The clouds parted to a sun-filled afternoon August 9th to begin Eugene’s 2008 Friendly Area Neighborhood/FAN Green Home Bike Tour, aka ‘preparing our homes for energy uncertainty’. Over 60 folks gathered to bike through the FAN, and the energy grew as more details were revealed. Over the course of the next 3 hours, they were guided through lower-carbon-footprint features such as strawbale home design, net-positive active solar, and new home permaculture designs.

Biking folks gathered first at locally-owned Friendly Street Market. Locally-owned and locally-trading businesses can better withstand the upcoming challenges of getting goods and services to market and recycling profits into the local economy. The emerging paradigm as a globalized economy fades away in the face of peaking oil supplies. Supermarket and other chains with their heavily dependent interstate-trucked goods will become increasingly challenged.

The first stop was at Fox Hollow Creek Nursery, in the parking lot of 835 W. 28th, by Friendly St. FHCN(345-4084) features locally-propagated food and fruit bearing plants, as well as a fine variety of ornamentals. On Tuesdays from 12-5 PM, Hey Bayles! organic CSA(767-0379) has their farmer’s market here featuring locally-grown produce. Rumors are another farmer’s market sells their locally-grown produce in the northeast corner of FAN, at 18th and Willamette[please let us know if you know more of this].

Next the bike-mass migrated across 28th with a special visit to Crest Drive Neighborhood, and Tiara Street, off Adams, for a look at 3 homes on Tiara Circle. A ‘sort-of’ community of 8 houses with common play space as well as a community center for meetings and potlucks. Resident/neighbor Neal Spangler says the circle also gives residents the freedom to keep their own identity, without inherent ‘community’ requirements. Dan Pyle(koalani "at"(@) hotmail 'dot' com) at 985 Tiara gave us a brief tour of his lower-carbon footprint’ed home with many fine features, including a straw-bale-wall-constructed system and a solar-assisted radiant floor heating system. See the attachment below for more on their house. Neal(nspangler "at" titlescan "dot" com) invited the throng into their backyard, with a good amount of healthy fruit-bearing trees and vegetable-crop contour beds. While there, others wandered across Tiara Circle to see the neighbor’s rainwater catchment, green roof, and rainwater garden with stormwater management installed. Here you’ll see a permanent display with brochures from their Eugene landscape design firm, Habitats, Inc: habitats at efn "dot" org

The bike tour then took to new heights, pedaling uphill to Steve and Kay Leppold’s superb year-old net-positive ‘Suncroft House’ on Ingalls Way. Since no fossil fuel, firewood, or burning of any kind is required, normal year-round operations of the house are considered "zero carbon". Suncroft House produces as much or more energy in a year than it consumes. Energy consumption is minimized by using a superinsulated, tight building envelope and energy-efficient equipment, appliances, and lighting. Solar panels capture enough energy for all space heating, water heating, cooking, lighting, and household electricity, with additional passive solar contributions to space heating. Excess production of electricity during sunny weather goes into the grid, and this "banked" electricity is later used during the cloudy heating season. Steve conducts tours once a month of this excellent home design for our future: www.suncroft.org . Please see attachment below, visit their website for more, and then sign up for a tour by finding the email address at the suncroft.org website. Steve mentioned there was a waiting list to get on a tour.

The group then coasted into permaculture design, biking to Matt Lutter(likebutterbaby5 "at" yahoo "dot" com) and Jessica Jackowski’s(violetspidereyes "at" yahoo "dot" com) home in the neighborhood flats on the northeast corner of Tyler and W. 25th Ave. Here Matt described details like their ongoing grass-to-garden landscape conversion, cold-frame greenhouse design, with plans for rooftop solar panels, concrete driveway conversion into growing space, and an upcoming, truly sustainably-built earthen cob-built wall sculpture along W. 25th.

The tour finished up at Toby Strickland’s(rickard_t "at" 4j "dot" lane "dot" edu) home at 2463 Monroe after a brief stop at Rachel Turner’s newer permaculture’d home, NW corner 27th and Monroe(more to see there on the next FAN tour!). Toby has, in less than half a year, done a massive backyard conversion from grass to garden, with ample, fertile food-growing to show. Toby just might be Friendly-area’s best resident gopher!☺ He finished the showing with a cute permie-style design touch, a heart-shaped willow turnstile gate to the garden. See attachment.

Be sure to watch this space for more info on the return of the home-based plant-starts business at Luminara and Justine's in the 2600 block of Monroe...

Over the course of three hours, this FAN home tour brought out new neighbor-to-neighbor relationships, raised awareness to sound sustainable building and living design features, and helped us ‘move in’ with the future of true community self-reliance. The future holds good promise for this and neighborhoods throughout Eugene in our energy-constrained future.