One of the most practical structures on a small farmstead is a multi-purpose garden structure that can serve as a storage shed or cool pantry above ground, or as a root cellar or storm shelter below ground. You can build this multipurpose structure for about $300 using earthbag construction (bags filled with earth and stacked … Read more
Here’s a real nice earthbag/ferrocement rootcellar plan from Karl in the Missouri Ozarks. It is 8’ across, has 2’ of soil on top and beautiful stonework in front. Great job Karl! Karl describes his rootcellar in more detail: The U-shape on the top of the bags is a row of cement beam block that will … Read more
According to an article entitled “Eccentric Aesthetics: DIY Eco-Friendly Earthbag Homes” posted at dornob.com, the phrase “form follows function” has morphed in meaning over time and is, perhaps rightly, open to interpretation. One interesting extension of this idea is that the form of a building can follow the functions of its constituent parts – that … Read more
Since water is vital to life, and there is increasing scarcity of clean drinking water in much of the world, it makes sense to store this precious resource and use it wisely. Earthbags in combination with ferrocement offer a number of interesting alternatives for storing water. Three different methods are shown below. www.flickr.com/photos/10349013@N02/2798383930 www.flickr.com/photos/11222150@N02/1082496465 http://earthbagplans.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/earthbag-cistern/
As you can imagine, we get quite a few emails from readers asking about earthbag building. Sometimes these questions and ideas are of interest to a larger audience and so we pass them along to you in this blog. (The best questions and comments also end up on Kelly’s Earthbag Building FAQs.) Chris, one of … Read more
Earthbag building (sometimes called sandbag building) started about one hundred years ago providing safe, bulletproof and bomb resistant shelters for the military. They proved to be fast, simple to construct and durable. The same qualities that make earthbags useful for military and flood control purposes apply to building houses. Now people all over the world … Read more