• Maya Creek is currently taking volunteers, giving tours, but not accepting members yet. Feel free to contact us to schedule a visit. 

Hello, we are Trish Woolbright & Cameron Gramarye and we started cleaning up and rehabilitating the infrastructure of Maya Creek with the support and permission of Tao, Luke, & David. We have been homesteading and educating in gardening and animal husbandry skills for about a decade and are exited to bring our skills to Maya Creek along with learning a whole lot more while we build! Its been an adventure this year and so much more amazing than we ever could have dreamed. Its hard, its rewarding, and its beautiful, while also gross challenging, and itchy. There will be regular blogs detailing the process of these buildings becoming finished, reasons why we love living off grid and in the woods, and the tips and tricks and challenges along the way. We want to dedicate our lives to making these woods the best they can be and help us all thrive.

Previously: My name is Tao Weilundemo, and in 2009 I moved back to the 310 acres of wild forested mid-Missouri land where I’d been born. I’d grown increasingly disillusioned with mainstream culture and felt that by dedicating myself to a more self-sufficient lifestyle, in tune with the natural world, I could find the satisfaction and happiness that eluded me in the pervasive consumer culture.

The experience has been all that I had hoped for and more. It has been a lot of hard work and there have been plenty of struggles and setbacks, but they’ve allowed me to grow and become a wiser and more capable person. I’ve decided to turn Maya Creek into a sustainable bed and breakfast to share the experience with others.  I hope to give people a taste of what a sustainable life can be like and inspire them to take their lives into their own hands and make it what they want it to be.


AuxvasseThanks to the help of volunteers and friends we now have significant infrastructure in place, but still have several years of construction before Maya Creek will be ready to open for paying guests.

I plan to host a variety of instructors and hold multi-day educational courses and retreats. Eventually, we will also build several more guest cabins using different natural and indigenous building styles other than the load-bearing and timber-frame straw bale styles we have now.

Below you’ll find my most recent blog posts.  The site is structured so that the folder tabs are the main categories and the colored tabs are the sub-pages.  To learn more about who I am and the vision for Maya Creek just click on the red tab above.

I post many pictures and small updates on the facebook group, Maya Creek Forum.



GingerBird Houses

Posted by Trish Woolbright on January 2, 2021

I love feeding the birds. I have a large garden and they eat off that usually too. I’m also keto and love gingerbread houses and constructing food art, but since I can’t have the sugar I decided that I would make a Birdseed house. I didn’t find many online to look at so I just came up with some construction ideas. Some failed and some were adorable. It was also a great chance to do something crafty together. I happen to be cleaning out the cabinets and realized i had a tub of lard I had never used, a lot of stale dried fruit from years ago and a lot of peanut butter. The peanut butter turned out to be too oily to use. The lard made an excellent material for glue and holding things together.

I poured the seed into a baking dish and heated the lard and poured it over the seed. Put it outside with a laundry basket over it to get hard. Then we cut the cardboard and built little houses with slits to hold them together. I put them in plant trays so they kinda stay together while outside.

Seeds. Pour warmed lard or suet over it and set in a cold place to harden. Cut into slices to use. Use cookie cutters for ornaments!
Make a base for your house. Use a tray with a lip to catch the rest and decorate the space.
Using some of those shipment boxes up!
Used Lard to sick the slices of suet to the cardboard. The peanut butter was too oily and slid off. I think a different kind of peanut butter might work.
Use died fruit and nuts and even a banana for a ‘snowbird’
Decorated with some branches for somewhere to step and set outside.

Learning to Tile during a Pandemic

Posted by Trish Woolbright on December 27, 2020

I’m super excited about natural building but there were just a couple of areas of the Straw-bale main house that had to have tile. So not at all natural and a whole learning curve most people hire out. Youtube and another friend on the same project really helped a lot!

The window wells were small and dark, and the shower of course needed to be finished. I have never done this and learned a lot along the way. I learned that un-sanded grout is better when dealing with mirror, I learned I had to sand the edge of every piece of mirror! I learned where to get scavenged tile and Habitat for Humanity Restore was a great resource but kept closing due to Covid. So every time I ran out of one little thing, I ended up with all new things and it kept adjusting all of my designs. I learned about having super heavy tile (how it slides down the wall) and how to mix mortar and grout best. I learned I needed to vent the area the hard way by poisoning myself with Red Guard. I also learned to install backer board alone by using my entire body while trying to drill it to a pretty lumpy wall.

