I was wondering if anyone out there has built a strawbale barn? It seems that the walls might not take the abuse from goats, horses, pigs etc. Also, has anyone out w est used flood irrigation for a garden?

-- kevin beckey (Kevcin@bemail.com), February 22, 2000

Answers

I flood irrigated my garden where I lived twenty odd years ago. The garden was on a slope, about 10% slope; I built raised rows, maybe ten inches high, with waterways in between. These ran along the contour. When I added water to the top "ditch", the water filled up the ditch about four or five inches deep, soaking through the adjacent raised row on the downhill side, then filling up the next ditch, and on through the garden. I had to play around with cross ditches a little bit to get enough water to the lower rows, but it was fun. The best thing about it was there were no weed seeds sprouting around the plants, because it never got wet on the surface of the rows. We have very dry summers here; if it had rained, I'm sure we would have gotten weeds sprouting.

I suppose it also encouraged deep root growth, too, and had less eveaporation than sprinkling

Later, I tried doing this at my next house, where the garden was almost perfectly flat. It didn't work. Between the flatness of the grade, and the high clay content, the water would not soak through and under the rows. It woudl just fill up the first ditch to overflowing. If you dug down into the soil in a row, it would be dry. Went back to sprinkling.

Hope that helped some,

Malcolm

-- jumpoff joe (jumpoff@echoweb.net), February 22, 2000.

We built a strawbale chicken coop and it is working out fine. If you stucco both the inside and outside walls of a barn I would think that they would hold up to goats and horses---don't know about pigs. The insulation factor is great, our coop is comfortable for the chickens at 10 degrees or 90 degrees. By the way, as an experiment, we did not stucco and the bales are holding up well after a year now. We start construction on our strawbale house in a couple of months. Doug

-- Doug Shutes (toadshutes@yahoo.com), February 24, 2000.