Our growing season at Rocky Corner is coming to an end. Our first field of mixed vegetables can be seen in this wonderful drone photo taken by Rocky Corner friend Domingo Medina. He and Brenda Caldwell are learning about our soil, how to enrich it with amendments, how to help the microbes become healthier and thrive. Soil has a microbiome that helps plants to grow, just like humans have gut bacteria that keep us healthier.

Domingo runs Peels and Wheels Composting in New Haven. Residents and businesses subscribe to his service. Using a cargo bicycle (Wheels!), he picks up kitchen scraps (Peels!) and other biodegradable materials left at the curbside. Domingo pedals it all to his composting enterprise at Phoenix Press Farm. This is the property below the large wind turbine you can see from the I-95 Quinnipiac River Bridge. Peels and Wheels compost is produced with solar powered  aerators that speed up the decomposing process.

We are building a relationship between Peels and Wheels and Rocky Corner farm so that his beautiful, rich compost can be one of our key soil-building amendments!

 

It’s beginning to look real. The first building has all three home types (one-bedroom type A, two-bedroom type B, and a type C, which nominally has three bedrooms, but this one has two bedrooms and a study).

The slab is insulated from the ground and wrapped in a vapor barrier that will extend up and over the whole building. All of the underground conduits and pipes are in place, and the carpenters are working fast.

The builder, the architect, and the structural engineer are checking to be sure everything is tight and sound.

And the main thing is that now we can stand in a home and get a realistic sense of the interior spaces.

The heavy rain storm last week was a challenge for our builders, but they have persevered and five homes are ready to be slabbed. What I mean is that they have placed the pipes, the forms and the insulation and are ready to pour the cement on Monday. The weather looks perfect for the weekend so everything should go as planned. I don’t think we will be out there with a champagne bottle to christen the pour, but a few of us may go to watch. This is Nancy and Rich’s home in the photo. so they may want the front row seats!

 

 

Two reps from Home Energy Technologies came to the site to review the requirements for Energy Star certification. They are excited about our project and find us in compliance with everything from lighting (all LED) to air barriers to insulation. Our foundations exceed the > R10 Energy Star insulation requirement for slab on-grade. We will have R16! If you don’t know about R values, an insulating material’s resistance to conductive heat flow is measured or rated in terms of its thermal resistance or R–value — the higher the R–value, the greater the insulating effectiveness.  R16 reduces the heat flow (in or out) by 95%.

Why are we doing slabs rather than traditional New England basements? The slab in every building at Rocky Corner is a heat sink. It will absorb heat during a sunny, winter day. The slab will gradually release the heat during the day and into the evening which will naturally warm up the house. That means less need for other heat sources that cost money. Free heat!

Lots to be proud of and to brag about. Rocky Corner homes will rock when it comes to energy efficiency!

 

 

The site contractor is backfilling and compacting the trenches where the under-slab utilities were laid for the first cluster of homes. When this step is complete, peripheral shaped trenches will be prepared for the haunches (shallow frost walls). These will be lined with a four-inch insulation layer that extends across the whole platform under the concrete slab.

 

The dark gray material is structural fill compacted level. The fill is cleaned and crushed recycled concrete. The next step is laying out the underground services (pipes and conduits) that will poke up through the concrete slab into the living space. The plumber needs to be able to pinpoint where those pipes come up relative to walls. Al, our construction manager’s ever-resourceful site superintendent had the clever idea to lay out the locations of all the walls using metal studs spiked into the fill. Unlike stakes and string, the studs aren’t going to move, and the plumber can measure accurately from them.

After trenches are dug and the pipes are in place, the trenches will be refilled and compacted again.

The next layer up from the fill is four-inch-thick rigid, closed-cell, high-density polystyrene foam insulation. Here it is, stacked and ready go to for the first two clusters. The concrete slabs will be poured on top of the foam.

Permaculture is a design process that works to meet human needs while increasing ecosystem health. We have definitely designed Rocky Corner to meet our needs as people while thinking of the Earth and our own land every step of the way.

The ethics of permaculture includes three important values:  Earth Care, People Care, and Resource Share. We can find all of these in our vision statement.

Rocky Corner’s Earth Care:

“We are devoted to preserving, protecting, nurturing and regenerating the natural environment.

• We are committed to learning about and adopting practices that minimize consumption of energy, water, and other natural resources.
• We strive to balance farming and community life with the preservation of wildlife habitats.
• We consider the Rocky Corner community, the wider human community and the health of the Earth when making decisions and choices.”

Rocky Corner’s People Care:

“We are dedicated to fostering a friendly, open, vibrant, mutually supportive atmosphere.

