Planting Milkwood

Links for 2010-02-07 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

Indigenous walk-off spokesperson: ‘We need to take the power back’ - Green Left
Specifically, the Alyawarr people staged a walk-off from Ampilatwatja in July, 2009. They walked beyond the boundary of the government lease forced onto their land, and back to their homeland.
Hyperlocavore - A free yard sharing community
Sharing time, space, seeds and ideas. Great ning community. USA
The Artichoke Blog » On Artichokes around Italy
Artichokes au go go. Yum.

Links for 2010-02-02 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 00:00:00 PST

How Can We Talk About Transformational Change Without Losing Hope? | | AlterNet
Transition-ish article. Very, very good read.
School Gardens Powerpoint | Preserving the genetic basis of tomorrow's food
Powerpoint presentation of some 45 slides of why and how to have food gardens in schools.
Sink and Wall your Garden in Arid Zones | Preserving the genetic basis of tomorrow's food
A successful strategy to overcome evaporation, protect plants from both drying hot and cold winds and to conserve water is the sunken garden. Here we see a grandiose garden in a massive fort complex and a modest urban vegetable garden, in the arid zone of western Rajasthan, India.

CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:58:26 +0000

Just a wee heads-up that a most encouraging initiative is being launched in Sydney this coming Saturday 6th Feb. Namely CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project. Another nudge in the direction of local food security. Huzzah!

If you're a Sydneysider you're probably already familiar with CarriageWorks' Saturday farmer's market, which has a darn fine range of yummy regional produce and is fast becoming the biggest farmers market in Sydney. With this Kitchen Garden Project, CarriageWorks are pushing the notion of 'creative sustainability' through a series of events and workshops which I hope will result in more kitchen gardens outside (or inside) more local kitchens.

The launch on Saturday includes talks and stalls from 1pm after the farmers' market and will generally be good fun and a chance to talk about important things like how to grow stuff where you live and the finer points of how to make Kale tasty (there is a way!).

The whole Milkwood family will be there with our bicycle-powered seed ball machine, a bunch of great books on Permaculture and urban farming, Permaculture course information, and many little brown paper bags containing stealth salad seed balls, for you to take away and try a bit of guerilla gardening on your home turf.

Come by and say hello!

Links for 2010-01-29 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

Mudgee Permanent Camping, NSW Australia | Small House Style
At approximately 10 feet square Mudgee Permanent Camping designed by Casey Brown Architecture takes up a very small footprint. Located at the edge of a ridge on a sheep station in central western NSW, Australia, the tower is surrounded by large granite boulders and ancient dead trees.

Links for 2010-01-27 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

The community-owned, timber-framed, self-heating village shop
Article from - The Ecologist - Ben law's latest project

The saga of the top dam

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:41:34 +0000

Nick and Mark discussing the merits of DIY dam sealing techniques

A leaky dam is an embarrassment to everyone concerned. The earthworks operator who built it feels terrible. The people who paid for it feel indignant. The folks who designed it feel responsible. And the ground beneath the dam wall feels wet.

In the case of our top dam, wet is an understatement. Small babbling brook, gushing forth from beneath the pipe in the dam wall, is more accurate. Hmm. What to do.

Suffice to say an unfortunate combination of road-base like soil (ok not really soil, more just small rocks), bad luck and something called 'dispersive clays' all played a part. Usually when you build a dam, if you find some good clay down the bottom you get all excited. And then the dozer driver carefully spreads that clay over the inside of your dam wall, to make it hold water. And your dam doesn't leak, and you feel very chuffed. Unless your secret valley is, unbeknownst to you, locally famous for having 'dispersive clays' - which, wait for it, disperse in water. Creating the opposite effect from what you would normally expect from a clay-like medium and henceforth, doing less than nothing to seal your dam wall.

The leak where it exited the dam wall. Note rivulet heading off downhill. Not good.

The leak in our dam wall was also next to the pipe. This pipe sat in the bottom of the dam and delivered water to a tap on the outside of the dam wall, from which we could water plantings via passive water pressure. Carefully constructed, with baffle-plates to stop water passing along the pipe as it went through the dam wall, with removable filters at either end, this was our pipe of dreams. It would be our food forest's lifeline in dry summers, and eventually supply our bathouse with water.

