Floating Slab

Here are the first and second posts in this series.

The most enjoyable part of this budding bread oven so far has been the response from the neighborhood. Everyone is so excited about the prospect of fresh bread and pizza. I am constantly amazed at the emotional connection people have to food. On the one hand, making your own bread is certainly laborious, and most people don’t have time for such a thing in their lives. On the other hand, not many of our daily activities bring so much easy joy to others. It’s sobering to survey our daily activities in that context. What do you do in a day that brings joy to someone in the world. It makes bread baking seem a lot less laborious.

The third phase of the oven project entailed building a floating slab, which will sit under the oven vault. Jan and Ken mixed cement with vermiculite, and filled the form that they created previously.

Clearly, such a delicate task required the supervision of not only our current neighbor, Rick, but our new neighbors, Billy and Mark. They’re building a new house on our old street (totally in keeping with the architectural spirit of the ‘hood, by the way – we’re happy to welcome them into our big, happy, dysfunctional neighborhood family).

Next, they stuck nails into the vermiculite mixture, to stabilize the rebar to be laid on top.

You can’t really tell from the picture, but there are grooves ground out of the concrete blocks where each piece of rebar sits, so it is suspended from the outer frame of the oven. The plywood jig on the right is where the ash drop will be: the ash can be swept out of the oven, straight down onto the ground.

Next, our intrepid heroes built a frame for a concrete slab to be poured directly on top of the vermiculite mixture (here’s the floating part). Notice the beer bottle shoring up the rebar in the front corner. That’s key.

Late into the night (it had to have been 9:00 when I stopped checking on them), they poured concrete into the new form.

Jump forward to the next time I grab my camera, and you’ll see the slab a’floatin’.

I must remind you at this point that I am merely an interested bystander. If you’d like real information about this type of oven, the experts are here:

general information about brick ovens

the directions that Jan is following (basically)

Mid-Summer Slump

I don’t know what it is, but I’ve been in a mid-summer slump. Lori thought it might be the blazing hot weather. Plausible. But then it rained like crazy for a week, which cooled it off nicely (into the 80s, yay!). Nothing. Just keeping up with watering, but not much more. Now I’ve get Ella back in school, and I’ve got to shake this.

So I thought a quick status update would break the block.

I finally got out and planted sweet corn and cucumbers on the 15th, right before the rain. So they all germinated perfectly, with no help from me.

I took some spare bricks from the oven project (which I will do another post about soon) and built a pathway across the new front bed.

The tomato plants are all winding down.

Plenty of watermelons on the vine.

Okra coming in: the burgundy variety is producing steadily, while the green variety still hasn’t bloomed.

All-in-all a pretty quiet time in the garden.

Anti-Cat Device

I don’t like cats. I suppose they look OK. But that’s about all of the enthusiasm I can muster for them. I’m quite allergic to them. And they taunt my dog all day long, sauntering around our porch and yard. I would have to endure about half of the barking as I do now, if there weren’t cats loose in our neighborhood. But I think the thing that pisses me off the most is what they do while running around loose. They shit in my garden. It’s disgusting. It makes me mad. It’s unsanitary. It STINKS! I hate cats.

Anyway, it has taken me all of these years to finally come up with something that works to keep them out of my garden beds. I’ve tried chili pepper flakes, which work OK until it rains. I’ve tried spraying them with a hose every time they come near and I see them. But they just wait for me to leave, then come back. Seriously, I’ve seen them waiting on the other side of my driveway, then walking into my yard as my car is pulling out. Ooh, that kills me. I’ve tried loosing my dog on them when they enter my yard. Temporary.

Then, for a completely unrelated reason, I started mulching parts of my garden with hay. It took me about two weeks before I realized that these parts of my garden were the only places that weren’t nasty, stinking cesspools of cat crap. Eureka! So out came the hay, and I had a, you know, hay day. Sorry. Had to be done.

Not too bad, huh?

This really saved me in my new front bed, which is sitting empty until the fall seeds go in.

Does that look like a big cat box to you? NOT ANY MORE! I am cat poop-free. I’m a new woman.