• Our communications, relationships, actions and behavior are honest, direct, respectful, nonviolent and caring.
• We are committed to equal access to power in decision-making. Our primary way of attaining this goal is by using sociocracy.
• We strive to create a neighborhood that is supportive and inspiring for individuals and families.
• Our community promotes the physical and emotional health, safety and security of our members and guests.
• We make space in our lives for play and artistic expression. We encourage continual learning, skill sharing and teaching.
• We seek out and are open to new ideas and to all interested people who share our vision and values and are able to share fully and fairly in community responsibilities.”

Rocky Corner’s Resource Share:

“We actively sustain our community and maintain our property by sharing work and responsibilities.

• Our community is planned, designed and managed by the members with attention to aesthetics and in a manner that supports our vision.
• We work cooperatively for mutual benefit.
• We make ownership as affordable as possible.”

I personally love our vision statement. It took us about a year to identify our mutual values and then write this into a statement that turned out simple and eloquent.

The work we are doing now to create Rocky Corner is still focused on our values. I am proud of all of our future residents, working so hard and keeping the vision alive.

Conduits have been placed in a trench parallel to the main drive. Two are for electric service (one to be used, the other a spare, required by Eversource, in case anything happens to the first one). One is for Frontier, for landline service. One is for fiber optic Internet service. No clue why there’s a fifth conduit in the picture.

 

The top of the polymer concrete box at the left at at finish grade. It’s a protective structure to allow an electrical worker to access the power line to splice wires and make repairs.

Here’s what we’re pursuing (don’t know if we’ll be able to pull it off): We may be able to entice a solar company to own and manage our electrical distribution system. What does that mean?

• The public utility, Eversource, would supply power to a single meter for the community. The solar company would pay for and own the electrical distribution system from that meter to all the buildings, as well as solar panels on all buildings (all the homes and the common house to start, with the possibility of solar-roof carports too). They would be responsible for maintenance and repair of the system.
• The system would incorporate battery storage as well as smart controls connected to our HVAC systems and our major appliances. This would allow the company to manage peak demand to minimize the rate they would be paying Eversource for power.
• The solar company would sell the solar-generated power back to Eversource. We would pay for all the electricity we use, with a small discount. So as homeowners we would not be saving a great deal of money on electricity every month. However, we would not have paid for our solar panels, and we would have saved tens of thousands of dollars on the initial construction.
• HERE’S THE KICKER. In the event of an area power outage, which can typically last for days in Bethany, we would have continuous power to our homes. For individually owned solar systems like those you see scattered in residential neighborhoods, this isn’t possible. When the grid goes down, your solar system is turned off. But for the system being proposed for Rocky Corner, the battery storage and the load management software would enable us to keep the lights and heat on.

Bottom line, the tradeoff is that instead of buying a $20,000 solar system yourself and then hopefully paying for it with reduced power bills, you would be paying nothing for the system and getting a token discount on your power bill. But the big benefit is the protection against power outages.

Wish us luck.

What can Rocky Corner cohousing bring to the small town of Bethany? We can bring new people to Bethany who are interested in how they are living together and how they are living on the land. We can bring people to town who are hard working and creatively thinking.

We can get involved in the local government and committees like the Sustainability Committee (http://bethany-ct.com/bethany-sustainability-committee/), the Bethany Land Trust (http://www.bethanylandtrust.org/), the Conservation Commission (http://bethany-ct.com/organizations-and-groups/commissions/conservation-commission/). Membership in some committees are elected positions; others are volunteer.

There were people in the town who were afraid of our project and probably still are. Let’s show them that our friendliness and our vision is good for Bethany and that we can help make it a stronger town.

Read more about Strong Towns and cohousing here – https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/18/cohousing-offers-a-different-way-to-live?gclid=CjwKCAjwtIXbBRBhEiwAWV-5nqD-iWaX9gGgS6kT5Ado1YZkSg_oKJkomAvQF1dVI3oe6qpYp4RklhoC85EQAvD_BwE

Recent progress:

