Muddy pizza anyone?

Look what we have been building.  Well, when I say we, actually I had little to do with the building.  More preventing claggy feet running back into the house.  The bottom opening is a fire place and the top opening is the pizza oven.

The clay was dug from our allotment where we needed a drainage pond.  Several bags of the stuff.  Back breaking work for the boys.

They have been planning this fire pizza oven since we moved in here 5 years ago.    There have been plans & counter plans.  Drawing after drawing.  Talking around and around the subject. Checking out blogs and permaculture articles. My brother especially was so excited that we finally have moved onto this project, as he hasn't had the interim house projectsthat have delayed this project of dreams to distract him.

So the dry September and October has worked in our favour, to get this thing dried out.  I was far too pansy to do the poddling of the clay as its called, because, well, quite frankly it hurt my feet!  Apparently I was unlucky and got the stoniest mix.  So I did the back-of-house stuff of making tea & bringing kettles to keep the feet warm.  We discovered that using warm water sped up the process by about half an hour.

Trial and error led to expertise by the time we got half way up the fireplace.  My beloved knew just how much sand and straw was needed to make the best mixture.  We still have the final test of lighting the fires, but it looks great!  I think it will be a while before its fully dried out, especially now the rains have decided to come.  There is still the small matter of a chimney pipe to be added.  Once it is fully dried out, the shaping bags of sand will be cut & removed.  Hopefully leaving a beautiful space to fire up.

The remaining straw bales have made a fantastic playground...