touchtheearthfarm.com Blog

Last weekend, I had the most amazing time at a strawbale building workshop, taught by a local eco-architect, Sigi Koko of Down to Earth Designs. She’s an amazing, vibrant person, as well as an excellent teacher, and I’m so pleased to have had the chance to work with her. (Thanks Jenny for the heads up!)

The project was a tasting room for a new local winery in Frederick County, Maryland, Black Ankle Vineyards. Owners Ed Boyce and Sarah O’Herron are strongly influenced by biodynamic philosophy and in keeping with that, they produced as much of the building materials on site as possible. Most of the wood was milled from their own land, the rye straw was all grown and harvested on site, and they’ve even worked closely with a papercrete company to produce countertops made from grape vines, seeds, and skins from last year’s harvest. It’s very cool. They’ll also be using some wormy maple from the grounds for tabletops. It should be absolutely beautiful when finished, and a delightful place for Jim and I to go. Since the owners have 5 children, their plans are to make the gardens kid-friendly.

This was a post and beam project with straw infill, meaning that the straw itself primarily functions as an insulator, and what an amazing insulator it is with R-42 value! The roof will be insulated with an expanding soy foam, and the concrete floors will be finished with a soy colorant. The building will also include a cob-covered masonry stove, some living roof area, as well as cob walls and benches in the outdoor rooms. (Note: these links aren’t necessarily the actual products being used.)

My team and I worked on an outside corner wall with a window (below) that flows into an internal wall and window, which means we had loads of specialty cuts to make in our bales. Here we are standing on our strawbale scaffold against our internal wall just before we laid the last course under the beam. Eventually, strawbales will be laid on the cut side on top of this final course, all the way up the cathedral wall where it will meet the ceiling insulation.

The weekend was amazing, and fun, and filled with all kinds of challenging weather, including a rain and hail storm which soaked me to the skin in the frantic run to tarp the outside walls, demonstrating the clear value to post and beam construction in our area of the country. If this had been a load-bearing or “Nebraska style” strawbale, there would have been no roof in place!

After work was done, we were all treated to a tour of the winery and an informal tasting back in the tasting room to toast all our effort. What an amazing experience! Now, I’ll have all kinds of experiential knowledge when I finally convince Jim to build our own strawbale on 100 acres somewhere.