Lammas Part Three - The Cob Nuts get to work

Tuesday saw us cob building in earnest. There was a cob greenhouse to work on and a timber frame building known as an Eco-pod.
The walls were made of cob, which is a mix of clay and sand. Often straw is added to give it strength. For the Eco-pod we were adding small amounts of lime. This helps to stabilise the cob, making it more weather-resistant, and also inhibits any fungal growth on the straw of the wood.

Chopping wood for the cordwood walls

The team making progress on the cordwood wall of the Ecopod

Both buildings were using cord wood as well as cob. Basically logs are placed across the wall and sandwiched together with cob. This means that faster progress can be made and a lot less cob is needed. For what I haven't yet told you about cob is that it is by far best to mix it with your feet!
It is hard work.

Traditionally it may well have been mixed by placing animals in enclosures filled with the mix ingredients. A little dung does no harm to the cob.

We only mixed one batch from scratch, taking the subsoil from existing heaps and adding in bought in clay. Where we live it would be the other way round, as our clay would need the addition of sand.

Mixing a clay 'slip' to be added to the subsoil

For the other batches, we were recycling a couple of old cob walls which had not fared well.
Cassie has learned about cob the hard way, by trying different mixes. Even if it has been built by volunteers, it must be desperately sad when all that hard work crumbles within a few years. One of the walls had apparently been mixed by digger, a short-cut too far, and one had been too thick at the base.
Personally I would rather do thorough research and learn by other people's mistakes, especially when so much hard work is involved.

I worked on the greenhouse that first day. Progress was very slow, especially round the window frames where we were using pure cob without the cordwood. The cob would do its best to sag too, so it was only really possible to build up about a foot at a time before leaving it overnight to settle.

While we were beavering away, we learned more about the community. It had been a difficult year with someone's house burning down (three years of hard work and commitment down the drain) followed by the drought.
But it did not sound as if the community was pulling together well either. There were hints at problems in committee (the usual story), obstinate individuals and those who just wanted to get on with things in isolation. This surprised me. The Ecovillage seemed more like nine disparate smallholdings. Yes, each smallholding was probably fulfilling the dreams of its occupants, but the community aspect seemed sadly lacking.
The same problems as afflict wider society seemed prevalent here too. This was a crying shame, as you would think that nine families with so much in common and such a similar set of beliefs and principles could be so much stronger than the sum of their parts.

More on the Lammas EcoVillage, how it started and how it works, in an upcoming post. More on the cob greenhouse idea too.