I did an interview with Jack Spirko over at The Survival Podcast. I got a lot of good feedback from the show and wanted to share that with you.
Jack: I'm going to go ahead and introduce our special guest again, Daniel Allen. He's going to talk to us about Aircrete today, building off grid. He's going to talk about some other cool stuff like building a subsistence diet of calories on apples. Spindle apples, is that possible? It might just be. We're going to talk about all that and more right now with our special guest Daniel Allen. With that, hey Daniel welcome to the Survival podcast.
Daniel: Thank you Jack.
Jack: I'm glad to have you on. We're going to be talking about Aircrete today and I've kind of renewed my hobby recently of looking at remote properties and things like that; looking for another property because we don't have one anymore. I think this is a really great topic because the first thing you think is, how do I put a structure on there? So, we're going to talk about that. Whether it be a remote property, whether it be a lifestyle design choice to reduce your cost of living I think it's awesome. But before we do that, how did you get to where you are now where this is what you do?
I know your history is pretty long from your bio but talk to me; how did you get started professionally in life and how did it lead you here?
Daniel: Well, as you say I had a very crooked path getting here. Raised by a government school doing all the usual things that everyone else does working jobs. But when I was getting tired of the rat race, I just happened to find your podcast and of course that started filling my head with ideas and I started looking at various alternatives but then life took the usual turn.
I moved back home, took an IT job, found love, all the usual things. But that company wound up being outsourced. They outsourced my job because Exxon had purchased the company which was the primary client for my company and in a matter of weeks that literally left me jobless. That was my own personal disaster as one might say. This was during the great recession if you will and jobs were very hard to find at that time. Basically, what happened is, I got really in a bind and I cashed out my little retirement and we paid for a little piece of land and we got started. I just committed to growing all of my own food. We built a little tiny house, we planted 400 trees on soils, we got goats and cows.
We had a tornado happen reasonably close to us which really just ruined the roof on the house and made the walls start to have mildew so, I started looking for alternative methods of building. About that time there were a number of people who were getting me more interested in alternative building so, I started attending various workshops on alternative methods of building like, rammed earth, earth ships and cob, earthbag and straw bales. And ultimately what I found with all of that was that, it's not only more expensive than conventional building but it takes a great deal of effort and work to move that much material. And in the case of straw, it's just not that really available in our area.
So, I began to contract a bit, I got my AC license and moved back into a more conventional lifestyle but ultimately that has proven to be not ideal, not the perfect life that I would choose to design for myself. So, I discovered aircrete while researching and I went and attended several out of the country workshops and I really fell in love with the idea because it's such a beautiful, craft-able material. It insulates, it provides structure and it's something that I can throw in the back of my truck and anywhere I can drive to, I can quickly put up a shelter. Not just any shelter but a nice shelter. So, looking at bug out locations and whatnot, it made sense to have a structure that also wouldn't be destroyed by pests while you're away.
Jack: What you're saying there is when you started out buying these other alternative building methods, some of them, I know people get really attached to the idea and I'm just like, they're not practical. One of the ones that I was thinking of when you mentioned these other options was the airship built out of tires. I'm sorry, I've seen way too many people in their eight year still ramming dirt into a tire. And you could say, I can get the tires for free and dirt for free but your time is not free. If you take 15 years to build a house, you could've bought a lot of houses in that time, I'm just saying.
Daniel: Exactly. And having done all of that, it's incredibly discouraging. The amount of labor and the physical pains. Not only that but who wants to gather up to all this trash to make your house out of? That's not exactly easy either.
Jack: There is a question too; I try not to be anti-tire Nazi because I see uses for used tires and all but I don't know that I really want to be working with tires for 15 years to build a house and breathing in tire dust. I don't necessarily think that is a good idea.
Let's talk about aircrete then. What exactly is aircrete?
Daniel: Aircrete is basically Portland cement that has been inflated six times in volume. So, you start with one bag of Portland cement and it becomes 6 cubic feet of an aerated, insulating cement product. That's it in a nutshell. It's structural, it's something that you can build out of. A lot of people have built domes out of them, there's a certain crowd that really likes the dome shape. And of course, domes being a compressive structure, are very strong. It's like a continuous arch. Certainly, you don't have to build only domes. We're actually developing a little get away cabin that one person can put together in just two weeks. Like I said, because they're so portable it makes it very practical and very comfortable to be in because of the insulating value that is entrained. It's actually the air that creates the insulation and the term aircrete is kind of the do it yourself version of what the industry knows as cellular cement. Only instead of using chemical additives we basically take soap and water and we make bubbles and we entrain that into the cement and those thousands and millions of microscopic bubbles are what forms the insulation in the cement.
