The Jolly Green Gardener

The Sustainable House demonstrates best practices in both residential energy and environmental practices.  For Live Green, Live Smart those environmental concerns extend to the environment beyond the walls of our home - the site and vegetation that surround us are also major elements in our efforts to create a sustainable home that will serve occupants for a hundred years.  Our landscape uses techniques well-known to many of us, such as restoring native drought resistent plants, building permeable hardscapes and rain gardens, and practicing rainwater capture - but we also use intensive techniques that allow us to provide food for humans and animals on the 1/3 acre we occupy.  One of these techniques is 'permaculture,' an old concept being rediscoverd and redeployed by gardeners interested in sustainable organic gardens.

The term itself, however, was coined by environmentalists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in the mid-1970s to designate "an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man," as Holmgren writes in his book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability.  The term itself is a contracted compound of permanent, culture, and agriculture.  In the 1970s Holmgren and Mollison began to develop a system of techniques for holistic landscape designs modeled after nature while including humans.

A more recent and expanded definition of the concept of permaculture is 'consciously designed landscapes which mimic the patterns and relationships found in nature, while yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs.'

In Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture Toby Hemenway defines permaculture as "a set of techniques and principles for designing sustainable human settlements."  Permaculture’s vision is of people participating in and benefiting from an abundant, nurturing natural world (Mollison).

Permaculture is a worldview, a design and thinking tool for consciously designing sustainable human environments. Permaculturalists design with plants, animals, buildings and organizations - and in doing so they focus more on the “careful design of relationships among [those parts]—interconnections—that will create a healthy, sustainable whole.” (Hemenway, 2000)

Permaculture’s goal is to create “ecologically sound, economically prosperous human communities.” (Hemenway, 2000) In order to accomplish this it is guided by a set of ethical principles:

• Care for the Earth
• Care for People
• Share the Surplus

From these ethical principles a set of design principles emerge and are used to guide the design of those sustainable systems.  Many of the design principles draw inspiration from our understanding of how natural ecosystems work, while others come from long-term societies and notions of sustainability. There are differing numbers of principles as permaculture evolves and adapts however these are the 12 as taken from David Holmgren’s book:

• Observe and Interact
• Catch and Store Energy
• Obtain a Yield
• Apply Self-regulation and Accept Feedback
• Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
• Produce No Waste
• Design from Patterns to Details
• Integrate Rather than Segregate
• Use Small and Slow Solutions
• Use and Value Diversity
• Use Edges and Value the Marginal
• Creatively Use and Respond to Change
  

While designing and implementing the landscaping at the Live Green, Live Smart project house we seek to follow these guidelines as they show us how to help our yard’s ecosystem thrive and therefore increase in diversity, health, abundance and beauty. By doing so we create a living ecosystem within our yard that does much of the typical landscaping work for us (fertilizing, weeding, spraying pesticides) while giving us useful harvests of food, plant and animal habitat as well as beauty.

The permaculture demonstration garden, located in the northwest corner of the property, is a fully implemented example of the possibilities permaculture design opens up to gardening. There you can see examples of trees, shrubs, herbs and ground covers all planted to establish relationships that are mutually beneficial and encouraging of growth and health, all while providing human needs as well.

Resources:

Holmgren, David Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability
Holmgren Design Services. Hepburn, Australia 2002

Hemenway, Toby; Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture
Chelsea Green Publishing Company. White River Junction, Vermont 2000.

Mollison, Bill; Permaculture: A Designer's Manual
Tagari Press. Australia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture

http://www.pathtofreedom.com An urban homesteading project in Pasadena, California.

I've been wanting to blog about permaculture ever since I signed on with Live Green, Live Smart back in May. With projects on the landscaping side of things beginning to take shape and a complete landscape plan including many permaculture principles as well as a fully implemented permaculture garden it is finally time I begin that process.

I'm interested in a detailed, in-depth, involved discussion and exploration of the design principles of permaculture and their power and pontential hope for our future. To that end I'm going to start a series of posts outlining what permaculture is.