Following some decent rain, the leak in the top dam got worse and produced a rivulet which ran through the food forest planted directly below the dam. This food forest was sited specifically to benefit from the slow plume of water which would emanate from the dam uphill via osmosis. Our carefully selected, hardy, drylands food trees that were in the direct path of this rivulet promptly turned up their toes and died from wet feet.

Following a bunch of research and talking to Permaculture earthworks experts, we were still at a loss. It turned out that all the dams along the valley leaked, regardless of their having a keyway or not, or a pipe or no pipe through their dam wall. We tried attempting to seal the dam with lucerne and bentonite (which was easy to apply as the leak had helpfully emptied the dam entirely), to no effect. We considered various techniques, and in retrospect perhaps should have borrowed some pigs and attempted to seal the dam via a method called glaying - a technique which uses a large number of animals, penned into a dry dam for a short period of time, to seal the dam by smushing their manure into the surface of the inner dam wall so effectively that it seals the deal. Apparently works great with pigs, even on pure shale, according to Joel Salatin.

So unless we wanted to seal the top dam with a very expensive, condom-like, custom-made, non-food grade, emanating who-knows-what plastic lining (we didn't), or just hope the leak would reduce in time (and have no irrigation water in the meantime without constant pumping - no thanks), our options were few.

New dam is lump to the left, old dam (new suntrap) is lump to the right. House building site is infront to the right.

The one other thing was that the top dam was not quite in the best spot. It was a little close to the building envelope that was slowly developing downhill, and I was having visions of my family tumbled out of their beds by a wall of water when a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake shook the top dam wall to bits. So we made a deal with our earthworks operator (who, as I mentioned above, luckily felt terrible about the leak) and decided to move the top dam south a bit.

Believe it or not, this all worked out quite well. We turned the 'old dam' into a north-facing amphitheater / suntrap which will be great fun as an experimental microclimate. I have hopes for bananas in about 5 years, once the protective ring of bamboo gets up. The 'new dam' we took no chances with, however, and lined it with plastic the minute it was finished. Yes, builder's plastic. I know. Most un-permaculture. But let me tell you something: it worked a treat. And now we've got water.

Topsoil being slowly and carefully loaded ontop of the builders plastic, from the bottom up.

And so a note on lining dams on the cheap, for the poor wretches among us that suffer from similar disasters:

First of all we put down a thick layer of lucerne hay, all over the inside wall of the dam. We basically stood large, cylindrical rolls of the stuff on the dam wall and unrolled them down the slope to the bottom of the dam. This was then wetted down with a pump and hose. This will rot down under the plastic in time, and also helped to protect the plastic from punctures from below as we laid topsoil ontop of it. If you can't get lucerne you could use other hay, but lucerne is great because of its high nitrogen content which will help it turn into a more sludgey impermeable layer as it rots down under the plastic.
Next we unrolled long rolls of black builders plastic down the slope of the inner wall, covering the lucerne hay. We made sure the strips overlapped by a good 40cm on each side, and weighed the whole palava down with rocks. Carefully, so we didnt puncture the plastic.
Then we got the dozer driver to place loads of topsoil on top of the builders plastic, to a depth of about 30cm, starting at the bottom of the dam wall and working his way up so it didn't slump off. This way he also didnt have to risk puncturing the plastic by driving a great heavy bulldozer over it. The depth of topsoil on the builders plastic means we aren't so concerned about our catchment coming from a giant plastic cup.
Then, when it was all covered, sealed and looked just like a new dam, we said a little prayer and crossed our fingers.

At time of writing, 6 months later, the top dam is full to the brim of water and the most water-tight dam on Milkwood. We ended up using a simple syphon, held a meter below the surface, to provide water to the food forest and other plantings below. We've still got great passive water pressure (about 6m of head) and no babbling brook at the base of the wall. The new dam is on the same contour as the old dam, and so is still fed by the 2km of top swale to the north and south.