Jack: How do you actually make it? I know you can't completely lay out everything because it's something that's very visual but how do you get that much air into the concrete?
Daniel: Well we have a mixture of soap and water and we have a pump and we have an air compressor. So, these two are mixed together in a line and it goes through a wand that is packed full of a fine, stainless steel wool. It's just like those little bubble wands you had as a kid, when you blow air through soap and water it creates a little bubble but because there are millions of pours in the structure, you're creating a very thick foam, almost like shaving creme. This foam is then injected into the bottom of a mixture of water and Portland cement. Then you just simply use a drill and just mix it and it will become entrained. It's actual the viscosity of the cement itself that entrains the bubble so the soap is only a temporary way to get the bubbles into the cement.
Jack: Is that highly specialized equipment? It sounds like stuff you could get at any Home Depot or Lowe's.
Daniel: Absolutely, it is exactly that. You can use a mixing barrel with a castor bolted to the side so you can take the labor off of your back. You use a standard drill that's just 8 amps or more, an air compressor that can deliver preferably 4 to 5 cubic feet at 90 psi. This is all off the shelf stuff. It's nothing complex or complicated whatsoever and it's what's so great. It's something that everybody can get their hands on. Everybody can try and people even make yard art or privacy walls out of it. It has other uses too besides just structures.
Jack: So, what is the cost of building with this material?
Daniel: When you talk about building, the most expensive aspect is usually the finishing. The shell itself, you put down the foundation and the shell of a dome for example and if you buy a pallet of Portland cement at somewhere like Lowe's who will actually give you a discount for buying in bulk then you wind up with the shell between $7 and $9 per square foot for your shell. It's the finishing of that structure that will more than double that price from there depending on what you're putting into it. If you're just wanting a simple hunting cabin or a storage shed or a studio that's one thing. If you're talking about building a house then appliances, flooring, cabinetry, all of those other things go into that and that price expands exponentially depending on how much of that you hire out for someone else to do.
Jack: How do you deal with thing like wiring, plumbing etc. with a solid wall?
Daniel: There are three approaches. One is to put the plugs and everything into conduits in the flooring that support into the foundation in advance and build the remainder into the interior walls because this is also very workable material. You can take a router however and you can just route through the wall and make a path to embed conduits and wires into the structure and then you seal it up with cement. The third option is of course you could cast a structure instead of stacking blocks, then you could actually put all of your conduits, your boxes and everything in place before you start and you simply pour around it.
Jack: And that would be obviously ideal if you can pull that off with the structure you're building.
Daniel: Yes.
Jack: Why would people choose to build with aircrete over putting together sticks and bricks pretty quickly? What is the big advantage of aircrete?
Daniel: We talk about our value with insulation. You talk about the cost of ownership of the structure over time and with aircrete you don't have moisture and air infiltration that actually decreases your insulating value. So, you have a very easy to heat and very easy to cool and their savings in the cost of ownership. But beyond that, if you actually compare the cost of fiberglass insulation to aircrete, the aircrete costs almost exactly the same as just the fiberglass insulation. However, it's not only insulation, it's structure. So, you also have a component of being able to build your structure very fast and very affordably.
Jack: So, you live in Texas, I live in Texas. We do have the Summer; we also call it temporary hell. How good is are the insulative properties? You're talking about going off grid here and to me, one of the difficulties of going off grid in Texas is not dying of heat exhaustion in the summer time. So, how good is it at that aspect of things?
Daniel: It's actually very good. The R value unofficially comes out around 2.8 - 3 R per inch which is similar to conventional construction. However, in actual tests where we build a vessel of 4 1/2-inch-thick block of aircrete and we fill it with boiling water and we measure the temperature change in that water over an hour. So, based on the pounds of water, we know exactly how many BTUs of heat are leaving through this material. And it winds up being somewhere around 2.6 BTUs per square foot a wall. When you compare that figure to let's say, a conventional 2x4 house, a normal stick box house, it's actually using half the energy of a conventional 2x4 frame house.
Jack: That's pretty amazing. Do you have any of these finished in Texas that you can say; hey I go in there in June and I don't die [laughs].
Daniel: [Laughs] Well, I'm working on mine right now and we're teaching workshops. So, being that I'm trying to transition into starting my own business, I have not finished that project intentionally because we started it last Fall and of course building this during freezing or cool weathers is a slow process because it chemically cures slower. But now that Spring is here, we'll be starting workshops and finishing that so, we should have two structures finished this year; a dome and a rapid build cylinder house that is actually going to be a bug out/vacation location out in the far West Texas environment.
Jack: As far as affordability, how would you classify it as a structure for like a bug out location?
