One Day Intro to Natural Building

If you’re curious about natural building, this is the class for you.

We’ll start early with a tour of our permaculture homestead nestled in the heart of Reno. We have several cabins, a couple ovens, earthen and straw bale garden walls, and appropriate technologies-a-plenty to show off.

We’ll spend the rest of morning getting familiar with clay soil, sand, and straw and how we process and mix them to make cob and adobe as we build a section of wall. We’ll demonstrate the use of earth bags and how we incorporate straw bales and cordwood into a wall.

In the afternoon we’ll focus on different types of plasters from base coats through finish coats using finer materials and pigments. We’ll also take time to do some sculpting and carving and make and use clay paint.

At the end of the day, we’ll fire up our cob oven, turn on some music, and make and cook our own pizzas.