Photos from Cob Oven Building Workshop

This top photo shows the oven structure around 1pm. It is actually about a foot taller, but the photo I took had buckets in the way.

I had a hard time finding info about cob building on the web- maybe I should have looked for natural building sites instead of cob sites. Here is a general description of cob building: http://www.alternatives.com/cob-building/what.html This one, too: http://www.geocities.com/mosesrocket/... and http://www.earthgarden.com.au/strawbale/cob_oven2.pdf

Basically put, cob building uses natural ingredients that can be home-grown or found locally - rocks, water, sand, straw (can be grown from cover crops, clay, and you and your friends' labor. It is long-lasting and all-natural, and it uses cheaper fuel than your gas or electric oven. People in the US who are interested in peak oil are learning to use our old technologies that had been forgotten during the timber and oil booms.

A woman and her child came into the garden early in the afternoon. I told her about the oven-building workshop, and she said everyone used this kind of oven in her native Mexico.

For future cob building workshops in the Bay Area, keep in touch with the website of the Ecology Center in Berkeley at http://www.ecologycenter.org, the Barrington Collective - http://www.barringtoncollective.org, and of course, Indybay's calendar at http://www.indybay.org/calendar