Daniel: If you're looking for something quick and easy and you're not going to do much, literally you can travel out on a two week time period or I supposed you could do it over time on multiple trips but you could put up the foundation and the walls of a structure like this in just 6 days and you're looking at $9 a square foot to finish the shell. If you're talking about a bug out location, you're not necessarily immediately worried about it looking perfect so, you can literally use it at the end of two weeks you can start moving into it. It's incredibly practical. That to me is also a great value, to have something that's quickly available. I've actually talked to a lot of people who are looking for an option because a hurricane has destroyed their house and they're still people I've talked to that are recovering from the floods in Louisiana and New Orleans. They really like the idea of getting out of poisoned trailer into something that is quick and easy and something that's affordable.
If you look at a conventional structure, you've got all your conventional tools and materials. In this particular location where we're building, it's 76 miles from the nearest town and so, you've got to account for every screw, every nail, every piece of material that's going out there; the logistics of it can be a bit of a nightmare. With aircrete and an online calculator we have, you can just throw bags of cement on a trailer and of course you'll need water but anything besides that is really optional. It's such an easy building structure. Once you have your tools and material you just go and you put it up.
Jack: Where can these be built? You've got building restrictions and then you were mentioning being really remote and to haul material; what do you need on site to make this work?
Daniel: You need a generator. You need an air compressor. You need an 8 amp or greater drill, a 32'' mixer and your little foam machine which consists of a little pressure washing pump and an air regulator. You need a barrel with hinges and then some wood to build a form out of if you're making bricks or to build a form to cast it in.
Jack: And I guess the biggest thing you need is water.
Daniel: Yeah, you need water. For each 6 cubic feet of material you're going make, you're going to require 10 gallons of water. In the case of our bug out location, we actually went out there last year and put up a water catchment in a tank so the water is now on site and this is a location that doesn't have the option for drilling a well because there's not an aquaphor underneath this. It's about taking the uniqueness of your location and working according to that. Water catchment is certainly easier and cheap er than drilling a well in most locations.
Jack: So, we talked about using it as a bug out location but we've also talked about using it as a house, a place to live, a dwelling. One of the things you said in your show notes prep for me was that a person who really wants it, even if they're on minimum wage, could end up with land, a house and a car in 1 to 2 years. How long does it really take to build a starter house? Something a person not only could live in but would actually want to live in.
Daniel: Let's take an example of a 1-bedroom dome because I have the numbers in front of me here. Let's make it 24 ft. which gives you enough room for a living space, a small kitchen, a bedroom, a bathroom and a small walk-in closet. It's about 425 sq. ft and the cost of this structure for more or less, getting it ready to put cabinets in and to move into would be around $6,800 based on current big box store prices for materials. That's only $13.25 per sq. foot. You can make that if you're a disciplined person, reasonably quickly.
Somebody who's work 38 hours a week at minimum wage, you can pull in $200 that you can put into your pocket each week. It becomes possible to put up a shell of something like this very quickly. I'm a big fan of not continuing to pay rent. You might consider putting up a quick and easy structure; something small or something you can complete as a temporary shelter that gets you out of paying the rent, gets you out of potentially paying a mortgage very quickly. So, when you look at a small structure like that that's nothing more than a bedroom and a bathroom, you could almost call it a yurt, then you're looking at $1,462 to put something like that up. That's where this lends itself to a unique opportunity if you will, to build something small and quick and get on your land right away. That gives you the ability to then expand more quickly as less of your money is going out to other expenses.
Jack: That makes sense. The other time limitation here though is actually just temporal. How much man hours does it take to make this thing happen? Like I said, I've seen people we're building our air ship and it's 8 1/2 years and they're pounding a tire. If a person was going to build something, the 24 ft. 1-bedroom house, what type of number of man hours are they looking at on the labor to get the shell done?
Daniel: I can give you an example based on actual experience because we've built these in Mexico and we've built one in California now as a "storage shed" and a 24 ft. dome is something that once you have your tools and your process layout and you actually get rolling with this thing, it can take 1 person 14 days to finish the shell. What that looks like is, coming in each morning, you've got to break down your molds, remove all your blocks and cut them to size. So, you're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of say 2 1/2 hours to break that out, clean your mold, put it back together and then mix more aircrete and fill it. With those blocks, you then spend, and it depends on how quickly you work and how much you're willing to do in a day but say you spend another 5 hours that day stacking those blocks, you're up to 7 1/2 hours and you've completed one course of blocks. These blocks being roughly a foot in height and in a case of a 24 ft. dome, we actually raised the equator up off of the ground by 2 ft. so that you don't bump your head into the side of the structure when you walk up to put your shoes on. That means you now have a height of about 14 ft. That's only 2 weeks of work if you stick with this and you can consistently put 7 1/2, 8 hours a day of work in then yes, you can get this done in 2 weeks with 1 person.
