What’s in the ground:
So if you’ve transplanted your fall crops into the ground, it’s going to take another three of four weeks for them to begin to mature. While you are waiting, it’s a great time to intercrop some beet seed within your rows. As the beets mature, they will inhibit weeds, and the tender leaves will keep the small leaves of your greens safe from the harlequin beetles that are still probably hanging around.

And now another installment from the Earthship…

Hey, everybody. Sean here again. I wanted to follow up last week’s brief nutshelling of the Earthship experience with a slightly more detailed look at the way these houses work. Certainly I have no formal training or education with respect to this stuff, and as such, I encourage you to check in at Earthship.com for more technical details. However, the principles upon which the designs are based are fairly simple, and I lay them out here to hopefully encourage you, friend, to consider how you could adapt these ideas in your own life.

Earthships, as stated last week, are entirely self-sufficient, providing everything a person could need to exist within the structure. No ties are required to any grid of any kind. This is accomplished through the integration of structural design and a couple systems that operate in the house, of the house and for the house. Let’s start with heating and cooling.

Also mentioned last week, “tire bricks” constitute the basic building blocks for the construction of the walls of the house. By packing them tightly with dirt and then stacking them, they become an effective wall of thermal mass around the back of the structure. The front of the house, south-facing, is a greenhouse, so it’s primarily windowed. Dirt is mounded over the back of the tire wall, essentially burrowing the house into the earth.

Since heat always moves toward a cooler medium, the thermal mass of the tire wall, buried under cooling earth, stores heat in the summer from the sun coming in through the greenhouse. In the winter, when the house cools down, that heat is then released back into the rooms. Additionally, a tightly tuned and insulated room can be heated by some surprising sources – a laptop, a body, a lamp.

The Earthship folks have employed this model in just about every climate on the face of the earth, and apparently it always works…no additional space heaters or fireplaces necessary. Amazing to imagine such a simple concept at work in extreme climates, but they’re developing these ideas in the desert of New Mexico where their summers are sweltering and their winters are cold and snowy. A perfect test kitchen, to be sure.

So there’s heating and cooling, and you didn’t have to do anything but situate yourself facing south and shovel some dirt. Next week I’ll elaborate on the water system for the house – capturing, filtering and recycling. Man’s gotta drink, right? Till then!