The Birth of BIG HOT!!!!!

maybe not a supernova, but definitely the birth of BIG HOT!!!




























jonah has named the new oven, BIG HOT! and boy, do i know why. she's big, she's hot and she bakes like you wouldn't believe. I'm envisioning making bread, pizza, roast veg and meat, yogurt, fruit leather, nuts, whatever. maybe one day a week, i will become simply a baker, preparing food all day, wearing a dress and an apron smeared with flour and soot. like an old school village baker from sicily, but perhaps i've had a glass of wine and am taking it a bit too far. ahem. for those of you who are wondering, the oven sits on a hollow base made from reclaimed sidewalk pieces (urbanite), filled with rubble and mortared with cob. The brick baking floor sits in a bed of sand. the first 4 inches of the oven is clay and sand and the next 4 inches is clay, sand, straw. on top of this thermal layer is an insulative layer of perlite and clay followed by a couple of clay/sand/horse manure plasters.

we've already had several fabulous pizza nights where one by one our friends emphatically swore their life long allegiance to the wood fired oven. My first bread baking resulted in 4 hot crossed buns, in other words, inedible lumps of char. My second bread baking was better but not great. There is much to be learned here, much to experiment with. How long to fire the oven, how to prepare the dough, what to wear whilst cooking, how do i prevent the wooden door from catching on fire, why is jonah determined to cook tree bark in the oven? stay tuned for more tasty results from BIG HOT!!!

Summer time

Its been a busy month on Temple Farm. Mostly, we've been preparing for the cob workshop that we are hosting early July. A new composting toilet, an outdoor shower, storage racks and a couple new sand bays have all been recently built, not to mention a huge foundation trench and urbanite wall, thank you Jason. We moved the kitchen downstairs and rearranged the entire house. I'm growing a big garden and attempting all sorts of things I've never tried before, like a huge potato patch, a 3 sisters guild, drip and soaker hose irrigation, growing tomatoes and peppers in a greenhouse, growing wildflowers etc. Its been a very wet spring and sometimes it seems all I'm actually growing is our local slug and snail population. Jonah has been accruing a fabulous collection of tools, and his latest and most favorite, is a sheath for his pocket neef (his pronunciation). he wears it outside and whips it out to cut branches and lumber that he steadies with his foot. This kid misses nothing. The cob oven, aka BIg Hot, is a ripper; pizzas cook in just a couple of minutes and are truly divine. My next project is baking loaves of bread and using the falling temperature gradient to cook a variety of other things, like casseroles, cookies, nuts etc. Jonah must be reading the dictionary at night when no one is looking because he's coming up with new words every day, not to mention complete sentences and correct verb usage. sigh. Amongst all the busyness, we find time at midday to go for our daily stroller walk down Blossom Lane which ends with Jonah falling asleep for his nap.

More Happenings

We walked in a pet parade, we watched a tractor parade, we watered the garden, we mulched the garden, we played with friends, we compared navels with friends, we did a little handplaning in the hallway at the Harborside Inn, we wore fuzzy wombat tshirts, we wore tractor tshirts. Such is the life of a 2 year old.

Rock on

My parents and brother came to visit for 9 days and so naturally we put them to work. We built a circular rock wall that has turned into the focal point of our side yard and is a wonderful place to sit in the sun (on those occasions it actually shines). We also had some friends visiting from Australia and so we put them to work too. We hauled each piece of "urbanite" from offsite and mixed cob on tarps to use as a mortar between the rocks; a bit of an experiment really. What a totally satisfying project it was. I've planted wildflowers, new zealand spinach, and herbs into the garden soil; now all we need is a bit of sunshine!

life on blossom lane

may has disappeared into the withers with exactly zero blog postings. we've been busy little bees, believe me. new flower beds have been created and planted, a circular stone wall built, an earthen oven built, a base for our own oven built, a hills hoist has appeared, a garden terraced, vegetables planted, a greenhouse born and now a grove of tomatoes climbs steadily upward. a pond has been dug though it appears more like an asteroid has left a crater. we've cleared a building site; did i mention we are building a yoga and massage studio? and hosting a 9 day cob workshop in 5 weeks? in other news, Jonah has begun to say Yep and is blossoming into a boyhood that is the most beautiful thing to witness. how fortunate am i, how truly blessed am i to have Jonah as my son.