But mostly I learned to keep going and resilience. I got pretty melodramatic a few times while doing this task. I have to say it was one of the harder things I’ve done so far. My body hurts, my hands hurt, but mostly my ego as the tile would go crooked and would suddenly not match as well as I hoped it would. I learned I’m much harder on myself than I really should be. And that in the end I like it after all.

So here is my shower tiling adventure!


Midwinter update

Posted by Trish Woolbright on December 27, 2020
Tile mosaic in the straw-bale house window and an original resident an Aloe we named Hope.

Hello, its been a busy time and I periodically update the Maya Creek Face Book Group faster. I’m hopeful to be more regular at this and we will see. I can get more detailed here which is part of the problem of motivating to slow down and post. I also like posting completed things and very few things get DONE. Though a lot of progress gets done. We have a few almost done things though to share.

Since this summer, we have been working hard on a few topics:

Cistern – Lid, roof flush on, sealed with sealant, intake tank in place to direct the water into the cistern, and then make the gutters more stable and also have guards on them. The snow guards are on order and should be here next week.

Water into the house: I have plumbed the pex to the sinks and the new pump but I busted a connector off the pump, bought a not good enough pump, then found a replacement part which is on order. Its been an ordeal. We did find a filter housing in the barn, and found filters for it.

Refinish the shower: I took off the plastic cover, put up the backer board, painted the red guard on it (poisoned myself, took a week off) and then attempted to get my tile from scavenge and habitat. During a pandemic this was an ordeal which all led to a really interesting design but it is now ready for the sealant tomorrow!

New kitchen cabinets and counters and kitchen shelves. This was all scavenged till the shelves and then I found over priced wood for that and stained all the wood the same color. The last thing is trim now and a bit of grout around the granite on the counters.

Filling the hole in the barn: At first this was really daunting and also difficult to find material without key information about local quaries. The first load I put in was clay and cost way too much for 1 16ton truck. The delivery was as much as the clay and it came from Jeff City. Then Tao suggested some Waste Lime from the Rock Quary down the road, so after hunting down the correct phone number I am now on my 2nd 16 ton of that material and almost done. Several people have come to help but I have put in a LOT of wheel barrows and went from 3 wheel barrows wearing me out to now 15 and I wear out. I try to do like 10 every day I am working on projects and we are close to finished with this hole. Its so close to done.

We also have attempted to find free or cheap siding for the barn and that’s an ongoing scavenge and attach.

We had some friends out to inoculate 10 shiitake logs, and harvest over 150 pawpaw’s. A farmer friend gave me 200 strawberry plants, and others gave me a lot of bulbs and flowers to plant. I also started moving my own garden over this fall and I started a small plot near the house for a few things and carved out room in the overgrown garden for a few things.

I would really like to talk more about each of these. I will do a few more posts to go into more detail.


Maya Creek Updates and Introductions! 2020

Posted by Trish Woolbright on September 2, 2020


Maya Creek blog.

Hello, I’m Tricia Woolbright (she/her/they/them) , nesting partner is Cameron Gramarye (he/him), and it seem like we have been working forever towards having a sustainable ecovillage, or some flavor of intentional community to call home. It’s our dream to live off grid, in natural buildings, be at home in wilderness, and conserve and repair land and nature for wildlife and plants! It sounds like a pipe dream and for a lot of years it was. But in the past year we have begun actively working on what we hope to be our forever home.


In June of 2019 we began talking to Tao about going to Maya Creek to help out and make a home. He was fully supportive and helpful with all of our questions, and helping us feel secure and independent while also supported in this difficult adventure. He, and many others, worked really hard for a lot of years at Maya Creek, and previously Calwood Fairview Farms. We really appreciate all the hard work and all the love they give this land. It really shows and it’s the most beautiful peaceful place I’ve ever stayed. I truly fell in love with it every time I was out there while Tao lived there, and even more so now.

For the past year, we’ve been working on cleaning out previous residents’ things and rehabilitating the grossness that has moved in. Lots of spiders and mold. Natural buildings need people to maintain them just like regular houses. The houses did not get finished, and four years of weather took its toll. There were a lot of truckloads of stuff destroyed by mice and mold ferried to dumpsters, with lots of help from lots of friends. But at the same time, there were LOTS of treasures left for us to build with as well. Every “Ewww!” and “Gross!” was matched by “Ooohs!” and “Ahhhs!”


I did find a lot of Luke Lundemo’s old newsletters that were awesome to read. I hope to scan them and make them available online this winter.



I honestly feel that spending time cleaning and sorting made me fall in love with Maya Creek even more. It definitely made me braver in my handling of spiders, snakes and stinging beasties! We have a good relationship already, but I’m learning everyone’s name and habits, and we are cohabitating in different ways now, like maybe outside the house.



