Acorn Community

The structural core of the new SESE headquarters is a timber framed skeleton. Timber framing is the traditional method for building in wood, only being replaced by modern stick framing in the early 1800′s when the development of industry made the cheap production of standard size wooden lumber and pounds of cheap nails possible. Timber framing, in a relatively well forested area such as our own, makes the use of local wood, even wood from our own land, possible. We decided to incorporate timber framing into our new office for a few reasons.

1. We want this building, SESE’s new home, to gel with SESE’s emphasis on regional heritage and empowering people to provide for themselves and their local communities. Timber framing in this case allows us to use local wood milled by local millers to build something showcasing a bit of regional building heritage.
2. The large posts and beams inherent in timber framing allow for large open spans between horizontal posts which works particularly well for straw bale walls. This is because the posts can be embedded within the straw bales with a minimum of notching of those bales (we only have to notch every 12 to 16 feet rather than every 16 inches as we would with a stick frame).
3. Exposed timber framing is not only a functional part of the building’s structure but is also quite beautiful and visually impressive. And what, after all, is life without beauty?
4. It looks like a lot of fun to build!

The timber frame in progress…

So we dived on in! Based on a number of recommendations we got in touch with George Allman of Timbersmiths, Inc., a second generation timber framer who lives and works about 30 miles away from us. He was and still is a great help as he is both an experienced timber framer and a professional engineer. So, he was able to take our architect’s drawings, confirm their structural soundness, size all our timbers, and provide us with all the diagrams and plans we need to construct the thing in addition to advising us on tools and strategy, loaning and renting us specialty tools, and teaching us all the necessary skills.

So what’s involved? Well, there are a range of timber framing styles (most countries have their own traditions) and a range of techniques ranging from round timber framing to square and from all traditional hand tools to the inclusion of modern power tools. As this is our first timber frame structure we chose a fairly simple style and are using common woodworking power tools (like power planers and circular saws) instead of sweating it out with axes and hand saws. The modern world has a lot of very useful things to offer us, after all.

First, we ordered our full complement of oaken posts and beams from local sawyer Mike Wheeler and had them delivered to George’s shop where we showed up in force to run them through his giant thickness planer, reducing them all to a uniform thickness and smoothing out the rough saw marks.

Running an 8″x8″ timber through the thickness planer. Look at that plume of shavings!

Once that was done, we loaded the planed timbers onto a flatbed truck and had them delivered to our farm where we set up some heavy duty saw horses and got to work cutting the mortises and tenons needed to join them.

Some of the bigger and more complicated posts required quite a bit of work chiseling out the joinery on their many facets. Tip: Avoid non-right angles when building a timber frame structure.

The author carving a mortise on the biggest most complicated post in the building.

To increase the drama (and hide the heavy wear likely to happen in the building) we decided to ebonize all the oaken timbers. Ebonizing is a natural finishing process we learned from a local furniture maker. Oak, it turns out, is full of tannins which will darken to near blackness when exposed to iron oxide (better known as rust). Being a working farm we have no shortage of rusty iron and steel laying around which we collected in a bucket and submerged in white vinegar. Painting this on to the timbers turns them from a golden tan to deep blueish black in minutes. Very dramatic indeed!

An ebonzed timber next to an unfinished timber in our work yard.

After this we put a final coat of boiled linseed oil on the timbers and lift them into place with the boom truck we are renting from George. Traditionally the building would be built on the ground in sections called frame rows (basically cross sections of the frame) and then tilted up into place and connected to each other. It requires a lot of people, a lot of rope, and a pretty good idea of what you’re doing. As cool as it would be to have a big barn raising, considering the realities of the situation I am incredibly happy to have a crane on hand. Individual timbers in this building can weigh close to 1000 lbs.

Sliding a girt into place with the help of our borrowed crane.

Once the timbers are placed we drive a peg or two through the joint, tying the tenon into the mortise and securing the frame in place. Voila!

