Owen,

“We launched our new VelaCreations.com website, with a special focus on our How-To articles, which now number over 50, with another dozen in the works. There’s a lot of shelter-related articles, from our Rapidobe system to ferrocement, to making all sorts of things around the homestead.

We also released our new book, Food Web: Concept, last week. It’s about integrated farming on a small, backyard scale, and how to use waste streams to produce food. It’s written from a personal, DIY perspective, and I’m sure it’s something you’d be interested in.

Let me know if you have any questions.”

Thanks, Abe

Here is what our land looked like before:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B4QFxJhd7QhxV2hZVFJGV2wzU00&authuser=0

“A forest planted by humans, then left to nature’s own devices, typically takes at least 100 years to mature. But what if we could make the process happen ten times faster? In this short talk, eco-entrepreneur (and TED Fellow) Shubhendu Sharma explains how to create a mini-forest ecosystem anywhere.” Read more from > How to Grow a Forest Really, Really Fast

Chris Dancey put together a video titled Natural Building Overview that shows many different natural building options. The screenshot above was taken from his video. I like the chart because it shows at a glance the various natural building materials and methods in an organized way. Read more from > Natural Building Materials and Methods

Harvey Lacey’s Ubuntu-Blox block building machine was featured in seventh place in yesterday’s blog post on Top 10 Cottage Industry Products. Today’s blog post shows how his block making process has shifted to using extremely low cost materials – vetiver roots, the waste material from making vetiver oil. The end result is similar to straw bales except the bales are smaller, lighter, more insect resistant and they’re made on site with waste materials. The mini bales are less expensive than ordinary straw bales, take up less space and can be made without an expensive baling machine. His open source plans make it easy for anyone to build his machine quite easily. Read more from > Building Blocks at a Fraction of a Penny Each

We covered cottage industry appropriate technology in a previous blog post. The aim here is to identify the top 10 products for ease of construction, impact on community and potential profitability. These products obviously go way beyond just creating jobs and making a buck. The products featured here will have a big impact on local communities. Some are saving thousands of lives. Water filters, for example, help prevent disease. Treadal pumps have enabled hundreds of thousands of farmers to greatly increase crop production. Read more from > Top 10 Cottage Industry Products

“Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert,” begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it’s happening to about two-thirds of the world’s grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes — and his work so far shows — that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert.” Read more from > Allan Savory: How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change