Jack: With 1 person, and obviously 2 people would move, maybe not twice as fast but faster. You're probably still going to have 14 days because you're cutting your hours but you still have curing time.
Daniel: It's interesting. In the case of stacking a dome, you can make as many blocks as you can make molds for and as many people as you can get in mixing those. You could conceivably, if you really wanted to take it to the extreme, have one massive day where everybody comes out and mixes all the blocks for the whole structure and fills up a large form. That's not realistic necessarily but it just shows you that the labor can be divided. And after the blocks have cured 24 hours, even though they're not full strength, if you can pick them up without cracking them, then you can actually begin to build with them. You can pull them straight out of the mold and build with them. Because these are homemade, and I should make that distinction too, the industrial version of autoclave, aerated cement is cured with steam. The homemade box takes 28 days to come up to full strength. You can build with them right away and honestly, they're more than strong enough. We have 3 or 4 people walking on top of these even though the aircrete is only 3 and 4 days old. So, it's really not an issue at all with the strength in that early time. It's just kind of adapting and being intentional to handle things carefully so you don't break a green block.
Jack: You've been talking about blocks. So, we have these blocks and I guess then they are fitted together and are you using more aircrete on top of them? Are they mortared together? How does that work?
Daniel: Yes, they are mortared today with an additional mix of aircrete but it has a cement bonding agent added to it, so it really grabs a hold of all the blocks really well. It's a little bit of a point of contention whenever you're teaching people to do this you've got to really watch this. A lot of people want to stick rock and bricks together so they keep adding more and more cement to the mortar and making it thicker and stickier which this is not brick mortar, this is aircrete mortar. It's actually pretty thin so, in the case of building a dome where you actually have to tilt the blocks, you actually put wedges of finished aircrete or cut blocks into the spaces to prevent the block from settling back and smashing that thin aircrete mortar out. It cures with the same consistency then of the block itself and insulative property. You don't want a hard, rigid mortar next to a softer, insulating aircrete block because in theory, as the structure heats and expands and then cools and contracts, it could eventually cause cracking throughout the structure.
Jack: Can you kind of summarized then the advantages of building with this system and how it maybe fits into something we talk about all the time on TSP which is lifestyle design?
Daniel: You can build houses with one caviot and that is that, the homemade version of this is not code approved. So, getting that approved means getting a variance with your building inspector if you have to take that route and that is the best place to start. For places outside in the country where there aren't building permits which there's a lot of that land. It's very useful to not only build your house but you can build privacy walls. I have built aquaponics raft beds that contain the water out of aircrete. It's also useful for solar greenhouses because it's insulating and you can make your north, your west and your east walls out of this and it doesn't break down in moisture like wood does and it doesn't corrode and rot like aluminum does so, it's a very good structure for uses in food production as well. You might even look into just using it for making nice, decorative flower pots around the house. The uses are kind of up to your imagination but it's definitely very practical in terms of the home setting life or preparedness life. If your house were damaged you could set one of these up very quickly or perhaps you build one of these in advance and you get that multiple function out of it. You function stack that so it's your storage shed, it's your storm shelter or maybe later it becomes your plant starting area for your garden.
Jack: The concept of a storm shelter is very attractive in the south west and south east because we do have Tornado season and it is no joke and there are a lot of places where the in ground tornado shelters are not doable because we have a lot of rock in the state, Texas any way. People don't know this but the state with the most people on average die in storms every year is Tennessee. Which doesn't seem to make sense until you look at how long Tennessee is. People think of it as being small because north to south, you blink and you're through it but it's a huge state. And a lot of that country is granite.
Dome structures are incredibly strong and incredibly storm resistant so I think a storm shelter that is also a storage facility, a guest house or what have you... and I think even in places where you can't have it be a house according to your safety inspector, department of making you sad guy, just like a shed. No one's prevented from going out and being in your shed maybe even overnight.
Daniel: Exactly. In California which is one of the toughest states; because they don't allow cellular concrete, from my understanding, even with the commercial product because of potential earthquakes. Now having said that, they actually tested they actually tested this on one of a seismic machine and the machine broke before they could shake it apart [laughs], there's no official test results there. But whenever you look at the win-drag of a dome, they've used that to put tornado measuring equipment inside of it because the air just physically can't get a hold of it and pick it up. Even a round structure, we were doing a win-load calculation on a 10 ft. tall round structure and with that coefficient of drag, you wind up with roughly 95 lbs. of wind force at 185 mph per sq. ft. and actually, that is well below what this material can handle. It's a compressive strength structure but it doesn't have the tensile strength. In the same way they build bridges with re-barring cement or the foundations of your homes, you also need a tensile strength added to this and with aircrete building that is a reinforcing roofing fabric. It's a commercial material that's already available and it provides all the tensile; it's like a miniature re-bar if you will but it's actually a fabric that is wrapped and bonded to the structure.