We've mulched and planted the dam wall with oats, vetch and clover, and we look forward to a long, loving and hard-won relationship with our passively harvested water supply.

Vetch doing its thing on the dam wall, fixing nitrogen and holding the situation together.

Links for 2010-01-18 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

An Introduction to Induced Meandering
A Method for Restoring Stability to Incised Stream Channels: Bill Zeedyk
Quivira Coalition
The initial mission of The Quivira Coalition, which was founded by a rancher and two environmentalists in June 1997, was to offer 'common sense solutions to the grazing debate,' principally by broadcasting the principles of ecologically sensitive ranch management

Links for 2010-01-01 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 00:00:00 PST

10 Shipping Container Projects of 2009
pretty sexy stuff
Window Farms
Window Farms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.
Window Farmers — Home
Window Farmers open forum
Manual for CITY FARMING PLANT MODULES
CITY FARMING PLANT MODULES enable persons to grow plants in cities. The plant modules can be arranged in multiple formations directly on pavement, squares, etc. - slightly bizzare.
Flickr: Windowfarms' Photostream
photos of windowfarms

Links for 2009-12-28 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:00:00 PST

Yeoman's Keyline properties on the 7:30 report 18/12/09 - VIDEO
Low res version

Seedballs: from Fukuoka to Green Guerillas

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Seed balls in the making at Milkwood

The poetry of the Seedball concept is simple, yet immense. Encase a seed (or seeds) in a protective jacket of clay, creating a Seed ball. Distribute Seedballs across ground, not worrying if this day, or this month even, is the best time to 'sow'. Protected from insects, buirds, heat and sunlight until the time is right, the seedball activates with a rain event which is sufficient to soak through the clay coating to germinate the seed. Which incidentally is the sort of rain event that you want to have directly following the perfect seed sowing day. And that's it. But that's not all.

Let's talk ferment. Add compost to the clay. Now you have something to kickstart those seeds after germination. Add more growing medium to the Seedball. Even better, for some situations. Add more that one seed. Different seeds. Compatible seeds. Now you're companion planting in the palm of your hand. Seedbombs the size of mandarins, which contain the beginnings of a field of wildflowers, or a hardy herb patch, or a bunch of soil-conditioning legumes. Now you're talking revolution.

Seedballing was probably initiated by Masanobu Fukuoka as part of his experiments in gentle, non-invasive farming methods at his family farm in Japan. A gentle pioneer of the organic farming movement, Fukuoka practiced a system of farming he called 'Do Nothing Farming', which is code for setting up a passive system that is as self regulating as possibe (how very permaculture). Fukuoka used a combination of powdered clay, fine compost and seeds, with simple tools like a series of screens, to make hundreds of seedballs every year as a part of his farming regime.

Fukuoka called seedballs 'a small universe in themselves'. His seed ball theory and methods are well outlined in his small manifesto on farming, eating and the limits of human knowledge, the delightfully readable One Straw Revolution, which incidentally has just been re-issued as a new translation in paperback (yay).

The beauty of the seed ball principle is not only its simplicity and economy of production. Seedballing can be used like a sort of amplified natural selection... Nature, ultimately, still decides what to grow where, but if the conditions in a particular place are right, you now have a crop. Or a stand of fast-growing pioneer trees, or a meadow.

There is a patience needed for this method - call it stealth sowing. The seeds may germinate next week, or next Spring. Or not at all. Wait and see. And in the meantime, move on to another chore. Or make more seed balls and seed elsewhere!

Guerilla seed ball action in Vancouver - before and after. Photos by Urbanwild

Seed selection is of course a fundamental factor in this method. You will be broadcasting these seedballs and probably leaving them to fend for themselves. The hardier and more appropriate to the environment the plant, the greater the chance of success. Here at Milkwood we are currently seedballing a wide mixture of acacia seeds and nitrogen-fixing tree seeds, with a sprinkling of woody ground covers and hardy native grasses. These are all being broadcast along our riparian zones, swales and future shelter belts.

We can now 'plant' thousands of trees in a day, in un-favourable conditions, and leave Nature to do her thing...

