Kerry’s Garden

Yesterday morning we hit the ‘world’s longest yard sale’ as we do every year. Aside from the odd rude individual that sees nothing wrong with parking their UHaul to block in several cars… it was a great time. I found an old Wagner Ware cast iron Drip Drop Roaster with the trivet included. I paid $20 for it. It needs a good seasoning for sure. I love the way the writing looks. It has that grandmother’s kitchen look to it. It had been marked at $50, then $30 and I talked the seller down to $20. I don’t know if it is worth that but I am happy with it. I tried to determine when it was made and the patent dates on the underside of the lid end with 1922. I don’t know if that means that it was made in 22 or not. On one site I read that the 1268b also on the underside of the lid may place it as being made in the 1940s. In either case I am happy with it. I also picked up a newer (91) Wagner cast iron skillet. It was one of the 100 year batch. Not worth anything to a collector but a good skillet to cook with.

Yesterday I found a local place that sold gravel that was also open on Sunday. No small miracle around here. Another truckload of gravel and the foundation hole is filled with some to spare for some inner fill later on.

After cleaning up the area, tools, and truck, I checked the clay/sand mix at about 4pm and found that it had dried out enough to make some more bricks. It was so late in the day they didn’t have time to dry enough to remove from the boards. They spent the night on the picnic table under a tree. They should be dry enough to cover by this evening in case the rain they are calling for tonight materializes.

Given all of the drought we have had around here in the past few years I refuse to begrudge all of the rain we have been having. That being said, it has put the oven progress back. I had planned to make another load of bricks on Thursday but the clay and sand had both gotten wet and even after mixing it was too wet to work with. I covered the bin and let it sit till last night. The weather gurus weren’t calling for rain so I dumped it out on a sheet of plastic to dry out a little. Hopefully I will get another load of bricks made this weekend.

When I came home yesterday my almost dug hole looked like a pond. I fully expected to find tadpoles living in there this morning. I guess i wasn’t surprised given the almost 5″ we have had in the last 5 days. Fortunately it was down some by this morning. I bucketed out a bunch of the water and decided to use the post hole digger to dig 3 lower corners to help with drainage. The picture below shows the water that seeped in within about 30 minutes of digging.

My morning actually started with me putting together the wheel barrow I bought on the way home from work last night. My old one broke and it was time to replace it. About half a dozen loads of soil later and the hole was finished. I decided this was a good time to clean up and go get that load of gravel. The place I get it closes at 2pm so I had just enough time to get lunch and get the gravel. I noticed the sky was clouding up a bit as I was about to go inside so I decided to recover my brick mix on the plastic.

FF about an hour and my poor truck is once again dragging it’s back end. If it lives through this oven business it will be a miracle. Of course the sprinkles started as I started unloading the gravel. Glad I covered that clay/sand mix. Most of the time I was unloading the truck it poured rain. I really didn’t mind, it felt kind of good. Just about the time I finished, the rains stopped. I had hoped to have enough gravel to lay the cement pad this weekend. But I was a little short. It is really still to wet anyway so perhaps some time next week I can get that done.

The first batch of mini adobe bricks are drying in the sun. I ended up making a form to make four 3″x4″x1.5″ blocks at a time. I wanted to start slow so I decided to make a small batch today. I sifted out the large pieces of clay with a 1/2″ mesh screen and mixed 1 3 gallon bucket of clay soil and 1 3 gallon bucket of sand in the wheel barrow. I used an 18 gallon plastic rubbermaid type container to mix the dry mix with water. I love the feeling of the mud squishing up between my toes. I ended up getting 52 bricks with some mud left over for next time. I would have made more but I ran out of the boards I was making them on. There is probably enough clay for 8 or 10 more. In all reality if I make a batch like this every weekend I will be doing good. You wouldn’t think stomping around in mud would be that tiring. I was wiped by the time I was done though.

While looking for materials for my newest project I have become a big fan of Craigslist. Yesterday I hit the mother load. While doing a search for fire brick I located an elderly gentleman about an hour away with a truck load of old fire brick. He wanted $65 for the lot. While I only NEEDED a fraction of the amount he was selling (116+several halves and 14+several pieces of 12″x15″ slabs), purchasing what I would need new would have cost me about half of what I paid for the truckload and the quality would have been much less. So… after MUCH sweating and many trips to the back corner of his yard, my poor old truck was loaded to the gills and off we set. Thank God Tia went with me. I would probably still be carting bricks if I had to do it myself. Concerned that I would end up breaking down on the way home, we took it slow. My old truck has over 400,000 miles on it and she performed like a champ. Go Ford!

FF several hours and my truck has been emptied, we are exhausted, and two beautiful piles of Temper fire brick are awaiting duty. The question then became do I still build the cob/adobe oven or do I go ahead and build the oven entirely out of the fire brick. I checked the Pompeii plans and I do have enough for an oven larger than I had planned to build. Being the obsessing (aka focused) individual that I am, I found myself waking several times during the night to ponder my dilemma. This morning I decided to go ahead with the cob oven as planned with one alteration. I would build adobe bricks first and use those for the oven. The fact that I have never done this before and that in all likelihood we will move from here within the next 5-10 years, I decided to wait on building a ‘permanent’ oven and get my feet wet on the mud oven. I decided to go with the ‘build the bricks first’ approach after reading about an oven redo using such a procedure. It was written by the same gentleman that wrote the book I have been using as a reference for this project. Proceeding this way will allow me to build the bricks I need at my leisure and put it all together in a shorter time once I finish the foundation.

The totally cool thing about these bricks is that they came from an old boiler where I went to college. They have been sitting in this back yard since 1979, long before I was a student. Talk about coming full circle.

What does one do with 8 bags of tube sand and a VERY large pile of sticks? Build an earth oven of course. Also known as a cob or adobe oven by those who build and use them. They have been around forever and are recently coming into favor as a cheap way of making a wood fired oven. I ran into the idea while browsing the net this weekend. I’ve always wanted a brick oven and wasn’t willing or able to outlay the money required to build one or have one made. I read a post on some blog about cob ovens and instantly knew I HAD to build one. The basic ingredients are clay, sand, straw or manure, and lots of sweat.

So far I have located a source for the clay subsoil without having to dig up my yard. I have 8 broken tubes of sand that you put in the back of the truck during the winter for traction, a few bricks and a site picked out. Today when I came home, the city had cut down a couple of pear trees that lined the street and left the nicely cut wood in my yard. A couple of dozen trips with the dolly and I have next year’s wood all stacked up.

After reading Kiko Denzer’s book ‘Build Your Own Earth Oven’ that I picked up from the library on Saturday, I made a test brick using about half sand and half clay. I cannot believe how solid this thing is already. I can’t even make a dent with my fingernail. I also did the water test and it looks like the clay is fairly pure.

I think I am going to do a cinder block foundation surrounded by field stones. The foundation needs to be about 4′ in diameter. I am hoping to get this thing built before the end of the summer.

Looks like this is going to be the best blackberry harvest that I’ve had in several years. It takes two years from shoot to berry. A a lot that can happen during that time. Lack of rain, too much rain, disease, deer, wind and winter temps can thwart a berries journey into being. The weather this year will determine the canes that come up this year and next to some extent. Also the rain or lack thereof will contribute to the number and size of the berries. All of the good weather in the world is for naught if I don’t get them covered prior to ripening. The birds will pick them clean if given a change.

This is the second picking of the season. The batch I picked a couple of days ago was just enough for a cobbler.