World Wide Wabs

It was a labour of love, involving blood (mud-&-straw clumps scratching up our hands), sweat (building under the Spanish summer sun) and tears (when a supporting structure collapsed for the 3rd time).

An outdoor oven is one of those things Babs and I nurse ambitions about having someday, in that yet-to-be-identified place where we will eventually settle down (along with a massive charcoal BBQ pit and motorised roast spit). So I jumped at the opportunity to learn how to build one… by actually building one, while WWOOFING at Anthony and Catherine’s finca in Orgiva, Spain.

Our reference guide for the project was Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer. One of Denzer’s main principles is to use recycled and/or foraged materials, so that cost of building will tax neither your pocket, nor the envioronment. The only materials Anthony bought were ~30 firebricks (a few spare) and a few pieces of slate. The rest of it was sand from the beach in Motril, clay fand rocks from nearby riverbeds, and dirt and straw from the farm.

The Base

Anthony had already completed the base when we arrived. It’s a ringed stone wall, filled in with rubble. Right at the top it has insulating layers of clay and sand. The stone wall is self-supporting, but the crevices have been plastered up tight with mud and clay to prevent wasps from building nests in the gaps (The stone wall must have looked like a luxe condo block for waspy property hunters). On top of the slate are the firebricks (built denser than regular bricks to retain heat). This is the cooking floor of the oven.

The Support Dome

Question: If you’re building a dome which has a base radius of 33cm and a height of 48cm, how many buckets of sand from Motril do you need? Answer: Many more than you think.

In any case, the shortage was a great excuse to do a day trip to the beach. To improvise in the meantime, we bulked up dome volume with an upturned bucket, a few rocks and lots of gravel. It might have been due to this makeshift base, or the coarseness of the sand, or the startling evaporation rate, or one of our sandcastle building techniques (as Babs and I hotly debated) but we had 3 major sandslides before completion.

Above: Babs VERY GINGERLY puts wet newspaper and sackcloth on the completed sand dome to help keep its shape while I hold my breath

The Baking Layer

This first layer of mud and clay is what absorbs heat from burning wood in the oven, then radiates it back onto food. We had too much water in the mix, leading to lots of “flab” from sinking clay (what is it they say about ovens resembling their makers?). After it solidified sufficiently, Anthony did some nip tuck, and we marked out the door and scored the roof to help it bond with the next coming layer.

Additional Heat Retention Layer

Again this layer is made of mud and clay, but with straw mixed in. You can build an entire house out of this stuff, as is the case in various pockets of the English countryside, Africa, Central America and more recently Gaza.

Getting the straw to bond evenly with the mud is quite the task (Denzer recommends you get all the kids in the family or the community involved). Two people walking on it took too long, so we eventually blasted music from the house to get things really jumpin’.

Cutting Out the Door and Hollowing Out the Oven

After running out of mud and straw for the day, we let the furry-winter-hat-looking structure dry out overnight. The next morning, Anthony and Babs debated about whether it was dry enough to cut out the door, and excavate the sand dome. Babs was convinced only after he personally conducted the very technical “squidge” test (3rd photo).

Above: For those of you trying this at home: If you’re going to use an upturned bucket to pad out your base, make sure it’s not too much larger than the intended height of your door!

Above: Team WABS, our hosts Catherine and Anthony, and our functionally finished oven

Drying Out the Oven

We now have a functional oven structure! There’s a 3rd layer (about 1-2 inches thick) that will eventually go on, but it’s mostly decorative. In the meantime, it’s time to start a little fire to dry out the oven from the inside. Babs and I can barely contain our pyro-glee as we slap together a clump of straw, twigs (2 sizes), a little log and a couple of pine cones for laughs. The team very graciously lets me light the flame. It burns beautifully. Babs and I spend the next hour just sitting on the floor staring at the flame and tossing in twigs and logs.

Our First Pizza!

Given we’ll be needing to crank out pizzas for ~30 people this Saturday, the (ahem) professional thing to do was to test-drive the new oven for Monday night’s dinner. Current cooking time for 1 perfect pizza currently takes 5-8 minutes. The assignment for Wednesday lunch is to experiment with timing of pizza entry and burning-log placement, to reduce cooking time and improve even-ness of heat distribution. I forsee Babs and I insisting on a lot of practice.

If only all projects were this delicious and satisfying.

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Posts on Restaurant Kursaal in San Sebastian and our quick stop in Granada are still in the works. In the meantime I thought I’d share a half-time report on our WWOOFing stint in Orgvia, Spain.

Early high points:

• Orange juice from the oranges we picked just before lunch
• Watching 1,000 yr old aquaducts built by the Moors water 400-yr-old olive trees
• Plowing through our hosts’ bookshelves during siesta

Early low points:

• Breathing so hard while working in the heat that you inhale a midge, and spend the rest of the day gagging on it, long after probably swallowing it
• Weeds that beat you at tug-of-war

What on earth is WWOOFing?

