COB TO LIVE.
Last week I (Jenny) participated in a worshop in Sudbury where I was part of a team that built an outdoor earth oven made of Cob. What is cob you ask? It's made from the soil under your feet and if it's clay, add some additional loamy soil, a bit of water and straw, do a heel-toe dance (preferably to ska or bluegrass) to knead it to a homogenous consistency and voila: a batch-0'-cob. Well, it takes a bit more than that, but that's it in a nutshell. Gino Cacciotti, a local stone mason who spends his winters in remote Mexico volunteering in cob projects, facilitated the project and Peter Zwarich & Lara Bradley and their sons Sebastien and Quinn, hosted the workshop in their back yard in downtown Sudbury. It was an extremely satisfying, rewarding & empowering experience to participate in such a project and I encourage everyone to get out and cob at least once in your life. It may change your life!
Instead of going on, here are a few links to learn more...
http://ecosudbury.ca/site/?q=node/6
www.cobworks.com
If anyone is interested in taking part in a future workshop in Northeastern Ontario, please email us at info@sundogoutfitters.infosathse.com. We will likely be hosting at least one workshop in 2007, either an outdoor oven or a cob playhouse (which will be a mini-version of a cob cabin so you'll learn alot about structural techniques). Hope to see you out here!