 Have you ever thought about roofing? I have and that's why I'm up on my shed roof here with a whole bunch of straw If you are in a building or have ever been in a building or enjoy having a building or a roof over your head Roofing is something that should matter to you. So let's talk a little bit about roofing today and specifically thatching and why it might be a Sustainable local eco-friendly alternative to basically everything else. This is the low-tech podcast Hello and welcome, I'm Scott Johnson from the Low-Technology Institute your host for podcast number 58 on November 4th 2022 coming to you out of the Low-Tech Institute's Gardens in Cooksville, Wisconsin Thanks for joining us today We're talking thatch and don't forget to follow us on Twitter Our handle is at low underscore techno like us on Facebook find us on Instagram subscribe to us on YouTube and check out our Website lowtech Institute org there you can find both of our podcasts as well as information about joining and supporting the Institute And its research Also, some podcast distributors put ads on podcast unless you hear me doing the ad Someone else is making money on that advertising well all our podcast videos and other information are freely given They take resources to make and if you're in a position to help support our work and be part of this community Please consider becoming a monthly supporter for as little as three dollars a month through our patreon page patreon.com Low-Tech Institute thanks to she say T and Todd F who signed up recently if you'd like to sponsor an episode directly Please get in touch with us through our website lowtech Institute.org as I said I'm up on my roof of a shed I built last year is a timber frame shed And we'll talk more about timber frame throughout the next year But basically I'm up here and I'm putting a whole bunch of straw on it to thatch it there are many different ways that I could have roofed it and I chose thatching and Thatching today has become a very expensive Very upper-class or a high-class or expensive roof and the reason for that is well once upon a time Let's start a little bit with history once upon a time thatching or vegetable matter was used as roofing since time immemorial since people have had buildings people have been putting grasses rushes other things on top of it to keep moisture out and It's been a very cheap and easy primary roofing material for such a long time because it's abundant It's cheap. It only takes labor really this would have been a byproduct of agricultural production So it really wouldn't have been a very expensive roof today The only buildings that have thatch on them are pretty high-end expensive buildings thatching is a very very expensive Proposition the rule of thumb in the thatching community is that standard roof for a reasonably sized house costs the same as a car so, you know twenty thirty thousand dollars to roof probably more than that now and What's happened to the thatching industry? I want to get this out of the out of the way at the top because there's so many thatchers on Social media on the internet that have the most they share just these beautiful gorgeous Thatching jobs they're doing mostly in England. It's the ones that I follow and It's just a different level of craft than it would have been practiced 150 years ago 150 years ago you could thatch a barn you could thatch a shed you could thatch your house it wouldn't have been as Restricted as it is today to these high-end houses or these historic homes where they're Committed to spend the money to preserve that historic look of thatch and so what's happened I believe is that thatch has fallen out of favor among more regular people and Also among the skill set of regular people my family builds houses one of the only memories I have of my grandfather alive was being up on the roof of our garage that we are building I was probably three years old and he was roofing. He was hitting a hammer into a nail and the nail went flying I said, oh go get a grandpa. He said don't worry about it That's like one of the few memories I have of him before he passed away You know a regular person can learn to do three tap shingles pretty easy And that's kind of the point of the three tap shingle is very easy thatching takes a bit more know-how But it's not impossible. It's not an impossible task. I don't do it to a professional level I would never do this on a dwelling. I'm gonna live in but for a compost hutch. It's perfectly fine Nobody would ever put a thatch roof on a compost hutch nowadays because it would be too expensive It's kind of unfortunate that it has become such a high-end roofing material because really it's So ecologically friendly and we're gonna talk a little bit about that after I grab a different bundle here to this straw That I just put up here. It's too short. So what I wanted to do so I will be Right back Through the wonders of editing. This isn't gonna take a second for you. All right, that's better The corners needs longer straw to reach reach the edges. So thatching Roofing in general basically roofing of course is just trying to keep water and weather out of the house the interior Right. Well, like I said thatching or using vegetable matter on the roof has been around a long time nowadays what predominates in the United States is Asphalt shingles asphalt shingles are ecologically speaking Absolutely terrible. They last forever and only a tiny percentage of them are actually recycled even though you could in theory Send them to a shingle recycling center Most shingles there don't actually get recycled. So think about it this way those regular shingles you see on all these houses Everyone you've ever seen in your entire life Still exists somewhere on the earth. Is that kind of a trip to think about every single shingle That you've ever seen Still exists somewhere on this planet. That's kind of sickening Really if you think about it the nice thing about that is when it's done You just compost it same thing with wooden shingles wooden shingles came about really with the advent of The circular saw or large circular saws and they were able to replace or replicate slates But with wood which was significantly easier to work with and a lot cheaper thatching and again I I shouldn't