Eco building, Garden

BUILDING AN EARTH OVEN PART 3 – THAT OLD SAND DANCE

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Placing clay mix at the base of the sand mound

Using feet to mix clay and sand

Sifting clay and sand mixture

Compressing clay mixture with fingers

 

That’s right the next part involves doing the twist, in fact dusting off any of your 60s dance moves only makes the mix better, I promise! With your lovely sand dome nice and dry it’s time to build the first layer of your earth oven. But don’t use up all your energy at once there are two more after this!!

This layer forms the inside of your oven, it is the thermal mass layer, the opposite of the insulation layer underneath the tiles this layer absorbs as much heat from the fire as it can then slowly release it back into the space once the fire dies down to cook your pizza! The layer after this obviously is an insulation layer to stop the heat being released to the ether.

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Eco building, Garden

BUILDING AN EARTH OVEN PART 2 – CRUMBLING SANDCASTLES

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Placing fire brick tiles on base

Cutting fire bricks

Piling sand on tiles to make mould

 

We could have researched ahead to see what materials we needed for the weekend. Instead we rose to a glorious morning ready to get stuck into the earth oven, only to discover the oven didn’t want any ordinary bricks for the oven floor, oh no, it needed fire brick tiles. We scolded it, so it knew it wasn’t allowed to be a high maintenance pet demanding a fresh coat of render to match the season! So a week went by and we procured some fire brick tiles, then it rained, for a week. The next week we realised that a chisel and hammer weren’t going to cut it, the fact that they were seconds with chips on them should have tipped us off that they like to crumble rather than cut neatly like a dream…time to call in some favours…

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Eco building, Garden

BUILDING AN EARTH OVEN PART 1 – DRINK BEER & MAKE MUDPIES

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Laying glass bottles on base for insulation

Building earth oven base out of superadobe earth bags

Filling the earth oven base with scoria

 

Well it would be as easy as the aforementioned pie if we actually sat down and read the book properly (the earth oven bible that is). Instead we took the attitude that one shouldn’t actually open to the pertinent page until a few minutes before getting started. Without fail we would discover that we didn’t have the right materials, tools or would need to let things soak or dry overnight or perhaps for a week, in light of this the only reasonable course of action remaining was to take a siesta or perhaps go fishing instead. This is perhaps not the most efficient way to get things done, but far less stressful.

We are now about 3/4 done on the oven and now that we know what to do, having more or less skimmed the relevant diagrams, I can promise you someone more prepared than us could easily knock this over in a week, with 5 out of the 7 days set aside for the oven to have some quality alone time to dry.

I encourage you to buy the book, but as a summary here are the first steps, with more to come (I promise, dear reader, that I won’t be as cavalier with my blog updates as my construction).

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Eco building, Garden

THE FLEMINGTON PERMABLITZ PART 3 – FROM WATERCOLOUR TO REALITY

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Watercolour plan of the espalier orchard and chook yard

Aligning the posts for the espalier orchard/chook yard at the Flemington Permablitz

Laying barbed wire in the earthbag garden bed wall at the Flemington Permablitz

Watercolour plan of the earth oven

Filling the earthbags, scoria and shadecloth laid on bottom of raised garden bed for drainage at the Flemington Permablitz

Felix levelling the scoria for drainage of the raised garden beds at the Flemington Permablitz

Kids rendering the earthbags at the Flemington Permablitz

Watercolour plan of the food forest

Mark mixing the earthen plaster to render the earthbag garden bed at the Flemington Permablitz

Rendering the earthbag garden bed walls at the Flemington Permablitz

Aerial of the garden after the permablitz, Flemington

Watercolour plan of the Flemington Sharehouse Garden

We called an armistice with the sky while we dropped shovels for lunch. The Blitzers made use of the newly constructed garden walls to gather around while we explained the design.

 

The raised earthbag garden beds form our Zone 1, the part of the garden we visit everyday. We were inspired by one of our Permaculture tutors who shared his garden responsibilities with his housemates by allocating each one a plot and a plant family to look after. This was so very appealing after oh so many days last year where we were late to work trying to get everything watered and sheltered in preparation for a particularly brutally hot day. So the annual beds are divided into four for a four year crop rotation so each housemate has a little piece of land all of their own and are assured of the purity of their seed saving (no more fights over contaminated brassica seeds, haha no we really are more civilised than that). Everyone seems pretty keen to get involved, even our housemates who have never grown a lettuce before (let’s home Melbourne’s climate is kind to them, she can be cruel).

The two “ribbons” of beds are thread so there is a path around the edge for a quick sandwich harvest before work with a more direct root down the centre to the woodpile/worm farm. The bags are at two different seating heights so kids, giants and the vertically challenged alike can find a nice sheltered place to soak in the sun or have a chat. The earth oven is the highlight of Zone 1, but will have to wait until after the Blitz to roar into life, as the rain just won’t let us make the sand mould! It is sheltered from the ghastly flats next door by the big tree, which brings us to Zone 2.

Despite the shade we are trying our best to grow a Food Forest to the West to block out the overlookers with Avocados and Tagasaste. Only time will tell how successful we can be. The Orchard to the east is where we will grow crops like corn between espalier trees, and maybe even our dream of a banana. (It can be done in Melbourne!) In summer the chooks, on the border of Zone 1 and 2 will doze in the shade of the shed and in winter when it is colder they will free range through the orchard after the corn has been harvested and reinvigerate the earth. And so that is how we have tried to make each area have multiple uses: the annual garden beds/seating & entertaining area, the food forest/neighbour shade and the orchard/chicken range.

 

And so the Blitzers went back to work, so keen that many stayed well after wrap up time and could’nt be pried from earthbag or rendering glove until after 6. The children in particular were so full of beans that when an exhausted father asked hopefully if they were ready to go they answered a definitive “NO” and he trudged defeated to the couch for a nap. As people started drifting away the transformation truely sunk in, it had taken us weeks to build the first two beds and in only a day the Blitzers had almost finished the remaining two, plus the posts in the orchard, a wicking bed and some rendering to top it all off.

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