Small Sustainable homes - slideshow Huffington Post

These exciting and comfortable designs from the new book "Small Eco Houses" show what's possible, and sustainable, in 1,500 square feet or less. Efficient light bulbs, non-toxic furnitureand Energy-Star certified appliances can certainly reduce your family's environmental impact. But as population rises, we have to start paying more attention to the fact that the more dwelling space we provide for each person, the more resources we are going to use.

Click through to see what's possible in a smaller size, selections from this collection of 18 amazing small green homes

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/14/11-small-homes-houses_n_808518.html#s223320&title=Watershed_House

Building with Whole Trees. NY Times Nov 5, 09

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Building With Whole Trees

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/05/garden/05tree.html?em=&pagewanted=all

Paul Kelley for The New York Times

Roald Gundersen built his home andd greenhouse using whole tree for structure and support. More Photos >

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By ANNE RAVER

Published: November 4, 2009

STODDARD, Wis.

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The Forester-Architect

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Paul Kelley for The New York Times

The loft in the Stoddard, Wisc. home of Amelia Baxter and Mr. Gundersen.More Photos »

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ROALD GUNDERSEN, an architect who may revolutionize the building industry, shinnied up a slender white ash near his house here on a recent afternoon, hoisting himself higher and higher until the limber trunk began to bend slowly toward the forest floor.
“Look at Papa!” his life and business partner, Amelia Baxter, 31, called to their 3-year-old daughter, Estella, who was crouching in the leaves, reaching for a mushroom. Their son, Cameron, 9 months, was nestled in a sling across Ms. Baxter’s chest.
Wild mushrooms and watercress are among the treasures of this 134-acre forest, but its greatest resource is its small-diameter trees — thousands like the one Mr. Gundersen, 49, was hugging like a monkey.
“Whooh!” he said, jumping to the ground and gingerly rubbing his back. “This isn’t as easy as it used to be. But see how the tree holds the memory of the weight?”
The ash, no more than five inches thick, was still bent toward the ground. Mr. Gundersen will continue to work on it, bending and pruning it over the next few years in this forest which lies about 10 miles east of the Mississippi River and 150 miles northwest of Madison.
Loggers pass over such trees because they are too small to mill, but this forester-architect, who founded Gundersen Design in 1991 and built his first house here two years later, has made a career of working with them.
“Curves are stronger than straight lines,” he explained. “A single arch supporting a roof can laterally brace the building in all directions.”
The firm, recently renamed Whole Tree Architecture and Construction, is also owned by Ms. Baxter, a onetime urban farmer and community organizer with a knack for administration and fundraising. She also manages a community forest project modeled after a community-supported agriculture project, in which paying members harvest sustainable riches like mushrooms, firewood and watercress from these woods, and those who want to build a house can select from about 1,000 trees, inventoried according to species, size and shape, and located with global positioning system coordinates, a living inventory that was paid for with a $150,000 grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.
According to research by the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, run by the USDA, a whole, unmilled tree can support 50 percent more weight than the largest piece of lumber milled from the same tree. So Mr. Gundersen uses small-diameter trees as rafters and framing in his airy structures, and big trees felled by wind, disease or insects as powerful columns and curving beams.
Taking small trees from a crowded stand in the forest is much like thinning carrots in a row: the remaining plants get more light, air and nutrients. Carrots grow longer and straighter; trees get bigger and healthier.
And when the trees are left whole, they sequester carbon. “For every ton of wood, a ton and a half of carbon dioxide is locked up,” he said, whereas producing a ton of steel releases two to five tons of carbon. So the more whole wood is used in place of steel, the less carbon is pumped into the air.
These passive solar structures also need very little or no supplemental heat.
Tom Spaulding, the executive director of Angelic Organics Learning Center, near Rockford, Ill., northwest of Chicago, knows about this because he commissioned Mr. Gundersen to build a 1,600-square-foot training center in 2003. He said: “In the middle of winter, on a 20-below day, we’re in shorts, with the windows and doors open. And we don’t burn a bit of petroleum.”
“It’s eminently more frugal and sustainable than milling trees,” he added. “These are weed trees, so when you take them out, you improve the forest stand and get a building out of it. You haven’t stripped an entire hillside out west to build it, or used a lot of oil to transport the lumber.”