Since Fukuoka got the ball rolling, so to speak, many others have since been getting their hands dirty and producing seed balls, seed bombs, seed grenades and other heroic-sounding lumps of clay with seeds in. There is a heap of info out there on technique, but not much documentation on results that I have found, apart from anecdotes and Fukuoka's plainly successful examples.

Moving from the rural to the urban, seed balls and seed bombs are now firmly in the domain of the worldwide guerilla gardening movement. If your community doesn't have one, it's probably time to start a guerilla gardening group, which is both a funky way to spend your spare time (or all your time) and might just increase your food security. And a seed balling workshop would be a very fine, inspirational and easy inaugral event to hold.

Anitya by Anne Cooper - Land Art piece involving seed balls, unfired clay bowls, mulch, and time. Photo by Deanna Nichols

Milkwood is currently being sprinkled in seed balls, and we will be sure to document the results (and how to make a bicycle powered seed balling machine - stay tuned!). In the meantime, here's a smattering of where the seed ball craze has spread so far:

Masanobu Fukuoka: Firstly, Fukuoka's texts, including Seed Balling technique, are all bunked at the Soil Health Library, an amazing online resource which has thousands of seminal farming texts available for download. Make sure if you use this option to donate, to keep this resource breathing.

Jim Bones: Who used to have an extensive website on the subject called seedball.com which is now defunct. Happily, his how-to and why-to video, The Seed Ball Story, has found its way to Youtube.

Kathryn Miller's Seed Bombs: an early example of Seed Bombs as art from 1992. 'As a form of urban and suburban guerrilla activity, it was a small scale, non-sanctioned intervention in the landscape. The seed bombs were made available to museum visitors to take and throw somewhere they felt needed native plants, and in the process they assisted me with my project.'

The Vancouver Guerilla Gardening Group: have done various seed balling workshops, with great success. Probably the best bunch of urban seed ballers i know.

Seed Bomb how-to: there are heaps of videos up now in this technique, but this is one of the most concise. The host, Richard Reynolds, also has the best hair.

Seed Ball land art by Anne Cooper: Anitya is a gorgeous piece from New Mexico set in a field involving seed balls, clay balls, the land, and time.

It seems strange somehow that something so simple and small can hold so much power, but I'm beginning to think that's the way of things, these days. And of course it comes back to the power of the seeds themselves. Just the idea of it - portable, potential ecosystems, folded in on themselves many times over. Amazing. I think I'm in love. Thanks, Nature! Thanks, Masanobu!

Happy holidays, everyone. May your next seed experience, whether it be on your salad, in your garden or just out of the corner of your eye, fill you with wonder, joy, and a sense of renewal.

Introducing our TinyHouse

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 23:00:00 +0000

If only building it was as easy as making this mock-up, we'd be done by now...

It's happening, it's happening! After what seems like a thousand stops and starts, most notably a) hiccups with the local council regarding various things (don't even go there), b) the death of a certain piece of essential machinery (still yet to be resurrected - best not go there either), c) the birth of a certain small human, and not forgetting d) our unfortunate need to make a living, it appears that things are truly moving forward on our small dwelling at Milkwood...

2010 Permaculture Diary + Calendar

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Getting organised has been an ongoing process at Milkwood - from planning our planting cycles for our kitchen garden to trying to figure out how to build that cottage of ours (getting there!). To keep track of everything that's going on we use a combo of online organisational gizmos, whiteboards, luck, guesswork and of course, my ol' faithful, hardcopy diary. And if i had to pare everything back to one organisational tool, it would be my diary - it doesn't need plugging in and even better i can tuck it under my arm, throw it in a wheelbarrow or use as a flower press for strange unidentified clover-like plants, if needed.

I mention all this because our friends Michelle Margolis + David Arnold have once again compiled a most fabulous Permaculture Diary and also Calendar for 2010. Both publications are building on last years efforts and are chock full of lush images of Permaculture in practice from all over the world, plus planting charts, personal stories, community initiatives and even a wee entry on our Rocket Powered Shower, featuring Nick in the nick - ha. This years' diary is also printed on a textured, recycled paper stock which will be a pleasure to write on throughout the year. We think they're both so great that we're helping to sell them by getting the word out.

