Breaking Ground Three

We are breaking ground on the third and last full natural building project here at Permaculture Eden. This is going to be a cob house with a living roof and stone stem wall.

The first job is to mark out the foot print slightly over sized and remove the turf from the area. We will keep the turf stored off to one side on a tarpaulin for later use as the living roof.

Now first the mark up, I want to mark two arks one of seven meters and one of five. First I have to choose the centre of the seven meter ark allowing for some space around the house away from obstacles like fences and other structures. Drive a peg in to the centre point and use a string measured to half the diameter of the required arc, holding the string and a can of builders spray marker I mark out the arc. Then using a line extending outside of the circle set four more pegs that will help relocate the centre of the ark. Then repeat this procedure for the second five meter ark, this line continues from the outside of the first ark on one side but being two meter smaller will leave a gap and start to resemble a spiral. Set another peg which will help you relocate the centre point of the second arc.

Now its marked up we just have to remove the turf, mark up demonstrated to our interns, then they were shown how to remove the turf, Fiona and I then left them to do the lions share of the work which they did cheerfully as you can see from the photo gallery below.