The leaves of a maple tree cast their shade on the white crocheted curtains of my windows. It is the Summer of Pure Sky – warm, dry, implacable, simply gorgeous.
I have been for a week now back in the area of Toulouse, in the Haute-Garonne department just north of Ariège. The place is held by a couple, Christian and Pascale. They are both French. She comes from the central east coast, he from the north.
Christian works part time in weather forecast. Pascale used to be a nurse, and now takes care of the house and garden. From the outside, they have very normal lives. But they want to live this “normal life” as ecologically as possible. For them, this does not mean being self sufficient. They have a garden, but it's not extensive enough and there is no greenhouse, so it cannot cover all their needs. Rather, they construct their house the most naturally as possible, using local materials, by caring very actively about their wastes, and about the protection of the local flora and fauna. They reuse as much of the plastic and metal and glass as they can (plastic for example can make labels for the plants in the garden), they have compost toilets, a solar water heater, a plant-based waste water filtering basins, they provide shelters for insects and birds (which have disappeared with the destruction of the hedges, as this region has not been protected from this like la Creuse has been), they try to regrow hedges.
They bought this house a few years ago. They chose this particular area because the houses are not made of stones, nor bricks, but mud - this for the reason that here the soil is poor in stones, but rich in clay. Not only is clay very nice to work with, but it makes great houses from the climate-control point of view, explained Pascale. Indeed, clay not only regulates temperature just like stone does (absorbing heat in the day, releasing it at night), but also regulates humidity. It absorbs water in the air and it can release it outside when it's sunny (I guess that's what it does), so it never stays humid for long. The feel in the house here is indeed very nice and healthy - fresh and dry, not a trace of smell of mold, even though the house is certainly a few hundred years old.
So here they want to make a house for themselves under the big hangar, and later turn the part where they now live into a gîte. Christian experiments with the materials that he finds.
With wood they raise the structure of the house. To cover already present stone walls, they use soil and straw or hemp, with some sand for the outside layer. The soil is filtered by hand with a sieve, the straw is cut with a machete, the two are mixed with water in a tray, the whole is then spread on the wall. The final layer I think is just soil and chalk and sand. For walls to build entirely, now Christian tries an insulating filling of sawdust (obtained for free at a local sawmill) and chalk (which allows the sawdust to stick all together), inside two layers of wood stick ladders covered with the soil-straw mixture.
Some of the walls have been raised already. The feeling of these walls is I must say, extremely nice. Their texture and and brownish-yellowish color are just lovely. I think I could sit in this room and just stare at the wall for a long while.
They use very simple compost toilets and, unusually for what I have seen until now, inside the house they use simple buckets with sawdust. The compost toilet at Peter and Julie was outside, and had a sort of gutter such that the pee would not get mixed with the shit. Joan and Sol had simple sawdust buckets outside, but for the inside had a special device, very expensive and imported from Norway, which blew air, had a plastic covering, collected the pee separately, and made no use of sawdust. Sol had said that they had gotten it because she had feared that otherwise their visitors, especially the Spanish ones, would be completely disgusted to “see and shit on top of other people's shit”. But personally I find this expensive system less agreeable than the simple “shitting in a bucket filled with sawdust” system, because with the expensive system you really do get to see the shit when the plastic covering fails to fall back on the opening, or gets trapped on toilet paper.
Christian afterward composts the shit very seriously. First the shit is brought to the compost bin, which takes six months to be filled. There are two of these, and when the second one is full the first one is emptied into another one which is twice as large, with intervening layers of fresh watered grass (thus this must be done when the grass is still green, i.e. before late in the summer). This brings the compost to ferment at high temperature, about 60 degrees Celsius, and thereby kills all the germs or seeds which might be there. As a further precaution, Christian does not use the compost for growing roots in the garden, but only for fruits or leaves.
Christian and Pascale are also very active in trying to publicize their beliefs. They organize visits of their water-cleaning basins systems, organize a elder tree collection and preparation days, because both the flowers and the fruits of elder tree apparently has lots of amazing protection properties for the respiratory system. Pascale goes to schools to teach kids how to make insect houses, and to install them in the countryside. All of it is done in a non-militant, simply friendly way.
All in all it is quite inspiring to see how this couple takes it share at doing something to care for nature.
