I’m deep into reading a biography by Linda Lear titled Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature. Carson’s most acclaimed book prior to Silent Spring was The Sea Around Us which I must admit I have never read. According to the biography, the night in 1952 when she accepted the Burroughs Medal for The Sea Around Us she said,

“Mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. He has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. Intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world.”

Although cohousing has existed for decades, I feel our Rocky Corner neighborhood is an experiment in turning around the destruction that often comes with new construction. Since the beginning of this project, and ongoing since then, “earth and water and growing seed” have been our focus.

Many of us think our future guide to approaching “earth and water and growing seed” will be permaculture. If I was going to change that phrase using the idea of permaculture, it would be “Human and earth and water and growing seed.”

Wonder if we could come up with creative ways to use this as our motto going forward. A song, a mural, a logo…Anyone?

-Submitted by Marie Pulito

Roof and wall sheathing are mostly in place, and north porches are framed for our first cluster.

New profile of Dan Batt at Centerbrook Architects.

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.

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, the Bethany Land Trust (http://www.bethanylandtrust.org/), the 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

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.

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.

Coverage in today’s Register

Architect’s rendering of Rocky Corner community layout. Computer-generated perspective view by Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Colored pencil by Charlotte Hitchcock. Colors identify the clusters to help you visualize the layout. Actual homes will not be the same color within a cluster.

Actual homes will have optional porches, dormers, skylights, and end windows selected by the original home buyers. Those shown are for illustration only. Buildings and improvements shown NEED NOT BE BUILT (our lawyer told us we have to say that).

To keep construction equipment of scenic Meyers Road, the first order of business is to establish the main driveway in from Old Amity Road, so that can serve as the main construction entrance.