Mr. Gundersen had a rough feeling for all of this 16 years ago, when he started building a simple A-frame house here for his first wife and their son, Ian, now 15. He wanted to encourage local farmers to use materials like wood and straw from their own farms to build low-cost, energy-efficient structures. So he used small aspens that were crowding out young oaks nearby.
“I would just carry them home and peel them,” said Mr. Gundersen, who later realized he could peel them while they were standing, making them “a lot lighter to haul and not so dangerous to fell.”
Mr. Gundersen, who built most of the house singlehandedly, also recognized the beauty of large trees downed by disease or wind, and used the peeled trunks, shorn of their central branches a few feet from the crook, as supporting columns in the house. “I thought they were beautiful, but I didn’t think how strong they were,” he said.
“In architecture, how materials come together and how they are connected is really the god in the details,” he continued. “The connection is where things will fall apart,” he said, adding that the crook of a tree “has been time-tested by environmental conditions for 200 million years.”
He refers to that first house — which cost $15,000 (for plumbing, electrical, septic and other basic amenities, as well as $4,000 in paid labor) and a year of his own labor — as his master’s degree in architecture. Divorced in 1997, he now lives there with Ms. Baxter and their two children.
After finishing the A-frame, Mr. Gundersen built a 100-by-20-foot solar greenhouse next door with thick straw-bale walls on three sides, banked into the north slope. He used small-diameter, rot-resistant black locust trees for the timber framing.
A wall of double-paned glass, positioned to optimize the low-angle winter light, faces south. Growing beds angled slightly toward the sun are planted with rows of mustard greens, kale, chard, arugula, lettuces and herbs. Hanging trays of micro-greens and a fig and bay tree promise fresh food for the fall and winter.
But it is the Book End — the little house attached to the greenhouse, which is home to the firm’s project manager and his wife — that quietly vibrates with the spirit of the forest.
“We used a lot of standing dead elm here,” Mr. Gundersen said, pointing out the delicate trails, or galleries, left by the beetles that killed the tree. Peeled of their bark and satiny smooth, these trees have a presence that seems to draw one’s arm around their trunks and invite a viewer to lean into them, to soak up strength from these powerful old souls.
In this quiet farming community, where people may not have a lot of money to spend, but do have plenty of wood and straw, word of the beauty and practicality of Mr. Gundersen’s structures has spread. Solar greenhouses made of local materials can extend the growing season through winter, even in a place where temperatures can drop to 30 or 40 below. In the last 18 years, Whole Trees has built 25 of them here.
It’s part of a vision Mr. Gundersen developed after spending three years as a project architect on Biosphere 2, the three-acre glass-enclosed miniature world constructed near Tucson in the 1980s, which tried to replicate the earth’s systems, but foundered on carbon dioxide, acidic seas, failed crops and internal intrigues. After that experience, he wanted to build something more basic to human needs.
Mr. Gundersen grew up in nearby LaCrosse, where his Norwegian great-grandfather, a doctor, founded a local institution, the Gundersen Clinic; he comes from a clan of doctors and tree lovers. “There are 23 doctors in the family,” he said, including his father and uncle and four great-uncles, but he seems to be wired more like his great-grandmother Helga, whose family still owns a tree farm in Norway. He and his grandmother would often picnic on this piece of wild land, where he remembers picking watercress and wildflowers and building tree forts.
Now, to be in his buildings is to be among the trees.
“It almost feels like we’re in a forest, the trees have such a presence,” said Marcia Halligan, a client who is a farmer and Reiki instructor, standing among the birch posts of her airy bedroom.
She and her partner, Steven Adams, who grows seed for organic seed companies, worked with Mr. Gundersen on a design that uses 22 different kinds of wood, most of it from their own land outside Viroqua, southeast of Stoddard.
The economic downturn has put commissions for several large buildings for nonprofits and a 4,600-square-foot residence on hold, Mr. Gundersen and Ms. Baxter say, but the demand for small houses like theirs is up.
“It’s remarkable how many people have called this last year asking for 1,000-square-foot houses,” Ms. Baxter said. “People are downsizing for their retirement homes, and even younger folks are thinking about energy costs, environmental awareness and simplicity.”
Whole Trees can keep construction costs as low as $100 a square foot, not including site preparation, if the client is willing to shop for secondhand fixtures and the like.
As people begin to see forests as a resource, they may begin to take care of them rather than cutting them down to make room for cornfields or pastures. And the forests keep giving back.
“I’ve taken 20 trees per year off one acre, for 12 buildings,” Mr. Gundersen said. “You can never tell that we’ve taken out that much wood.”

