Really and truly I shouldn't be writing the blog on our wonderful clay pizza oven. It was dreamt up, designed, created, built, wept over, laughed about and ultimately completed by our team of wonderful volunteers. I have however, benefited from its use and so I feel qualified to write this blog now that most of the participants have moved on.

So... where to start? Perhaps at the very beginning. November 2013 we attempted to build a clay oven. It failed. The reasons for this were

1. We tried to build with clay in the rain
2. We tried to build with clay in the rain

What we learned from this is 'Don't build with clay whilst it's raining'

July 2014 – Success!

The base was built from meticulously cleaned, recycled bricks from our recently demolished house. 

Clay was initially dug from the ground and an area created for the cleaning of the clay. This proved far too difficult and everyday deteriorated into clay fights or phallic modelling classes. Basically the dirt was too stoney. 

 

Finally Patrick and Ben arrived at the genius idea of digging the clay from the bottom of our wildlife pond. Galloping with excitement (not forgetting the obligatory arm swinging), they began. We all watched with baited breath and fingers crossed that the water wouldn't start to drain from our pond with each fresh extraction of clay.

Luckily after about a week of removal and eight dirty, wet, slightly disgruntled volunteers, we had enough clay, a full pond and a date to begin 'the build'.

We first laid some fire bricks, reclaimed from a local church which was undergoing refurbishment, onto the base. After this we then surreptitiously stole a small amount of sand from the beach to make a mold for the oven. From this we learned that even a small back pack of sand carried for 1.5 miles is a heavy load!

We covered the sand mold in wet newspaper and began the first layer of clay. The clay needed to be around 7 or 8 cm thick on the first layer, so we started to build around the bottom. Gradually the oven took shape and we let it dry in the British summer time.

Whist drying, Tano made a beautiful chimney from clay and wire to allow the smoke out. We then covered the oven in more recycled bricks, creating an arched doorway at the front, using more clay as mortar.

When this was dry, all the sand was scraped out and a fire was built to dry the clay and burn off any left over newspaper.

Finally the day arrived when we could eat pizza, but where was Stefano when we needed him? Never mind, with Spanish, French, Dutch, Australians and English we managed to light the fire and make siliceous pizza. This was our first attempt, so we ate at around 11:30pm by which time a few celebratory bevvies had been consumed and the pizza, although delicious, was definitely under appreciated.

Fast forward a month and we gain a genuine full blooded Sicilian (Australian). With vast amounts of pizza and cooking skills he lit the fire 2 hours in advance and we took up dough, tomato sauce and toppings for DIY pizza night. These were spectacular and cooked in around 4 minutes... Success!

A big thank you to everyone who helped on this project.

Tano, Patrick, Ben, Florian, Ryan, Arthur, Cedric, Thomas, Marleen, Jess, Coral, Kai, Jowan, Antoine, Fernando, Nathan, Anna, Alex, Simon, Sara and Glenn Candy.

And a huge special thank you to Ade and Sam for helping so much with the roof of the oven and supplying the delicious toppings of our 3rd pizza night.

Loo With A View

With the development of a new kitchen and shower area in the yard, we are in need of a toilet too. I put a few ideas together, mostly a mix between an outside toilet I used while helpxing in Asturias, and the existing toilets used by the campers here and came up with the Cerenety volunteer 'Loo with a view'.

 As with all of our projects, we firstly had to see what materials were to hand that we could use. In this case it was a few solid pallets and some roofing wood, which was all in good enough order to build with and already a nice size when pieced together to make a toilet cubicle. With the sterling help of Dazzer, a pallet floor was set out on paving slabs to keep it off the ground and the structure was built up; a pallet wide on all sides and two pallets high. We left the top half of the front wall open to create the view  through the trees in front and out over the fields. 

We decided to have just two posts in the structure to preserve our timber supply and because in the sheltered place that it sits it does not need to be all that well anchored to the ground. These posts sit on the side of the building and form the door frame. The pallets were all fixed to each other and to the posts with screws, coming together nicely, and certainly seemed strong enough for their intended purpose. 

The door was reclaimed from an old shed, we used hinges that were taken off the old cattle trailer back in the spring and the roofing material was a couple of offcuts from another roofing project. Once we fixed all of these in place it was time to consider the toilet itself. For this I employed the help of Jess, another volunteer here well known for her upholstering skills. I painted up an old steel chair frame and fixed on a toilet seat, the back of the chair was upholstered by Jess in a rather majestic yellow and black striped material. This frame would house the composting container in much the same way as the ones used up in the camping field. It turned out to be a comfortable sit.

The finishing touches were a lick of paint to make the whole thing last that bit longer and a toilet roll holder. We also installed a shelf, which amongst other things will hold a pair of binoculars so the user can really make the most of their time answering the call of nature by looking out over the fields to see what wildlife is in the area. 

 

All in all the project took twelve hours to complete - obviously this included a fair few tea breaks. It is always satisfying to start and finish a project in one day, and it could not have been done without the help and advice of Dazzer (master pallet craftsman), Jess (accomplished upholsterer) and Celli (champion roofer).

Cerenety Stoup

Well, it's been a rather hectic year and that is the reason for the lack of blog posts. But... from now on I have come up with the genius idea of having volunteers do a weekly blog themselves about what is going on at Cerenety. That way, not only can I be lazy and disorganised but we get to see things from the views of different cultures, nationalities, ages and ideas. So here's the first one from our very own Australian James McDonald.

For last night’s dinner Ben, one of the other volunteers here at Cerenity, and I decided to create a soup completely out of fruits, vegetables and other edible organic matter growing onsite. With a great deal of enthusiasm we collected as much of a variety of ingredients as possible hoping that our one-pot wonder would provide a tasty treat for the other volunteers. And, as it turned out, it was amazing!

Our soup contained;

• Potatoes from the vegetable patch,
• Tomatoes from the polytunnel,
• Some cooking apples,
• Garlic from the vegetable patch,
• Blackberries from the hedges,
• Mushrooms found in the field,
• Courgettes from the vegetable patch,
• Carrots from the vegetable patch,
• Chives from the herb garden,
• Coriander from the herb garden,
• Nettle Leaves growing around the vegetable patch,
• and some kale.

So ALL of the ingredients come from the ground of the camp site grounds. All together and chopped up it looked like this…

Once it was all chopped up and chucked in the Dutch Oven we filled it with water to cover and left it to cook for an hour over a fire using a fire tripod.

We then sat there in the rain around the fire watching our meal cook. It was a massive success, everyone enjoyed it and we decided to call it ‘Cerenity Stoup’ because we don’t quite know if it is a soup or a stew. It was immensely satisfying knowing that our ‘stoup’ was completely derived from the land so it is needless to say that we will try to do more of these meals in the future.