summer Archives - Rural Studio

The Patriece’s Home team, affectionately known around the Studio as the “Stairs Team,” just hasn’t gotten enough of Hale County! Now college grads and no longer students, Adam, Laurel, Daniel and Lauren picked right back up and finished their details mock-up as “leftovers.” The team is using their mock-up to test metal shade devices for windows and the articulation of their wood-clad porches.

A model of a wall with corrugated metal siding and a window with black shade devices around it.

The team's detail mockup covered in ZIP panels

After hunting through differing foundation types for their home, the team talked to Tyler from C & T Excavating Inc. and is now moving forward with a plan to sculpt the site with engineered fill for their slab-on-grade foundation.

A Sketched perspective from the home's front porch interior looking out onto the landscape and front driveway

A sketched perspective from the home's side porch interior, looking toward the trailer

Patriece’s Home has been focusing on the landscape opportunities in their home’s design. They are not only using natural, space-making tools to ground the house on the site, but to shape and protect areas of outdoor activity, such as play, sitting, parking, and driving. The team Zoomed with Emily Knox, a landscape architecture professor from Auburn University, to discuss their design for siting home, how the landscape design can extend across the whole site, and both existing and potential “materials” (trees, shrubs, grasses) for the site.

a plan diagram of the manipulated topography lines

a plan diagram with blue arrows shows how water shed off the site

an axon perspective of the driveway entry to the site

a plan sketch of the proposed landscape plan of the site

Thankfully, the team had their mock-up and details ready to be reviewed because our friend and consultant Dan Wheeler (from Wheeler Kearns Architects in Chicago, IL) showed up again! Dan had an intense design discussion with the team about the wood cladding on the interior and exterior of the home. He left the group with lots of tips and a positive direction toward establishing a character for the wood details. Let’s see what the team decides!

a sketched perspective of the interior stairs clad in horizontal wood that has been cut to equal lengths.

students gather around a man kneeling as he points to a drawing on the wall

And because the team is itching (literally, the mosquitoes are waking up) to start work on site, they completed their batter boards for their excavation date set in two weeks! They will be in the business of purchasing, perfecting, and tying loose ends as they eagerly await this date. So wait for the next blog post when the team will be playing in the dirt!

Until then, here is a gallery of some Hale County summer shenanigans!

the camera is looking through the site transit and frames an image of a student sticking their tongue out with a measuring pole

Students harvested the first sweet potato crop since the Rural Studio’s farm reboot in 2019.

A textured shot of dappled sweet potato vines

A student lifts several large sweet potato tubers out of the ground

But unlike previous sweet potato crops, these were grown in the greenhouse. The Farm’s passive solar greenhouse gets so hot and still during the long Alabama summers that it can be difficult to grow many crops in the peak of summer, and sweet potatoes take up so much space that they are difficult to grow in our small, intensively managed outdoor cultivated areas. Growing the potatoes this way solved both difficulties at once!

Five farm workers plant sweet potato slips

Sweet potatoes are most often grown from slips, which are small shoots cut from mature sweet potato tubers and rooted. The farm team planted 200 sweet potato slips into the raised beds in the greenhouse on June 7.

Sweet potato vines begin to creep into the aisles — July 1

In only a matter of weeks the vines from the growing slips swallowed up the greenhouse: filling the aisles, climbing the barrel wall, and bursting through the windows. It was a beautiful transformation of the space that required almost no maintenance all summer long.

The sweet potato foliage is so dense that it covers the windows

Sweet potato vines swallow up everything within the greenhouse

After four months, students dug up the new tubers and cleared out all of the vines.

Two students harvest tubers and clear sweet potato vines

Once dug up, the tubers then needed to be placed in a warm, humid environment in which to cure for about two weeks. During the curing process, the sweet potatoes’ skin thickens somewhat, any wounds or nicks heal over, and the sweet flavor of the flesh concentrates. Not only does this improve the flavor, but it significantly lengthens their storage potential, so students and staff can enjoy sweet potatoes all throughout the winter.

summer

Summer Shenanigans

Sweet potato harvest