Thanks to everyone for their kind words, sympathy, and offers of support.  We’re generating a list of things we’re replacing that will be up next week.  If you’d like, check the list to see if there’s anything on there you’d like to help with, and give Paxus an email to coordinate the donation: paxus.calta@gmail.com

If you’d like to make a monetary donation, we would like to encourage you to donate to the Louisa Volunteer Fire Department, as they brought a huge crew and several trucks out to contain the fire.

As storage is very limited right now, it may take us some time to be able to accept much stuff.

Thank-you again for thinking of us.

I was going to write about the effects of a few inches of snow in Virginia (power outage, cars grounded, no water, etc), in combination with busy season debacle of the year (the discovery of hundreds of orders throughout the busy season hiding in the database).  I even had cute little pictures of things with snow on them.  Then, the unthinkable happened:  the steel building burned.

People were milling around Heartwood eating dinner when Fox ran in, reeking of burnt plastic. “Call 911, the steel building’s on fire.”  Mutters of disbelief and questions about the severity of the fire were left unanswered.  She continued, “I tried to walk in to see how bad it was, but I couldn’t see past the black smoke.”

Fire from the West End

I ran upstairs searching for the phone.  I related the details to the dispatcher, who informed me that trucks had been notified.  I stepped outside and observed a black cloud of noxious fumes filling the sky.  My gaze turned to the steel building, where smoke was pouring out of both sides.  Within minutes, flames were leaping out of each end.  Bibi observed that the shape of the Quonset hut acts as a very efficient chimney, ushering air in one end and out the other.  The resulting sound was a truly horrifying rush of air, the flames tearing through the contents of the building, punctuated by explosions.  I imagined all the tiny motors and gas tanks of all the machinery we’ve accumulated over 20 years bursting like popcorn.  We waited anxiously for a few larger explosions to come – namely the four oxyacetylene tanks and the air compressor.  Drawn by the horror and magnitude of the fire, many of us stood within sight, sometimes ambling closer till  we were reminded that the tanks hadn’t blown yet, and that when they did they could do so with enough force to knock down several brick walls.

Fire fighters arrive

Within 15 minutes, the entire side and top of the building glowed orange, with the fury of the flames visible through holes where fasteners had been.  Finally the fire department showed up, with two fire trucks and two other fire department vehicles.  Firemen with full gas masks and oxygen tanks begun unrolling their hose.  Soon, they started spraying the firey opening on the West side.  Streams of water vaporized in the pit of fire, a mere fly on the back of a behemoth.

Questions of whether or not we had insurance of any sort were answered – negatory.  We turned to one another, recounting the things of value going up in smoke – all of our 2013 catalogs, 6 new energy-star freezers, some full of seeds, some full of food, lots of other seed in storage, our community closet (aka commie clothes),  our prized wood shop, complete with a planer, band saw, saw-stop table saw, compound miter saw, drill presses, and lathe, the seed curing room, our weight room, the autobay, all of our appliances and extra furniture, and possibly our new station wagon, which we couldn’t move in time.

Fire fighters spraying the side

the next day

ashes to ashes

East end

West end

the wood shop

For those of you who are familiar with the steel building, or who can infer from the name of it, the steel building was the last thing we were worried about losing to fire.  In fact, we were allowed to build our fledgling seed office closer to it than code usually calls for due to the lack of risk of fire.

Sorry for the long silence on the new headquarters we’re building for our collective business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, but we’ve been so busy building it that we completely forgot to tell you all about it. We broke ground on the recycled warehouse and mostly erected it back in 2011 (post on that coming up soon) and then broke ground on the building proper in May of 2012. The months preceding ground breaking were a flurry of design sessions, draft drafting, research, and consultation. After laying a lot of the ground work ourselves we ended up working with architect Fred Oesch, an area green architect who came highly recommended from a number of people, to bring our plans to completion. He was a great help, advising us on design elements to aid in natural lighting and ventilation, building systems for high performance and low cost, and helping us figure out what we could do ourselves and how best to do it.

The final design is a beautiful sweeping two story affair oriented invitingly to the south (how could we build a building without a grand southern exposure?) and fitting cozily into the space we prepared for it. Take a look.

The new SESE office... now the trick is getting it off the paper and onto the ground.