Green Roofs with Succulents

June 7, 2009

Editorial | The City Life

Up on the Roof

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

From the 15th floor you can see all manner of Manhattan eccentricities on the street below. But how did the humdrum rooftop of a nearby apartment house suddenly become covered with a blanket of suburban grass? “No, not grass — you don’t want grass,” explains Stuart Gaffin, a research scientist tracked down at Columbia University who turns out to be the city’s rooftop Johnny Appleseed.

A specialist in something called the Urban Heat Island, Mr. Gaffin has successfully campaigned to have over a half-dozen rooftops, including four at green-minded Columbia, entirely matted with small plants called succulents.

They sop up and vaporize rainwater before it can jam the city sewage treatment plants; they cut summer heat that can exceed 170 degrees on a roof. No mowing required. “They’re nature’s geniuses at staying cool,” Mr. Gaffin says, while stepping across the resilient mat of sedum plants flourishing high over West 112th Street. He gestures to the city panorama and estimates 30 square miles of unused rooftop acreage that could be vegetating. “Twenty times Central Park!” he declares, sounding like a producer coveting Broadway.

Mr. Gaffin’s gardens range from vegetation plain as the top of a pool table to more advanced mixes that resemble pointillist abstractions atop two roofs at the Bronx’s Fieldston Middle School. Students tend instruments measuring insulation, water conservation and other virtues of green roofs, which Mr. Gaffin says far outlast normal roofs. They have a weird urban serenity. Far from streetwise rats, the worst critters that have shown up are butterflies and crickets.

The city lags far behind Europe in green-roof savvy, but Mr. Gaffin is as patient as his succulents. He evangelizes roof by roof, delighted to uproot a stray weed above 112th Street. “Field work,” he says.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07sun4.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

The Energy Challenge

No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in ‘Passive Houses’ 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?em=&pagewanted=all

Rolf Oeser for The New York Times

Berthold Kaufmann and his wife, Dorte Feierabend, with their daughters in their "passive house" in Darmstadt, Germany.

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: December 26, 2008

DARMSTADT, Germany — From the outside, there is nothing unusual about the stylish new gray and orange row houses in the Kranichstein District, with wreaths on the doors and Christmas lights twinkling through a freezing drizzle. But these houses are part of a revolution in building design: There are no drafts, no cold tile floors, no snuggling under blankets until the furnace kicks in. There is, in fact, no furnace.

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Articles in this series are examining the ways in which the world is, and is not, moving toward a more energy efficient, environmentally benign future.

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In Berthold Kaufmann’s home, there is, to be fair, one radiator for emergency backup in the living room — but it is not in use. Even on the coldest nights in central Germany, Mr. Kaufmann’s new “passive house” and others of this design get all the heat and hot water they need from the amount of energy that would be needed to run a hair dryer. 

“You don’t think about temperature — the house just adjusts,” said Mr. Kaufmann, watching his 2-year-old daughter, dressed in a T-shirt, tuck into her sausage in the spacious living room, whose glass doors open to a patio. His new home uses about one-twentieth the heating energy of his parents’ home of roughly the same size, he said. 


Architects in many countries, in attempts to meet new energy efficiency standards like the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standard in the United States, are designing homes with better insulation and high-efficiency appliances, as well as tapping into alternative sources of power, like solar panels and wind turbines.
The concept of the passive house, pioneered in this city of 140,000 outside Frankfurt, approaches the challenge from a different angle. Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies. 

