The Just Add Water natural building Video really kicked off the new year for Community Cultivators’ Permaculture Potlucks on the east side of Austin. Collaboration with Ape99 at the Permaculture Park.

The video and story were featured the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia‘s website under the title Natural Building Fun!

Ecerpt From PRI Australia:

Every Sunday I’ve been getting together with some friends to work on various permaculture projects. It’s something that has become a trend for several years now. There have been several ebbs and flows over the course of that time but the general trend has been ever climbing. These days, Sunday workday/potlucks are the norm for me and my circle of friends. Just over this past year we’ve built several gardens, re-landscaped a housing co-operative’s front entryway and built a few aquaponics systems. During the month of February, we took to a natural building project that will soon become a large new greenhouse.

For this project we knew we wanted several strong, well insulated, walls. Going into the project we already had an idea for a natural building technique using woodchip mulch of which, we just happened to have a surplus. Also on hand was a large bale of weathered paper pulp left over from a previous papercrete project. Mixing in a little lime and concrete we came up with a surprisingly strong structure that sets nicely and shows very little evidence of slumping!

Check out the fun video above that I put together!

This is definitely an experiment and I look forward to the results… whether they be full of successes or failures (or both!) they will most certainly be educational!!

The good news is that we have a structure to experiment with that isn’t intended as a living space. So, should there be failures on any level (even catastrophic) we’ll be able to recover and, best of all, we’ll learn a great deal about how to do it better the next time!

After the “mulchcrete” wall is plastered we’ll add the greenhouse panels and plastic over the top and begin to build our new aquaponics system, propagation table and guinea perch (we need a warm place to shelter the guinea hens when the weather turns bad.)

Stay tuned for updates to that project and others were working on as they develop.

Some of the things on our list include…

• More aquaponics!
• a DIY ram-pump
• a street drainage filtration system
• grey water
• outdoor kitchen and shower
• food forestry
• passive irrigation for your kitchen garden using mini-swale double-reach beds (a design favorite of mine!)
• the list goes on… please stay tuned!