Earthbag Construction

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If you plan on building a garage or other small outbuilding, or if you're looking for a great "green" building method, consider using earth bags as your primary building material. With just the dirt in your yard and inexpensive woven bags, you can construct durable, cozy and energy-efficient structures.

Earthen buildings currently house more than one-third of the world's population. Earthbag building, one method of earthen construction, utilizes the ancient technique of rammed earth in conjunction with modern woven polypropylene bags to create a building's shell. The basic procedure is simple:

1. Fill the bags or tubes using a suitable pre-moistened earth.

2. Close, fold and pin the bags to make neat, square-cornered rectangles similar to grocery-store brown bags.

3. Lay the finished bags in a masonry-style running bond.

4. Thoroughly compact with hand tampers after a row has been laid.

5. Lay two strands of four-point barbed wire, held down with bricks, between every row. This acts as a "Velcro mortar," cinching the bags in place and providing exceptional tensile strength (resistance to lengthwise stress) while allowing the rows to be stepped, creating corbelled domes and other unusual shapes.

6. Over the earthbags, apply exterior and interior plasters.

To learn more about how to build durable buildings with the earth in your yard, see "Earthbag Construction" (Mother Earth News Oct/Nov 2005) or check out Kaki Hunter and Donald Kiffman's book, Earthbag Building at Mother Earth Shopping.