Many of us are interested in ways we can help "save the world." The end of every book, documentary and website on environmental issues always includes a "what you can do" section. Permaculture offers something more powerful than a recycling program, more substantial than turning the water off while brushing teeth, or more effective than changing to CFLs. This is a different way of looking at the world around us. If you, like me, are tired of being "against" things in this world, against global warming, against social injustice, poverty, corruption and greed then read on and discover something to be "for" that could change the world but more importantly might change you.

    This weekend we received quite a bit of rain, in fact there is some rather serious flooding in parts of Minnesota as a result of the storms. We knew the storms were coming, and we knew we were vulnerable to flooding without gutters and our egresses in mid construction. Going into the weekend I made sure we had operable drains running from our egressed window areaways and tried to divert as much water from the roof away from the areaways as possible, but I couldn't help but be nervous.

    I was out of town over the weekend when the storm hit, but my thoughts were with the house and how our drainage was holding up. We'd had some problems in the past with large downpours filling in the window wells and having water spill over the sills into the basement. Now that we have drywall on the walls we can't afford to have that happen again. There were some tense moments Saturday night as I sat waiting to hear the outcome, unable to do anything about the situation myself but hope I'd done enough to prepare on Friday.

    As it turns out some last minute fixes by Peter to make sure our drain inlets stayed submerged and open (they were tending to float as they weren't set into the gravel yet due to the egress construction in progress) managed to keep our water infiltration to a minimum. We did have some water seeping in around the foundation in a few areas but we have fans blowing in the basement to dry that up as quickly as possible. Taking these steps to avoid water infiltration and then dry it as quickly as possible will have long term benefits in mold reduction and prevention, key aspects of building a green house that will last and maintain a healthy living environment.

    Tomorrow, Tuesday Aug 21st the gutters are being installed and all our worries with water will be over. 

It's August 16th already, time has certainly flown on the Live Green, Live Smart project house. It's been a hectic week at the house for me with Keith taking some much needed time away from the site as the tapers get the drywall mudded and taped. During his time away I'm making some big steps outside the house, all while taking care of a couple minor emergencies at site along the way. We took delivery of the first set of our large landscaping stones Tuesday morning. And I do mean large, these stones are around 4 to 6 feet long, 3 feet deep and 16 inches tall. They will become our egress window wells and the stones following them from the quarry will become landscape stone outcroppings around the rain gardens. They are a dramatic statement and will look great, however they are posing their own set of problems and logistical issues. In order for the recycling to make sense time and money wise we have had numerous piles accumulating around the site. The problem was those piles had a tendency to look a little unruly if we didn't keep close tabs on them, and were also taking up quite a bit of space. However it just doesn't make sense to take a trip to the scrap metal recycler every time we have a piece of old ducting to recycle, you have to stock pile and then make one big trip. So this week I set about the task of getting those piles were they needed to go. We got the last of the old stucco cement into a dumpster to be recycled. The scrap lumber we can't re-use or grind up for mulch also found its way into a dumpster to be used as fuel at a power plant. And our scrap metal pile was taken to the scrap yard to be recycled. Those are big steps towards getting the yard into a place where we can begin our landscape installations. The other big news is that the piping is now complete for the rainwater tanks. The tanks are scheduled to be buried completely tomorrow morning, so far they've only been partially buried. Getting them covered to final grade will give us back the left half of the front yard. That piping went smoothly if slowly, we did end up with adequate elevations for getting the water from the gutters into the top of the tank while having appropriate slope out of our overflows towards the rain gardens.

    Today the rainwater tank components arrived from Resource Conservation Technology. RCT is the Baltimore based company specializing in, among other resource/environmentally oriented products, rainwater harvesting systems. They were generous enough to give us a discount on the components necessary to turn our rainwater tanks into a working system and also provided a lot of very useful information and expertise.

    The pieces we received today include our cistern pump, the pump's controller, the filtration system, and our system controller. The system controller is pretty neat, it will receive a signal from a device inside the tank which will allow it to display a digital read out of tank level. It can also then perform functions based on that tank level such as turning valves on or off as needed, transferring water around, emptying the tanks, activating backup systems, or several other functions. It even has a scheduled maintenance warning light. Talk about bells and whistles!

