As we all know, it’s been a rocky year (uhhh, at best). However, I want to take this opportunity to share some updates about workshops and natural building happenings. I also want to take a moment and find something positive to celebrate about the past year. I hope you can do the same.
2020 Workshop Hiatus
2020 started on a hopeful note, with registrants quickly filling up our Natural Building Workshop slots. As many of you know by now, we eventually had to cancel all classes, including the much anticipated Japanese Carpentry Workshop. Ackk! I guess the upside here is that there’s a great hunger for hands-on natural building courses. And it’s always amazing to see the diversity of folks from across the country who register for our classes. I hope we can meet everyone someday soon and build together.
Winter Timber Framing
Along the same lines, 2020 kicked off with some exciting building projects. Over winter, Tom, Fred, Nick, and I cut and raised an oak timber frame for a local family. We cut all of the joinery in my driveway “shop”. Despite many rainy, mucky days, we made surprisingly quick work of processing thousands of board feet of white oak timbers. Later, we transported the material to the site and raised the frame over the course of an eventful week, which is of course the most exciting part of any timber frame project. This one was no exception.
Spreading Plaster
I have since returned to the timber frame home to consult the owner-builders about light clay straw installation, and during an unseasonably warm week in the fall I applied the first coat of exterior plaster to the completed clay-straw walls. I love applying the first coat of plaster and immediately transforming the appearance of the building. I used a clay/lime base coat recipe, one of my current faves.
In the early spring, I had the privilege of working at the Ekvn-Yefolecv Ecovillage, an inspiring community of Indigenous Maskoke people. You can read more about the community here. This community is easily one of the most inspiring projects I’ve had the opportunity to experience. I truly want this group to succeed with their far-reaching vision. Anyway, I was there to play a small part in helping with the lath and plaster work inside their ceremonial roundhouse. (Pictures of the space aren’t allowed, so I don’t have anything to show. (Imagine a sixteen-sided timber frame structure with a large fire pit in the middle of the space.) I had planned to return to Ekvn-Yefolecv for additional projects throughout the year, but travel work during COVID has since become very difficult or simply not possible.
Other projects had to be delayed or simply fell through, but I continue to offer consulting and work for hire, especially for more local projects in Kentucky.
The Home Front
Because we didn’t host any workshops and traveling was more limited this year, lots of my time was instead allocated towards the long list of home projects either in progress or awaiting their start. A list of some of what we got underway…
- completed our new cob oven
- applied plaster work on the outdoor kitchen
- started the dry stack stone retaining wall around the outdoor kitchen and patio
- completed excavation work for a new pond (!!)
- dug swales on the hillside around the new pond site
- had our biggest garden year in a while (including 500 lbs of sweet potatoes harvested with another family)
- canned lots and lots of tomato sauce
- purchased tractor with the aid of a newly acquired grant by April
- overhauled woodworking shop and started plastering over original OSB walls
- appeared in a follow-up film segment on the “Who Wants to Come to Japan” TV show (here I thought all that was over, ha!)
- baked a couple hundred pizzas and almost 500 loaves of bread
Outdoor Kitchen & Pizza Nights
When April and I originally conceived of the outdoor kitchen and cob oven project, we imagined hosting regular Pizza Nights to offer a way to regularly connect with the community through delicious food. At the start of 2020, I thought that idea was dead in the water and I became forlorn. However, as time passed it became clear that hosting outdoor gatherings was one of the best and only ways to see people. We’ve since hosted 3 or 4 Pizza Nights (with proper safety protocols). Over this winter, we’re doing Pizza Pop-Ups so people can preorder and pick up pizzas.
I still yearn for the day we can host Pizza Nights without any worry. But given the state of things, it’s been about as good as I can ask for. Baking pizza and bread has been a natural extension of what we do here at South Slope, and I look forward to doing it more and seeing how this mini venture evolves over time.
2021 Workshops…?
I’ll say now that 2021 workshops are a big question mark at the moment. We have no set dates for any of our usual classes, and do not plan to schedule anything until it becomes clear that it’s safe to do so. What is “safe”? That’s not totally apparent, in all honesty. There’s very little precedent for this kind of thing and conditions are continuing to change. Given the nature of our workshops, there are risks with convening 15 people from all over the country in one place, in close proximity, for a full week.
Please know that we are still anticipating hosting classes at some point, but it remains unclear exactly when.
Despite everything, there was some good stuff to happen this year. On a final note, I want to acknowledge that while we have been fortunate enough to remain healthy and continue with some of our work, that hasn’t been the case for everyone. My compassion goes out to everyone impacted by COVID, police violence, wildfires, and the barrage of struggles in 2020.