Mud pies and sand castles or pie in the sky dreams?

23 September 2012
Week Eight

Well, so much for building anticipation by showing all the steps and slowly explaining how we did this before revealing the completed work. Lol. I've never been one for surprises much and I really like how this turned out so I wanted this pic to be the top of the page. "Layer One - clay bread oven, Sept 2012"

Needless to say we spent the weekend in every (ok, most?) child's dream ... making mud pies and building sand castles ... squishing the clay and sand mix between our toes and under our feet, slapping it together with sticky grimy hands, splashing water on each other. And in the middle of it all we had to stop and build a giant wet sand dome shaped 'just so' to act as support for our clay walls. It was every bit as fun as playing in the big dirt pile when we were kids but a whole lot more rewarding in the end!! It's probably a good thing I didn't know about these ovens when I was a kid or my mom and dad would've had a whole yard full of them. As it was they has brick turtles pens and whole house plans built from walls of leaves ... me and cob would have been a nightmare!

So, anyway, here's a few more pics from our weekend adventure.

Good ol' Oklahoma Red Dirt

Our base layer

Breaking up the clay

Kneading the cob

The oven base and beginning of the walls

Mixing sand with water to form the dome

Sand dome covered with newspapers and walls going up

Finished first layer with door cut out

Honestly the only part that was a pain in the neck was forming the sand dome inside the clay base. It kept falling all over the place and judging how steep to make the walls and how high to build it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. But we finally got it done and then we had to fight to keep the wet newspapers stuck to it. They wanted to fly off in the wind. At one point I just gave up and started throwing clay on it so the inside of the oven may be kind of wrinkled-y but no one will see that part anyway. I'm already drooling over the bread and pizzas that are going to come out of this - chicken pesto, eggplant and onion, sourdough bouille, etc ...

Pie in the sky?? Well, in the midst of us playing in the mud and building with wet sand, we found out that the 26 acres of land that we have been drooling over for the last two years, which is only 30 miles from my parents, was dropped in price by half. Obviously they needed to come down in price given the land sat there for two years with no movement, but we never expected it to ever be in our price range. However, and this is where the pie-in-the-sky dream comes in, even though it's in our price range we can't even start to arrange financing for it until January when we pay off our car ... and we just don't imagine it will stay on the market for very long now. If it were only "money falling out of the sky" instead of "pie in the sky", we'd have it made. I guess what will be will be. I thought of starting a fund for donations ... I could call it the mud pie fund and everyone who donates gets to spend a weekend with us "living the farm life" and take home fresh eggs and veggies. It would only take 1,000 people giving us $75 each and we'd have it made ...

Ah, ... pie in the sky!