   We're still running into the problem of our elevation heights for the piping. In order to maintain slope from our downspouts our piping is fairly deep already. Once near the tank we have to drop another 11 inches for the filter device. That drop in elevation puts us coming into the tank at a lower than optimal height, which will both lose a small amount of capacity (the inlet isn't at the very top of the tanks) but more importantly force us to drop our overflow level to match. That leaves us with very little elevation drop between our tank's overflow and where our rain gardens will be located. Stay tuned for final solutions and pictures of the system in place very soon!
 

    Getting the two 1500 gallon rainwater cisterns to the site turned out to be a little bit of a hassle followed by several surprises that required creativity and a lot of patience to deal with.

    We ordered liftgate service from the delivery company, which is a truck capable of lowering the tanks mechanically - the cistern tanks are large, heavy, and awkward. The tanks, it seems, are much larger than any lift-gate the company had -- but somewhat beside the point, since it turned out that any lift-gate truck wasn't available for a week, anyway. That meant we needed to have equipment on site to lift the 700 lbs tanks off what was supposed to be an open flatbed truck --  we'd just get our backhoe here to dig the holes the same days as the scheduled delivern, and then lift and handle the tanks with the same backhoe.

  That morning, our backhoe arrived and we started digging. Our hole was squeezed tight between our gas line, which we hand dug around - the line sits on the south side of the hole; the city water and sewer lines bound the north side of the hole, along with the discovery of the house's old septic tank (still in surprisingly good condition).

The tanks themselves are 9 feet long, 7 feet tall, and require 2 feet of manhole access above that.  They have to be buried sufficiently deep to provide adequate slope from the gutter downspouts halfway around the house to the tank inlet. If the tanks aren't deep enough those pipes wouldn't flow properly. So we now have a 10 foot deep hole in the front yard, which is much more impressive than it sounds when written down.

    It's time I updated on the status of the Live Green, Live Smart Sustainable House. So much has been going on and we've all been so busy that spare time to blog has been rare.

 After several delays, the geothermal heat pump was installed in the basement (the thing weighs around 400 pounds, so that was fun to get down the stairs).

The exterior stone work has been completed and looks great. The stone around the fireplace was extended down the stairs and into the basement to make it look like one solid unit and add aesthetic appeal and texture. The only stone work left is the mantal and facing around the efficient gas fireplace.

The stucco company is also at the site today, starting to put up the mesh for the outdoor stucco. 

We've taken delivery of the rainwater harvesting tanks, with way too much excitement over the delivery. The two 1500 gallon tanks are sitting in the ground right now, while we anxiously await the components needed to set up the water filter, pump, piping and what-have-you.

We've finished up most of the framing details of the house, which means the spray foam guys are in the house right now spraying the foam insulation. The wiring rough-in is complete, as well as the plumbing rough-in.

    The big news last week was that we passed all three of our inspections! Framing, wiring and plumbing all got the OK from the city inspectors, which is a big hurdle for the project.

  WCCO-TV journalist, anchor, and environmentalist Don Shelby has been by the house, the first part of a series on our project aired on the 10 o'clock news on CBS-affiliate WCCO last Tuesday. He was back at the site today filming an interview with Peter Lytle, LGLS founder and home owner for the next in the series. I took the opportunity to talk to his producer and camera man about all we're doing on the landscaping and gardens, so look forward to a piece concentrating on that aspect of the project.

    Tomorrow legislators from the Minnesota House and Senate are scheduled to tour the site, which is encouraging, but provides some challenges as we're in the midst of a humid heat wave. And senators and representatives will have a chance to watch while we finish up the spray foam work, continuing to get the lathing up on the exterior, installing the solar hot water heat exchanger, taking delivery of the sheet rock, receiving our rainwater tank components and probably solving a minor disaster or two for good measure. 

    The project continues to make great steps forward every day, even though sometimes those steps look like big setbacks they're all really just chances to learn.

    Despite being the beginning to yet another crazy week, some really awesome steps were taken today at the house.

    The guys from Solar Midwest came this morning and installed the Solatube skylights.  I wasn't at all familiar with solar tubes, beyond a basic conceptual basis - but these are one of the greatest innovations for the effort, and I look forward to seeing more of them used in green building.

