Making Sense of Things

Posts tagged with cob house

• 24 June 2011 - Week 5 – Cob camp hits the road to learn eco-building in the Pyrenees

  Cobbing

  The beginning of week 5 was all about mixing and building cob since the roof was up and stable. There is so much to learn about cob that you can only truly understand through tactile experience.  You need to feel the critical proportion of clay to sand to ensure a plastic, cohesive, workable mix that won’t shrink and crack too much.  Depending on the coarseness of the sand and quality of the clay (and other components in the soil) the final mix should be between 5% and 25% clay.  By observing the soil composition from a soil test (seeing it settle in a jar with water) you can estimate proportions.

  But, it is the snowball test and crunch test that helped us refine the mix.  For the snowball test we created a sphere from our mix, held it 1m above soft ground and let it fall. If it shattered, it was … Read the rest

• 19 June 2011 - Week 4 at Cob Camp – Hard work and fun

  This week started with Marco and Linda departing camp and Anita and Martin making a real effort to progress the project positively and constructively.

  A real highlight of the week was when Laurence came to camp to give us an edible weeds tour of our area. She taught us how to identify what we could eat that was naturally growing around us and how we could eat it.  She pointed out blackberries, wild sage, Jerusalem artichoke, daisies, yarrow, hog weed and more… here are some pictures…

  

  Fitting in with this theme, Wayne decided to teach us all (in a humorous TV cooking show style!) how to make delicious elderflower cordial from some local elderflower trees. Here is his recipe:

  • Pick 25-30 heads of fresh fragrant flowers (not starting to fruit, brown or bud) to make 2L of cordial
  • Shake the flowers to remove insects
  • Put the flowers in approximately 2L

  … Read the rest

• 12 June 2011 - Week 3 at Cob Camp – Community Matters

  Most people want deeper links to a community as modern society is individualistic, insecure and fractured. Many don’t know where to start to lead different lives and those of us who do, seem to grapple with making ‘community’ work.

  How do we live co-operatively, thoughtfully and simply with each other whilst conserving natural resources, sharing responsibility for work and providing meaningful, dignified and safe work – including successful projects?

  All of us on this course are from Western societies where we’ve been encouraged to be highly individualistic. Given we need to learn new skills for living together with others (especially giving up personal space) this group has done remarkably well at banding together, without conflict, to get things done.  But… it’s not all smooth sailing.

  

  Proper management is important. My previous management experience is on big projects but there are many inspiring models to emulate, especially from small populations of … Read the rest

• 4 June 2011 - Week 2 at Cob Camp – Planting, rescuing, cooking and eating food. And making stuff out of leather…

  Week 2 of the cob building course was (nearly) all about FOOD!! Planting food, skip diving for food, cooking creatively, making a stove and oven, eating, discussing… it really seemed to be our focus all week!

  

  After our first skip dive at the local supermarket bin, we organised the camp kitchen and enthusiastically embraced communal cooking with our rescued food. We made scrambled eggs, with smoked salmon and goats cheese, frittata, salad nicoise, salsa, potato salad, creamy pesto pasta, coleslaw, ratatouille, couscous, nettle and goats cheese quiche, garlic pizza bread, chocolate brownies, spaghetti and more… but the best creation all week was Sunset Bin Crumble with Sam’s Special Sauce. This cob-camp specialty was essentially apple and rhubarb crumble cooked in Mr Oo (the cob oven we’ve recently made).  The crumble was made from delicious, rescued bright pink biscuits and butter. The sauce was Samantha’s inventive concoction of cottage cheese, 2 … Read the rest

• 28 May 2011 - Week 1 at Cob Camp – Eco Building and Community Living

  

  I just arrived at La Creuse, a region in the middle of France, in order to participate to the building of a cob house organised by AM Rustic with other volunteers. Jean on his side, went to Central America for few weeks, in order to do a consultancy with a British humanitarian organisation.

  I understood from the first day on the cob building course that this wasn’t really a structured course but a gathering of people with a shared interest in natural building coming together to live, work, learn and share their diverse experiences and skills.  Anita and Martin had ditched the ‘Day 1 – Designing your Cob House’ for driving the newcomers (myself, Vicky and Wayne) around the local area to see a previously built cob house, some sites and buy supplies.

  The second day a family from the Netherlands arrived (Ester, Dirk, Emile and Liam) so while they … Read the rest