All the rest of 2019 consisted of cleaning and clearing. The barn, the duplex, the pillbox, the house, the trash trailer, the recycling trailer, the cistern. Clean up continues, but it’s not the dominant activity anymore, and yields a lot more treasures. One oscillating fan box also contained a beehive, which led to a comical week-long eviction.

In December I took off from work and I cobbed the walls that were still bare straw on the inside of the common house. In January and February, I cleaned out and planned the kitchen, and now have built a new counter top and am tiling the window wells with scavenged tile and mirror.




We have also sealed the cistern, because the cinderblocks needed something as a barrier. The plumbing leading from the gutters to the intake tank is nearly finished too.

Next is drilling drains for the sink and plumbing the sinks in the bathroom and kitchen.

We have also gathered the manure, cattails and some of the sand we’ll need to create a finish plaster inside the house and earthen floors inside the house, and have started sifting clay. The plan for the house also includes exterior finishing plaster, and re-skirting the foundation. The granite from the current skirting will be used in flooring and other projects.

We also want to build a screened in porch, and a covered deck as a lid for the cistern. We still need to finish the bathroom, kitchen and improve some ventilation.

I would also like to redo the solar batteries and solar equipment, and double check some connections to further out buildings that seem to be shorting a bit. The lack of attention and maintenance was harder on the solar power system than any other infrastructure. So its going to be a bit of money getting that fixed up and we hope to consult with Dogwood Solar on this project as well. I’ve learned quite a lot in a year though! Thank you public library and YouTube and the random dude at AutoZone who specializes in deep cycle batteries. I’m looking forward to a consult with more professionals.


We have a pop-up camper out there, and the pillbox is re-furnished and very cozy and cool and comfortable in the summer. I’ve got 3 composting toilets right now. The biggest problem has been showering. The Camp showers have been reworked over and over and are just faulty as all hell, leading to plenty of shower bloopers. There’s nothing more frustrating than being soapy and swatting bugs, and the bag breaks, leaks, or falls down. I recently purchased a rechargeable shower head pump for camping that’s pretty great so far.

July 4th we came to find the Electric Cooperative allowed Hentges tree service to clearcut a huge area along the front driveway. The ground was exposed, the house was exposed to the road, and dozens of large trees were removed. And they weren’t finished. We’re glad we were able to prevent more damage, but the ground was littered with leftover brush and the road is in jeopardy of eroding. So we recruited some friends and got busy moving things. Like a LOT of friends. It was some of the hardest labor I’ve done besides cobbing in the middle of winter.



We were told by MDC forester Angela George that it should all grow back as oak, and the driveway may even be fine. But we do have plans to plant a lot of native perennials in that area, and friends have seeds and other plants to contribute too. Soon we will look at this space with joy and gratitude and not grumble. They also left some really good lumber behind that we are going to cure and use for building purposes! (Shower house? Covered deck over the cistern?)

When the incredibly smart and helpful Angela came out to look at the land with us on an initial site visit, she said, “They don’t make oak forests like this anymore.” She had so much to teach us about forests, woodlands, trees, oak varieties, diseases, young maples lying in wait to take over the forest if we don’t cut them, and how to see where timber stand improvements were done, could be done, and are no longer an option in some areas. We talked about types of forestry practices that encourage migratory birds, and lots of diverse wildlife as well and I’m encouraged and excited to make some plans for the woods that are sustainable and positive to maintain this big old oak forest.


All of these activities have been performed nearly every single weekend all year, with a slowdown during the couple months following when my mother passed away. We have been weekend warriors on this project for a year without a word to the general public. I wasn’t ready to talk about plans when there were more questions than answers. But we feel pretty great these days about our process and decisions and looking ahead to working with more people on projects and building community, even during COVID.

We also are ready to start investing in this new life in a big way. I have quit my position at Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture as the Opportunity Gardens Manager, and will be working on this dream full time for the next several months. I do not have a date or deadline in mind, I just want to get moving on this full time, and we will gauge how much I have to side hustle as needed.

I know there are a LOT of people who would absolutely love to keep asking me questions about homesteading and gardening but I’m no longer paid a salary to be able to spend all the time doing that for everyone. So I decided to start a Patreon. If you would like to support this new project and me doing it, and have access to my hard-earned knowledge of over a decade of teaching over 300 gardeners how to grow veggies, or all the hours of cob lessons I’ve gotten and done, or even cooking, herbalism, preserving, etc. I am thrilled to share. But your support helps me be able to do that for everyone regularly.

I’m also going to be keeping up this blog, doing some educational videos, and potentially doing some podcasts!