And in Germany, passive houses cost only about 5 to 7 percent more to build than conventional houses.
Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency. 

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”
There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.
The first passive home was built here in 1991 by Wolfgang Feist, a local physicist, but diffusion of the idea was slowed by language. The courses and literature were mostly in German, and even now the components are mass-produced only in this part of the world. 

The industry is thriving in Germany, however — for example, schools in Frankfurt are built with the technique.
Moreover, its popularity is spreading. The European Commission is promoting passive-house building, and the European Parliament has proposed that new buildings meet passive-house standards by 2011.
The United States Army, long a presence in this part of Germany, is considering passive-house barracks.
“Awareness is skyrocketing; it’s hard for us to keep up with requests,” Mr. Hasper said.
Nabih Tahan, a California architect who worked in Austria for 11 years, is completing one of the first passive houses in the United States for his family in Berkeley. He heads a group of 70 Bay Area architects and engineers working to encourage wider acceptance of the standards. “This is a recipe for energy that makes sense to people,” Mr. Tahan said. “Why not reuse this heat you get for free?” 

Ironically, however, when California inspectors were examining the Berkeley home to determine whether it met “green” building codes (it did), he could not get credit for the heat exchanger, a device that is still uncommon in the United States. “When you think about passive-house standards, you start looking at buildings in a different way,” he said. 

Buildings that are certified hermetically sealed may sound suffocating. (To meet the standard, a building must pass a “blow test” showing that it loses minimal air under pressure.) In fact, passive houses have plenty of windows — though far more face south than north — and all can be opened. 

Inside, a passive home does have a slightly different gestalt from conventional houses, just as an electric car drives differently from its gas-using cousin. There is a kind of spaceship-like uniformity of air and temperature. The air from outside all goes through HEPA filters before entering the rooms. The cement floor of the basement isn’t cold. The walls and the air are basically the same temperature. 

Look closer and there are technical differences: When the windows are swung open, you see their layers of glass and gas, as well as the elaborate seals around the edges. A small, grated duct near the ceiling in the living room brings in clean air. In the basement there is no furnace, but instead what looks like a giant Styrofoam cooler, containing the heat exchanger. 

Passive houses need no human tinkering, but most architects put in a switch with three settings, which can be turned down for vacations, or up to circulate air for a party (though you can also just open the windows). “We’ve found it’s very important to people that they feel they can influence the system,” Mr. Hasper said.
The houses may be too radical for those who treasure an experience like drinking hot chocolate in a cold kitchen. But not for others. “I grew up in a great old house that was always 10 degrees too cold, so I knew I wanted to make something different,” said Georg W. Zielke, who built his first passive house here, for his family, in 2003 and now designs no other kinds of buildings. 

In Germany the added construction costs of passive houses are modest and, because of their growing popularity and an ever larger array of attractive off-the-shelf components, are shrinking.
But the sophisticated windows and heat-exchange ventilation systems needed to make passive houses work properly are not readily available in the United States. So the construction of passive houses in the United States, at least initially, is likely to entail a higher price differential. 


Moreover, the kinds of home construction popular in the United States are more difficult to adapt to the standard: residential buildings tend not to have built-in ventilation systems of any kind, and sliding windows are hard to seal.
Dr. Feist’s original passive house — a boxy white building with four apartments — looks like the science project that it was intended to be. But new passive houses come in many shapes and styles. The Passivhaus Institut, which he founded a decade ago, continues to conduct research, teaches architects, and tests homes to make sure they meet standards. It now has affiliates in Britain and the United States.
Still, there are challenges to broader adoption even in Europe. 

Because a successful passive house requires the interplay of the building, the sun and the climate, architects need to be careful about site selection. Passive-house heating might not work in a shady valley in Switzerland, or on an urban street with no south-facing wall. Researchers are looking into whether the concept will work in warmer climates — where a heat exchanger could be used in reverse, to keep cool air in and warm air out.
And those who want passive-house mansions may be disappointed. Compact shapes are simpler to seal, while sprawling homes are difficult to insulate and heat. 

