22 NOVEMBER 1913, Page 17

(To the Editor of The Farmer's Weekly.) SIR,—In reply to

your correspondent's inquiry re pise I built a kraal about seven years ago, which will probably be standing for another seven. It was my first essay in this country, and I used mostly turfy ground, which I find is not the best for the purpose, a few boxes of sandy ground showing a marked improvement in collating resisting qualities. This kraal is entirely unprotected, and has never been plastered or even smeared. Last season I built a room with eight feet walls and twelve feet gable, which ought to last a lifetime. Any soil with a fair amount of sand in its composition answers the purpose. The ordinary mealie bult would be excellent. As regards rainfall, rain has not much effect on it once it has set, but I am inclined to think that the Australian rainfall, say at Harden and Murrumburrah, where a great deal of pise building is done, is greater than here, and a steady winter rain, with little sun to dry, should be more trying than one storm in hot summer weather.

Pise building is very cheap, efficient, and requires no skill other than ability to place the boxes perfectly vertical. Myself and a boy did a "box" six feet six inches long, two feet six inches high, and twelve inches wide easily in an hour, and eight of these in eight hours. It is a mistake to think that pise is a makeshift. I assisted to build a house at Engowia, on the Lachlan, which cost £750 when finished, and a station homestead near Murrumburrah in New "South Wales is built two storeys high of this material. Plastered with hydraulic lime or a good whitewash, it should have as long a lifeas a brick or stone house.—I am, &c., Box 162 Kroonstad. South Africa. HAROLD L. EDWARDS.

lye have felt, and we expect a great many other people have also felt, that the ideal for cheap cottages and houses would be that they should "rise like the larks from the furrows," as someone said of the peasant folk-songs. In order to obtain cheapness with comfort, i.e., size, solidity, and protection from heat and cold, it is obvious that a great deal of material is

required. But in a country like England transport of all kinds is very dear. To put it in another way, a very large percentage of the cost of the cottage comes from the cost of assembling the materials at the place where the house is to be built. If a house can be built out of the stuff which is dug out of the _ground it is obvious that a very great saving will be made. For example, if there is good sharp sand and gravel on the site the house can be built of con- crete, and this means that nothing but bags of Portland cement will have to be transported. "Pise," as we under- stand it, however, does not require cement of any sort, but merely the hard ramming of ordinary earth. We do riot profess to know much about the system, though it was apparently used by the primitive inhabitants of the South- Western States of America, but from the accounts we have seen it appears to be a kind of glorified or im- proved cob wall— a cob wall which will not only keep out the weather but keep itself perpendicular. If any of our readers should have had practical experience of this kind of building in England they will perhaps enlighten us on the method. A useful form of building somewhat analogous to this used to be employed in Norfolk in places where there was heavy clay. Great blocks of clay were cut out of the ground and piled while still wet one upon another and then left to dry in the sun. If the building was carefully, neatly, and truly done, no better wall was possible. Here the house rose so directly out of the soil that there was almost always a good fishpond beside it. Out of this fishpond the house bad literally grown. The "Pise" system of building, however, is, we are informed, suitable to almost all soils except clay. How sufficient pressure is obtained with ordinary con- trivances to bind the wall we do not know nor does our correspondent state.—En. Spectator.]