From the Ground Up

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If you do have to haul in either day or sand, you can go heavy in the mix on the one you don't have to haul, to a point. To figure out what ratio makes a workable cob mix for Ann's soil, Becky made some test bricks. The test bricks that held up the best after they dried basically turned to stone. We couldn't even break them if we clubbed them with a rock. Ones with too much clay cracked slightly, and those with too much sand crumbled slightly. The ratio we settled on was three buckets of sand to a three-quarters-full bucket of clay. We added straw until the mix wouldn't take anymore without clumping apart.

"Because we were building near the river, the soil didn't have the required amount of clay in it," Ann says. "This meant the bringing in of pure clay which we harvested alongside the roads, and river sand that had fine gravel in it that we had shoveled into the truck. All of these building materials were free, and the expeditions to gather them were fun, but very time consuming."

They placed the sand in a pile fairly near the hermitage so we wouldn't have far to go to get it. ("Use your brain to minimize work," Becky often implored.) For the clay, they built pits out of strawbales, a dozen or so of which they had also hauled in earlier, simply draping a tarp over six bales arranged in a square you could stand in. They mixed the clay with water and over the next week people spent lots of time stomping around in the pits getting the clay suspended in water to add to the cob mix. (If there is a naturally rich clay soil at the site, you can just add sand to it without suspending it in water.)

We put one cob mixing area inside the budding and a couple others outside near the foundation. To make the mix, we dumped the buckets of sand in a wheelbarrow, wheeled it over, and plopped it on the mixing tarp. Somebody would then step in and spread it out a little with their feet. Then someone would bring over a bucket of clay and spread it over the sand. We added a little water and pulled one edge of the tarp up to mix the ingredients. When we released the edge of the tarp, three or four pairs of feet followed each other in circles to step the cob down flat. Becky would wander by and pick up the comers of the tarp and hand them to us. This was her way of saying, "You are not turning your cob mixture in the tarp enough." Rolling it saves stomping work and speeds up the mixing process. Eventually, when we pulled up one edge of the tarp, the Mix Would stick together in a loaf. Then we Would begin sprinkling straw into the mix. We'd add straw as we flattened our mix with our feet, and then we'd roll it by picking up one side of the tarp. We did this three or four times. When each strand of straw seemed to be covered in the mix, and we couldn't get it to hold anymore, the mix was ready. It is fairly laborious to reach the stage where you can begin budding.

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