Making our home-made Pizza Oven!

Joe has a problem, he is Mediterranean... and lurking deep within those Mediterranean roots, emerged the inevitable Mediterranean yearning, that wells up within the psyche of every Mediterranean man.: the need to build a pizza oven.

"Darling, I've been thinking about that corner in the backyard; You know the one where you wanted the Balinese daybed retreat. I thought perhaps we could go with something a little more... Mediterranean, how about we build a pizza oven!"

And so it was.....our pizza oven journey began.... and the Balinese daybed retreat with spa and flapping white sails in the cool summer breeze, suddenly ended.

YAAAAAAAYYYYYY!!!!!!!

Of course, the yearning to build a pizza oven is not exclusive to Mediterranean stock, and so, its quite possible that one day you may find yourself experiencing a similarly sudden urge, so we thought it only fair to share our oven building experiences with you.


Some preliminary notes on building a Pizza oven

Building a pizza oven with friends can be great fun... (I've heard). Making an oven with children can be a freeking nightmare. But if you are like us and your children have scared all your friends away, then children will simply have to do. In actual fact, we had a great time making it with our kids... ok I'm lying, but they enjoyed it... and it will endure as a lasting family memory, and that's what counts. If you make an oven with your kids, remember, while your hosing clay out of your children's eye, or mopping up hardened clay footprints from your polished floorboards, it will all be worth it when you take your first bite of your delicious home-cooked traditional pizza.

MIXING THE COB... with friends.

 

So, what do you need to make your own?

The structure of our oven is made entirely from clay, straw and sand. It's what is better known as a cob oven. Cob is a mixture of clay or soil, straw and sand. The quantities of which will vary according to the size of the oven you build. We used approximately 8 bags of powdered clay, a bail of hay, and a cubic metre of sand.

We also purchased some proper fire bricks for the cooking base, and constructed a platform for the oven using bessa-blocks and railway sleepers.

Step 1: Choosing a spot

We chose to build our oven under cover, to protect it from the weather. This said, you can build it in the open if you like, or even build a canopy for it.

Step 2: Making the platform for your oven

Before you begin mixing your clay, you need to construct some kind of platform or base for your oven to rest on. What you choose to make this out of is up to you, so long as it is able to support a heavy load and is reasonably level.

Once you have a sound platform to build on the fun begins.

step 3: Insulating base layer

Mix a combination of straw, clay and sand at approximately 3 parts sand to 1 part clay. Add as much straw as you can without the cob mix loosing its stickiness.  We placed a tarp on the ground and mixed it with our feet. The kids loved it. It's easiest to sprinkle handfuls of straw on as you go, mixing it with your feet and rolling the tarp over  regularly to keep the mix in the centre. Once its mixed, roll it into large balls about the size of softballs.


Roughly mark out the diameter for the base of your oven on your platform. We made ours about 90cm in diameter. Use the clay/sand/straw mixture to create a base like the one shown below. This acts as an insulating base, keeping the heat in the oven. You will notice a lip around the perimeter, this is to hold a layer of sand, about 5cm deep.

the cob base

 

Level the sand and carefully lay the fire bricks on the sand, taking care to make them as level as possible. We cut the bricks using a masonry angle grinder blade.

the fire bricks on a bed of sand, on the insulating cob base

Step 4: Sand castle form.

Using wet sand, it is time to build the form for your oven, by basically making a big sand castle on top of your fire bricks. Our sand mound ended up being about 60cm high. Once you are happy with the shape, lay wet news paper over the sand castle form.

Step 5: building the thermal layer

Time to get mixing again - 1 part clay to 3 parts sand, just like before and rolling into large balls, as before. But this time don't add any straw. Begin packing the balls of clay/sand around the base of your sandcastle form, working around the base, then working your way all the way up to the top in a coiling fashion. The thermal layer should be about 10cm thick. This is the layer that retains the heat and keeps the oven hot. The thicker it is the longer it stays hot.

We built our oven door beforehand and pressed it against the sand form so that we could build around it as we went. The edge of the door is bevelled to make it easy to take in and out. This is probably easier than cutting a hole out of the cob wall at the end and then trying to make a door that fits. An important note about the door is that it must be 2/3 the total height of the oven interior. This provides the proper air flow for the fire to breath and let out smoke at the same time. We made our door out of wood and we soak it in water before using it on the oven to stop it catching alight.