be teaching anyone anything about thatching So I'm just going to talk in real general terms thatching was around for such a long time And then wooden shingles came on the scene and then tar paper Although tar has been used since ancient Mesopotamia for roofing tar is not a new roofing item at all But in the u.s. It's mostly just these asphalt shingles that don't go anywhere And I'm sorry for the slightly disorganized object of my talk today, but I'm up here on the roof I don't have much time to get into the house and give a full regular Scripted podcast because I got to get this roof on before the winter comes So you're joining me. So what am I doing right now? I'm affixing what's called the brow course This is the bottom edge of the roof and it's going to get the most water and rain on it so it needs to be well affixed and Affixed means under bar here this way and what I'm doing right now. It's just taking armfuls of long straw There are three Primary types of thatch one is called combed reed. There's long straw First of all is basically you get a pile of straw and You wet it and you pull out and create organized bundles called yelms Y e l m s and they are then used really to carry the straw up the roof and then the straw is affixed on The roof under bars that are called sways and these sways used to be made out of wood Mine are made out of wood because I have that available to me But today a lot of them are done with stainless steel and screws I'm using wood bars and I am using Screws although you could perfectly well tie all this down which is a traditional way to do it I have tied down this previous course because it's the very bottom brow course and then this is getting affixed by a Sway bar so long straw is one of the more Traditional I suppose because it's been around for quite a long time. It looks like the Straw has been poured on it like a kind of a more of a liquid state than a solid. It's really beautiful It also takes a little bit more skill and specialized tools than what I'm doing, which is combed reed Combed reed came about really at the time that mechanical Threshers came about and the reason for that is When you the first mechanical threshers would bind Sheaves of wheat and then chop the heads off or thresh the heads out And then leave these nice clean combed bundles It was a mechanized process that gave really nice Uniform straw bundles to the thatcher and then similar to long and and it's affixed similar to long straw But it's a little easier I think to work with because it comes already in bundles This is Maris Widgen, which is kind of the gold standard of thatching straw I grew this myself in the in the field next door. I have more growing right now We have the wheat itself to eat in our house We make flour with it and bread and so this is the leftover straw from my harvest this year And I'm using it to thatch the roof I grew it specifically for a straw I also have some rye which also makes a good thatching straw one second here I have to use this leg it which is kind of like a a big Corrigated paddle and I'm going to kind of start to shape the edge of this if you want to see more videos of this again Not for instructional purposes only for educational purposes just to kind of have a look at it You can check out our Instagram and we're there under a low-tech Institute and you can see some a couple of videos I made this week. So what I'm doing now is I'm driving the wheat up Underneath the sway which is the bar holding it all down and that creates kind of a wedge because it's fatter at the bottom And so it creates a wedge that helps Really pack this down straw in thatch is put down really dense It's not that it is waterproof if you thatched a flat surface and then put standing water on it It would obviously leak through what thatch is doing is that every single piece of straw in here is Sloped downhill and so by being sloped downhill if the drop of water touches it It runs downhill and so the beauty or the the functionality of a thatch roof is not in that It is waterproof is that it is water shedding and that's really important to understand It's not waterproof with water shedding and so what I'm doing just like if you're installing shingles or any other piece by piece roof material I am Starting at the bottom and just working my way across and up to create an entire wall of Water shedding material or a water shedding Structure and shape now aside from its ecologically friendliness of being easily grown and easily Composted someone might say well, how long does does a thatch roof last right so typical asphalt shingle roof You can expect about 20 years out of it a wooden roof a cedar roof if installed properly in theory is supposed to last 30 years And that's similar to a thatch roof a properly installed thatch roof with no Trees over it and a steep slope should last 30 years However, the ridge that is the very top which gets a lot of weathering from the wind might need to be redone every 10 years So it needs a little bit of maintenance here and there and it can be fixed and patched And it can be revitalized in different ways, but it could last 30 years, which is a pretty good lifetime for a roof I don't anticipate mine will last that long. I'm not installing it well enough again I'm not a professional thatcher. I haven't learned this professionally, but that's also exactly my point Somebody should be able to do this People should be learning how to do this because this is a local material I got this from I can see the field just over there where all this straw came from I can't say that about many building materials that we use today and It's gonna be a problem as fossil fuels become less Available to us. Where are we gonna get our roofing material? If we're completely dependent on asphalt roofs Where in the heck are we gonna get that? When we can't use trucks to ship things long distances a Heavy asphalt. Have you few ever picked up a bundle of asphalt shingles? They're incredibly heavy and not that straw isn't but it's easier to handle and nicer It doesn't have to travel as far in theory if you're able to find someone who can grow it and harvest it I realize I neglected to mention the third most common type of Roofing material and that's water reed frag mites They are invasive