What Are We All About?

We’re all about cultivating community through building with natural materials — mud, wood, straw, and stone. Our Natural Building Workshops are a place to forge new friendships and revel in the joy of working with each other. We strive to communicate the genius of traditional building, organic food growing practices, and the contributions of women and indigenous peoples into each project we complete. Even the meals we serve during our building workshops reflect this — April makes an art form of growing and preparing meals infused with love, magic, and her ancestral heritage. This is more than just building with mud for us — it’s a fundamental approach to living creatively and having joyful shared experiences.

How Did All Of This Begin?

Hi there, Ziggy here. I started The Year of Mud website back in 2008 when I began constructing my first cob house with little prior building experience. “The year of mud” marked the beginning of a new era — my full tilt pursuit of building with clay, straw, and wood. Since then, I’ve been involved in a variety of natural building projects, big and small. Many of these projects and mud-slinging adventures are documented on the long-running blog. I may not post on the blog as much these days, but natural building is a cornerstone of our lives and livelihoods.

Natural building has taken me down many different roads over the years — meeting countless different people from all over the country, visiting gorgeous structures near and far, appearing on a television show in Japan (??!), baking thousands of pizzas out of a cob oven… the list goes on. I love the creativity inherent in the building process and strive to incorporate the best possible practices into each and every project, no matter the scale. Building is a constant learning process and there’s always something new to discover.

Building Community with Mud

In 2012, April and I hatched the idea to team up with other builders and offer a series of Natural Building Workshops. Our first courses were a Timber Frame Workshop and Straw Bale Workshop. We were instantly hooked on the experience of building with an enthusiastic group of students. At that point, we decided to make organizing workshops a long term priority. Not only was the practice of building with others a truly rewarding experience, it proved to be a powerful catalyst for creating relationships and community amongst far-flung people. Mud sparks a kind of primal joy and creativity.

In 2014, we moved to the community of Berea, Kentucky. The next year, we planted roots on 30 acres of land in the beautiful Clear Creek Valley which we’ve named South Slope Farm. South Slope is the current home to our Natural Building Workshops and all of our other creative pursuits: gardening, woodworking, community pizza nights, and other community events. Ultimately, our goal is provide a space where individuals can come together to learn and grow and where community can flourish. Since moving to this area, we’ve hosted 25+ different classes, dozens of Pizza Nights, Interdependence Day Parades, and other celebrations.

The journey continues to evolve with each passing year.

We’d Love To
Hear From You

Questions about workshops? Want to hire us for your natural building project? Go ahead and shoot us a message.