And best of all, you can get yerself a copy right here. See below for Diary, Calendar and Diary+Calendar combos, all delivered to your door quicksmart. And once your package arrives, all you need to do is throw it in your actual or conceptual wheelbarrow, and off you go to plan next year's everythings.

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The Edible Urban: Part 1

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Fissured foodstuffs - image by Tom Fox

One of the few things that makes me sometimes long for the city is to be part of the kerbside revolution that's happening here, there and everywhere. Every time i walk past an inner-city grass verge that's sprouting tomatoes or a roundabout which has seen a bit of guerrilla gardening action I breathe a little sigh of relief, because I feel like I can smell the beginnings of that sweetest of ferments in the air: it's the beginnings of food security in the hands of people, not supermarkets.

In the last several years, community gardening has taken on new significance throughout the western world. It seems nearly every city now has some sort of kerbside vegetable gardening initiative, victory garden schemes, community gardens, you name it. And hooray to that - we need any and all of these initiatives. We need them because we all need to get more deeply involved in our own food security. We also all need them to get more deeply involved in our community if we're going to build true resilience in our world over the next number of decades, and gardening is a great way to start. Bring on the edible landscapes......read more

New Milkwood Permaculture website

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:53:08 +0000

A brief but shameless plug for our brand new website over at www.MilkwoodPermaculture.com.au. Over this winter we've been very busy selecting and organising a bunch of great teachers and courses to fill our calendar for Spring 2009 through to Autumn 2010. There's Introductory and also Urban Permaculture courses, Compost Tea workshops, Keyline Design Courses, the full-blown Permaculture Design Certificate course and who knows what else still yet to come.

Oh *and* our courses are FarmReady accredited, so if you're an Australian farmer, land manager or in the family of either, you can do our courses completely free through the FarmReady subsidy scheme. And you even get a refund on travel, accom and childcare. Wow. If I didn't already live here, I'd come here just to attend something. So go on over, have a look at the site and tell us what you think? I think we've even ironed out most of the spelling mistakes now...

Geodesic Chookdomes R Us

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Nick inside his newly completed Geodesic ChookDome, pre-chook.

A while ago we discovered online the ultimate plan for a Chook Dome which was stronger, faster and better than any others we had ever come across before (ok maybe not faster)... Nick whacked one together and it has been helping us establish the top Food Forest ever since, along with its 6 or so feathered residents. What's even more exciting than playing Buckminster Fuller with white plastic piping, however, is being able to share this great construction with the rest of you. The Geodesic ChookDome's creator, Robert Freeman, has kindly offered us to host the plans for this fabulous construction over in our How-To section. So git on down to How To: build a Geodesic Chook Dome and find out how to get your garden's fertility on the up and up. Also watch out for the video how-to here soon. Possibly followed by a run of 'Gosh I love Geodesic ChookDomes' T-shirts and bumper stickers. Maybe.

Water and me. And you.

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 07:21:07 +0000

Water woz ere. A clearly hydrated landscape thanks to good hydrological design at Strathcona Community Garden, Vancouver Canada

We're all becoming acutely aware of the value of water. And so we should, as water's role in our lives and in the planets' cycles cannot really be understated. When designing and planning a Permaculture system, it's top of the list - the order goes: Water, Access, Structure. Design and sort out your water catchments and systems before you design anything else. Give them priority. Water is not an optional extra. Without water, you're stuffed.

So it's very strange to consider that, in most temperate and dryland urban biospheres (and, god help us, many rural ones), water is not top of the list in terms of how living systems are designed, and therefore how our lives are led. Designing water into our landscape is still seen by many as an optional extra in terms of habitat and urban design. Because worst case scenario, you can just turn on a tap. Or a drill a hole down to the shrinking ground water. Water is still seen as someone else's problem, or something we deserve to be handed on a plate with no conditions or responsibilities.

