Earthbag Tipi Photo Gallery

We needed a garden storage building near the greenhouse. Here is the site before we started. A few years prior, a volunteer put down a wooden frame for an 8' x 10' steel building, but we decided to go with a greener, more sustainable solution. Also, somebody had saved the dead tree trunk to the left to make it into a totem pole. That, combined with a mission we are developing to bring our healing work to a Lakotah Indian healing center, led us to the tipi design for the building.

Here is the site viewed from ground level. Notice the slope in the background. We are on the east side of a mountain.

The slope on this part of the mountain is about 1 inch to 1 1/2 inches per foot. We can work with that rather easily.

The straw in the background is old mulch from the greenhouse garden and not part of the building project.

We roughly staked the outside of the building, a 14 foot diameter.

We used a round stake in the center, around which we put a loop of twine and put a knot in it at 7 feet. This is our first crude compass. We will make a more precise one after we get the site prepared.

We ordered a GoBagger. As soon as it arrived we tested it with rice hulls.

It worked great -- just like the movie on the GoBagger website, only rice hulls are much lighter than sand to work with.

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