Quote:
Originally Posted by conradpdx
Good luck with it and keep us updated... (Start a blog and do it well and you could probably start your own specialized contracting company...especially if you bend the code enforcers in your area.)
|
You know, with such a lack of work around the area I'm in, I have already seriously considered that... Building strawbale structures as a niche market income but folks are hard to sway around this area.
I remember when I started growing vegetables hydroponically, I showed the system I built to about a thousand people over 5 years and offered to show them how to do it also, for free... and no one came back. rofl. It was very discouraging since the vegi's were awesome and the system didn't look bad at all.
It's a closed loop NFT system which causes me not to have to dump the nutrient solution so there's really no damaging waste, faster fruit production and 75% less work. There is the initial cost in materials which was around $300-$350 but it doesn't have to be as large as mine to see good results. Anyway, a lot of people are stuck in their ways and no one wanted any part of it except one guy who went off on his own. He started growing strawberries but failed and quit. I would have quit six times over if I quit at a failure with that thing. lol. I considered every season a failure because I couldn't turn anyone else on to the idea. It sure did beat dumping thousands of gallons of my drinking water on the ground along with hundreds of pounds of chemical fertilizer. I'm not what some consider "green" but that seemed so wasteful when another option is there.
I've mentioned strawbales to people here before and it's like they don't even hear what I'm saying... Go figure. I'm from SW florida originally and I saw what hurricane andrew did to homestead fl back in 91-92. It flattened every wood framed home within a 15 mile radius of landfall and that's all we have here in GA... wood frame and mobile homes. Although it's not exceptionally windy here, we've taken some wind damage the last few years (not us personally but in town) and it gets pretty hot here. Strawbales make perfect sense to me in this environment.