Plastering at the Cabin, Part 2

Contrary to popular belief, it takes a long time for natural adobe homes to return to the earth from which they were made.  The roof (with 2' overhang) has protected these unplastered walls for over 30 years with no discernable 'melting.'  As time goes by and the interior is basically done, I realize I have to finish the exterior.  So the plastering has begun.

The process is pretty straightforward.  Obtain screened soil with the appropriate clay/sand ratio, add a binder  (I'm using horse manure - I have a ready source), add water and mix.  It's a good idea to wait a few hours to let the mud fully hydrate.  Remove dust from the wall, hose it down to help adherance, and then apply mud.  Adobe mud is great stuff . You can keep working it forever on the wall.  You can keep your mud till the next day.  If you have too much mud you can let it dry and put it back in the garden, or the yard, or maybe make some adobes with it.   

As for the technique, everyone develops their own.  I do not plaster with a trowel because I have a difficult time maneuvering the tool with mud on it.  I use my hands to apply the mud, and because I don't have calluses, I use thin leather gloves to maintain my feel for the wall and keep my skin from being ground off by abrasion.  Plastering is fun and the end result looks great (as you can see in the photo below).

Plastered on the left, unplastered on the right.

According to my father, a traditional mud plaster without stabilizer will last 40-50 years.  After that, the walls have to be replastered.  He seemed to think this was a negative, but compared to normal house maintenance, it's not bad. And I think mud just looks great, as you can see here, the result is warm and natural.

Stay tuned for more plastering in the spring..

Plastering At the Cabin, Part 1

As I mentioned in the previous post, I've been plastering at the cabin.  The building is made of basic adobe (dirt + water + sun); no additives.  These days, many people use stabilized adobes to increase waterprooficity, but when my dad was building the cabin, he went with the traditional recipe.  (Stabilizing adobe most commonly requires the addition of petroleum additives.  Another option is the addition of lime.)   The benefit to natural adobe is that anyone who has ever made a mudpie has the basic experience and feel of the material.

The back of the cabin - all adobes visible.

Looking at the still unplastered walls of the cabin is like a reverse stratigraphic investigation.  My father made many of the adobes himself, trucking in soils from various areas nearby.  As the bricks were made, he build the walls, so a close look reveals a variety of textures and colors.  Some bricks were made by now defunct adobe yards throughout NM.  When I was very little, he brought in some burnt adobes (fired in kilns until the clay has turned to ceramic) from the Tucson area, a type of brick not seen in NM.  Some bricks have larger pebbles, others have a lot of sticks and bits of wood in them (which makes me wonder because my dad hates that).  The mud used as mortar came from yet another soil source, so the walls are interesting to say the least. 

They walls are, of course, quite thick - at least 12", more in some places.  In the early days, my dad was sloppy about the mortaring, so there are many large crevices that serve as homes to a diversity of insects and small mammals (how I feel about this depends on how often the fauna pass through the veil into the interior of the home). The whole building is very NM, not at all like the nueva Santa Fe Style featuring smoothed edges, massive walls and weird pink and turquoise accents.   

The Tragic Cost of Mud Plaster In December

"Where oh where is my tail?"

Recently I plastered a portion of an adobe wall at the cabin.  I used a traditional recipe: dirt, water, horse manure.  A friend brought me a truckload of dirt from a particular locality that my father indicated was the appropriate mix of clay and sand for good earth plaster.  The dirt has been sitting in a squat pile in front of the cabin for two years, looking pretty much like a boring pile of dirt, just like so many others sitting in the front yards of NM homes.

Anyway, I was mixing mud a few weeks ago, at the beginning of December, an interesting time for most NM reptiles.  Nights are regularly freezing or below, but days are warm -into the 70's.  Most herps decide to find a cold, safe spot and hunker down for the next few months, but a few are still out.  They are taking advantage of those last good basking hours and hunting the diversity of insects following the same strategy.

I was also taking advantage of the bask worthy temperatures and so, there I was, digging into my pile of dirt, tossing it against a screen to get rid of rock and gravel.  Every so often, something would bounce off the screen rather than smack and slide down.   The bouncers were lizards - I have never seen so many in one place at one time.  After unearthing five and injuring two (so sorry!), I decided I would have to stop - no more plastering in December! 

Over my short lifetime, I've investigated many piles of rocks and found many lizards (and snakes).  I've never found lizards fully surrounded by dirt.  In the end, it's not unusual.  This was soft dirt, very diggable, and probably enticing as a quiet spot with stable temperatures.  Because of the fire this past spring and the giant cobble/boulder dike only 100 yards away, I would have guessed that a lot of the local reptiles would seek winter hibernacula there. 

Although I didn't do much plastering, and now have to do extra good deeds to make up for the lost tails, the big plus was finding three different kinds of lizards without much work: a juvenile Madrean alligator lizard (Elgaria kingii), Cnemidophorus flagellicaudus and C. uniparens.   I took photos of everyone and will post some info about these guys in a few weeks. 

Stay tuned for this year's herpetological version of meet the locals...