WWOOF stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms. In summary you volunteer on an (often small) organic farm for an agreed number of hours a day and days a week, in exchange for food and accomodation. Along the way, you learn about different organic farming methods and sustainable living, as well as get an insider and rural view of the country you’re WWOOFing in. Your WWOOF host gets some sweat and muscle (and sometimes creativity and complementary knowledge) on the cheap. No money is exchanged, so no nasty work visa paperwork is needed. You pay a nominal WWOOF network membership fee to keep the network up and running.

This sounded like a genius proposition to Babs and me. We’d get to learn a little more about the food chain, AND stretch our travel budget. We decided Spain was a good place to start, and after writing to 12 hosts in various bits of the country, providence led us to a 3-week stint with Anthony and Catherine and their 3 acres of olive and orange trees in Orgiva.

Anthony and Catherine moved to Orgiva 2.5 years ago and have since built their house and the infrastructure around their homestead bit by bit, with plenty of patience and good humour. Before moving to Spain they spent the last 2 decades teaching children with special needs. I noted this with some optimism – perhaps they’ll have some patience for the occasional daftness of a lifetime city girl!

Orgiva Where?

Above: This is an optical illusion of the idyllic farming life. Swaths of land planting just 1 type of crop creates chemical imbalances in the soil over time. The wide brown paths between the olive trees ease the way for the harvesting machine, but the exposed topsoil (where the nutrients are) is vulnerable to wind and flood erosion

Orgiva is the administrative capital of the Andalucia region, about an hour south of Granada in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. It also turns out that Orgiva’s immediate surroundings — Las Alpujarras — are the setting of Driving Over Lemons by ex-Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, the first of his autobiographical Lemons Trilogy about uprooting from the UK and building a new life among peasant Spanish farmers.

Two decades worth of Dutch, German and Brits — blackberry-beeping businessmen and barefoot-as-a-lifestyle-choice-hippies alike — decided the same, making the neighbourhood a strange little agricultural cosmopolis. It’s not entirely hard to see why. Below is the view from our breakfast table on the front porch, and a few peeks around our hosts’ garden.

Where Do We Fit In?

Specifically, in a 34-yr-old caravan in the back terrace of olive and orange trees, right next to a large patch of mint. So during the sweltering Spanish siesta, our caravan smells like Moroccan lemonade.

In addition to our hosts, we have dos chien Andalus, Zumba (the cream-coloured one) and his mother Oliva for regular company and entertainment. Hilarious when they’re horsing around, half as hilarious when Zumba bounds off with our solar torch in his mouth, usually at dusk.

For our 3-week stint, we have 2 major projects: 1) Build an outdoor oven, and 2) Build a compost toilet. Both are partly a lead up to Catherine’s birthday weekend bash on July 18.

There are also the more day-to-day tasks of upkeeping the farm: Pruning trees, ripping out monster weeds choking up irrigation channels, and replacing knackered recycled wine and beer bottles around the vegetable beds.

Our day starts at 7.30am and we try and get in the heaviest tasks done before breakfast, before the sun really goes into overdrive. The shift between breakfast and lunch goes about 5 times as slowly and we’ve since learnt the art of tracking the path of the sun and planning our course for hopping between tree shadows to get as much done as comfortably as we can manage. We wrap up at about 1.30pm (it’s too hot to work after), have lunch, shower and pootle about for the rest of the day.

Above: Babs checking out our hosts’s alberca, part river-&-rainwater storage pond, part swimming pool.

So far, so good! Stay tuned!

Coming soon: Building a Bread Oven

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So it’s been 4 days of work on the farm and today’s an off day (we’re also taking tue off to go to the beach).

Major tasks have been getting materials ready to build an outdoor bread oven, building a concrete wall for a compost toilet, pruning olive trees and clearing monster weeds from the main irrigation channels to improve speed and volume of water going down to the trees lower down the slope.

We start at 7.30am and finish at 2pm cos it’s too hot to work after that. Hard work but very satisfying to see the results. Just not yet convinced I would want to do this long term (esp cos Babs and I are still wrestling with how it is at all economically sustainable). It’s a very pleasant lifestyle though, and I’m told the weather is ridiculously comfortable in spring and autumn.

Our hosts are vegetarian and obviously we eat what they eat, so all in all, am currently experiencing the healthiest lifestyle I’ve had, probably ever.

Am glad we’ll have another 2 weeks here (which culminates in one of the host’s birthday party). We’ll get to finish the bread oven and compost toilet, and the travel budget will be back in good shape (after the gluttony of San Sebastien)

P.S. Recently finished The Little Prince, and currently reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Have always been an Orwell fan and this continues.

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