, plenty of good food - sounds like a good recipe to me :-)



Then this evening I've ended up watching the documentary Dirt, via the great Permaculture Media Blog (see their Free Documentary Films Archive!) - loads of good stuff on here.

One last unrelated thing before I go to sleep: a friend of a friend apparently found it was so expensive to hire a mini digger for several pieces of work, it was better to buy one second hand for £5000 and sell it a year later for £4500 than pay all the hire charges. No there's a thought, although you need the spare cash...