Just a little about me:
I have been growing food for about a decade or so pretty successfully, and getting better and better all the time. In 2013 I came to Missouri to teachit for a living. I learned things most at Sequatchie Valley Institute with the Kimmons and Ironwoods, and at Sequatchie Cove Farm/Creamery with Padgett Arnold and Randall. I owe them so much for helping me create this life for myself, and the hundreds of people I’ve been able to assist.

I am really into community organizing, mutual aid, social justice and anti-racism activism. I love to read in my hammock, and hang out with my partner, I love to swim, and to make art, and be busy with projects. I really love to teach people things and learn new things myself.

I have been doing nothing but learning about and practicing so many of these skills and topics for so long. I looked back at my life, and there have been 4 times that I’ve cleaned up someone’s property and made a new awesome life for myself there. One of those times I cleaned out over 7 tons of trash, which allowed me to farm and have chickens.

I was once part of a group that was given the keys to a great big property to rebuild. Its like I’ve been working towards a caretaker position all of my life. I have always fantasized about taking care of a large property of woods and gardens and natural homes, and it’s finally coming true. I’m still gaining confidence as I learn by doing, but I’m also reaching out to experts and learning before doing. Knowing what I don’t know is another key component of being ready to do this. I’ve been trying to be diligent by following the experts, calling in professionals, paying for consultations, taking a few classes, and it’s been REALLY valuable so far. I’ve helped a whole lot of people over the years, and I’m excited to do so from Maya Creek!

My nesting partner Cameron is at his day job right now and can introduce himself here soon.

I will do everything I can to open up homesteading knowledge and access to all. I would love to foster a inclusive community and I look forward to all the unique opportunities we are going to create together to do that.

I’m so thankful for this new opportunity and so excited. COVID has upended my entire life, so it seems to fit that I do this now. I look forward to building the better world we know is possible.

My Patreon is: https://www.patreon.com/MizTrish?fan_landing=true&fbclid=IwAR22RI2JQoDRdpZihIIKxNXP4-qkcedkwwUcylplnFaIXmML8zLrzg7crF4

We love it when people come out to visit, masked and with a safe social distance. Camping and helping out with projects is also an option. Just contact us at trish.woolbright@gmail.com














Summer 2015: Rainwater Cistern Construction

Posted by Tao on January 7, 2016

light-posts-comparisonBefore delving into the big project of the summer, the rainwater cistern, I decided to finally bury the electrical and network wiring running to the cabins in flexible conduit.  I also put in 4 cedar light posts that also act as junction boxes.  The lights are attached to a light activated timer that turns the path lights on for a couple hours after it gets dark.  There’s also now a light in the composting toilet that’s got a timer switch so it can’t be left on.

Eric helped a lot with digging the trenches for the conduit.  The project cost a lot more than I’d hoped.  Thick copper wiring and conduit are expensive.  They also get you with all of the connector pieces.  Outlets, junction boxes, a breaker box, breakers, etc. It all added up to a pretty penny.

cistern putAfter that it was on to dealing with gaping mud pit that the cistern hole had become after 3 years.  Last Fall we spent a lot of effort cleaning it up again only to have the monsoons this Spring deluge it and cause the sides to collapse.  Any hope I had for letting it dry out to make work easier evaporated unlike the water in the foot or more of clay mud at the bottom, so we sucked it up, pulled our shoes off and jumped into the muck.

It took Eric and I probably 2.5 weeks of hard work to get it all cleaned up and leveled out.  The next step was laying sub base gravel for underneath the concrete slab.  The cistern will hold almost exactly 4,000 gallons or 16 tons of water, not to mention the weight of the concrete-filled cinder block walls and wooden cap, so having a thick sub base and thick foundation slab were important.  We tamped down and leveled 8″ of 1″ minus gravel (~10 tons).

cistern leveled with sub baseNext week built a square form for the slab using 2x8s, bracing the corners and putting stakes in to hold the sides in place.  We had to get it pretty level for the concrete, and we also needed to leave as much space as we could around the outside to remove the frame and be able to maneuver.

We then used a couple of pipes and an angle grinder to cut and bend the 1/2″ rebar so that base and the walls would be tied tightly together. We used broken bricks and rocks to hold the rebar up off the ground so it would end up roughly in the middle of the slab.  We used wire to hold the rebar together where it crossed and held all of the ribs upright by laying down a piece of rebar on the ground with screws in it that we could tie each piece of rebar to.

pouring cistern slab concreteAt last it was time to call in the cement truck.  We had to drag a bunch of tables and other things out of the way and clear out some brush to make a path for the truck.  I believe I calculated that we’d need 3 yards and it turned out to be almost exactly right, with just a little left over to spare.