Jack: Just so I understand the logistics here; we build the structure and then we wrap the structure in this fabric and then we put some kind of a layer over it, is that what you're saying?
Daniel: After your bricks are stacked or your building is poured, you literally apply a coating of aircrete and mortar to the block surface, then you apply your fabric and then you work it through the fabric with a trow and then you put on a finished coat of cement which is no aircrete, it's actually a very hard material. At that point it's finished, it can be painted or if you would like you could put in an acrylic stucco on it for a final finish.
Jack: That makes sense. Who would be capable of doing this? How much physical labor is it? Because everybody says everything's easy until you go do it, including the people who are ramming tires with dirt.
Daniel: [Laughs] Absolutely. If you have an office job and you don't do anything, it takes a little bit of time to get into shape so, the reality is that you can break this construction process up into manageable chunks. You don't have to work it all day every day. An example, the 24 ft. house, maybe one day you come out and you break out the blocks and set your mold back up and then you come pour it another day. You basically just manage it in chunks that you can manage. We had a 76-year-old man who has built his own home and he just moved at his own pace. If you're somebody who can't climb a scaffold or a ladder or you're not stable on your feet, it's also pretty easy to teach this process to unskilled laborer and as long as somebody who is knowledgeable is overseeing the process, you can get it done.
If you're financially limited and physically disabled, you can still get it done. You don't have to lift a 92 lbs. bag of cement. What if you just pick it up 1-quart scoop at a time until you get it done? Yes, it takes longer but you still can get it done so, really, I would say a mental preparedness attitude is really the key ingredient in getting something like this done.
Jack: So, we've talked about dome structures and there's a lot of advantages there. Can you build other dwellings in other shapes and how is that different if you do so?
Daniel: Well, you can make blocks and stack them into a more conventional square structure if you'd like. You can use a pole barn style and use the aircrete for infill. You can also build molds and literally just cast it like a monolithic pour in place. You can build round structures, you can build square structures, it's a very artistic material, it can be shaped. If you wanted to, you could cast this stuff into a wall and then you could scratch and etch to appear as stone or brick and then you could stain it and literally build something that looks like a castle out of it.
Jack: That's pretty cool. I've seen on your site, I was looking at some of the different designs like round structures but they're not really a dome, they're more like a tower shape with a more conventional roof. I guess those generally would be, you build a form and pour it instead of make blocks?
Daniel: Exactly. For the bug out location or hunting cabin, my preferred shape is the cylindrical structure and the reason is you can get that cheap quarter inch utility grade plywood for between $9 -$11 a sheet and you just put it together. Because it's round it supports itself very well. And you put this on top of your footing and you just start pouring aircrete and within 2 weeks you can be ready to move in. It's actually cheaper to put on a more conventional roof on a structure like that such as 2x12 that insulated. You can also finish that with a dome. These round structures are incredibly fast to put up. To me, that's the biggest advantage; they're affordable and quick to put up, it doesn't require you to make blocks and then mortar blocks and haul blocks and whatnot. The round structures are actually my favorite because of how practical it is to set up and because it's cylindrical, the air-drag even from a Tornado, is really not going to grab hold of it.
Jack: So, would you say there's people that this isn't for, maybe this is not the right decision for them?
Daniel: Absolutely. In fact, I would say if you have to be able to pull permit and you're not willing to do the ground work and get the engineer in the lab and you just want to go pull a permit and set this up in your city this isn't for you because it takes a great deal of work to convince somebody who doesn't like to get outside of what they know to give you a variance to give you a permit. Secondly, a bank i snot going to finance this. If you want to build a conventional house, you want to run down to the bank and get a loan for this and just pay someone else to do it, that's not going to get financed by a bank. On the flip side of that, if you're going to flip your house or you expect to sell your house and just move away very quickly, again you have the issue of you're going to have to owner finance it because a bank is not going to knowingly finance a homemade aircrete structure. If you can get no help and you're not going to be able to pay labor and you can't climb a ladder then certainly, I wouldn't encourage you to climb a ladder and do something you're uncomfortable doing.
Those are the main groups of people. It's not conventional, it truly is alternative construction.
Jack: I think one of the gotchas there too then can be, so you put all this effort into a property, build it, one thing we always have to think about is, what is our exit strategy if we want to sell it? You can't finance it to build it which means most likely, no one else is going to be able to finance it to buy it, at least with the value of the structure. So, somebody may be able to get land financing on that 20 acres you have but you're going to have a hard time selling it to anybody that's not a cash buyer.