You can see quite a few features of the building on this drawing. The long face full of windows is the south and front side of the building, maximizing solar heat gain in the winter and letting lots of light into our working space. Our recycled warehouse is poking its nose into the picture from the right. You can see the sun porch and front airlock projecting out of the face of the building. The exterior grade doors leading from the porch to the outside and into the office proper will prevent outside and inside air mixing which should help keep us cool in the summer and warm in the winter. The mostly glass walled area should also make a cozy place to take off your snowy coat and boots or just pass the time in the winter.

From here you can also see the terraces providing outside access from the second floor, which is mostly private offices and flex room for our growing co-op to expand into (knock on wood!). The east and west terraces will be surfaced in an engineered soil and planted with sedums forming a living roof which should last indefinately and help keep our building cool in the summer by converting some solar energy into living energy rather than heat and by doing a bit of evaporative cooling to boot. Crowning the building you’ll notice the full length monitor (a sort of super cupola) that we’re including for lighting and ventilation. The windows all along this ridge will let a flood of light into the core of the second floor, naturally lighting what would otherwise be a dim northern side of the building. When we open them up in the heat of the summer, we’ll be setting up a powerful stack or chimney effect whereby hot air in the building will rise into the monitor and escape through the windows, pulling in relatively cooler air from the ground floor to replace it. When the days get hot enough that the stack effect stalls out we’ll be mounting a few whole building exhaust fans in the monitor to take up the slack. Out of our commitment to live lightly on the land we will not and have never air conditioned our people, although we do air condition our seeds. Ventilation, shading, and the timely opening and closing of windows can keep our spaces comfortable throughout some pretty challenging weather without the high energy cost associated with air conditioning.

The first floor of the new office, the place where it will all go down.

Here you can see the layout of the first floor of the building with a few features I already mentioned. Here you can see how the southern wall (the bottom of the drawing) is peppered with windows while the northern wall opposite it is pierced very sparsely. This lets light (and heat during the winter) in on the south where it is abundant but keeps the cool dark northern wall as well insulated as possible. You’ll also notice that the rooms clustering around the northern wall are spaces not generally inhabited by people, like the mechanical room or the bathroom, or that we want to be cool and dark, like the picking room where all the packets of seed live. The principles for good seed storage are to keep the seeds cool, dry, and dark as what they want to start growing is warmth, wetness, and light. Situating the picking room along the north helps keep it cool and dim. To supplement this we will be super-insulating the walls of the room (including a straw bale wall along the whole northern exterior wall) and installing a good wrap around vapor barrier to keep our amble Virginia humidity out. These measures should minimize the amount that we need to run our air conditioner and dehumidifier to keep the room at its optimal condition.

The southern rooms are more self explanatory. The multi-purpose room is our big open space that we hope to use in a variety of ways. It should provide over flow space for working during the busy winter season, space to hold our regular community meetings, big dance parties, and hopefully to hold occasional public workshops on seed starting, seed saving, cooking with heirlooms, gardening organically. The clean office, also called the quiet office, separates computer and phone workers from the dust and loud music from of the shippers and packers occupying the dirty office (also the noisy office).

Two little harder to spot details are the wood fired boiler and the composting toilet. We’ll heat this building, as we heat all our buildings, with wood harvested from our own land or purchased locally burned in a super high efficiency boiler. Wood is a great heating fuel, especially in rural areas, as it is relatively abundant, naturally renewable, and carbon neutral. Using a high efficiency gassification boiler and an intelligently designed heating system (which we got a lot of help with from Galen Staengl, a local green mechanical engineer) can get the fire running pretty cleanly and can get the most energy out of this still precious resource. The building also features a small basement vault where we will house Virginia’s first legal owner built vault composting toilet and the dosing basin for our grey water system, designed by John Hanson of Nutricycle Systems. Composting toilets are ecologically and economically wonderful waste management systems and, as we’re in a position to easily pull it off, we would have felt remiss not to include one.

Well, that concludes the preliminary tour of the new seed office. We hope to throw up a few more posts in the coming weeks to catch you all up to the current state of the construction. Stay tuned!

When I first joined the Design Team, there was so much to do that I had no idea where to start.  Being a literal sort of person, I decided to start from the ground up: the foundation.

