November Project Update

A lot has happened since our last project update.  Thank you all for your patience and your continuing interest and support with the creation of the Treehouse Learning Center.

We have finally finished with the tree clearing of the new half acre plot.  Check out the past four months of work in our tree removal time lapse.

This process was enlightening to say the least.  It's nice to have the highest liability work out of the way.  We had a great group of volunteers join us in cutting the trees and cleaning up all of the debris.  Thank you to all of the friends who helped with that!   

James Toye mastered sharpening the chain saw

Ben Case is getting strapped up with the go-pro hard hat

We will be using all of the debris from the trees for different purposes including:

Inoculating mushroom logs with spawn and technique from Mushroom Mountain

Thanks Tradd and Olga for the Spawn!

Carly, Kalen, and Chelsea drilling and plugging some birch logs

Next we will be constructing a trailer for a band saw lumber mill that we acquired through a friend.  We will use the Mill to transform Logs into usable material.  This milling machine will give us an additional source of income in the future, adding value, knowledge & resilience to the Treehouse Project.

Thank you Greg Fowler for Letting us use the mill!

We will use the milled lumber mainly for construction of the Eco barn and the Community Center.  Sketches of the community center have not been completed yet.  Once we complete the milling, we will build a simple solar kiln for drying the wood.  Hopefully the wood will be dry enough to utilize in the spring of next year, but we might have to supplement the drying with a fire heat source.

The Eco barn will have sleeping quarters, material, & tool storage as well as  food, and energy production

This winter we will begin planting some of the new trees for the edible food forest on the north side of the project.  We also have quite a bit of mulching to accomplish once we get our mulcher fixed.  Thank you Danny Malpass for helping us fix the mulcher.

Some other cool recent happenings

-Jessica researched soap making and made a few batches which turned out really well.  Thanks Jess for the awesome home made soap!

-Tom helped us harvest three quarts of honey from our bees for the first time. Yum!  Thanks Tom!

 

Spinning honey from the comb with a centrifuge

Carly and Chelsea candled some Eggs after 10 days of incubating to determine if they were fertile.  Out of this batch of eggs came our special miracle duck Noah.  He's super friendly and follows you everywhere.

What's currently happening with the Treehouse Project?

We are interviewing some individuals interested in living at the project.  It is very exciting to see an increasing number of participants.

Scott is in Missouri working with Open Source Ecology (OSE) to design and fabricate some of the worlds first open source hardware called the Global Village Construction Set.  Over the past few days, Scott has been collaborating with Marcin Jakubowski, Chris Reinhart, Sam 'the techie' Carlyle, and Rob Kirk to finish the design and begin fabrication and real time documentation of the Trencher.  Check out what OSE has done so far through their Dozuki.  You can also check back to this blog post to keep up with the daily progress on the project or visit Scott's OSE log 

Here is a video time lapse of today's work on the modular wheel units


So how can you get involved with the project?

Learning some great ideas and strategies from OSE, we have created a wishlist through Google Docs.  We will keep this as a running list of thing we could use to expedite progress.  You can check out our wishlist here.

Thank you all for checking our our project update.  We hope to inspire and help others create resilience at home and in communities around the world.  Lots of love and appreciation to you all.

-Seneca Treehouse Team-