Rustic By Nature built a pallet greenhouse in Alaska with a rain gutter grow system for watering. It’s very low cost, simple and easy to build.
Kelly Hart
Rice hull concrete for cool room insulation
UC Davis designed a CoolBot cool room (excellent project for homesteaders!) using rice hull concrete for insulation and a CoolBot controller to keep farm produce fresher. The cool room paid for itself the first year and even helped make a good profit for local farmers. The rice hull concrete was poured into forms to make insulating wall boards. This blog post will briefly summarize the outcome of their project. The full report is available online for free and can be found by searching for the title of the report: Cool room insulation – UC Davis D-Lab
SpaceCrete (Formless Vertical Concrete)
This method allows concrete to be pumped into place to build walls without forms. Redimix concrete is delivered to the jobsite, then thickeners and accelerators as required are injected and intermixed in the pumping line, to give the fluid concrete the zero-slump-with-workability properties that you can see here.
Family tests Rotterdam self-sufficient home within greenhouse
When Helly Scholten was offered the opportunity to spend three years living in a home inside of a greenhouse on Rotterdam’s docklands, she immediately volunteered her family. Scholten, her partner and two teen daughters moved into the experimental home and immediately began planting the four greenhouses surrounding and atop the home in an attempt to grow enough food to feed their family.
How the Pyramids of Egypt were really built – Shaping the blocks
This animation describes how water could be used as a level during the shaping process of the blocks, used in the construction of the Giza Pyramid. The second video below shows the entire building process.
Open house day at Bio Veda Academy – 03/03/2018
Take a tour of Bioveda’s Urban Garden in South Africa. This whirlwind 46 minute home tour shows Bioveda’s earthbag and aircrete structures, their appropriate technology such as solar cookers and biogas, as well as an extensive system of earthbag planters, wetlands and water filtration. They reuse all their water seven times. There are some audio glitches, but the information presented is excellent so please overlook the minor flaws.