The Lower Case "a" Frame - Matt's cleverly shaped humanure toilet shack.

This is the cordwood sauna, which we started last September. Matt dug it into the ground around an old tree root and some seriously big rocks.

Here's the completed sauna this fall, with a dressing room on the side and a double loft on top. We fired this puppy up and sweated like stuck pigs, then jumped in the cold, cold creek.

Part of the plan this year was to work on a human scale solar oven with a back up rocket masonry stove so that we can keep Matt warm when he comes up to the property mid-winter. I brought up my copy of Rocket Mass Heaters by Evans and Jackson and some literature from Aprovecho and started piecing it together. The first thing to do was find a metal barrel and burn the paint off. This bonfire was not sufficient to do the job, so there's some scraping and sanding in Matt's future.

 Here's the layout of the first few bricks. One brainstorm I had was to use chimney flue liner for parts of the stove. We bought a 1' and a 2' section of 8" diameter liner. This 1' section (the feed tube) proved to be too tall for the heater to draw well, so I ended up replacing it with some shorter fire brick.

 Here's the layout of the stove with some chicken wire around the 2' heat riser section that will help hold up the clay slip mixed with perlite that I used to insulate it.

Here's a close up after I added the insulated clay slip to the heat riser and cobbed in the rest of the stove and the first section of stove pipe. 

 Here's a functioning rocket stove (still in need of a finished cabin!). The pipe will probably end up going into a cob bed that will absorb the heat from the 1000F+ fire.

 The first successful burn with the heat riser now made out of one height of fire brick (4") rather than the 1' section of flue liner. The jist of the rocket stove is that the fire gets stuck in the insulated heat riser where the high temperatures reached can combust most of the smoke and other particulates, making for a very efficient and clean burn.

On the way back from the Catskills to NC I stopped in Newark, DE to visit my friend Dan, who's studying arboretum management at the University of Delaware, which is affiliated with the insanely huge Longwood Gardens. Here we are chilling out under an artichoke arbor with a giant corn chandelier in the background.