Through this process, I learned some basics about concrete in general.  Between mining the raw materials, transporting them, and kilning them, concrete has relatively high embodied energy. For each ton of concrete produced, approximately one ton of CO2 is released.  Global demand for concrete is also colossal: 1.6 billion tons annually, with demand rising steadily as more and more countries incorporate concrete into industrial and residential construction.

Concrete Jungle

Since the concrete in our foundation looked like it was going to be one of the most environmentally impactful parts of our building, I decided to research our options in minimizing our concrete use.  I approached the issue from two different angles: 1) minimizing the amount of concrete used in our foundation, and 2) finding less impactful materials to create concrete with.  I started with the former of those.  What foundation would meet our needs, match our overarching design criteria, and still be as environmentally benign as possible?

Concrete use in Third World countries is on the rise.

Since the Seed Office is slated to be our business headquarters, and since it was looking like it may be over 5,000 sq. ft, we decided experimental foundations would be too big of a risk.  We considered the option of building the office on piers, but with our humid climate the crawlspace would likely require constant dehumidification for mold control.  We would also use lots of wood for the floor, as well as the concrete for the piers.  Our most favored heating option to date, radiant floors, would also be much less practical, and the floor would have to be highly insulated against heat loss.

We shudder at the thought of foundation failure!

A slab-on-grade foundation would double as our floor as well as a robust supporting structure with which to build upon.  It would eliminate the crawlspace, and would allow us to imbed radiant tubing directly into the floor.

Smooth sailing for people with mobility restrictions

Having the building on grade also provided an even surface to move pallets of seed over (thus eliminating our current rigamarole of schlepping 50 lb bags of seed betwixt obliquely located sheds and up and down multiple flights of stairs), and also enables aging and/or less able-bodied folks to easily move seed around, which is line with our anti-discrimination values.

On-grade design will help us move heavy loads of seeds

With inclinations of radical simplicity informing our concept of sustainability, we fantasized extensively about having an earthen floor.  The design would essentially be a  slab-on-grade, without the slab (or at least without a concrete slab):  it would still have a regular concrete footing along the perimeter and pier-like “point loads” for centrally located posts, but instead of filling everything else in with concrete, we would fashion our floor out of cob or adobe.

An example of the earthen floor we dreamed of

However appealing the earthen floor, worry that it wouldn’t withstand the magnitude of foot traffic and other unforeseeable mistreatment, especially with an imbedded radiant floor, prevented us from pursuing it.

So, in the world of sustainability trade offs,  it looked like the durability, multifunctional properties, and dependability of a slab-on-grade made it our most viable foundational option.

With an estimate of how much concrete this would amount to, we turned our attention to the composition of concrete:  were there ways to make concrete less environmentally impactful?

Further reading on concrete and the environment:

http://www.buildinggreen.com/auth/article.cfm/1993/3/1/Cement-and-Concrete-Environmental-Considerations/

http://www.ecosmartconcrete.com/kbase/filedocs/trmehta01.pdf

by Irena

Here at Acorn, I generally don’t cook much.  I tend to specialize in a few recipes, and granola tops the list.  People compliment it a lot so I decided to make a post about it.  Lately I make about 7 gallons of it at a time, eyeballing almost all the ingredients.  I use ingredients from two other communes affiliated with us – nut butter from East Wind, and sorghum from Sandhill.  I use a 6-cup or 8-cup scoop and a big, deep Hobart mixing bowl.  Unlike most granola, mine has no extracted oils, just the oil in the nut butter.  Granola sticking to the pans has never been an issue for me.  It has no refined sugars and no honey; with sorghum as the only sweetener, I think with sorghum it’s easier to make sweet granola without making it too sweet.

My Ingredients

10-12 cups nuts (I count sunflower seeds, though I find them less nutty than other nuts.)

about 45 or 50 cups of oats

about 7 cups of sorghum syrup (a sweetener made from a the stalks of sorghum, a crop related to corn; we get ours from Sandhill Farm, an FEC community in Missouri)

about 7 cups of nut butter (this can be peanut, almond, and/ or cashew butter; we get ours from East Wind, another FEC community in Missouri.)