• Water storage tank is backfilled and covered. Next, a standpipe will be installed and the tank will be filled with water. That’s the point at which the fire marshal will give us the go-ahead to bring construction lumber onto the site.
• We saved the trees! Our construction superintendent alerted us to a problem: a drafting error on our site plans resulted in the ring road wiping out a couple of immense white oak trees that everyone wanted to save. Fortunately the architect and site engineer were able to work out a plan to save the trees by rerouting the ring road and moving a few parking spaces. And the solution improved both the view from homes and the scenery for drivers.
• We sealed the deal for our Internet service. Every home will have its own dedicated fiber optic line for Internet service. You will have 500 Mbps download speed and 500 Mbps upload speed standard, with an option to upgrade to 1 Gbps and another option to have a static IP address if you need it. The basic cost is $67 a month and is guaranteed never to go higher. Add an inexpensive streaming service for your favorite television and movie channels; add a voice over IP service if you want to; and you’re all set. Once the common house is closed in and wired for power, the service will be available, not too long after the first cluster or two of homes are finished.
• We will also have conventional landline service available from Frontier, for those who want the security of a phone that will continue to work in an extended power failure. (If you are someone who is fine with having no landline, you’re not alone. The Frontier representative said they would run wire to all thirty homes but they’d be surprised if they picked up more than ten subscribers. Times have changed.) Meanwhile, with a cell tower as an immediate neighbor, we have five bar cell service on all carriers.
• Trenching for utilities is in progress. We should have electrical power on site in another week or two. Fiber optic and phone conduits will be in the same trench.
• Structural fill is being placed for the first cluster.  Under-slab plumbing work will begin shortly.

 

What you get when you cut up potatoes.

 

 

31,000-gallon water tank. The eight precast concrete sections were placed yesterday, amid intermittent thunderstorms. The sections have rubber gaskets between them and, basically, gravity keeping them from separating enough to leak. The sections are not tied together. The hole will be backfilled and covered with a layer of dirt before the tank is filled with water. Only a fire hydrant will be visible when it’s done.

The crane operator was not thrilled about the weather, but the site superintendent was watching the minute-by-minute forecast on the Weather Channel and called for breaks when the storm clouds rolled in. By 7:30 pm the tank was in place and the crane was loaded for transport.

The two end sections have temporary concrete access covers that will be replaced with steel covers once the tank is fitted out for the fire department. Who knows what an archeologist a thousand years from now will think this strange structure was intended for.

 

Char made a timelapse movie this morning of the guys installing section 2 (of 8 total) of the water tank.

 

This morning, the site contractor finished getting the bottom of the pit down to grade. This is looking over the brink into an eleven-foot-deep hole where bedrock used to be.

This is where the water storage tank will be buried. A minute later, a loader smoothed out the temporary slope . . .

. . . and then they started laying a bed of crushed rock in the bottom for the concrete tank to rest on. The tank is due to be installed Thursday.

The pit being dug here is about eight feet deep in the video, with about three feet further to go. Once it is leveled out and the bottom is filled with a level layer of structural fill, the hole will house a 31,000 gallon concrete water tank. The water will be available to the Bethany Fire Department in case there is ever a fire at Rocky Corner.

A fire engine will pump water out of this tank and into a series of dry hydrants arrayed on a water main down the center of the community. This water supply is not connected to the water we’ll use every day. Sprinklers in the homes are connected to the domestic water supply.

 

. . . construction site.

You have to break some eggs . . .

Ledge (gray schist bedrock), inconveniently located where the common house is supposed to go, yields to a pneumatic hammer delivering 8,000 pounds of force.

Our site contractor has stripped a great deal more topsoil from the construction area than will be needed to regrade the site after the homes are built? What should he do with it? We decided to use it to increase the depth of topsoil in the primary vegetable growing area between the main driveway and Meyers Road.

 

A bonus is that spreading it now will smother all that mugwort and will allow us to get a cover crop in soon.

The soil is a rich sandy loam with excellent tilth. We did not go to the added expense of screening it. This is New England; what would we do without rocks in the soil?

 

 

 

Rather than renting a trailer for several thousand dollars and having nothing to show for it after construction is complete, we authorized the purchase of this portable building.The construction manager will outfit it with power, insulation, and heat. After completion of the project, they’ll deliver it to the farm core, where it will serve as a utility building. One end is a garage door, so we’ll be able to store a tractor or truck in it.

The dark hump in the driveway that looks like a sleeping dog is actually the top of a knob of bedrock. For the time being, workers are driving around it. Within the next few days, it will be broken up and removed. We’re waiting for the four-ton hydraulic hammer to come to the site. (Four tons is the force rating, not how much the hammer weighs.)

 

From left: Melissa Kops (original project architect), Connecticut housing commissioner Evonne Klein, Bethany first selectperson Derrylyn Gorski; Carla Weil, Capital for Change; Marie Pulito, Rocky Corner; Rob Crowner, Equity Trust; David Berto, Housing Enterprises, Inc.; E.J. D’Ettore, Ion Bank; Dan Batt, Centerbrook Architects; Brenda Caldwell, Rocky Corner; Dick Margulis, Rocky Corner.