Community Supported Agriculture

CSA's are not a new idea but they have changed over the years. It used to be that a group of people would get together, buy some land, and then hire a farmer to tend the land and provided them with fresh produce. Now it is more often a farmer who owns land already that will sell "Shares" of his or her crop. This way any family can basically pre-purchase all of their vegetables and sometimes fruit, eggs, honey, and on occasion meat.

There are both pros and cons to a system like this. Some of the major pros include being organic, being local, being fresher, and getting to try new veggies. Some of the major cons include having vegetables that you will not eat, having a bad growing year (you are accepting the risk along with the farmer), and having to learn to eat what is locally in season.

We are currently looking at a CSA from a farm about 30 miles from here that has a pretty good variety of food including some fruit, but no honey, eggs, or meat. The thing that is drawing us to them the most is that if you are willing to come to the farm at least 12 out of the 22 weeks and help pick then you get everything at half price. Not only that but we will also get the opportunity to learn some of the tricks of the trade. And by we I mean Tami since it is only on Wednesday and Sunday mornings (but hopefully I will be able to go at least once sometime).

Check it out in your area.
http://www.localharvest.org/
http://www.bountifulbaskets.org/
http://www.eatwild.com/

Earth Scrapper

Along the lines of several other earlier posts I introduce the Earth Scrapper. It is proposed as a 65 story sky scraper built below the surface of Mexico City. It is a gorgeous design that has some awesome potential.

Check out the video on yahoo, http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/this-could-be-big-abc-news/building-down-instead-161537141.html

Cheaper Living in a Hole

In response to my Hobbit Hole post Ruth brought up the fact that building underground can be more expensive than building above ground. While this is true for the upfront costs I would like to show why it makes sense in the long run. First why is it expensive to build underground? In order to have a basement (or anything underground) you must first dig a hole. Then you have to make sure that it is moisture proof. All of this costs more than just building on top of the ground. Checking around a couple of places online most people said that it cost them about $10,000 to build their basements. For this argument lets say that since the entire house is going to cost $20,000 or even $30,000 more than a typical house.

Now lets look at why you want to spend that much more initially. First it would eliminate your heating and cooling bills. According to the Energy Star website that is about $1,000 dollars a year. So over the period of 20-30 years the house has already made back every penny to originally spent. And that is assuming that you live in an average place. In places where summers are really hot (Arizona) or the winters are really cold (Michigan) the energy bills could be even higher which means the house would pay for itself even faster.

Second if we were to build below ground then we could be building on smaller lots with the same size of house. Now land prices vary greatly by location so this is a variable that may or may not save a lot of money. Looking at a few places here in my area I found that even on the cheap end a lot of land is about $50,000. Now when we are building underground en masse we could easily build two houses on a quarter of an acre or even a eight of an acre. So now the cost of land has dropped in half. That savings alone basically covers the cost of building underground.

Third is the fact that if this was done en masse it would be easy to reduce the cost of building. For example if a builder decided to build his new subdivision all underground he could easily excavate the entire area, build the houses knowing that they would be buried (which would definitely take a different set of construction techniques). Then as the houses were finished each one could be covered back over with soil and the project would be done. I do not know how much this could save but it should definitely reduce the costs.

Those I guess are just a couple more thoughts about why we should be building underground. I am sure that my argument is not perfect or the numbers completely accurate. That was not the point of this post. The point was to just look a little past the initial costs so that we all can realize how worth it some of these initial investments can be.

Yurts!

This is something that I just ran across today. Modern day yurts are build in the design of yurts from Mongolia and Turkey. It is basically a round house with a peaked roof. The walls are a wooden lattice, the roof is support by wooden beams. The walls are now often a high quality plastic. They are simple and easy to construct, even the larger yurts can be put up in a weekend if there are a few helping hands working together.

One can be used as a starter home. As a family grows it is simple to add another yurt next to the original and basically double the living space. Or if you do not need to double the space you can get a smaller yurt for an addition. Yurts can be used as a guest house, a room for a hot tub, a office, or even a rather epic tree house.

I guess there are a few things that have me interested in yurts. The first is that they are simple. It is something that I could do for myself (with help of course). It would not have to be built by someone else. I could intimately know and understand every last detail. That way when something goes wrong, A) I am more aware of what needs to be done to fix it, and B) I can only curse myself. Second it is a unique and simple building that could easily go onto any empty plot of land without too much fuss.

The only thing that I think would take some time would be building the interior walls, kitchen and bathroom. However the Yurt could go up in a couple of days and then slowly build up the rest as I go. I am pretty sure that it would take a lot of thinking outside the box to make it work but that definitely sounds like an adventure.

Hobbit Holes

Why is it that hobbits are so much smarter than we are when it comes to building homes? They are the one race that has figured out that it is so much more efficient to build underground. Between the insulation that comes from having tons of earth all around you and actually having the ground keep your house at the same temperature as itself it just makes so much more sense to build underground.

Most places have a ground temperature somewhere between 50-80 degrees Fahrenheit. This is so much better than the air temperature range of 0-120 that we have. For the most part we could almost completely get rid of all our energy costs related to heating and cooling.

With the proper use of skylights and solar wells the houses could still receive as much light as we currently do with windows. Then when you left your house you would not see row after row of housing but instead it would be like walking into a park. You would still have roads and cars scattered about but in between would be trees and grass.

It would also be a lot easier to fully utilize your lot. Even a 50 x 50 foot lot would give huge houses and then you could have the entire surface to play games or grow flowers or gardens.

At least in my opinion it would turn subdivisions into gorgeous parks. It would turn cities into forests. It would bring us closer back to nature.