1 Tbsp nutmeg

1 Tbsp cinnamon

about 2 cups water

My Steps

1. Pre-roast the nuts for 10-20 minutes at about 300 degrees.
2. Put the sorghum, nut butter, water, and spices together in a pot over low heat.  For large amounts, I like to sift the spices through a tea strainer so they don’t clump.
3. East Wind nut butter doesn’t have emulsifiers or such added to it, so it separates.  I break the nut butter up so until no chunks are larger than, say, an almond.  Stirring helps accomplish this, but I generally find it necessary to also find the biggest chunks and manually break them apart.  This can be the most laborious part of making granola.
4. Mix the nuts with the oats.
5. Make a depression in the oat-nut mix and pour ½ to ¾ of the liquid into it.
6. Stir immediately and deeply, turning the bowl in order to get all the edges.  Continue stirring until all the oats you’re bringing up already have some liquid on them, that is, until none of them have that floury surface texture, and until all easily visible sorghum-nut-butter chunks have been broken up.
7. Spoon the already-mixed granola onto an ungreased pan.  Leave the uncoated oats in the bowl.
8. Pour the rest of the liquid into the oats.  Repeat step 6 (stirring to the bottom of the bowl) and step 7.
9. Spread the granola evenly over your pans.  I use 3-4 large baking sheets.
10. Bake at 300 degrees until surface begins to brown, turning the trays around halfway through or when the first edges begin to brown.  In Acorn’s convection oven, I bake the granola for a total of about about 50 minutes; I think most home ovens would take longer.

Some notes about this process

1. The only essential ingredient is the oats.  All other ingredients can be replaced with something else.  All proportions can be changed according to your taste.
2. It is important to pay attention to the ratios of oats to nuts to liquid ingredients.  Significant changes in these ratios will result in significant changes in the texture of the granola as well as the taste.  Large changes may result in granola bars or in very dry granola.
3. The water is just to make sorghum and nut butter more stirrable so that they won’t burn while in the pot.

Sautéed Greens in Orange Lemongrass Sauce

Ingredients, preferably organic and homegrown

Note: All ingredients proportional for one person, increase measurements proportionally for more people.

Greens (chard, cow pea leaves) 1 cup
Calabash (bottle gourds) ¾ cup
Onions ⅛ cup
Garlic ⅙ cup
Olive oil ½ cup
Soy sauce ⅛ cup, or to taste
Orange and/or tangerine, 2
Lime, 2
Lemongrass syrup ¾ cup
Ginger ⅓ cup
Basil, preferably Thai, ⅓ cup, or to taste
Lemon pepper, ⅓ cup
Turmeric, a spoonful
Cayenne pepper, a pinch

Directions

Place greens in boiling water until tender, but not entirely boiled. Let dry.

For bottle gourds, cut lengthwise and quarter.

Sauté an amount of onion proportional to ⅛ and an amount of garlic ⅙ of the amount of greens in olive oil until slightly tender.

Make sauce in separate pan.

Heat enough oil to cover the pan.

Eighth one orange/tangerine and place into pan. Squeeze juice of other orange into pan and throw in pulp. Simmer on low.

Pour soy sauce into a mixing bowl. Add lemongrass syrup. Add ginger and turmeric. Add cayenne. Mix. Add lemon pepper and lime juice. Mix again.

Put greens into pan with onion and garlic and sauté until well oiled.

Pour lemongrass sauce into saucepan with oranges. Throw in chopped basil. Mix well, until orange pulp is incorporated into sauce.

Pour sauce onto greens.

Mix and sauté.

Sautéed or Caramelized Mushrooms with Sweet Peppers

Ingredients

Any type mushrooms, ⅔ cup
Sweet peppers, ⅓ cup
Garlic, ⅛ cup
Onion, ⅛ cup
Olive oil
Lemon/lime, 1
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

Heat pan with oil.

Cut mushrooms and peppers flat.

Mince garlic and onion, add to pan.

Add in mushrooms and peppers.

Let stand until caramelized and turn, or sauté to taste.