Daniel: You are. Now having said that, there are private individuals out there who like investment bankers who can make their own personal decision to finance but no, you can't just run down to the bank ad sell this and move away with the money in hand. However, with given the price of building a structure like this, they are really lending themselves to being more in the lines of tiny and small houses. It doesn't cost a lot to build one and you probably could own or finance it which makes you more money in the long term but it does not give you the money to just run down to the next county or the next state and have the money as cash in hand to start over.
Jack: That's not a reason not to do it, it's something to think about and how much do I put into this if it's not my forever place, right? Because when we moved here, we found this house and just looking at the pictures alone we're like, oh we'll buy it. It was $260,000 and I looked at the kitchen and went, that's $100,000 kitchen and it was a [00:37:06] dome. It wasn't even non-typical construction. It was just round and we could not get financing on it. And the reason we couldn't get financing wasn't so much because the bank wouldn't do it but no appraiser would appraise it. It was ridiculous because they couldn't pole a cop is what they said. The city of Mansfield had no problem saying it was worth more money in taxing accordingly but it was almost impossible to get financing for it.
Daniel: [Laughs] Of course, that is the issue. It is out of the ordinary. Again, you could build it square but what do you compare it to whenever you're going to assess the value for it? It would be something considered more of a garden shed, a storage shed or something along those lines.
Jack: You do make good point about it being better as a small house type thing. I've always said about tiny houses, if I was going to use tiny houses, no matter how you built them there's a compound approach. You build your initial structure and then you know, there'd be a lot more room to cook if we had a kitchen so we built a kitchen structure, then they're having kids now so, let me build the kids a house. It seems to me that with this type of material you could kind of almost George Jetson it where you could build another one next to it and then create an archway to connect; I'm thinking about space pods or something.
Daniel: Absolutely. You can overlap the structures. You can take a wood blade and you could just cut the wall out. It's not like hard cement, it's easily workable so you can create new doorways as you add on or yes, you can build an archway across the front to connect structures together. And if you like earth ship type design, why not build an arch that connects all your structures in a line and make that an attached greenhouse?
Jack: Let's talk about some other stuff that you have here. You have something here you call spindle apples. You've got to feed yourself once you have your place to live. What are spindle apples?
Daniel: The tall spindle apple system is a system that's been developed by universities all over the country to bring a person into profit as quickly as possible. You literally start getting apples on the second year of production and they're trim. They call them tall spindle because of the shape. It's a culmarized set of apple trees where you tie the limbs down so the hormones go out to the tips and it produces apples sooner. You cut them off, they're only 3 ft. wide so, in the same way you might see tomatoes in a greenhouse that look like they're almost all tomatoes and few leaves, these trees look like this but at maturity, one tree is expected to produce 200 or more apples each year. The first advantage of getting production in the second year in the neighborhood of 20 to 30 apples per tree and then maturing into 200 apples per tree is a trellis system where you actually have to tie the trees up because you don't want them whipping in the wind and putting energy into building a thicker trunk. You want to get these trees to 10 ft. in height by the end of the second year because once they start setting fruit they really don't grow much more after that. It's a high production apple system.
What really intrigues me about fruit trees as opposed to gardening is, you plant them one time and they could potentially feed you for a lifetime and actually, when you examine the human digestive system, it actually really is optimized for digesting fruit. Having said that, you have to mention that not everyone's microbiome is in a good enough shape to just go to eating fruit without having problems, so it's not always or never. It is interesting that if you survive, remember the story of Johnny Appleseed, those apples helped a lot of people survive and as a survival food, there's really nothing that you can produce more food in a smaller space. You put these on a 10 ft. trellis system and you space them 11 ft. apart so that the sun can shine all the way to the bottom from the next row of trees and if you examine that and you look at the number of calories that you have to have when you're digesting fruit, you can have one row of trees 40 ft. long that can actually put you into a state of survival and that's amazing when you consider 11 ft. by 40 ft. and you're surviving.
Jack: What is the spacing on the trees themselves?
Daniel: 3 ft.
Jack: So, every 12 ft. you've got 4 trees?
Daniel: Yes. And when you do this, I would encourage to buy metal tubing to hang wire on as your trellis because we've had some issues with the modern treated timber even though the 4x6 [laughs], they'll just break off at random and the termites will eat them anyway.
Jack: Yeah, the termites don't eat steel. That's just one of the good things about steel. This is kind of cool. So, you've been actually doing this? You've been growing them this way in Texas?
Daniel: I have.
Jack: Have you find any particular varieties that do better than others?