We let the slab set for a week or more before we started in on the block walls.  I should have gotten concrete blocks not cinder blocks since cinder blocks contain fly ash which is toxic, but I didn’t realize it until I’d already bought, hauled, and unloaded all of them.  To get around that I’ll be putting several more coats of potable cement coating than I’d planned and then do testing before I use the water.

cistern block mortared wallsI’d never mortared blocks before and Eric had only watched, so the first few courses were slow going.  Getting the right amount of mortar on the blocks to keep it level without too much overflowing, and also getting the mortar to be a good sticky consistency were the main tricks that we had to get worked out.  We used Type S mortar, which is essentially a mix of cement and hydrated lime.  It probably took us 3 weeks to do the walls.

Ultimately I believe we used about 8 90-lb bags of mortar mix and a pick-up load of masonry sand.  I believe we used about 300 cinder blocks altogether in the 12 courses of the wall.  We turned 2 half-blocks on their side, one a couple feet down which will allow the 3-inch PVC inlet pipe in and the other is in the top course for the 3-inch overflow pipe.  I also used a masonry bit and drilled about a 1-inch hole 2 feet down to run the outlet pipe from the cistern into the common house where it wouldn’t freeze.

cistern cement paintOnce the blocks were in place we filled in all of the block holes with concrete that we hand-mixed.  It took us 4 days to mix and fill all of the blocks.  We also placed some anchor bolts as we went to attach the wooden roof cap later.  I also went around the outside of the cistern and put 3 coats of potable cement paste on the outside of the cistern to minimize any toxins leaching out from the cinder blocks.

Next we back-filled dirt around the cistern to about 2 feet below the surface.  The frost line in our area is about 20 inches, so I want to make sure there’s good drainage down to that point to avoid wet soil freezing and pushing against the cistern, potentially cracking it.  Once we got the ground back-filled and tamped we made sure that it was all sloping down towards the lowest corner and then dug a trench from there downhill and put in a loop of 4-inch perforated drain tile around the cistern to collect water and then non-perforated drain tile to carry it from the lowest point out and away downhill.  At this point in the year Eric’s time was up so I carried on by myself for a few weeks.

cistern backfilled with insulation, gravel, and drain tileI used some 2″ extruded polystyrene boards that someone gave me to insulate the outside of the cistern from 2′ down and up to the top of the cistern.  This is to help keep the water from freezing.  After getting the insulation in place I back-filled with 1″ clean gravel on to the drain tile so water would drain down.  Once I got that tamped down to a little above ground level I put landscaping fabric down and then piled up dirt against the side of the cistern.

That’s as far as I got with it this summer.  I laid some boards across and then put plywood on top of that with an empty 55-gallon drum on it and then tarps laid over that so the rain and snow would run off.

The plan for next year is to build an insulated wooden roof cap over the top, which will essentially act as the floor of a gazebo.  I’ll put several cedar post timbers in and then a gable roof with galvanized steel roofing on it.  This will protect the roof cap and also provide a nice flat outdoor space for people to do yoga or other activities.  I’ll also add some retractable clotheslines.

After that I’ll need to add the system that filters the water coming off the roof by filtering out bigger debris like leaves and sticks, and then dumping the first 20 gallons, which is the dirtiest.  Then the water will go through a couple of fine screens before entering the cistern.  I’ll describe that system more in a future post.

 

 


Spring 2015

Posted by Tao on July 1, 2015

The summer solstice has arrived and it’s hard to believe the days will already be getting shorter, unfortunately though they keep getting hotter for another 2 weeks. The big story lines of this Spring have been the large amount of rain, a bumper year for fruit and vegetables, tree clearing, mushroom logs, a hippie reunion, and a new urban homestead. Not to mention I also got engaged! More on that later.

Soaking mushroom logs

Photo Credit: Amber Garrett

I spent the early part of the Spring nearly clear-cutting about a quarter of an acre between the common house and the campground area. Not exactly my favorite task, but I’ve replanted the area as a nut orchard with blight-resistant chestnuts, hazelnuts, and hickory/pecan(hickan) hybrids. Processing the chopped trees took a lot of doing. The 4″-8″ diameter pieces were cut into 3′ sections for use as shiitake mushroom logs. I cut the thicker pieces into 16″ and roughly split a large portion of it to speed up the drying process and stacked some of it round. Green wood can be harder to split, but I find that oak splits pretty well even when green. I now have enough firewood to last me probably 3 years.