Step 6: Outer insulating layer

Its back to the tarp for some more mixing, but this time we also added straw again. The basic rule of thumb here is to add as much straw as you can without the cob loosing its structure. In other words, you should still be able to roll it into balls and drop it without it falling apart.

Mixing with your feet can be hard work and its definitely worth while having some friends to help. It makes it MUUUUUUUCH easier... doing this solo, may break your spirit.

Once the cob is mixed, its time to add the final layer, much in the same way as before; working around the base first and then working your way to the top. This layer acts as an insulating layer, the straw eventually burns out, leaving air pockets in the dome, which acts as insulation. The smaller the hay pieces, the better. Make this layer nice and thick, around about 10cm.

step 7: let it dry... be patient... not like me

We learned this the hard way... and dug ours out after 4 days...















...and yep, it collapsed a few minutes later. I was a broken man, and so was my cob oven.


After several days of counselling for PCPOS (Post collapsing Pizza Oven Syndrome), we resurrected our collapsed cob from the ashes. Jo called her brothers on my behalf, and a few other mates, who came around to help with attempt number 2. This time around, we attempted a slightly less ambitious design, opting to go without the chimney, and also slightly reducing the scale of the oven.

We left it to dry for about 3-4 weeks. We removed the door, cut through the newspaper, and dug out the sand, (which we used to make the kids a sand pit) ... Success, it didn't fall down!

We had a fully functional, home-made, hand build, authentically Mediterranean (with a touch of Greek tragedy) pizza oven! I hugged the kids, and thanked them for their help, and mentioned that if they even laid a feather on our new, 2nd pizza oven, I would kill them!

We let it air dry for another week, and then prepared with great ceremony for our very first pizza night with the kids. It was fantastic! We fired it up and let it heat for about 3 hours to get it nice and hot. (about 300 degrees Celsius). The pizzas were Amazing, cooking in under 5 minutes, and tasting  incredible.

In hindsight, we are so glad we made our oven... twice. Since it has given us many wonderful nights with friends and our own little family, and it looks great. So far we've made oodles of pizzas,  but we've also cooked our sourdough and slow-cooked lamb shanks for a dinner party for 10... and each time we're more impressed by our amazing cob oven.

If you are keen on the idea of making your own, there are some good videos online which are worth watching for those finer details.

 

Funky Bugs: composting with Black Soldier Fly

Life as a bug in our garden must be pretty good. there would be no shortage of friends and parties to attend, and no nasty chemicals to make you feel unwell. Life would be darned good, in fact, so long as you were the kind of bug that was willing to pull your weight in the garden and do your bit!

Not so, however, for the slugs and snails whom we introduce frequently to our chookens, nor the uncouth stink beetles that N and G sucked off our citrus trees with the vacuum cleaner (simply the most enjoyable way to get rid of them), nor the white cabbage moth that we use for practicing our backhand,  but there are many bugs that we do appreciate in the patch. Worms, bees and lady beetles are always welcome in our garden, doing their bit to pollinate, cultivate and eradicate pests, but we have recently become acquainted with a new creepy crawly of the good kind, known as the Black soldier fly (BSF).


black soldier fly (pleased to meet you)
Black soldierfly have a rather short and desperate adult life, with the sole purpose of finding a mate, a pile of rotting compost, and a good pick up line before dropping dead. Somehow they seem to manage. But before this fatally frantic paced lifestyle as an adult fly, they leisurely spend their childhood and teens as ravenous compost devouring larve!

BSF larvae eat just about any kitchen scraps including meat and dairy, as well as the usual fruit and vegetable leftovers, and can be cultivated in much the same way as composting worms, to break down food waste.  A BSF composting unit can be easily built from materials found at your local hardware, and once a colony has been established they can consume food waste at an incredible rate (much faster than worms), but best of all, they make a fantastic feed for chickens and even fish. BSF larvae are high in both protein and calcium, which is perfect for chooks. they are non invasive and do not enter houses or spread disease like other flies.

Once we got acquainted to this new bug on the block, we realised it was time for us to try our hand at making our very own BSF Composting unit!

Our black soldierfly composter

TA DA!!!! Our Black Soldier fly composter

Here is how it works. Food scraps go inside and the female BSF are attracted by the scraps. They fly in through the pipe at the top and down into the bin where they lay their eggs (in the hundreds). They like to lay their eggs in crevasses, so some sheets of corrugated cardboard attached to the inside make great maternity wards. the eggs hatch and the larvae fall on the food scraps, and get to work munching it up.

the larvae crawl up the pipes and into Jo's Tupperware container... thanks darling...sorry

 

 Like all good teenagers they eat just about anything until it is time to finally leave home, at which point, the larvae develop the instinct to climb to higher ground. The larvae find their way to the pipes and climb up them, then slide down into the separate storage container, where they are unwittingly trapped to be fed to the chooks.

the larvae hard at work on one of our defiant choko's and watermelon rind

But does the composter work?

