Sitting in Jim and Sharon Smith’s sunroom watching cardinals and blue jays flit from the drifts of yellow-and-white daisies in the garden to a nearby tree line, it’s hard to believe that, 20 years ago, this spot was the middle of a soybean field.

That that is no longer the case is a testament to the power of nature to reclaim its own – and the tenacity of two senior citizens who wanted nothing more than to live out their retirement years in close connection to what they love best – the natural environment.

Jim, 74, a retired farmer and barn repairman, and Sharon, 69, a retired hospital nurse and massage specialist, have spent the last two decades building an Earth-friendly house that sits on 40 acres of restored wildlife habitat.

They call their property, outside Churubusco, Rainbow Acres, and it contains a spectrum of features as beautiful as they are resource-sparing.

Painstaking work

The Smiths’ four-bedroom ranch – Jim Smith designed and built it himself over nearly five years with only a little help from his son, Cory, and professional drywall and tiling contractors – is an example of an earth-sheltered structure. Like an old-fashioned bank barn, it has its northern wall built into the side of an earthen mound, a design that saves energy by preventing heat loss.

The house is heated and cooled by a geothermal system installed when such systems were still a novelty. And the home’s exterior walls were built using cord-wood and tamped-earth construction. It’s an unusual, and unusually weather-tight, method that Jim picked up from a Mother Earth News demonstration project he and Sharon visited while on a motorcycling vacation in North Carolina.

“We said if we ever built a house, I’d try some of this cord-wood construction, and that’s what I did,” Jim says.

The technique involves stacking round tree logs and square or rectangular beams cut to 16 inches in length in layers and filling the spaces between them with a concrete-like mortar. The finished product looks a bit like a stone wall, except the “stones” are wood rounds and the walls are a well-insulating 16 inches thick.

Jim recalls the work, which he did mostly after hours and on weekends, as painstaking.

“We started in early spring of 1993, and it took all summer to build this front wall and the tamped-earth wall in the bedroom, which is 90 percent dirt and only 10 percent cement,” he says.

“It was tedious,” Sharon adds. “It takes forever. And you have to sift all the dirt. There can’t be any rocks in it.”

Sharon recalls working with her husband on the bedroom wall, which now has the warm luster of wood patina, in 90-degree weather, pressing layers of mud together by hand.

“We didn’t last long because it was such hard work,” Sharon says, adding they eventually hired someone with a machine to finish the job.

The tamped wall, which separates the home’s living quarters from an attached pole-barn-style garage, is not only snug but fireproof, Jim says, adding he had a little trouble with building inspectors at first but it dissipated as they learned more about the construction methods.

But the couple did most of the other building projects themselves, including adding the birch-paneled sunroom after enclosing the former front porch.

Despite Jim’s failing eyesight and struggles with diabetes, he also has made several pieces of furniture to fit spots in the house, which has an open-concept kitchen, living and dining area.

The 2,800-square-foot home’s spare bedrooms are now an exercise room and a hobby room for Sharon, who lived with her husband in a trailer home while they were building.

Created wetlands

Sharon says the landscaping was mostly her idea. Originally, the couple had the idea of planting trees on their original 20 acres for eventual sale as timber, “but we didn’t know what we were doing,” Sharon says.

Some of those evergreens are now dying. So when they bought 20 more adjoining acres at a farm sale in 1994, they decided to concentrate on creating wildlife habitat instead.

That led to the planting of hundreds more trees and the creation of a pond and wetlands area in 1998 – an area that was certified in 1999 by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources as the first created wetlands in Whitley County.

There have been some problems with the wetlands – a windmill aerator acquired in 2008 hasn’t always controlled algae blooms, Sharon says – but the water is now 4 feet deep and wetlands plants, including cattails, line the shore.

She regularly sees ducks, opossums, rabbits, deer, turkey and pheasants around the wetlands. There have been owls and warblers in the woods, kestrels and meadowlarks in the meadow and butterflies and hummingbirds in her gardens, which recently were brimming with purple columbine plants that, like the daisies, have been spreading on their own. She also has a raspberry thicket and a small vegetable garden planted in raised beds.

Wildflowers have spread throughout the woods on their own, she says, and even the lawn in front of the house was never seeded.

“It just grew by itself,” Sharon says.

Recently, the Smiths allowed the ACRES Land Trust to invite members and the public to come for a nature walk through the trails that have been mowed into the woods and wetlands, and the couple are now considering donating some of the land to the Huntertown-based conservancy so it can be maintained in its natural state.

“It was fun at times and trying at times,” Sharon says, adding that she thinks the endeavor helped her and Jim mature as a couple. “Mature” is her choice of verb.

“We learned how to work together better, and I’m very glad we did it, and I’m very glad my husband is smart enough to figure all of this out,” she says, noting that the house has proven economical to live in and was paid for by the time it was finished.

“It’s so peaceful,” Sharon says. “I love living here and caring for the land.”

rsalter@jg.net