The End of the Oven

A few months ago, we went to patch up the mud oven because some of the doorway had crumbled, over the winter. 

 

So we mixed up some new mud and clay and added dried grass to it as binding and insulating material.

  

  

And we tried to patch it up by wetting it and then adding wet new clay to it, but it wouldn't stick and just kept crumbling further.

And then it dawned on us: after 6 good years, the mud oven is dead!

Long live the mud oven!

But because, following (or inspired by?) the First Law of Thermodynamics which states something like, "mud is neither created or destroyed," such an oven can never really die - it can only be reborn! (Incidentally I had a wonderful dream about seeing a brilliant red phoenix with its mate, in a rainy, grey garden, a day or two we started to rebuild this oven - so 'rebirth' was definitely on the brain. It's such a lovely sensation to be doing something with the echo of a dream turning around in your mind at the same time.)

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In short, we took the old oven apart and saved much of the material for re-use. It was cool to see how well the inner, thermal layer was differentiated from the outer, insulating layer.

The inside of the thermal layer had turned red from the type of clay we'd put in originally. 

The outer insulating layer has the straw and grass. 

And with many buckets filled of clayey soil and others with 'scrap' insulating material, we got ready for the building of mud oven 2.0.