Daniel: Well, we're having some struggle with the apple rust. Because we're in East Texas where at exactly the wrong time of year it starts raining and it stays wet and it stays humid for a long period of time so, your mold, mildew, every pestilence that you can imagine gets up into the trees. I haven't found one variety particularly any better than another except I will say this; Fuji apple, it tends to produce way too many branches and requires a bit more TLC to keep them in shape.
Jack: Are you using semi-dwarf, dwarf, what kind of root stock?
Daniel: They recommended dwarfing root stock but after ordering apples from Kuffel Creek and talking to them, I actually tend to agree with them and based on m experience, agree that not using a dwarfing stock is better because it's a much stronger, healthier tree that it takes less fertilizer and care and attention to keep that little tree healthy. Whereas a dwarfing root stock just doesn't reach out the way a regular root stock does.
Jack: We control the tree and any trees formed with pruning and I've always thought controlling with the root stock is probably not the best idea. The university of Massachusetts is championing this method, there are pretty cool pictures I'm looking at right now. There is a difference between the soil and the climate in Massachusetts growing an apple than Texas. Whether it's your red prairie or my black prairie, it's a harsher environment there and anything you can do to give that tree more resilience just seems to make sense to me.
Daniel: I agree completely. In the north you have a dormant season when it's cold but in Texas we have a dormant season when it's cold and a second dormant season when it gets so hot the bacteria in the soil says yeah, I'm done for a while and the nutrients aren't in the soil so, with a dwarfing root stock, the tree doesn't really have the reach to get out and grab that and I can see the difference between my dwarf trees and my standard sized trees. The standard sized trees, they just go on. I don't fertilize them; I don't even generally water them and they do fine.
Jack: This is really interesting. It's something I'm going to have to look more into is developing the full system with it because you talk about survival and survival is about more than calories. You mentioned Johnny Appleseed; this country ran on apples for the first half of our existence. What destroyed the apples in this country was prohibition. People don't realize that. More people drank hard ciders than beer before prohibition. Beer was like, prohibition's gone! And you can commercially make alcohol now again. All the guys that ran the orchards were going broke so they cut the trees down so it's going to take us years to have apples again. I know, let's malt barley and make beer and that's when we really became a beer drinking country. It has a lot to do with distilled alcohol as well. But you go back to that time and it wasn't just hard cider. You had apples. So, you now you had juice, you had jelly, you had vinegar, you had cider both hard and not hard. You had apple butter; apple was the foundation of the homestead. When people would get their 40 acres and a mule, the first thing they would do is plant an apple orchard generally from seed and over time they would be like, this is a good apple for making cider, this is a good apple for making vinegar. Now if I can make cider and vinegar and I have eating apples, I've got so much of that survival component taken care of. I can sweeten with certain apples; I can use vinegar for curing etc. And so, the apple has this incredible array of things that it can do so, I'm kind of glad that you threw that in there.
Daniel: The apple is really pretty miraculous. I don't want to sound like a snake oil salesman but when you look at what you can do with an apple; when you talk about survival, you can get to a point of survival very, very quickly and from that you can add on the layers of luxury and the things that you want in your life to just live that better life. Honestly, whenever you've got a 50-gallon drum of apple cider set up, it's like having canned food. It creates this deep sense of accomplishment and security that is really difficult to describe to somebody. Apples are something that work really well and with a tall spindle system, we're talking about having apples the second year if you go and buy these trees at the nursery where they're already 5/8 of an inch whip and then you have to spray those with a hormone to make them branch more.
The trees that I buy from the Kuffel Creek nursery because they're only 3 or 4 inches tall, they have taken 3 years but they have set apples this year.
Jack: That's more of a long-term concept I think when you're dealing with Kuffel Creek. One of the things I learned from them which would be very advantageous in a system like this is staging your harvest; early, mid, late season apples so that you don't get everything at once. I had them on the show years ago, I probably need to go reach out to them again.
Let's move a little bit from there though. So, we built this place, put our apples in and you eat enough apples or anything, sooner or later you've got to poop. So, let's talk about how we handle waste with one of these off-grid cabins. What people typically do at least to start out, a human moo, bucket toilet or something like that. Is there anything better out there than that approach?
Daniel: Yes. I've done it all and honestly with certain first world expectations, I really don't want to deal with it because no matter what you say to human or bucket, especially in Texas with our heat, it does stink. You can try building a box and putting a fan in it and if you ventilate enough air you generally don't smell it but then people won't come over to visit you when they have to look down in there, right. We have a system, we didn't develop it, we're just borrowing the best of the best from everywhere we can find it; a flushing compost, worm composting system. You use a low flush toilet and this is flushed into a container that can be made out of just brick or you can pour it in place with regular cement so, it's something you don't necessarily have to buy a tank for. It's sizeable, you can calculate how much of this you need and what's amazing about it is that you fill this container, you have a drain that comes off of the bottom or you have a sewer grinder pump in the bottom to life that liquid. So, the liquid never stays in the composting chamber and the amazing thing is the more you use it, the less material that is in this container. We find that twice a year you have to add back woodchips to this. The wood provides the carbon and processes out the nitrogen. And the nitrogen coming in helps it break down quicker but the liquid itself just passes through and is sent into a 75 - 100 ft. by 2 1/2 ft. woodchip bed that's lined with a liner. So far, we've never seen a discharge from a system because you plant all sorts of water hungry plants, maybe even a willow tree in this growing area. If you wanted to make a system like this legally when you could take the end of this system and put it into a conventional sceptic system.