Add salt and pepper, citrus juice.

Mashed Potatoes

Boil potatoes with skin. Mash moderately. Add in dairy-free milk or dairy milk, basil, oregano, pepper, salt, and butter to taste.

Note: mashed potatoes can be substituted with Asian rice for a more authentic tone.

Tomato Cucumber Salad

Quarter small tomatoes and cut cucumbers crosswise.

Chop basil and mince garlic if desired.

Mix in proportion ¼ apple cider vinegar or balsamic vinegar and ¾ olive oil. Add in leftover lemongrass syrup for a hint of sweetness.

Mix all in salad bowl. Salt, pepper, and citrus juice to taste.

Serve and enjoy!

After years of collaborative design and research, we’ve finally broken ground for the Seed Office Headquarters.   Here 7-year resident and master mind of the project GPaul meets with concrete contractor Kevin to review the floor plans one more time before bringing in excavation machines.

Just beyond the meeting of the minds you can see the building site, the lull and quiet imminently to be replaced by the head-spinning change and activity of construction.

Looks like our frenetic anticipation might be rubbing off – here’s Sean, concrete worker, laying out the building footprint.

After coming to an understanding about the foundation plan and execution thereof, we gave the okay to get the machines rolling.

As the default project coordinator, this is both a terrifying and triumphant day for me, as witnessed below.

About a day into the excavation, Kevin frantically called me out to the site.  They’d hit bad ground, i.e. spongy, non-compactable soil – not the kind of thing you want to put a 6,000 square foot seed office slated to house our business, the livelihood of our community, on.  I was told I needed to call a geotechnical engineer immediately, which I soon learned was an engineer who evaluates your site soil and tell you what your options are for building on it.

It turned out that our options were to a) re-design the foundation as a “floating slab”, which entails laying a grid of rebar and pouring the slab thick enough so that shifting ground underneath the foundation wouldn’t effect the structural integrity of the building, b) scrape off the spongy soil till we hit good ground, or c) find a new building site.  The later most of those filled our hearts with dread, as we had already errected a warehouse adjacent to the site to be part of the “seed plant”, and had designed our building precisely to fit in this site, with passive solar components designed off the solar orientation and coordinates of the site.  We contemplated option a and b, and eventually sided with option b, as we could use some clay mined from the site and crushed recycled concrete debris to bring the site back up to height, as opposed to the steel and concrete of the floating slab, which has a much higher embodied energy.

Below you can see the lighter-colored dirt being scraped off the site to reveal a deep red clay underneath.

Once the “bad ground” was all scraped off, we begun bring clay back in, compacting it in lifts, and adding the recycled concrete to be compacted on top of that.

Although the spongy soil and lots of rain really slowed down the timeline, here we’re almost ready to begin the foundation.

An exciting opportunity is opening up this season at Acorn—we’re building an office building for our community business, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.  We’ve done our best to design the Seed Office Headquarters in line with our values: a strong commitment to efficiency and non-toxicity in systems and materials, responsible and ethical stewardship to the land, preserving our diverse, beautiful, and unique heritage, and providing an educational platform in which to pass on the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve these goals.

The Seed Office HQ is a passive solar building with many elements of passive heating, cooling, lighting, and ventilation incorporated.   The frame will be modified post-and-beam, insulated with straw bale and blown cellulose (with a high content of recycled paper), and finished with earthen and lime plaster.  Solar thermal panels and a high efficiency wood boiler will supply heat to our radiant floors, and will preheat our domestic hot water.

If you’re interested in building with natural and local materials, and if you’re like to learn about efficient and sustainable systems and design, you’re welcome to join us.  Experienced builders are certainly welcome, however we want this to be an educational opportunity, and will work with whatever ability you’re at.  As a feminist community, we want to specifically encourage non-male identified folks to join us, seeing as a disproportionate percentage of males are represented in the mainstream building sector.

Construction will begin the end of April, and last through fall.  Contact darla@acorncommunity.org for more information.

Things with a newborn are never easy. Now that Finley is 3 months old, things are much less hectic and we have been able settle into a routine. He seems to get cuter every day and loves to flirt with the ladies.