And if we do feel a tweak of guilt or responsibility, we can install a half-flush on our drinking-water grade toilet. Or get a more efficient showerhead. Put in a tank if there's room down the side. Maybe plant some succulents instead of dahlias this year. All very cosy. But there is soooooooo much more we can do to harvest, retain and re-use water within our habitats, which will result in more fecundity, more home-grown veggies, and less reliance on water coming from somewhere far away. And it's not just the domain of those who are building from scratch, or have enough cash and/or space to re-design their entire surroundings. All that water falling out of the sky needs to be put to work back through a natural system as quickly and completely as possible. And letting what doesn't fall directly on your roof or said succulents all skid down the gutter and into the stormwater drain does not count.

A landscape on the wasteful path to water scarcity / A landscape on the stewardship path to hydrated abundance

From Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands Vol II by Brad Lancaster

There are many good books around that help you take responsibility for the rainwater in your habitat, regardless of whether you're in drylands or in a more temperate environment. An interesting read that I came across recently is Dam Nation - stories from the water underground, which focuses on grassroots water activism, but also the practicalities of greywater re-use. The politics of water is gathering steam, and films such as Flow are starting to articulate just where the future of water could be headed.

Here at Milkwood water has always been a priority, right from the word go. In fact, the reason we still live at Basecamp and not in a lovely passive solar cottage just yet is because we prioritized water-harvesting earthworks over building our home when implementing our initial Permaculture design for Milkwood. And now, as we're building our cottage, we have multiple dams and swales that feed and water various plantings all over Milkwood in a completely passive way... which means that now, while we're busy building, Milkwood's forests and pastures are busy growing - establishing biomass, making soil and slowly, quietly building up a biosphere that couldn't otherwise occur without so much residual, passively harvested moisture.

Synchronicity - a just-built swale at Milkwood after a big rainstorm. Water is held in the swale until it percolates into the soil on the downhill side - a process which in this instance took about 24 hours. That's a lot of water ending up in the soil instead of rushing off downhill, taking our topsoil with it... After this photo was taken, the downhill side of the swale was planted out with various trees to take full advantage of all that passively-harvested moisture.

Considering how utterly important water is, it's very good to know that there are some very good resources on water harvesting for both the urban and rural sectors. There are many good strains of writing on water-harvesting earthworks - there's people like P.A. Yeomans, an Australian farmer who developed the Keyline system of farming in western Sydney in the 1940-1950's and put out Water for every Farm, which is seriously funky stuff and far reaching for the carbon farmers end of things, among others. There's classic Permaculture earthworks, as outlined in Bill Mollison's magnus opus Permaculture: A designer's manual. There's also folk like Peter Andrews who'se natural sequence farming basically incorporates aspects of both Keyline and Permaculture techniques by another name with a focus on bioremediation and watercourse re-shaping. All these resources lean towards, but are not exclusive to, water harvesting on properties and larger areas, which is why this strain of thing is sometimes called Designing Water into Landscape.

P.A.Yeomans' property 'Yobarnie' in Western Sydney, a property emblematic of Keyline Design. Plenty of water designed into this landscape...

However there are now some resources that really truly span the urban and rural sectors when it comes to harvesting rainwater. Two hotspots of this sort of info that spring to mind (heh) are the websites of writers Art Ludwig (He of titles such as Creating an Oasis with Greywater) and also Brad Lancaster (He of the really rather brilliant Rainwater Harvesting website).

Brad Lancaster in particular has some great books out at the moment, the Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands series - I recently reviewed Volumes I and II and you can read the book review I did here. What I like so much about Brad's work is that his stuff truly straddles both urban and rural environments, and his books outline intelligent, do-able solutions for rainwater and greywater use on both the large and the small scale. Finally, both volumes are finally available in Australia, so you can figure out how to get your hands on a copy over on our Bookshelf. Yay for access to good information.

If you want to continue learning and thinking about rainwater harvesting, you could do worse than having a look at Brad talking Rainwater Harvesting on YouTube. Or you could go outside next time it rains and get a feel for just how much water is slucing off your property and into the gutter / roadside ditch / neighbour's paddock, and have a think about what you might do to keep that water in place, so that you can use it to create general fecundity.