Jack: Interesting.
Daniel: And there's an option. Texas A&M actually has a constructed wetland set up and designed that of course has gone through all the hoops and is approved and they can't really argue with a system like that either. There are alternatives and honestly, you're talking about living a better life. If I'm surviving, I want to survive well and hauling buckets of poop around just isn't...
Jack: I'm not doing it. I'll do it in an actual emergency situation if I have to. I'm not designing my life that once every few days you have to pick up a 5-gallon bucket of poop and haul it somewhere. I just would like to believe that I am a better designer than that. So, I'm going to find something better than absolution.
You talk about survival mindset and we talk around here, water, food, shelter, sanitation, security and energy. What would you say is a luxury survival item next to that?
Daniel: When you're surviving, if you're really surviving you have the stress situations, they burn up extra vitamins in your diet and you want something nice so, that luxury item is very unique for each individual. That's something that you've got to examine for yourself. For some people it might be a big supply of hot chocolate. For me, I really enjoy a nice hot tub as well as a cold dip right beside the hot tub. I have my aquaponic systems and I at this point will go float with the fish and watch shooting stars at night [chuckles]. It's about your unique desire to plan that in. Truly, you want to survive in a mentally well way. You don't want to feel like you're missing out on something. You don't want to be struggling with your internal thoughts because you're just hiding from something or you're just getting by. You want to build luxuries into your life and you know, that flush toilet might be one of them. Another one might be a recycled, solar heating hot water shower where you can use 5 gallons of water and take a 3-hour bath for comfort. It's about designing these things into our life based upon what our personal and individual needs are. And of course, starting all of this with the right attitude, that general human toughness that's hey, you know what. No matter what, I'm going to be alright. I can do this.
Jack: Gotcha man. So, if people want to take your courses, and I know you have on site courses, people can come out, hang out, spend a couple day; you've got predesigned date on that. You've even got things wheree people can say, hey I want to come out and learn this, and set their own date. And you have online courses where people can basically get all the information on video. Where do people find all of that?
Daniel: You can find all of that at our tinygiantlife.biz website. Sign up for the email list because you'll be able to get a series of emails that basically take you from what is aircrete? To what are its advantages? All the way to, how do I build with it? So, it's a way to get the information coming to you automatically. And I will say this, about 30% of the people who come and take a workshop for example, they decide that aircrete is not for them. It's not necessarily wasted money to get a video course and find out what is actually going on or to even attend a workshop.
We do our daily workshops where you can schedule it on your time and just come out by the day if you'd like.
Jack: You do have some preset ones coming up. Do you want to talk about what dates are available there?
Daniel: We're going to be starting several of those.
Jack: It's in May.
Daniel: The issue with these things, it seems like people always wait till the last minute to actually make any reservations so, it's kind of like you don't give it much thought until you're suddenly upon the deadline.
Jack: I've got them for you. I'm on your side.
Daniel: I've got them. March 15 was sold out. We've got May 31 and that's going to be a continuing project, it's not from scratch. We're going to continue building a student project in Tyler at the Tyler, Texas workshop building at 24 ft. 1-bedroom dome. June 22 will be more of the same and then October 12 we're going to build one of those rapid build, cylindrical aircrete cast houses as a bug out location/get-away vacation spot and that's out near Terlingua, Texas near the Big Ben National Park.
Jack: That sounds like where you get lots of land for a little bit of money.
Daniel: They give it away out there because generally it costs more in taxes than the land is.
Jack: [Laughs] Anyway man. Again, the website is tinygiantlife.biz. I appreciate you being with us today man. I hope you have a good day. Thanks for sharing this with us. I think it's going to help a lot of people.
Daniel: Well, thank you Jack. I really enjoyed it and I appreciate you.
Jack: Great interview, really interesting content. The kind of stuff I love, like how to take control of your life. I don't think this for everybody. Daniel himself said it's not for everybody. But maybe it's for you. You want to learn more? Remember his website is tinygiantlife.biz, definitely worth checking out.
With that, we've wrapped up another episode of the show. I hope you guys did enjoy it.