here in Wisconsin and they are all over in other parts of the US, but these are water reed Grasses that you'll see in ditches and marshes They look like just a thin reed with kind of a flag a sail type seed head on top and These reeds are grow all across Europe and they're harvested in England and Turkey and All around the Mediterranean and they've been used for thatch for Millenia and they're very common in England and also in the United States There's a few thatchers in the United States like three We're all very friendly when I chatted with them through emails and in one case phone calls lovely people But what I wanted was somebody to come teach a workshop for a weekend and every one of them told me it wasn't worth it because what you could learn in a weekend wasn't enough to start doing anything and I believe that I'm a very handy person and I also I'm not afraid to try things that I probably shouldn't be trying but they said in a weekend You're not gonna learn enough it would take a summer to become even halfway Competent to like barely do anything so there you go. That's why we're not having a workshop on this Anyway, the reed the water reed is what most US thatchers use So if you've seen one of the few thatch buildings in the United States It's very likely water reed water reed has a very dense kind of thick prickly appearance It's got slightly larger straws diameter than wheat My wheat here is pretty narrow diameter smaller than a pencil whereas most water reed is gonna be pencil or thicker in terms of diameter But that brings me to an important point. I have permission from the Wisconsin DNR To harvest Fragmites because they as I said are an invasive species here So I have a I have to harvest them especially and treat them in a special way But I'm allowed to harvest them here DNR actually wants me to kill them off So what a great synergy of things that we need we need this reed to be gone and It works as a great roofing material But those three materials the long straw the combed reed comb wheat reed and the water reed Just because those are the three most common doesn't mean that those are the only three you need to use There's so many materials that can be used other types of straw of course any hollow Grass stem can be used down here. I've got weeds canary grass blue stem and other grasses that work just fine for an undercoat And historically people use whatever they had available for the undercoat. I'm Installing what's called new work, right? There's nothing on the roof above me and I'm installing fresh coat That's to a structure that has none. That's new work. Well, what's gonna happen over the next 30 years just kidding It's not gonna last that long What's gonna happen over the next years is that the tips of this straw is going to rot But just the last inch or so and hopefully I'll lose about an inch a year or less And so the 20 inches or so between the fixing the sway bar and the tip of the straw It's gonna rot away and by the time it starts to get close to that sway bar and Exposes fittings below. It's time to put on a new coat and that new coat can be put on top of the old work By just sparring it in the bottom undercoat. So the stuff that's above the sway bar Will be on this roof in theory forever or until they decide to switch away from thatch So what's really cool is that it's kind of a time capsule by using this weedy stuff from some of the undercoat here in 1,000 years or 100 years you could look and see what weeds were present right now and indeed they've done that in England and they found thatch That's 500 years old and they could see what are the different plants that are common at that time. It's really neat Kind of a time capsule. So I'm installing like I said new work here So some of this will rot away, but a lot of it will stick around for quite a while So here it's not dense enough because I haven't tightened down the sway bar, but over here It's nice and dense. It's it's not a it's not a loosely applied thing so I said alternative materials and I want to talk about that because When I lived in Mexico people use palm as a thatch and it lasted 10 to 20 years depending on how How well it was applied and how thick it was so that the only things that the the English thatchers like to use Doesn't necessarily dictate what the rest of us have to use It's just what the high-end houses in England can afford to have put on their houses, which is nicer stuff and truly Combed wheat reed of Maris Wigin is lovely to work with. I don't have much to compare it to being a complete novice here Although I have used Fragmites and I don't like them as much. So it's a lot coarser and just doesn't but maybe that's just the Fragmites I was able to harvest they weren't as good. So we could in theory be using weedy unwanted vegetation for thatch locally and this would be a huge help and it would be really nice to get something like this going now When we have the wherewithal to send people to England to learn how to thatch properly rather than waiting 25 years till we don't really have access to fossil fuels and then we have to scramble to figure out Well, how are we gonna put roofs on our houses? it takes a little bit of a design thought because Thatch roof needs to be steeper than a typical roof in the US It should be at least 50 degrees Even if you're doing a wood shingle roof a 50 degree roof is preferable because the steeper the roof the faster the water sheds off In England you can get by with a 45 degree roof with thatch, but we have more snow and snow Sits on the roof and the whole point of thatch is to shed water as I said So if it's not shedding water, it's not doing its job and by having snow sit on it It's gonna make rot set it and you're gonna have a giant compost heap on top of your your roof instead of a nice water shedding Mat of material it's a really beautiful process. I recommend a few resources online one of them is called the Thatcher's Craft It's a book from the 1960s or 70s And it's a absolutely wonderful step-by-step guy with black and white pictures of every single step for the three Primary thatch materials definitely worth checking out if you can find it I found plenty of PDF versions of it online So that's worth checking out the Thatcher's Craft and then there's another