With help of my volunteer, Whish, we made about 50 shiitake mushroom logs. I tried a different method this year that involves a little more equipment, but is ultimately cheaper and faster. Using an angle grinder and a special attachment drilling the holes is sped up probably 4X. Then instead of using the plug spawn we used sawdust spawn, which is significantly cheaper, though you do need a special plunger tool to press the spawn into the holes. I’m also using a combination of paraffin wax/mineral oil(3:2) to seal the spawn in and to seal the ends and that seems to give it a good enough flexibility that it doesn’t just chip off.

StrawberriesThis year’s Midsummer Mayhem, what I hope will be a summer solstice tradition, got postponed until the weekend of July 17-19 because of the nasty camping weather. As storms rolled through this morning I realized I’d made the right decision. In the last month we’ve gotten 12″ of rain and it’s very muggy whenever the sun is out.

The plants are loving it though. I’ve seen whole varieties of trees flower this year that I haven’t seen in my previous 6 years here. The fruit trees and berry bushes have been productive thus far, and a heavy crop of peaches is weighing down many branches in the food forest right now. I also had far and away the best strawberry year so far, and the blueberries, gooseberries, blackberries, and raspberries all seem to have gotten the memo too.

Me, Whish, and EricI have a volunteer from Connecticut, Whish, who is handling a lot of the garden management this year. She’s kept an eye on plant pests and diseases, and she also helped make a large number of metal plant markers from roof flashing and marker flags for the garden. She is just now getting into the canning and pickling portion of the season, but she’s been dehydrating plenty of herbs and other produce.

My other volunteer, Eric, from Vermont has helped out a lot in the garden too. The extra rain this year has made weeding a bigger chore than normal, though I should have put down more rotted straw for mulch.  Anyway, Eric is going to be helping me more with the construction this year that we’re just now gearing up for because of rain delays.

farm reunionIn the middle of June, some of the original members of the land trust got together in Columbia and then came out for a tour of the new happenings at Maya Creek and to see what remained from the old buildings that were here.

It was nice to put faces to names, hear so many stories, and to see old friendships being renewed. I was also glad to see that they were all excited by my new endeavors out on the land they helped to purchase back in the early 70’s.

CARE CCUA strawbale cob benchRight after the reunion, my volunteers and I spent a couple days working with a group of young people working with the C.A.R.E. gallery, a summer program run by the city of Columbia and the Missouri Arts Council, to build a strawbale/cob bench at the main CCUA(Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture) farm in Columbia.

I was excited to do this project, despite a busy June, as I’ve wanted to contribute my skills to the CCUA for awhile. The materials were not ideal, but the group did a good job working with what we had. I’ll be going back later in July to show them how to mix and add a finish coat to the bench.

TaoSephhouseI also closed on a home in Columbia at the beginning of May. Not to worry! I’m in no way giving up on my work building Maya Creek, but I’ve been wanting a crash pad in Columbia for some time and boy did I find a nice one. I’ve already gotten an energy audit and started making easy efficiency upgrades like adding LED lighting, a hot water insulation blanket, and an efficient front-loading washing machine. I’ll be adding more attic insulation soon and somewhere between 2-4 kilowatts of solar panels next Spring.

Only a few weeks after closing on the new house I asked Persephone to marry me. I was beginning to think I’d never find someone to share my life with, and just as I was giving up I meet the woman of my dreams and I couldn’t be happier! She is kind, altruistic, funny, and vivacious, with a beautiful and intelligent head on her shoulders. Her eye for style and design compliments my utilitarian engineering mindset wonderfully and the future is full of possibilities.

For now the house in Columbia remains mostly her domain, though I’m there nearly every weekend and help when I can. I spend the rest of my time out at Maya Creek continuing to build what I hope will become a wonderful institution for learning self-reliance and communing with the natural world.


Fall 2014

Posted by Tao on January 25, 2015

This Fall was relatively uneventful, but I did get a few minor projects done that have made Winter much more pleasant.  Also, I hosted wine-making workshop, which didn’t draw as many people as I imagined it would.  My volunteers from Chicago left at the beginning of October heading to another farm in Georgia.  They took my long-term volunteer, Billy, with them and as far as I know he’s still at that farm.

Rocket stove flue extended through the roofFirewood

The volunteers helped me split a good bit of firewood before they headed out, and I spent most of the Fall preparing for Winter in one way or another.  After they left I hauled some more logs, split them, and stacked up about a chord of wood.  I also cut down a big oak tree that had died over the summer and was leaning precariously towards the shed.  I cut that up, split it, and stacked it to cure for next Winter.

