Furnishing a permaculture home

[Peter Ellis]

<p style=”text-align: right;”></p>. Legs, rails and rungs for the undercarriage of a coffee table. Top will be oak slab(s). Materials all from our woods.

[tenalachfarms]

Current project is a “rustic” coffee table. Oak and maple harvested from our site, much of the wood is material that’s a by-product of felling and organizing timber for the frame of our house. This project is using some of the simplest techniques possible. Simple round wood, just peeled branches, with round tenons fitting into round mortices. I’m using an electric drill to operate a tenon cutter, but the tenons can be cut with a drawknife by hand. Tenon cutter in a drill is much faster. The mortice holes can be drilled with a brace and bit or a T auger, but again, much faster with an electric drill. For this work you want a heavy duty drill. The manufacturers recommend something like the Milwaukee Hole Hawg. I’m using the Milwauke Hole Shooter. Again, it can all be done by hand, just slower and with more effort.

For the top, I’m planning on using a slab or two from a white oak we needed to take down because it was a hazard to the house site. I plan on milling much of that tree into dimensional lumber for various elements of the house construction that don’t use roundwood. Things like window and door frames, sill plates on the foundation under the straw bale infill.

Permaculture isn’t just about food. There are all the other necessities of life to address as well.

I’ve got logs that I’ll be milling for dimensional lumber, but to prepare them for milling, I stripped the bark and used that as a mulch along the edge between our new fedge and the pathway alongside it. The milling will generate loads of sawdust, which I plan on stuffing into used feed bags and inoculating with oyster mushrooms. Function stacking and getting yields.

I’ve got several garden tools with broken handles. I also have wood, tools and skills that will let me make new handles and get these broken tools back into service. Repair, re-use.

Well managed, a forest ecosystem can supply food, fuel, construction and craft materials for generations. Coppice lots can produce on a cyclic basis for a thousand years and over that period feed, shelter, warm, comfort and provide income for forty generations.

It’s not just gardening techniques.

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