We have Graeme North NZ's well known Earth Building architect, Peter West, an inspiring and supportive engineer, Zac a builder who no longer wishes to work in the industrial building scene, but who wishes to  support the team to create legal, local, simple cheap and beautiful ( indigenous) building methods evolve in this land, we have several other builders keen to support, we have the hemp association keen to see if we can work together, we have every family in this village represented and we have a group of students who have come from around NZand even OZ to attend.

Some of the practical things we have done are build a rocket stove fired oven in the Institute kitchen (as part of retrofitting this old homestead) , we fired some earth tiles we madeto build another rocket stove wth, we made several earth building mixes with local materials including pine needles, raupo, toitoi and various erath, sawdust cowmanure variations. We made bricks with all mixes to dry for future testing. We tried a new idea for the rocket stove that heats the water for our Insttute showers which didn't work well so we are rebuilding that system.... lots more another report tomorrow ... k