What happened late last November.

I did just roughly scan through explanatory videos before my first Holz Hausen wood pile attempt and I have to admit, it failed miserably... At the beginning my pile stacked up nicely for 1m before I realized, that it was slowly pushing outwards.

I went on for another 20cm and heard several repeating grinding sounds before the whole pile slipped sideways like it was liquid. Only 4 seconds later my work of the last 1.5 hours was anihilated. I took it with a smile, because I had a great time out in the garden in late November sun, stepped back to have a drink and realized how beautiful the stack shifted. So without hesitating I went to work again and piled along with the seemingly random pile and finished it off in a strange wale like shape with all covering wood pointing in the same direction along the back of the "wale". I was happy with my work, not only knowing, that the wood would dry out properly until next year, but also having made a kind of sculpture that I could injoy in the low November back light sun.

Reason for this article:

I got inspred to write this article by a recent comment-coversation with @wisewoof and remembered my teenage love of making art. I was mostly copying surrealist painting from color-printed books onto small format canvases with acrylic paint, but also drawing and graffiti where part of my meditative off time. A special favourite in my late teenage times was "land art". I got into land art, after looking through an art book of Andy Goldsworthy and was stunned about the simple and ephemeral character of this humble art. Most intesively my strong connection to nature and nowadays love to Permaculture resonates with these early insights on Andy Goldsworthys work...

Who is Andy Goldsworthy.

If you don‘t know who I'm talking about I chose a few images from google search of Andy Goldsworthys wood work to stay around the topic of "wood piles". He also worked with leaves, sticks, mud, stones, basically everything one finds laying around in nature. He is a 62 years old ingenious artist whos work is based in nature and natural materials. All his scope of work shares the ephemeral character, or it is changing over time, as the materials cure or weather. After the following images I also linked to the classic Andy Goldworthy documentary named Rivers and Tides from 2001.

*The four images above are from the google search results for "Andy Goldsworthy"

Please check out this classic Rivers and Tides - Andy Goldsworthy documentary and take some time. It is well worth seeing!

The reason I come to talk about Andy is, because as I was stacking wood a few months ago for our Rocket Mass Heater winter 2018/2019, I wanted to try and build a Holz Hauser wood pile. Holz Huaser wood piles are a way to stack wood in beautiful circular shapes without support of any kind.

Holz Huaser wood piles.

A good description of how Holz Huaser wood piles are made:

A nice Holz Hauser hack, using long round poles that go through the whole pile several times during construction, kind of binding in together.

Conclusion.

Before you try a Holz Hauser wood pile study the videos provided here better than I did and remember the following three rules:

• Don't stack exclusively round wood, as it will make the pile collide under the growing weight and it will slip flow like wood lava to the weakest side of the stack. Mix in enough chopped wood to hinder the rolling action of round wood pieces.
• The diameter of the Holz Huaser wood pile should be about 3 meters (10 feet). That way the curvature of the outer wall will be more suttle and the whole structure more stable. I tried with a very small diameter of 1.5m (5 feet) and encountered many problems of managing the curve, even with the small pieces of wood that I was stacking.
• Like described in the second Holz Hauser video form above, implement wood poles, that have the length of your piles diameter every now and then, which will have an effect of binding the curving ring wall together, making the pile a lot more stable.

Last but not least I have to shout out that I find it beautiful to find art, inspiration adn creativity in everyday homestead work and I would like to ask you where you combine creativity and the joy of estetics with every day work? PLease leave a comment.