Most passive houses allow about 500 square feet per person, a comfortable though not expansive living space. Mr. Hasper said people who wanted thousands of square feet per person should look for another design. 

“Anyone who feels they need that much space to live,” he said, “well, that’s a different discussion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/world/europe/27house.html?em=&pagewanted=all

Tips on Growing Pretty Apples - Mike McGroarty

Mike McGroarty's Backyard Growers Newsletter November 13, 2008

Tips on Growing Pretty Apples


Pat, even in a slow economy people still buy small.
low priced plants because it makes them feel good. Now is
a great time to start a Backyard Nursery so you'll have
plenty of plants to sell when things really pick up.

If you get involved right now, the middle of November, you
have all winter to study the materials and you'll be ready
to hit the ground running this spring.
http://www.freeplants.com/backyard.htm

A signed copy of my book makes an excellent
Christmas gift!
http://www.freeplants.com/easy-plant-propagation.htm



Tips for Growing Pretty Apples

Many people want to grow their own apples, but it can be very
disappointing when the apple crop is damaged by insects and
disease. The fruit can become so disfigured and blemished that
it is no longer edible.

Choosing a disease-resistant apple tree variety is the first
step in producing pretty apples. You will find an assortment
of apple varieties these days that are resistant to some of
the more common apple tree ailments, such as fire blight and
powdery mildew.

Many of the insects and diseases that attack apples and apple
trees tend to overwinter in the leaf litter and ground fall
apples beneath the tree. A simple method to improve the quality
of your homegrown apples is to eliminate the over wintering
habitat for those pests.

Leaves and fruit that fall from an apple tree should be picked up
and discarded. The leaves and ground fall apples should not be
added to your compost pile. They should be bagged and placed in
the trash, far from your apple trees.

Insects that attack apple trees like to spend the winter beneath a
blanket of fallen leaves. Once spring arrives, those insects are
ready to fly or crawl up into the tree where they damage the blossoms
and the developing fruit as they lay eggs for the next generation.
Without that warm blanket of leaves, many of those insects will
succumb to the cold winter weather.

Other insects lay their eggs in the apples. Come spring those eggs
hatch and the insects are ready to attack the next crop of apples.
If the ground fall apples are kept picked up, those insects won't get
the chance to damage next year's crop.

Practicing good garden hygiene will help you reduce the amount of
spraying necessary for a blemish-free apple crop. A good pruning
schedule is also beneficial, but that's an article for another day.

Have a great week!
-Mike McGroarty

Shipping Container Homes

Home Sweet Shipping Container?

Architects and Builders Use a Surplus of Unused Shipping Containers for Construction

By KI MAE HEUSSNER

Nov. 7, 2008 —

You've probably seen them stacked high to the sky at city ports, left empty after traveling around the world carrying furniture, appliances and other household goods.
But the next time you see a shipping container, it might be far from the waterfront and serving a purpose for which it was never intended: housing.
Originally developed as an artistic experiment, shipping container homes are moving into the mainstream, as architects and builders recognize the economic and environmental benefits of working with the giant Lego-like steel boxes.
"It's not just a bunch of mad scientists tinkering in a garage making these buildings," said Peter DeMaria, principal architect of DeMaria Design Associates, a Manhattan Beach, Calif.-based firm that has designed several container-based suburban homes. "It's people who understand the economics and understand the environmental benefits."
Each year, millions of shipping containers arrive on American shores. Because it's so expensive for empty containers to make a return trip across the ocean, DeMaria estimates that up to half never make it back. Some industry experts say the number of containers available for reuse hovers around 100,000, but can reach 700,000.
In addition to the several modern homes DeMaria's firm has already completed in southern California, it will launch a new line of shipping container homes in the coming weeks.
In the last year, he said, 25,000 people have inquired about these Logical Homes through the company's Web site. Each day, he said, about 10 others approach the firm by telephone or e-mail.
Although architects and builders have been experimenting with shipping container homes for the last few years, questions about structural integrity and legality have continued to nag.
But, DeMaria said, a home he designed for a family in Redondo Beach, Calif., last year changed the landscape for his company and others in the field.
Its completion demonstrated that a container-based building could conform to local building codes, he said, and proved that "it isn't going to fall down, rust away. The technical, functional issues have been put to bed."