wonderful website called thatchinginfo.com and They have accumulated hundreds of photos lots of step-by-step instructions just wonderful resource overall thatchinginfo.com That one should be easily accessible to everybody so that's definitely worth looking at and those as well as some Videos online will get you started and then if you dare you can start following some Thatcher's on Instagram and they post the absolutely most beautiful Thatch that you've ever seen but again the the issue is these are all for high-end houses Nobody does utilitarian houses anymore. So bringing back utilitarian thatch I think would be a huge and useful step for a less carbon-intensive future because it's not only beautiful and traditional it's labor-intensive and Easier on ecological resources than everything else I'd much rather see a whole bunch of people learning to Thatch and use local materials to make beautiful roofs Then continuing to cart in this asphalt crap that's gonna just sit in landfills forever I'll try not to just rant and rave about asphalt roofs, but they're just an ecological disaster from Creation to use to finishing you shouldn't even be collecting rainwater off an asphalt roof because it drops Especially the first couple years. There's a lot of shedding of chemicals and and other things that were used to make it It's it's not great for putting on your plants that you're gonna eat unfortunately so again, I apologize for the rambling nature of this week's podcast, but It's a field recording. I'm in the middle of a project. It's got to get done in time That's how life goes sometimes especially when you're doing a lot of random stuff like this yourself It is nice to get out of the office to be up Doing something physical like this. Another thing I want to mention is this would fall Well under what I'm calling the 10 mile building rubric, which is a new idea I've teased a few times on here, and I'll introduce a little bit now, but basically the idea Is that in a certain amount of time an indeterminate amount of time We're gonna stop using fossil fuels whether we give them up or run out of them And at that time we're gonna undergo a huge change in how we live And one of those changes is how are we gonna build a house with materials that are on hand? And so I've come up with this thing called I'm calling a 10 mile building rubric Basically that means can you build a building that comes of materials that come from within An average of 10 miles by weight that basically means you add up all the weight of everything Multiply it out by how far it traveled and then divide it all by the total weight and you get the average miles traveled There's more details on this on our website lowtechinstitute.org slash TMBC that's 10 mile building challenge TMBC on our website and next summer Excitingly we are going to be shush. Sorry about the chickens in the background We're excitingly going to be building a 10 mile building building and we're gonna follow that on our YouTube channel Where you might be watching this now or if you want to see some of the thatching I'm doing go to youtube.com slash oh see Low-tech institute or just search for low-tech institute in the search bar or a low-tech podcast and you can see this Weeks episode as a video which might be more interesting since I'm up here on the roof And so we're hoping to build an entire mini house with materials that are available close at hand So a 10 mile building challenge building so that that's originally why I got into thatching and again if you go would not go away with nothing else think about the the idea of Utilitarian thatch as something that needs to be brought back if when you see these thatch houses realize you're looking at High-end beautiful, you know high high best level of craft that isn't necessarily indicative of what thatching was thatching was Utilitarian also high-end but also utilitarian and we've just lost that utilitarian portion of thatching So I'm trying to bring that back with my terrible thatching job here So we will post pictures of this as it comes to be Finished or closer to finish on our Instagram Facebook and YouTube. So check those out If you want to see this wheat being grown and harvested you can check out the series I'm doing on our YouTube channel about growing and harvesting your own grains. So check that out also on our YouTube channel Thanks for sticking around today. I'm gonna end it It'll probably be a short kind of rambly one and I do apologize for that But it is a field recording and I hope you guys will indulge me on these every once in a while If you have ideas for the show or questions feel free to write in I'm Scott at low-tech Institute org And I'm always glad to hear from folks who are interested in learning more about any particular topic That might be related to what we're doing here at the Institute That's it for this week. The low-tech podcast is put out by the Low Technology Institute The show is hosted and co-produced by me Scott Johnson and co-produced and edited by Hina Suzuki This episode was recorded in the Low Technology Institute gardens. Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, YouTube, and elsewhere We hope you enjoyed this free podcast. One way you can support the show is by leaving us a review If you've done that, maybe you'd consider sharing our work with friends on social media If you'd like to join the community and help support the work we do Please consider going to patreon.com slash low-tech Institute and signing up Thank you to our forester and land steward level members Sam Braun, Marilyn Skirpon, and the Hambuses for their support The Low Technology Institute is a 501c3 research organization supported by members grants and underwriting You can find out more information about the Low Technology Institute membership and underwriting at lowtech Institute org Find us on social media and reach me directly at Scott at lowtech Institute org Our intro music was last slate of the roof off the album The Mountains Don't Care About You by Dr. Turtle. That song is under the Creative Commons Attributions license And this podcast is under the Creative Commons Attribution and Share Like license Meaning you're free to use and share it as long as you give us credit. Thanks so much and take care