In a nut shell, yes. but getting started can call for some weeks of patience. Its best to start a colony in warmer weather when the adult fly is most active. Every few days we have been checking the tub, and after many weeks, we finally discovered some young soldierfly larvae munching away under the scraps. As the weeks progressed and the temperature rose, so too has our colony and the rate at which they are breaking down our food scraps is quite impressive.

Make your own
there are a number of DIY designs on the net. we made ours using a clip lock tub, some PVC pipe parts, , some hessian and fly screen, a saw and a drill. The key is to angle the pipes at 35 degrees so that it is not too steep for them to climb.include some ventilation holes and cover with fly screen, and some drainage holes in the bottom, which you can cover with hessian.  It takes less than half a leisurely hour to put together and cost us about $40 or you could buy one of the fancy ones online for about $200.


the main benefits are:
1. a very efficient method of waste disposal
2. meat and dairy waste can be added to established colonies, unlike regular composting methods, reducing your waste output.
3. the larvae make an excellent source of food for poultry and fish, and can be frozen for later use.
4. they don't spread disease like other flies, and rarely enter the home.
5. they emit a natural repellent to other flies once the colony has been established.

Downsides:
The smell can be an issue if you add more waste than they can consume. Sawdust or coffee can help here too. This said, ours does not smell.

Initially, we had a problem with fruit fly gate crashing the party. but as the weeks have gone on, there numbers have decreased dramatically as the BSF colony has increased. AHa, dear potential BSF composters, do not be dismayed by these minor downsides. we have an organic, effective and easy solution to manage fruit flies in the patch... read on!

Bug eyes and beer goggles - a simple and effective fruit fly trap

With the onset of day light saving and the Spring evenings becoming more balmy, there’s nothing quite like kicking back on the front porch with a home brewed beer or a chilled wine and watching the sunset. But it seems that we aren’t the only one’s who love a beer to celebrate the start of spring.

We have been using some of our beer in our fruit fly traps, and we have noticed that they are more than happy to exchange their bug eyes for beer goggles, which is great, seeing as our nectarine tree is laden with new fruit to be.

got ya succers!

The trap is simple. All you need is a plastic soda bottle, some scissors, and a beer on the balcony. Simply cut the bottle cross ways about a third of the way down from the top. Turn the top upside down and insert it into the lower part of the bottle, like a funnel. Pour an inch of beer (or wine) into the bottle, and if necessary, run some tape around the edge of the rim to keep the trap together. Place the traps around your fruit trees and compost bin, or any other place that fruit flies are being a nuisance. then drink the rest of your beer.

The fruit flies fly down the funnel and get stuck. "Oh save me! Save me! I've accidentally flown into a giant pool of beer. what ever shall I do???". After an initial panic attack, they come to their senses and drink themselves to death. What a way to go. It works surprisingly well, as fruit fly are naturally attracted to anything that is fermenting. We have tried a few variations, such as sour dough starter, orange juice, and vinegar, but beer seems to win hands down.

So if you're concerned about fruit fly this spring, relax, have a shandy, and make yourself a beer trap or two.

Our New chook pen

Talking about grubs and chooks, we decided recently that it was time to make a proper enclosure for our lovely ladies. Up until recently, their pen has been a makeshift tangle of old chicken wire and odd posts. It was a shabby-chic chook pen (but with more shabby and less chic), and so it was time for an upgrade.

We decided to build their enclosure around the fruit trees, to give them shade and also to fertilise the trees. The trees have since gone mad with a flush of blossoms, which have smelled divine this spring. the combination makes a lot of sense. The trees are robust enough to handle the chooks digging around, and the poop makes a much appreciated fertilizer for the trees. Meanwhile the hens can rest in the shade and help keep pests under control, such as fruit fly.

the whole enclosure cost under $250 (about $10 per square metre) . First we dug and cemented in the posts, making sure they were level...most of the time, then connected the cross beams. the wire was fastened into place, and last of all, added the gate.

Next blog, its time to go foraging, dabble in some heirloom guerrilla gardening, as well as try our hand at some simple home made wines from our foraging finds.