Flue Extension

I also finally extended the common house rocket stove flue pipe up through the porch roof.  The exhaust from the stove had been getting hung up under the porch and the moisture was condensing on the rafters to the point it was practically raining underneath the porch.   I used a dremel to cut a precise hole for the flue and a butyl rubber to seal around it.  The draft on the rocket stove has improved and I haven’t seen it back-smoke at all since the improvement.

Rocket-Powered Hot Water!

Rocket stove barrel copper hot water heating coilsLast winter I combined a couple of ideas and came up with a plan to have hot water year-round.  I built the solar hot water heating panel and installed the hot and cold barrels earlier in the spring, but the panel will only work in above-freezing temperatures because the water would freeze in the panel and burst the pipes.

I came up with the idea of using the same thermosiphon principle that worked on the solar panel, but wrapping copper tubing around the rocket stove barrel compared to the sun heating up the water in the panel.  It was a little tricky getting the copper wound tightly around the barrel, but luckily when you buy large sections of copper tubing it comes in coils to begin with making it easier to avoid crinkling the pipe when I bent it around the barrel.

After running the stove the average 6-8 hours it takes to heat the common house up for several days the water in the 55 gallon hot water barrel will be upwards of 120F.  The mass of the water and insulation on the barrel keeps the water hot for a couple of days, so it holds the heat almost the same amount of time as the house does.

 


2015 Volunteer Position

Posted by Tao on January 19, 2015

manu-billy-mulchI’m looking for one long-term volunteer for 2015 from April through October, though I’m flexible on those dates. The volunteer will be provided room and board in exchange for 20 hours of work per week.

I am specifically looking for help in the garden and food forest as well as with preserving the harvest.  No previous experience is necessary.  Duties would include planting, pruning, weeding, watering, pest and disease control, and harvesting.

Secondarily,  I’ll need some help on natural building projects, such as finishing construction on the rainwater cistern and filtration system, as well as mixing and applying a finish coat of earthen plaster and earthen floor to the straw bale common house.

Looking for a person with their own vehicle and who does not have a very restrictive diet(ie vegan, raw food, gluten-free).

Find out more on the volunteer information page.


Summer 2014

Posted by Tao on January 6, 2015

tao-seph-fireWe kicked off Summer with a solstice party that I may try to do on a regular basis.

‘Midsummer Mayhem’ as I called it featured a large bonfire, a pickup truck pool, lawn games, garlands, and me in loin cloth and antlers for fun.

Plastered

duplex-back-plasteredThe major summer accomplishment was getting the 2nd layer of plaster done on all of the buildings.  The 2nd coat is the most labor-intensive coat, and involves sifting, mixing, and applying a large amount of plaster.   I owe a lot to my volunteers who put in a lot of sweat getting it done this year.

The finish coat won’t take nearly as much effort, though getting it nice and smooth will take a decent amount of time.  I’m excited to get it done at least in the common house next year, it’ll drastically lower the amount of dust that coats everything now.

Holy Shiitakes!

shiitake-harvest4I got a great harvest of shiitakes off of the mushroom logs from the 2012 workshop and a previous smaller batch of logs.  There are usually 2 big flushes of mushrooms each year, one in the spring and one in the fall.  I did some soaking of the logs prior to the logs fruiting to give them some extra moisture and I think it really paid off.

I think the mushrooms will be a pretty big piece of the puzzle when it comes to making Maya Creek financially sustainable.  I helped fund a kickstarter project to product a book called “Farming the Woods”, and I finally got my signed copy in the mail.  It looks to have some other great ideas on how to make a living off of non-timber products in a temperate forest environment.

The Garden Harvest

pasta-sauceFor the last couple months there’s been a weekly routine of harvesting the garden on Monday and then spending the next two days processing the harvest by canning or dehydrating it.  The sun hasn’t been cooperating too much this year as far dehydrating goes so a lot of it has been canned.

The tomato harvest was intense this year.  Despite getting off to a slow start I’ve ended up with 20-25 quarts of tomato sauce and probably another 6 quarts of salsa.  The amount of time and effort that go into it don’t make financial sense, but it’s hard to argue the quality of the end product.

Without my volunteers I’d be spending the vast majority of my time working in the garden and processing food.  I enjoy that work, and I hope that’s how I eventually spend my late summers, but for now I need to spend a lot of time earning money for construction and on the actual construction itself.

The Cistern Pit

cistern-hole-dugThe last part of the Summer was spent digging out the cistern hole. It was originally dug out in 2012, but because of too many things going on, it was covered up and left for the following year.  Unfortunately, the temporary roof collapsed and it filled with water, which then caused the walls to partially collapse in.

