Messing About With Cob - Earth Oven Part 1

 For a long time now I've been saying how much I'd like to build an earth oven. The trouble with saying it lots, that doesn't mean it happens! 

So yesterday each of the children had asked to do something with me (eldest wanted to do green woodwork, middlest wanted to use my pyro pen to burn some pictures onto wood and the youngest wanted to carve some dinosaurs) So I thought maybe we should do something we can all be involved with. 

The day before I had started to clear an area for a proper clay oven with the digger. The trouble was I'd never used clay or cob as a building material. The book we were using suggested we make a small oven first (all the materials can be reused anyway) so we set about mixing some cob!

We started with some old building sand that had stuff growing in it to make a former for the clay. the girls were hard working in getting the sand up to where we were going to build it. 

Once that was roughly built the fun could begin! The boy didn't want to get his feet dirty, but the girls were more than keen!

It took so long to mix the clay in though - I was surprised that it wasn't slightly quicker! We might have to come up with a way of speeding things up when we build the proper oven as we're going to need a lot of building material! 

The girls had to be hosed down before they could even think about going inside! Bu they laughed the whole time. Unfortunately we didn't get to use the cob yet as the heavens decided to open and we had to get inside pretty quick. There will be other days though and I'm looking forward to this as a nice summer project we can do together. Should be good quality cheap fun! 

I'm still not sure how we'll build the base of the oven. Part of me knows it'll be easy to just use the concrete blocks we have here and build them up to waste height and cast a slab on top. But I think using some hardcore to make a base then building the base up in materials that are found here might be more fun (although more work) and more eco friendly. If we build it the slow way then the children can be far more involved as well which will be great.