   Installation was simple and went quickly. The solar tube is basically a little plastic bubble that sits on the roof, collecting light, sending that light down the inside of a mirrored tube, to a diffuser that is in the ceiling of your desired room. The diffuser is fairly inconspicuous, it's just directing the light to be a more broad, diffused light around the room rather than a little round bright spot on the floor.

   Installation was basically making a whole in the roof, very similar to standard vent installation. Then making the necessary holes in the floor of the first floor. The roof-top portion of the unit has flashing, which slides up underneath the adjacent roof shingles. This creates a water-tight seal, exactly like the flashing around a chimney or other vent.

   The most fun part of the whole thing was the finally connection, which allowed the sunlight to begin flooding into the basement room. Looking straight up the tube before the diffuser was attached was like looking into a bright, mirrored kaleidoscope of the sky.

  The difference in light, most noticeably in the basement (which had been a little dungeon-like) is spectacular - the fixture uses parabolic mirrors to bring daylight indoors - that dark corner is now awash in natural daylight as long as the sun or moon shine. 

   All-in-all, Solatubes get my vote as necessary additions to any home. The benefits of natural light, as anyone with adequately windowed rooms or a skylight knows, are manifold. Having that benefit directed to the room you want, even several floors down, is excellent. They can even come with dampers to shut out the light when you don't want it, or a light fixture built-in to allow it to serve as the main light fixture in the room. They can even rig them up with exhaust fans, so that one fixture can light and ventilate a bathroom.
 

    It was an eventful week at The Sustainable House. Occasionally it was frustrating, occasionally gratifying, but mostly just hectic...per usual.
 
    The concrete pours were completed, allowing the go-ahead for the stone guys to set the stone trim, which in turn allows the stucco to be applied to the exterior walls. The wiring rough-ins are for the most part complete. The ducting is now complete except for the cooling coil for the geothermal unit, which is still on order. The two egress windows in the basement are now framed and mudded in to the wall. And we have picked out block to be used for the raised bed gardens and permeable driveway.

    Most of the tasks this past week have been common to home construction and remodeling.  The concrete pours were a standard affair. The egress windows were framed-in with a typical treated wood frame where it contacts the foundation block, and is mortared into place. The quality and resulting durability of this construction technique is standard expectation for our general contractor, Keith Poets of Quality Builders. His quality craftsmanship and pride in the work being done on the home was especially noticeable as we pulled out the old existing basement window in the one area that already had an egress window put in with makeshift workmanship - and an amazing amount of industrial adhesive and sprayed-in expanding foam. Keith explained that gluing so copiously is a clear sign that someone didn't know what they were doing. It was easy to see that the shoddy installation allowed large quantities of air (and resulting heat or cold) to pass through.  In addition, several areas of the window had untreated wood resting directly on the block wall - a technique that would have greatly reduced the lifetime of that window frame. Keith surmised that the window was the result of a previous homeowner attempting to do some quick, easy work to get the house more attractive for sale.  Apparently it's buyer beware.

  We've also used a better-than-conventional-standards technique in the House's ductwork.  The return duct lines are solid runs of duct - different from conventional work of the period (1948) in which they just enclosed a stud or joist space and used that as a cold air return. LEED standards follow the principle that a solid return run will produce greater efficiency and more durability over time.

   I was talking to Ryan, the lead installer for UMR (the geothermal guys) on site, about the cooling unit and the new Honda Freewatt system. Apparently all we're waiting on now is the geothermal A/C coil. It's a 32 inch coil inserted into the main trunk line of the ducts where they exit the furnace. Using the furnace's fans in the summer, minus it's heating capability, to cool the house. The geothermal unit will pump what is essentially radiator fluid, glycol, down through the wells dug out front. The temperature in the ground stays steady in the mid 50 degrees all summer. This cool liquid is then used to cool the air flowing into the house. Thermodynamically speaking, it technically takes heat from the air and pumps it into the ground. I find it easier to understand the other way around, taking the cool-ness of the ground and pumping it into the house.

     The "Freewatt" system will deserve its own post in the near future. We're all excited to see what it'll do.

 

Today the geothermal guys started digging the wells that will transfer warm air between the subsoil and the house. The rig for drilling is basically two big trucks, one drill rig with a large drill bit, and a water truck to pump water alongside the drill into the borehole.  Two guys are able to run the entire outfit.

