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Southern exposure helps control the home's heat
By Mary Beth Breckenridge
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published on Saturday, Aug 16, 2008
CHIPPEWA TWP.: Vince and Ruth Lavery were environmentally minded long before green was chic.
When the Laverys built their earth-sheltered, passive-solar home back in 1985, family members asked why they'd want such a house. ''You'll never be able to sell it,'' Ruth Lavery remembers people saying.
But the couple persisted, creating a home they can heat with just the sun's rays and scrap wood. They committed themselves to growing vegetables and ornamental plants organically and to preserving much of what they eat. They even feed the dog organic food.
And today, with energy prices rising and bacteria-tainted food making news, their foresight is paying off.
The Laverys have strived to create a largely self-sustaining lifestyle on the two acres they share with their younger daughter, Abigail, 14. (Their other daughter, Danielle, lives in Clinton.) Their goal isn't so much saving money — organic growing isn't cheap, Vince Lavery pointed out — as it is living healthfully and in harmony with the earth.
Despite their environmental leanings, the Laverys aren't wacky eco-extremists. Their three-bedroom house is attractive and fairly conventional-looking; their property, with its sweeping view of the Wayne County countryside, is lushly landscaped with beds of perennials, shrubs and grasses that bear the stamp of Ruth Lavery's horticultural artistry. They even have an above-ground pool, although theirs is heated by a solar blanket made up of tubes through which the pool water circulates and picks up the sun's warmth.
The home wasn't entirely their idea. The notion originated with Ruth Lavery's father, the late Nick Neila, who owned the farm from which the couple's land was subdivided. ''He was a Renaissance guy,'' Vince Lavery said, and the idea of building a passive-solar home was his passion.
''It wasn't something we had in mind when we were going to build, but he (Neila) kept pushing the issue,'' Ruth Lavery recalled. When she and her husband researched the issue, they came to agree.
Neila and Vince Lavery constructed the house together. It's built into a slope, with earth mounded against the rear of the structure to moderate the indoor temperature. The design helps keep the house 10 to 15 degrees cooler than the outside temperature in summer, Ruth Lavery said, and in winter, the temperature never drops below 50 degrees.
The open layout of the interior is brightened by skylights and by windows that stretch across the front of the house, which faces south. In winter, ceramic tiles in front of windows capture the rays of the sun when it's lower in the sky and collect heat for release into the house.
The Laverys buy scrap wood to burn for heat, which costs them about $260 a year. The house has electric baseboard heating, but the Laverys used the system only one winter, when Vince Lavery injured his back four years ago and couldn't haul wood.
The injury forced his retirement from the Firestone Park post office in Akron, where he'd worked 30 years. Ruth Lavery works at Little Flower Greenhouse, her family's business in Doylestown.
Normally, the Laverys' electric bill is about $130 a month in winter and $80 in summer, but the baseboard heaters pushed the numbers up that year — and the heat wasn't even that comfortable, Ruth Lavery noted.
''After that, we said, 'Forget that.' I healed really quick,'' her husband said with a smile.
Even their furniture speaks to their environmental commitment. Much of it is recycled, hand-me-downs and curb finds that Ruth Lavery has repainted and reupholstered.
Saving on food
Outside, the Laverys maintain a vegetable garden that covers a little less than a half-acre. There they grow a variety of fruits and vegetables, most of them chosen for their potential to be frozen or canned. They sometimes sell their excess to restaurants, and this year some of the more than 400 quarts of strawberries their plants produced were sold to Marshallville Packing Co.
The extra from the garden also goes to their chickens, which produce eggs and eventually meat for the Laverys. In turn, the manure produced by the birds goes back into the garden as fertilizer.
The Laverys' gardening efforts aren't strictly utilitarian, however.
The house is surrounded by plants, including dogwoods, daylilies, burning bushes and Rose of Sharon shrubs, as well as the ornamental grasses that are Ruth Lavery's favorites. Containers brimming with dahlias, trailing petunias and showpiece plants such as Black and Blue salvia and Twist & Twirl coleus accent the front deck.
At the rear of the property, she's created a garden hideaway, a patio area surrounded by trees and low-maintenance perennials — plants such as lilies, black-eyed Susans, canna, echinacea and about 20 varieties of hosta. Many of the plants were passed on to her from others, ''so when you garden, you think of the people who gave them to you,'' she said.
The plants thrive under her care, yet she insists she does little to maintain them. She added greensand when she started the garden to loosen its clay soil, but she doesn't fertilize her plants or water them once they're established. Instead, she depends on mulch to help keep the moisture in the soil and add nutrients as it breaks down.
The garden is a spot that nurtures the Laverys' soul, just as the rest of their lifestyle nurtures their environmental consciousness.
They were just a little ahead of their time.
Mary Beth Breckenridge is the Beacon Journal home writer. She can be reached at 330-996-3756, or at mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com via e-mail.
CHIPPEWA TWP.: Vince and Ruth Lavery were environmentally minded long before green was chic.
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