Sean, Caroline, Billy, and myself spent several hard days of digging and hauling out buckets of clay from the hole.  The original plan called for simply attaching mesh to the clay walls and spreading concrete on it directly and then building a thick frost barrier wall around the top.

Since the pit is now much larger, I’m planning on essentially building a below-grade concrete box, pouring a rebar-reinforced concrete slab, and the walls will be cinder blocks filled with rebar and concrete.  I’ll backfill outside of the cistern up to the frost line and then build the thick frost barrier wall and use that to help frame up the roof cap when I pour it.


Spring 2014

Posted by Tao on July 21, 2014

The day after my last post we planted potatoes. Last week we harvested those potatoes.  That’s how erratic my blogging has become so I’m not going to go into detail about the almost 3 months in between, but I’ll try to summarize.

solar-hot-water-collectorHot Showers!

Not long after my last post I finished up the solar hot water collector and the associated insulated hot water barrel.  I made sure to leave space next to the collector in case I needed to build another one.  That turned out to be unnecessary as the collector easily heats the 55 gallons of water to scalding temperatures within a day, and then holds it there even on cloudy days.

It feels so much more civilized out here now.  Sure, it’s still really dusty in most of the buildings, and there’s still plenty of work to do before we have real sinks or a washing machine, but at least now we’re just a bunch of mildly-dirty hippies instead of filthy ones!

 Workshops

plaster-workshop-2So far I’ve held a shiitake mushroom log workshop, wild edible foray, and an earthen plaster workshop, all of which have gone well.  There was plenty of good networking going on between people with mutual interests, knowledge was shared, skills were learned, and I got a nice pile of inoculated shiitake logs growing their way towards deliciousness.

One side note on the shiitake logs that I’m kind of excited about.  I cut more mushroom logs than I had spore plugs for, and I decided to take some of the mushroom logs that already producing and stack them interspersed with the uninoculated extra logs.  I have strong hope that the mycelium will grow into the other logs or that spores will fall on them and they’ll begin producing as well.  I’ve had the mycelium grow between the logs and from the logs into the pallets I stack them on, and have had mushrooms pop out of the pallet itself so it’s not far fetched.  If so, I may be able to seriously ratchet up my shiitake production for a fraction of the effort I put in now.

The Garden

garden-6-18-14The garden has done really well this year.  We’ve gotten an above average amount of rain and only had to water occasionally mainly to get seeds started and transplants settled.  All of the extra rain made construction projects difficult, so the volunteers spent an above average amount of time in the garden; weeding, fighting bugs, harvesting, etc and we’re now reaping the benefits.  The dehydrator is constantly full and anything we can’t dry we’ve been canning.

It now seems clear that I can grow almost all of my own food, and probably trade excess for the things I can’t grow.  The volunteers have been a big help, but I could do it all on my own if I didn’t have construction projects to deal with too.  Maybe in a couple years I’ll try a year of total food self-sufficiency and see how it goes.

Construction Projects

earth-tube-trench-billy-diggingI originally planned on working on getting the inside of the common house finished, but after more detailed planning I saw that I needed a lot of carpentry work first that wouldn’t be easy to use volunteer help on so instead we’ve been working on getting the 2nd, and most labor/material intensive, coat of plaster on the cabins.  The small single cabin now has it’s 2nd coat completed and we’re well on our way to getting the duplex coat on.

We’ve also been digging a 100′ long 2′ deep trench to lay some PVC pipe in and use as a very simple geothermal cooling/heating system called an earth tube.  I’m mostly concerned with the cooling side of it, though it should decrease the already small amount of firewood I need in the winter.

According to what I could find on the internet I believe the air coming into the duplex even at the hottest part of the summer should be 70F or less and be significantly less humid.  A small CPU fan will pull the air and as it cools in the pipe the moisture should condense and drain out.  Another CPU fan attached to a pipe going through the highest point of the roof will blow the hot air out.  The fans may not be needed all of the time since natural convection should move the air, but they certainly won’t hurt.

The rainwater cistern is the next big project and we should be starting on that in August.  The pit is still wet from all of the rain this year, but the storms seem to be dropping less and less water and I think it’ll dry out enough to work on within the next month or so.

Volunteers

manu-billy-mulchRight now I’ve got a full house with 3 volunteers.  Billy, my full-summer volunteer is turning into a real asset now that he’s gotten the feel for things.  The other 2 volunteers are Emmanuel, from France, and Daniel, from Utah.  Both of them have been hard workers with good senses of humor and pleasant dispositions.  I’ve also had a couple of volunteers from Pennsylvania and London earlier in the Spring.