Carbide drill bits are used to bore holes about six inches wide in diameter. The bit is fit on the end of a long pipe, maybe 35 feet long and held vertical by being screwed into the drill motor that sits at the top of the drill rig's boom. The pipe is then rotated and the whole drill motor pushes it down into the hole. The pipe that holds the drill bit is hollow, allowing water thickened with a clay called bentonite to be pumped down the pipe, pushing out the middle of the drill bit head itself. The water mixture lubricates the process, keeps the drill bit cool, and also flushes the drilled earth up and out the hole.

The operators have a well-organized regimen, removing the drill motor from the pipe, raising the motor to attach another section of pipe, and then drilling down through that. They just repeated that process all day, occasionally flushing out the hole with more water, changing drill bits as needed. Apparently they use one drill bit per hole, more if the subsoil is particularly hard or they're drilling through rock.

It was amazing to see how fast they dug through the first pipe's length, not even 5 minutes and the drill had pushed all the way down. The operator told me the first 30 or 50 feet is all sand, loose gravel and some clay at our site. Easy drilling.

The initial plan had been 4 wells for the geothermal, each about 150-170 feet. But with the very first hole, at about 110-130 feet they hit a combination of hard, cement-like gravel and black granite. Hitting that hard layer meant that it made more sense to change their plan, and drill 5 shallower holes in place of the four deep ones originally planned.

After drilling the wells the crew pumped them with more bentonite. This means that the hole is sealed to prevent adjacent aquifers being contaminated. The pipe going into and coming back out of the hole will carry liquid through it as a medium for transferring heat, but there will be no mixing with the groundwater.

A Wikipedia search brought up this information:

"Bentonite is an absorbent aluminium phyllosilicate generally impure clay consisting mostly of montmorillonite, (Na,Ca)_0.33(Al,Mg)₂Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂·(H₂O)_n. Two types exist: swelling bentonite which is also called sodium bentonite and non-swelling bentonite or calcium bentonite. It forms from weathering of volcanic ash, most often in the presence of water."

Not sure if they were using the swelling or non-swelling versions. I'll ask tomorrow.

Factoids of the day: In 2005 USA was the leading producer of bentonite, with roughly 1/3 the world's share. The majority of the high-grade commercial bentonite in the US comes from the area between the Black Hills in South Dakota and the Big Horn Basin in Montana.

Wikipedia also has this to say: "Supposedly the world's largest current reserve of bentonite is Chongzuo in China's Guangxi province"

Geoff

 6-11-07

Lorne, a consultant working for ICC on the irrigation and rain water harvesting stopped by to discuss our choice of cistern tanks. They are coming from California via railroad, which is more energy efficient thank truckng, if slower.

    The original plan had been two large tanks at opposite corners of the property. But after considering the cramped space and the House's operational needs, we decided to set both tanks off the southeast corner. One tank will fill; overflow will drain into the second tank which will hold the pump. This configuration allows us to use only one rainwater harvesting pump instead of the two we'd originally planned.  The simplified system will be less prone to malfunction - so it will be more sutainable.

    Additional issues with the system are the rather large hole the tanks require, the manhole for maintenance access to them, connectors for the inlet pipes coming off the gutters, and the underground wiring for the pumps.

   The hole the tanks go into will be on the order of 20 feet deep, 6 feet wide and some 20 or 30 feet long. Yeah, big holes. Since the foundation has been dug around, exposing it for the addition of insulation, now is prime time to dig for the water tanks.

    The pipes that will bring the water from the gutters are to be buried below the frost line - we want to go four feet deep. To maintain a steady tilt down towards the tank - so if we put those at the back of the house four feet down, the slant required will put the tanks pretty deep. Which is fine, but it means we'll need to have a deeper manhole connection than the tanks normally come equipped with.

  The pumps we've considered have a 20 foot cord attached. This will get us to the surface from the likely depth of fifteen feet, but that puts us into the middle of the front garden. Running an extension cord isn't an option, so we will have the electrical guys from Southside wire a junction box. We chose to put the junction box on the side of the house and find a pump with a longer cord that will reach the house.

   All in all the rainwater stuff is shaping up - but it's going to be hard to wait for the tanks to be delivered so we can deal with our amended design in real terms.
 

