We talk about a variety of fun topics in this episode including yurt building (and touch on some other traditional/natural building techniques), managing a coppiced hardwood forest, English green woodworking, and traditional lime wash and lime production in the UK.
Alex and his wife Selene run Little Foot Yurts, which produces handmade, coppice wood yurts up in Nova Scotia, Canada and he was gracious enough to come on and chat for awhile about how they build their yurts, additional natural building techniques/methods, and various other traditional skills he has experience with.
Great chat, enjoy!
Resources Mentioned
Little Foot Yurts — Alex and Selene’s website
The Green Gathering Festival — Held in Wales at the end of July
Museum of Welsh Life (St Fagans National Museum)
The Deanery Project — A lot of focus on natural building, Kim Thompson is the executive director. We talked about Kim in relation to various straw bale building stuff so I thought I would put a link to her work, but didn’t see a website for her specifically so I included this one.
simondale.net/hobbit — The “hobbit house” Alex mentioned. This is also the same as beingsomewhere.net (the second link goes to the homepage).
Books
- Small Scale Lime Burning by Michael Wingate
- The Encyclopedia of Green Woodworking by Raymond Tabor
- Green Woodwork by Mike Abbott
- Living Wood by Mike Abbott
- The Woodland Way by Ben Law
- Woodland Craft by Ben Law — Alex actually mentioned a book called Woodland Crafts by Mike Abbott, I was unable to find that one but this one popped up whenever I did that search. I included it here as Ben Law was the author of another book he recommended.
- The Straw Bale House by Steen, Steen, Bainbridge & Eisenberg
…. And I’m still trying to figure out how to embed the Little Foot Yurts video I mentioned in the intro, I’ll put it here when I get the tech figured out!
