First firing

The weather has been unrelentingly cold and wet for the past three weeks. So the cob oven hasn't exactly dried out. The outer layer of the south-facing wall is partly dry: you can see the lighter colour in the right of this photo. But the rest of the outside, and all of the inside, is still damp. Not really wet, just not dry. And as fall settles in and the weather continues to cool down, I'm not hopefully that the oven will dry slowly and naturally.

It will probably crack a bit as it dries, and that cracking should ideally happen before we put on the last layer, so that we can cover and fill the cracks with it. And I'd love to get the last layer done this fall rather than next spring. Not essential, but I'm hankering for a sense of completeness.

So today we decided to fire the oven for a short time to speed the drying from the inside. We laid a fire inside and watched to see how much smoke there would be and where it would travel. At first there was lots and it blew straight at the kitchen door. But then as the fire heated up there was less, and it mostly blew up and over the house.

The spiders were amazing. There were hundreds of long-legged ones in residence on the outside of the dome. I suppose they like the texture. They got all excited when we made the fire, just from the activity of humans nearby, but they couldn't really figure out what to do. So for a while the dome was host to a milling crowd of excited arachnids. I don't mind spiders in the slightest, so I was quite entranced by the spider rave.

So far the dome hasn't exploded into dozens of super-heated fragments of hardened clay. Which is nice.

I'm currently looking for an old pre-digital-age TV satellite dish, a 6-foot diameter one. My plan is to use it to build a roof over the oven, mounting it dome up on vertical posts and then planting it with a living roof. All the pictures I've seen of lean-to or peaked roofs look completely incongruous with the round, organic shape of cob ovens. I think a round, grass-covered roof will look nicely hobbit-like.