Couch Surfing on Noah's Ark

"Of course you believe the end of the world is this month-- it validates everything you're doing on this farm!"

Last week, I visited my little brother, Matti, who is WWOOF-ing at 10 acre farm in Lodi, Ohio. WWOOF-ing is not what you do wit de hammeh and de nails on top uh de house. WWOOF-ing stands for world wide opportunities on organic farms. So, Matti learns how to farm the organic, bio-dynamic way and gets all the fresh produce and naps he wants. Talk about having life by the balls!

Maestro, the African Goat is a real sweetheart.

The farm is called Earth Song Farm, and it's run by an interesting and hospitable couple, in their 60s-- Steve and Cindy. They only started farming 5 years ago, but I've never seen a more motivated couple. They have deeply embraced the message of Anastasia from the Ringing Cedars of Russia series and are building their "space of love that will last forever." In fact, they believe they may be the only ones left on the planet, come August 15th or so. Yes, folks, the end of the world is coming! Like Noah, people who meet him call him crazy.

Steve and Cindy take their responsibility seriously...but not too seriously. This picture dons their living room/library. Recognize the scene?

The first night I was there, we stayed up till 1:30 AM around the dinner table talking about why Steve and Cindy are convinced that time is running out to build the earthship that will transport them to a new era.

I won't go into details about cataclysmic signs are out there, but I will say that I barely slept that night due to nightmares. And when I came home, I bought an armagedon's-worth of peanut butter, rice, and lentils at the Restaurant Depot. Heck, an American AA+ credit downgrade is an excuse enough to buy peanut butter.

Their earthship is a "greenhouse" (with 5 code non-compliant bedrooms) that is modeled after Michael Reynold's earth-bermed Earthships, yet it's made of concrete masonry blocks rather than rammed earth tires.

Here's the non-buried side of the earthship at Earth Song Farm. The "glass" is two layers of thick polyethylene sheeting--easily replaceable in the event of a global meltdown.

Another Earthship. (Not in Lodi, Ohio. ) Gorgeous architecture! These homes support human needs-- food, warmth, protection--zero energy bills!

The inside of the earthship is a work in progress, but in the far corner, you can see the hydroponic lettuce growing system. The sump pump that waters the system is run off of a solar electric panel and the water is harvested off the roof into a cistern.

Matti spends a lot of time in here doing construction work. The backbone is mostly complete, but the coolest features of all have yet to be added-- the THERMAL UMBRELLA, baby-- a low-tech geothermal heating, cooling, and ventilating system.

Cindy liquidated her stocks to buy excavating equipment. She moved 1,000,000 lbs of soil to bury her house. She will use the earth as a heat sink-- a passive geothermal system! This pic was taken from the roof.

These beautiful timbers are HUGE. They're about 6 inches thick and 14 inches tall. They were milled by the Amish neighbors. There must be about 50 of them supporting the buried roof.

Pink sheets of XPS foam board insulation will serve as the thermal umbrella-- a geothermal system with no moving parts.

The soil on the roof will be smoothed over, then three sheets of 2" extruded polystyrene insulation board will cover the house. Then three layers of thick plastic sheeting will cover that. Then 8" of dirt will cover that. This creates a thermal skirt extending 20' around the house, which isolates it from the ambient air. Everything below the umbrella serves as thermal mass, which will take 3 years to reach equilibrium. The three layers are part of the strategy of permaculture-- everything serves multiple functions and every function has built-in redundancy-- everything is a multi-tasking back-up system to something else.

For a typical geothermal system, you could easily pay $30,000. Steve bought a bulldozer for less than half that! He salvaged at least a hundred sheets of insulation for the thermal umbrella. Dirt is free. Matti's labor costs some strawberries and chicken eggs, but it's mostly free. The entire structure (~5000 SF) will cost about $15/SF. Most new homes can't be built for $100/SF! By the time most of us homeowners pay off our biggest expense, our mortgage, our monthly energy bills will have eclipsed our monthly mortgage payments. So if we know how to build homes like this, why are our current home-design/building practices so future-fragile?

