Wattle and Daub

Wattle and daub is a composite building material used for making walls, in which a woven lattice of wooden strips called wattle is daubed with a sticky material usually made of some combination of wet soil, clay, sand, animal dung and straw.(from Wiki)

Remember a little while back, after we'd had a break and a little holiday. I came back all enthused having made a few decisions about the direction we would take. One of those decisions was to increase food production. Well to do that requires an increase in seedling production, but the propagation house was full to bursting already, so, we needed to increase the size of that first. So here is the story of the propagation house reno.

First start with one propagation house....

The propagation house is the little building to the left with window facing north to catch winter sun. Next to it is the cow shed with calf pen and milking bales. We have since moved the milking to another shed. Thisshed is now vacant and can be added to the other building by just removing a few panels of tin.We plan to add similar features as can be seen on the original nursery. A window to catch winter sun and and some thermal mass like the cement blocks. But we wanted to use resources that we had on hand, and liked the idea of wattle and daub.

We had the bamboo growing here on the farm for the' wattle'.......

Here you can see Mark cutting the bamboo

The 'wattle' is woven on the lower half of the wall'

A window we had stored away is installed in the top half.

And cladding nailed around the window. The cladding came from an old building that Mark and my brother dismantled a little while ago. Don't they look great?

I love the look of my new propagation house. The daub, for thermal mass, will be applied before next winter. We decided that there was no hurry in the warmer weather and the gaps would provide good airflow on humid summer days.
It doubles the space and now it's up to me to double the production.

I'm wondering where else I can use the "wattle' I've got a few ideas!