 The new solar hot water piping is done and looks great.  Photos and a description of the various elements of the system can be found in the construction diary as well as on the technology page of this website.

    Today at the job site was humid and hot. Luckily, most of the scheduled work took place down in the much cooler basement. I had the pleasure of knocking out a section of the cinder block wall to make room for a new basement window, which was fun and much simpler task than the continued ducting adventure. The excitment/headaches continue to abound around the ducting and maneuvering in the confined basement ceiling space. 

    Several aspects of this project are making every little detail tug, nag and pull at the builder's attention.  It's the nitty gritty details that are both so important and so annoying. The guys from UMR working on the ducting are having problems fitting all the connections for the heating, cooling and return duct runs into the confined space. The main issues were around getting through the squeeze into the mechanical room. Now what's happening is that we're running out of physical space in the main trunk ducts to attach the various offshoots needed for heating and cooling. The space between each floor joist is really the only option, and each joist space can only hold one connection going one direction. We're running out of joist spaces, an interesting problem.

 We're finding that since many of the specific features aren't the everyday routine for the contractors, more planning and resourcefulness are called for than in a conventional remodel.  For instance, in  conventional construction the return runs aren't necessarily enclosed in their own ducts. It is common to simply seal off the joist space between the sheetrock and run that back to the heating/cooling units. Not so in LEED construction, where the fresh air and  'old air' are separated.

    All these little details are where the real energy and resource savings and sustainability lie. They are also proving to be one learning experience (a nice word for a headache) after another.

 

    So today the geothermal guys from UMR started digging their wells - and let me tell you, that was awesome to watch. I'd never really witnessed a well being drilled before and it was cool. It was basically just two big trucks, one water truck pumping the water they needed and another big drill rig, with two guys operating the whole show.

     They use carbide drill bits to bore the holes, about six inches wide. The bit is fit on the end of a long pipe, maybe 35' long. The pipe is held vertical, screwed into the drill motor that is at the top of the drill rig's boom. The pipe then is rotated and the whole drill motor pushes it down into the hole. The pipe that holds the drill bit is hollow allowing water, thickened a little with Bentonite to help it do its job, is pumped down the pipe the whole time, pushing out the middle of the drill bit head itself. This serves to lubricate the process, keep the drill bit cool and also flush the drilled earth up and out the hole. It was amazing to see how fast they dug through the first pipe's length, not even 5 minutes and the drill had pushed all the way down. The operator told me the first 30 or 50 feet is all sand, loose gravel and some clay at our site. Easy drilling.

    The operators were a well oiled machine, removing the drill motor from the pipe, raising the motor to attach another section of pipe, and then drilling down through that. They just repeated that process all day, occasionally flushing out the hole with more water, changing drill bits as needed. Apparently they can figure about 1 drill bit per hole, more if the subsoil is particularly hard or they're drilling through rock.

   I found out that about 110-130 feet down the first hole they hit a combination of hard, cement like gravel and black granite. The initial plan had been 4 wells for the geothermal, each about 150-170 feet. Hitting that hard layer meant that it makes more sense now to drill 5 holes instead, each a little shallower.

   After they'd drilled their hole the crew plumped it with more bentonite. This means that the whole is sealed and any aquifers will not be contaminated. The pipe going into and coming back out of the whole will carry liquid through it but there will be no mixing with the groundwater. A quick wikipedia search brought this up:

"Bentonite is an absorbent aluminium phyllosilicate generally impure clay consisting mostly of montmorillonite, (Na,Ca)_0.33(Al,Mg)₂Si₄O₁₀(OH)₂·(H₂O)_n. Two types exist: swelling bentonite which is also called sodium bentonite and non-swelling bentonite or calcium bentonite. It forms from weathering of volcanic ash, most often in the presence of water."

Not sure if they were using the swelling or non-swelling versions. I'll ask tomorrow.

Factoids of the day: In 2005 USA was the leading producer of bentonite, with roughly 1/3 the world's share. The majority of the high-grade commercial bentonite in the US comes from the area between the Black Hills in SD and the Big Horn Basin in MT.

Wikipedia also has this to say: "Supposedly the world's largest current reserve of bentonite is Chongzuo in China's Guangxi province"