On a blue-sky Saturday morning on a hilltop in Stanton Heights, the working world is divided into lifters, pullers and feeders.

By noon, 11 lifters are lined up along the 26-foot, red-oak beam that will form the top of one of the long walls of the straw-bale barn at Mildreds' Daughters Urban Farm. One of the city's first straw-bale structures will be located on its last surviving farm.

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Daniel Curtis of Morningside, front, and David Mooney of Squirrel Hill, in baseball cap, along with about 20 other people push up the timber-framed wall of a straw bale barn being built on Mildreds' Daughters farm in Stanton Heights. Click photo for larger image.

The urban farm's serendipitous revival began five years ago when two nurses looking for a house with a big yard lucked into five acres that had just gone on the market. The DiCaprio family was selling the land they had farmed since 1929.

Since buying the farm, Randa Shannon and Barbara Kline's initial dream of having just enough land to run their dogs and grow a few vegetables has evolved into a nonprofit enterprise and a growing community of volunteers who help plant, weed, harvest, sell produce at local farmers' markets and build the occasional barn.

In recent weeks, builder Nick Hurst and his mostly volunteer crew assembled the barn's post-and-beam sides. There are no nails in this timberframe barn; it's being put together the old-fashioned way, with wooden pegs securing the mortise-and-tenon joints.

"We need a drum roll," Shannon shouts as the crew of lifters and pullers moved into position.

"You guys are just going to provide tension," Hurst says to the 10 women on the ground whose gloved hands are gripping the three ropes lashed to the beam.

"Ready?"

A little harmonica riff comes out of nowhere, sending a ripple of laughter through the lifters, pullers and the dozen or so others standing around holding their breaths.

"Ready ... one, two, three, LIFT!" Hurst says.

The lifters lift, the pullers pull and a miracle happens. The frame rises and its three posts, with some gentle persuasion, drop neatly into the three square holes in the floor.

"We're in, we're good," Hurst says. "Way to go, guys!"

Applause and cheers all around.

The crew declines a water break and digs into lifting the opposite wall, which lies assembled on the barn's plywood floor.

Finally, at 2:40 p.m., after Hurst has pounded tenons into mortises with the mother of all mallets and the crew has pegged all of the joints, the timberframe is complete except for its roof trusses, which will go on later this month.

"In true timberframe fashion, you should have a small tree or branch to nail to the top of the frame," Hurst says, standing atop one of the long beams. A red oak branch is produced and Hurst nails it to the center of the beam.

Now it's the feeders' turn to strut their stuff, as the hungry crew walks down the hill to a table groaning with freshly baked ham, breads, cheeses, spicy baked beans, horseradish-spiked deviled eggs, pasta salad and fried plantains.

Some of these volunteer lifters and pullers are members of the Mennonite Urban Corps, which has provided more than 100,000 hours of youthful assistance and exuberance to about 40 schools, churches and other community-building groups here over the past 10 years.

"We're here to get some experience for ourselves and also to help the city," said red-haired Jessica Walter, 22, of Mechanicsburg, during the lunch break. "It helps us know where we want to go" with careers. And as a lifter, she said, "I get to add this to my list of random things I've done in life."

This year, eight young Mennonites, all college graduates, have helped out at the farm.

Tony Tye, Post-Gazette Susanna Meyer picks okra at Mildreds' Daughters farm. Click photo for larger image.

"We've really been blessed in our connection to that community," Shannon said under the branches of the sprawling red oak that sheltered the picnic table.

"Amazing young people," she said a few days later, picking up the thought as she rocked gently on the swing near the fountain and the willow tree next to the farmhouse. "It's the first generation that grew up with Earth Day on their calendars and ecology taught in schools."

The Mennonite program has provided interns to the farm for the past three years. One of them was Hurst, who helped build their greenhouse. More recently, he learned straw-bale construction at a workshop.

He and contractor Bill Neely, who poured the footer and built the 8-foot-high foundation walls, are working from construction drawings produced by architect and sustainable design consultant Chris Leininger, who has designed and built several straw-bale structures. The foundation will be 3 to 4 feet above ground, high enough to keep the straw-bale walls dry. Inside and out, the stacked, rectangular straw bales will be covered with an adobe plaster.

The deeply overhanging, corrugated steel roof will allow rainwater to collect via gutters and downspouts into barrels, where it can be tapped for watering crops.

The barn will get most of its heat and light through its large windows. Because the insulation value of straw-bale walls is so high -- about R-50 -- Shannon and Kline are not otherwise heating or cooling the barn, which will be used most heavily in the summer months. Partly because it will have neither plumbing nor electricity, securing the building permit went smoothly. The straw-bale walls will be built next month or in early spring, depending on how long the warm weather holds.

Kline and Shannon decided to build a permanent straw-bale structure after building a small, temporary one themselves two years ago to overwinter their chickens. After finishing it, the women, who share a nurse anesthetist job at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and their four dogs gathered inside.

"It felt like being in a big nest," Shannon said. "You couldn't hear traffic" or sirens or any of the other city sounds that float up to their hilltop.

The new structure is no henhouse, however. Its basement will be used for farm storage and eventually, perhaps, as the distribution point for members of their community-supported agriculture program. This summer, 20 families invested in a weekly supply of Mildreds' Daughters heirloom tomatoes, kale, okra, chard, zucchini, beans and more. All of their produce is organically grown and sold at two seasonal farmers' markets -- the city-sponsored market, held from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Mondays on Penn Circle West in East Liberty, and the Union Project's market, held from 4 to 7 p.m. Thursdays at Stanton and Negley avenues in Highland Park. The farm also supplies five local restaurants.

The barn's main room will be a classroom mostly for farming and food-related programs.

"We want to be a model for how to take care of the earth, how to eat well and how to teach other people how to do that," Kline said.

This summer they have 1.5 acres in cultivation, and they will expand to 2 acres next year, adding herbs and more vegetables. Two of their five acres are on the hillside overlooking Butler Street, and Kline is looking for an institutional partner to help explore what crops can be grown on a steep, north-facing, urban slope.

The farmhouse's long, deep front porch, which overlooks the hillside, has a bird's-eye view of Etna snuggled in its valley. After raising the timberframe, the crew had set to work clearing ailanthus trees and other unwanted vegetation from the slope.

"We can see the river again," Shannon said.