I read an interesting article on the “earthlodges” of Native Americans in the Dakotas the other day. I’d learned early in my life when the family moved from New York to “Indian Territory” – Oklahoma – that not all Native Americans lived in those portable teepee tents so prevalent on the plains. I knew the ‘civilized’ tribes of the southeastern United States were able constructors of log cabins for their permanent villages, and of course knew about those spectacular adobe pueblos in the southwest. And while I learned in junior high Oklahoma history about the sod-roofed shanties built by white settlers (and for which Oklahoma was famous), I’d never heard of earthlodges.

Earthlodges are large round structures from 20 to 50 feet in diameter which are built to be much more permanent than the yurts that basically amount to a Mongolian version of teepee for migratory people. Lots of people these days have deck-mounted yurts that are popular as camp cabins or gazebos, but they’re not really something stable or well-insulated enough to live in full time.

In contrast, the earthlodge is dug into the ground and framed with logs, covered with woven willow mats and then covered completely (except for a smoke hole in the middle of the roof) with mud and sod. Your basic hobbit house, but as its own hill rather than dug into a pre-existing hill. Of course, there are some modern earthlodge designs that combine aspects of natural landscaping and lodge building, which are actually quite nice if you don’t care much about windows. It would be quite easy to engineer one of these with skylights, so interior darkness can be alleviated.

Dakota State Historical Society

The original earthlodges were built communally, often housing between 15 and 25 people. They provided solid, very well-insulated shelter for harsh Dakota winters, and stayed naturally cool in hot Dakota summers. They lasted only as long as the palisade poles and main support logs lasted in the ground, about 7 to 10 years before they’d rotted enough to need replacing. Since it took only about a week for a group to construct an earthlodge from scratch, the old one would simply be torn down and a new one erected in its place. The old logs recycled into firewood made this village system quite efficient given that the Dakotas do not enjoy the thick, lush forests of the American southeast.

For a new homesteader looking for cheap, eco-friendly housing on a tract of raw land, it’s not difficult to see how the problem of ground-rot could be simply eliminated by seating the anchor and palisade logs in concrete. The thermal mass of palisade logs plus dirt/sod can be nearly warm in winter and cool in summer as 3-foot thick adobe walls. More modern – and fully waterproof – coverings take the place of those woven willow mats, and fewer palisade poles would allow for regular insulated walls or an opportunity to place windows and/or exits to porticos, or to build storage rooms or closets off the main structure. For a truly permanent structure, some research on new under-sod waterproof roofing material would probably be a good idea.

The niftiest thing about this kind of permanent shelter is that if your land is raw enough to need some clearing, the logs and poles can be taken as part of your clearing plans. These will have to be de-barked and dried above the ground, there are many good Do It Yourself books and plans out there for site-built log homes that have clear instructions on how to do this. If you’re planning to grow crops, the sod shouldn’t be hard to come by. Rather than a big central fire pit and large hole in the roof, a central wood stove with just a pipe running up through the roof will protect from the elements much better than the wicker baskets the Mandan people used to cover their smoke holes when it rained.

It also strikes me that the side walls could be constructed of straw bales and covered with mesh and stucco or adobe instead of mud and sod and still be as easy to heat and cool. Some may consider rock as well, if the land has an overabundance of those that need removing before crops can be grown. Any of these alternatives for some or all of the side walls would make for a very handsome home. The sod roof does have great appeal, I’ve always envisioned a hobbit house with wildflowers instead of just more grass to have to mow.

The interior, once you’ve got the central roof supports and planned your walls, can of course be framed and subdivided as you please for cooking sleeping and living areas, bathrooms and utility as you wish. The Dream Green link above also offers a plan for a ‘multi-lodge’ made up of several octagonal earthlodges connected to a front portico area. This idea offers the possibility for future expansion as the family grows.

So chalk this up as yet another eco-friendly green construction to think about if you’re new to homesteading or are planning to build more structures on your homestead than you’ve already got. A far less modern (more true to origin) version of earthlodge would make a very serviceable combo barn, root/wine cellar and tool/vehicle storage shed. For as long as you can keep the livestock from eating the walls and roof, that is.

Links:

Indians 101: The Earthlodge
Dream Green Homes Earth Lodge
Blue Ridge Yurts

It’s now just one week until Christmas Eve. Have you found and installed your Christmas tree yet? The holidays around this homestead require a tree that must go up the week before Christmas and come down a week after Christmas, so let me lend a few homestead hints on that particular subject…

Our family stopped buying commercially produced Christmas trees as soon as we moved to our homestead in serious Christmas tree country. They’re a regular Big Cash Crop here, but take years to grow and a lot of work trimming so they’ll have just the right thickness and shape. Heck, there are Christmas tree farms in our immediate region that’ll let you come in with a hand saw and cut your own!

But that’s not what we do. We do have a cathedral ceiling in our little living room from when the loft was built, so we like our trees to be 15 feet tall. But even though Scotch pines and hemlocks and Frasier Firs grow wild on our property and in the forest around us, they’re rangy and thin from growing in a forest. You’ll have this if you don’t carefully trim your growing trees in view of future Christmases.