From the Mobile to the Local

Adam Kalkin, a New Jersey-based artist and architect, was one of the first people to experiment with shipping container homes more than 10 years ago.
Now, he has about 12 container-based homes under his belt, in addition to a new crop of prefabricated Quik Homes. But, when he started, building homes from the steel shells -- 40 feet by 9.5 feet by 8 feet -- was more performance art than practical enterprise.
"For me, it was an intriguing idea. I like their very sculpture in nature. [They're] beaten up. They've had this history," he said. "God knows where they've gone, what they've done and what they've seen."
"I loved the idea that you've taken something that has been all around the world and you localize it," he said.
When Kalkin first started, builders were so reluctant to join his experiments in construction that he had to take hammer to nail himself and recruit his friends.
But now, he said, two forces are contributing to the growing acceptance of container-based homes: a slumping economy and increasing environmental awareness.

Converting the Containers

Founded two years ago, SG Blocks (for Safe Green blocks) is one of the companies at the front of the field working to source and convert shipping containers for construction. 

"We take instruments of trade -- cargo containers -- and turn them into instruments of construction," David Cross, the company's business development director, told ABCNews.com. 

Through a partnership with ConGlobal Industries, a leading retailer of shipping containers, SG Blocks has access to a network of 17 depots in North America that house used containers. 

But sourcing containers close to their destination sites, the company can significantly cut down on energy costs.
At these depots, metal workers torch, weld and remove rust to transform the battered steel boxes into large building trusses, he said. 

Depending on the container's condition, one container costs between $1,500 to $4,500 and needs about 100 hours of labor to prepare it for construction, Cross said.
In the last year, the company has converted about 100 containers for a handful of projects, including a two-story office building for the U.S. Army in Fort Bragg, N.C. Designed by the St. Louis, Mo.-based architecture firm the Lawrence Group, the building was made from 12 shipping containers converted by SG Blocks. 

In the next two years, the company expects to convert 5,000 containers for 50 to 80 residential, commercial and mixed-use projects across North America.
"Builders and developers are looking for a leg up. Everyone is really wanting to be green," said Bruce Russell, managing director for SG Blocks. 

Noting that the process of converting the containers into construction blocks consumes far less energy than the process of totally melting the whole container down, he said, "we have the greenest building structural system that there is." 

Attracted by the company's sustainable approach to construction, developers, architects and builders have had an overwhelmingly positive response, Russell said.
Right now, the company is working on a 220-unit dormitory for Lubbock Christian University in Lubbock, Texas, and a senior housing development in Oceanside, Calif. SLS Partnership, Inc., a Lubbock, Texas-based architecture firm, designed the dormitory and the Lawrence Group designed the housing development. 

Because the containers were designed to brave the elements at sea, they're perfect for hurricane- and tornado-prone parts of the country. They're also best suited for multiunit buildings. 

"The higher we go, the more cost advantageous it is," said SG Blocks' Russell.
Fifteen containers can be installed with one crane in one day, which means that months can be shaved off construction time. 

"This is far faster than conventional construction," said Dan Rosenthal, a principal with the Lawrence Group. "There are significant savings associated with that."
The larger the project, the more apparent the savings, he said. But, in general, an SG-based project is at least competitive with, if not 15 percent cheaper than a conventional project. 

John K. McIlwain, a housing expert at the nonprofit Urban Land Institute who saw an SG Blocks-Lawrence Group home at a recent conference, said he was impressed by both the economic and the environmental benefits of the innovation. 

"They strike me as a very practical solution to lowering the cost of construction," he said. "While costs of many materials are coming down, it's still going to go back again." 

Given the state of the economy, finding ways to reduce housing costs is very important, he said.
"It's not the answer, but it's one of the ways we can provide attractive decent housing to people at a lower cost of production."

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