The Rocket-Powered Shower

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Plan for our Rocket-Powered hot water system for the Basecamp shower + bath block

Spending all your day gathering sticks for a hot shower is just no fun. No fun at all. Mind you, anything that results in a hot shower (or even better, a hot bath) has to be considered a priority at Milkwood. So when Nick finished converting the old 'Sunbeam Sheep Shower' structure (basically a new-fangled sheepdip) to a shower block with a little wood-fired, home-made firebox thingamy to heat the water for the shower and the bath, that's what we did. Lots of stick-gathering.

The romance of wood-fired hot water quickly wears thin, however, if your water-heating system is not terribly efficient. Because this means the system requires a fair deal of wood to heat the water, which therefore releases a corresponding amount of CO2. And also results in lots of stick gathering. So Nick went searching for the most super-efficient, super-simple and super-funky heating system idea he could find, which could then be converted to a water heating system. And thus we discovered the glory that is the Rocket Mass Heater.

Nick Ritar + Si Horsely cobb around the burn chamber and firebricks to protect them

The basic premise of a Rocket Mass Heater is that the heat energy of a small, very hot-burning fire is used in a optimal way to get the utmost out of that heat energy. Hyper efficiency with minimal fuel input. Ianto Evans + Leslie Jackson, a couple of Permies who are prettymuch gurus on this subject, put together a great little book called Rocket Mass Heaters and this was our inspiration and guidebook for our project. The heat of the small fire is drawn up through a vertical heat riser of some kind, which creates an updraft and therefore causes the fire to burn extremely hot. A hotter burn means less smoke. And less smoke means more hot water per handful of sticks.

Then the hot gases in the riser is put to work - pushed (or pulled) under hot plates, past water boilers, underneath cobb benches, through thermal mass walls - wherever you need to heat. By the time the hot gases make their way out to the outside world, they are spent, and much cooler - the heat energy has been transferred along the way to whatever needed to be heated. Hurrah!

The completed system - two days work, all told

Rocket Stoves are quickly catching on in various places around the globe - because they're so fuel efficient, for example, they're being used in development aid projects where fuel is scarce. And because they're super simple, they can be made by prettymuch anyone with a need, a plan and some simple tools. There's a stash of great Rocket Stove projects that have been done around the world at RocketStoves.org.

But back to us at Milkwood. The making of our Rocket-Powered water heater took two days for two blokes. The above diagram explains it all pretty well. Firebricks in a pattern with a burn chamber in front, topped by an insulated heat riser, topped by a small heat exchanger, topped by a chimney. The water came in one end of the system from the bottom of the water tank, then passively circulated between the heat exchanger and the hot water tank (just a normal hot water tank like you would have on your normal western hot water system) once the fire was going via simple pipes and the power of convection. A handful of sticks in the burn chamber set the fire going. Then we waited and finally turned on the shower tap and... voila. Steaming hot water for one shower. Hoo-bloody-ray.

Post-wash, the water flows into a greywater trench which waters a planting of She-Oaks (Casuarinas) downhill from the showerblock. These will, in time, yeild excellent stickwood for the fire, as Casuarina wood is some of the hottest burning wood in the world. Which is the closest we'll come to closing the loop (in terms of energy, carbon and responsibility) on our daily shower anytime soon... which makes for a very happy shower.

A handful of sticks is all you need...

Here's a Flickr set of the construction process - it should give you a good idea, it's fairly thorough. Feel free to ask questions if you like, I'm sure Nick would love to wax lyrical about his beloved Rocket construction.

So viva la Rocket Stove. These things are hyper-efficient. They should take over the world, I rekon - what is a better beacon for sustainable, responsible living than a guilt-free hot bath?

Happy Nick bathing in the glory of his Rocket-Powered Shower

**Notes on this system for safety: you want a pressure relase valve on the hot water tank (most have them on already) so the water tank doesn't explode, and also a tempering valve on the hot water outlet (so no water hotter than 60º comes out), so that no-one burns themselves during their lovely wood-fired shower.