A tree that’s only going to be in your living room for two weeks isn’t required to be seriously fireproof and isn’t likely to catch fire before the New Year’s bonfire (when you burn it on purpose). This is good, because commercial trees don’t burn worth a darn no matter how long you keep them, and who really likes the solid cone effect anyway? I like some real depth to my tree – ornaments and silk flowers and bows and ribbon and lots of lights deeply into the tree, branches that stick out far enough to shade a lot of presents.

Because our tree is up against the wall, it only has to be half-round. The room is too little to accommodate a free-stander, so this is a plus for those rangy Scotch pines on the property that look good on one side, but have nothing on the other. If you put your tree in a corner you need even less fullness! Pre-planning is essential, and the most important thing to remember is…

Duct Tape Is Your Friend. Yes, we duct tape two or three rangy trees together (and add trimmed-out branches to the front wherever needed) in order to get a tree tall enough and full enough to decorate our living room. Yes, the taped-on parts will dry quickly because they aren’t in water, but as I mentioned, it needn’t last long. Once you’ve got the perfect thickness of branches and fullness of shape and height of tree, you can disguise the trunk’s duct tape sections easily with crumpled tissue paper, big ribbon bows and other such decorative tricks.

String those lights in layers from interior to exterior, don’t skimp! We love lots of little white and colored lights on the tree, use lots of strings. The tree itself is attached with cable to eye-hooks in the trim atop the wainscoting, so we just cover the base trunk and under-tree area with skirts. We don’t use plastic or metal icicles – these get everywhere, aren’t good for the environment, and don’t burn. We’ve been collecting plastic and glass icicle ornaments over the years and use those instead. They come off as easily as the regular ornaments do, to be packed away for next year, and don’t hide around the baseboards or in the rug.

So. If there are evergreens on your homestead, particularly scraggly young ones competing for growing space with all the younger ones, make your own Christmas tree and don’t forget to light it up at midnight on New Year’s Eve out in the backyard fire pit! It’ll decorate your holidays twice and warm you up too. What more can anybody ask of a Christmas tree?

In my last post I started talking about building your home, and introduced the subject of log and timber frame housing. These homes are becoming more and more popular all over the country, and offer some rather large advantages for homesteaders in a number of ways.

First and foremost, log and timber frame homes are environmentally friendly. There are companies producing “kit” homes in various parts of the country from farmed pine logs, and there are even a few specializing in ‘salvage’ timber. Those are standing dead or down trees, usually from large forest tracts (publicly or privately owned), harvested at little or no cost to the harvester because harvesting is part of the forest management strategy.

In my southern Appalachians, for instance, we have large stands of southern pine and hemlocks that have succumbed to pine bark beetles and wooly adelgid infestations. These insects get underneath the outer bark and kill the trees by destroying that thin layer of inner bark that the tree depends upon to transport water and nutrients from the roots to the limbs and needles. While treatments have been developed and are now available to landholders like us, it will only save the young trees. The older trees have already succumbed, and local environmental regulations even demand that landholders take down dead stands (or burn them).

The logs from such harvests are fine for building. Bark infestations do not damage the inner wood at all, and the logs are often naturally dried and easy to de-bark, ready for work. Homes made from such logs, or farmed logs, or timber derived from such sources helps to manage forests, lessen fire dangers, and make good use of what would normally rot or be chipped for fake fireplace logs. No need to feel guilty!

Homes can be a hybrid of these styles of homebuilding, depending on the lay of your land, your design requirements, and your budget. A friend of mine has built a hybrid home on a semi-steep grade of lakefront property. The foundation is cinderblock faced with flat rock. On the ‘tall’ side facing the lake (and sporting a full-length screened deck) whole logs are used. They’ve been flattened on their meeting edges and pre-notched to fit without chinking. On the ‘short’ front facing the uphill driveway timber framing was used. These are very sturdy 10×10 rough timbers used to frame the front and its roof beams. This was faced with tongue and groove half-log siding to match the real logs, and it looks great.

Actually, this half-log and quarter-log siding could be used to refurbish an older cabin like mine, where the rustic chestnut boards have warped and hosted too many carpenter bees over the past century. We’re seriously considering that option, once we replace the roof!

Log homes are also energy efficient, naturally insulated from the cold, the heat, and all variations in between. If you’re careful to install only double-paned insulated glass in your windows, heating and cooling shouldn’t be very expensive at all. Wood furnaces and smokeless wood stove technologies are available these days as well, which puts the homesteader in charge of that aspect of life. One more thing to contribute to prideful independence!

My husband has always told me – every year this time, when we’re working hard to get the winter’s wood supply cut, split and stacked – that wood is the only fuel that “warms you twice.” It makes you sweat when you cut, split and stack it, and it warms you again when you burn it on a cold winter’s day. That’s a two-fer any homesteader should readily appreciate!

There are some great resources and helpful hints out there on the internet, including full instructions on how to build your own log home from timber harvested from your own property! Our ancestors used to do this as a matter of course, so a modern homesteader can do the same thing – even better with some rented equipment to do the heavy lifting! Definitely something to look into if you’re planning to build.

The links below are particularly good, so spend a little time with them and see if perhaps renovating that falling-down fixer-upper might be less satisfying than building something new. Or, you could do both if you’re planning on sharing your homestead with your grown children when the time comes!

Links:

Log Homes Journal

Natural Log Siding

An Environmentalist’s Guide to Responsible Wood Heating

Log Home Builders Association

Build Your Own Log Cabin!