Let’s Build a Chicken Garden! New Hyperadobe Earthbag Project Plans

Well hi there. Hi. It's nice to see you again. Guys. Guess what's back? Us. Well no. The wind. The wind is back. Yes it is. We're entering windy season so from now on there will be wind in the video. Yep. We do everything we can to prevent it. We have a big old mic with a big dead cat screen on it but it only can do so much. Right. So if you hear some... It's just what it is. Sorry. Anyway. What have we been up to the last three weeks babe? I have been stuck in front of my computer editing the longest video we have ever made. For some reason we decided to do a full build of the solar shed. Yeah. And rather than just like take all 140 videos and just like slap them right in front of each other, no. We had to actually edit it to where it's faster and it makes sense and it's more fun to watch. So yeah. Three weeks worth of editing a video. A two plus hour recap of the solar shed tour is coming to a YouTube near you soon. Very soon. And I'm very proud of you. Thanks. It turned out really good. I'm really excited about it too. I actually have watched it about three times now and I have enjoyed watching it every time Yeah. Which I think that says something. Yeah. We'll see. We'll see what you think. It could just be that I'm like, dang, we did that. Cool. I don't know. Maybe we're the only ones that think it's cool. Maybe. Anyway. What else have we been up to? Johnson's parents have come into town. They were here for two weeks. Yep. And we took them up into the mountains, over to Chiricahua, to lots of restaurants. They helped us trim up some trees and clean up around the property. We put them to work for sure. And they rocked it. We've loved having them here. And we're so sad that they have to leave soon. Yeah. So guess what? My mom and dad are coming. Are you guys excited? Yeah. It's been almost two years since we've seen Mimi and Papa. Two years. A long time. We stopped there on our last leg of travel before we came out to Arizona to buy property. And then COVID happened. So they haven't been able to travel. But, they just landed here at the airport, and they're headed our way. Is my mom and dad are going to get to help us on the first day of our new project. Which we're going to tell you about right now. Ready? Do you want me to say it? I think you should. Okay. Guys, we're building a chicken coop garden. Oh yeah. Now, let's take a second and start to answer some of your questions. Yeah. About what is it? Why are you doing it now? Why would you put chickens in a garden? How are you going to do it? When are you going to do it? All those things. Okay. So, the big sort of 10,000 foot view is that chickens and gardens can work very well together if the space is designed properly. Right? Which we hope we have done. Okay. So how do chickens and gardens work together? Okay. The plan is my garden waste will feed the chickens and the chickens waste will feed my garden. Circular. Which makes perfect sense if you think about it. The way it's going to work, we are building a huge circular wall. Okay? Mm. Stick with me. It's going to be out of earth bags. Out of earth bags. Yes. This is hyper adobe coop and garden. So the exterior will be about a five foot wall and a gigantic circle, 42 foot inside that circle. We'll have about three foot of garden, a pathway, and then we'll have an inner circle that will also have garden on the outside of that inner circle. The inner circle will house our chickens. Yes. The run for our chickens and the coop. The chicken coop is actually intersected with that inside circle. So the front of the coop will be inside the circle. The back of the coop will be outside that circle into the walkway, the circle behind it. But the whole idea is that we're going to use the water from that roof and we're going to catch it and store it and then use it for drip irrigation in the garden. Now, I really want to sing the circle of life. Okay. Keep going. This garden will be our salsa garden. There's very few things that we care about growing. Salsa ingredients is top of the list. It's going to be huge. It's more bags than our solar shed, but only five foot tall. That tells you how big it is. Yeah. It's pretty large. Now, let's talk about why we're doing it now in relation because obviously we can do whatever we want out here. Why are we choosing to build a chicken coop garden right now instead of the myriad of other projects that we could be working on? Right. Some people are like, why don't you just start on your house? Well, to start on our house, we would have to move our airstream. To move our airstream, we would have to move the deck. To move the deck, we also have to move shade sails. And to move that, we need to have a place to put the airstream and a septic for the airstream and power. And we'd have to rerun the electric and run the water again. And we need to do our berms and swales on the property before we can put the house exactly where it needs to go. Awesome. And water catchment. Awesome. We still haven't finalized the exact size of the house. That's true. It's all still like up here collectively. I feel like it's right here. It's mostly there. And I have this like hazy view of what it might be, but we got to get it down on paper and get actual like dimensions and square footage and like, oh, that room's going to be this and this room. And that's where the water pipes are going to go. Like we have to figure all that out because it's not like a regular house. Like you have to be able to put the pipes through the wall at the right places at the right times. There's a lot more involved with the house than there was with the shed. We just haven't finished those plans. Also I just don't want to. True. There's that. But essentially we need more time to really spec out those plans. This will give us a couple of months to work on this project. It'll be good. Adelaide's been asking for a long time for a better chicken coop situation because she deals with the chickens every morning and she's like, got to do something. Also, the garden needs drip irrigation because once I have drip irrigation run for two years here on the homestead, I could apply for a grant for a hoop house and then we can go saucy around. Exactly. Yes. A covered garden. Yeah. This will be a nice sort of very simple project. There's other than the chicken coop, there's no actual roof on it. Much less sort of mechanically complicated than the solar shed was. Right. But also we're going to be doing a few different techniques. I'm thinking about plastering it differently than we did with the shed and way more bottles in this build guys. That may not necessarily have frames around them. Right? No. So we're going to play around with how that's possible with earth bags. Just getting a few more techniques under our belt before we really get into the house. Yeah. There'll also be some really cool features in this that we'll show you when we get to that point. Yeah. We can't tell you everything. But the other big news is that yes, we are bringing daily videos back, but with a twist because we're still experimenting with all this, right? Yeah. So we're going to try Monday through Friday. So five videos instead of seven videos a week, because seven... We need a little bit of a breather. Yeah. Well, there's, this is a time of year when everyone out here is working on their own projects and so we've become part of this great community out here. We're all trying to build these unique off-grid natural building structures and we want to help with those whenever we can. And so in the past, we've just had to keep telling people no, because like, well, we got to do this today and then we have to shoot the video and then we got to publish it and edit it and all this stuff. So this will give us a little more time to actually be a better part of the community and just to make sure we have time to like take care of things around the property because when you're that busy, stuff just falls into disarray. That's a great word for it. Disarray. Yes. Anyway, Chicken Coop Garden is coming very soon. Get ready for daily videos, Monday through Friday, starting... Pretty soon. Sometime soon. We'll let you know when it happens. We still don't know. Stick around. Lots more to come. We'll see you then. Oh, hey. You remember that time when we built a solar shed from dirt on our property and then we did a really cool walkthrough tour? Yeah, me too. It's right here. You should go watch it. I'll wait. Anytime. It's up to you. Go ahead.