In the summer, PVC pipes bring fresh air beneath the umbrella and into the bottom of the greenhouse. As warm summer air passes through the earth, it dumps its heat into the heat sink. All summer long, the PVC makes thermal deposits into their thermal mass bank account. Then, in the winter, the process reverses-- fresh air comes into the PVC pipes, passes below the house, warming up from the soil and enters the greenhouse.

The greenhouse also has a fallout shelter with this gigantic pipe-- an escape tube! Matti, Sam, and I wiggled through it Shawshank Redemption style-- mud and spiders included!

Matti D in the sacred circle

According Matti, Steve and Cindy try to incorporate "sacred geometry" into their garden. I'm not sure what that means, but the medicinal herb garden was laid out in a wheel-like fashion, rather than rows. And the large circle that Matti is standing in points to the East at the edge of their property.

My personal belief-o-meter and BS-detector was having trouble keeping still, but I really just wanted to be open-minded about how these novice gardeners/farmers were growing the farmers market's most amazing produce. They were the only vendor with strawberries. Their tomatoes were orgasmatronic. Their eggs sold out in an hour. Did it really come down to sacred circles? And if geometry was so sacred, then why did their home look like an explosion of chaos?

Eggplant pre-Parmesan

Ass-kickin' garden skillz

Soil-less growing and modular irrigation system

Cucumbers

Unfortunately for me, Steve and Cindy don't grow any high calorie fruit, so I'd probably starve, get lethargic, and obsess with conspiracy theories if I tried to eat 100% raw here. (I brought my own cooler of goodies). In fact, after my all-night 32 mile run that Saturday, I was out of bananas and famished, so I asked my bro to cook me potatoes and the freshest eggs that could ever be eaten. They were good and guilty. I used to begin every long workout with eggs and toast. It's been over a year now, and I don't miss it. I'm getting better results with high calorie fruit.

Free range, organic ovulation secretors

Admittedly, I am basically importing the tropics to Cincinnati every time I go to the store. I feel slightly bad about that, and a little worried about how I'll do that once the world ends. I just don't see how it's possible to eat raw and local unless you grow a ton of paw paws and melons. So, I prodded Steve and Cindy about whether they thought local-raw was possible. They actually believe it is possible with their greenhouse and hydroponics and vertical growing systems. But they made it clear that they don't think raw is healthy. That's based off of Cindy's 1-yr experience trying to go raw. Supposedly, her Chinese reflexologist told her she was eating too much raw for someone living far from the equator. I asked her what she was eating; it sounded like predominantly high fat nuts and greens (aka a dangerous"calorie restriction" diet for someone who is trying to live the life of a planetary superhero)-- nothing like the Hunzas, Okinawans, or other cultures who have proven themselves the masters of longevity and health, whom she actually knew about. If she's going to be earth's only dietitian in a few weeks, I wasn't going to let her get away with bogus generalizations about raw food or anti-Darwinism.

While the dinner conversation was too intense, the garden was one of the most peaceful places I've been. I hope to bring some of that back to my little urban postage stamp of a kin's domain. Output-wise, my best bet is to make an alliance with my dad who has much more land. While Steve and Cindy have 10 acres, they only grow food on 1.5 acres, and half of that is hoop greenhouse. I can easily envision us building our first hoop garden and hydroponic system. After seeing what Steve and Cindy have done, I'm convinced that inertia and plumbing are the only obstacles.

Hydroponic gardens don't use soil. Something seems un-natural about that. But, the results speak for themselves. Steve plays Mozarts to the tomatoes, strawberries, and kale. That's something he calls bio-dynamics-- the way birds' songs "wake" the plants.

Lot's more happened, that I hope to write about later, but I've got to prepare for my race tomorrow. It'll be an olympic distance triathlon about 40 minutes east, at East Fork State Park. My plan was to ride hard today so I could race on tired legs tomorrow. It seems to be working because I'm pretty nakkard from today's 70 miler. Stay tuned-- race report to follow.