Cob - Natural Building at the Farm

Written by Katherine Kugay | 09 January 2011

At this point, it would probably sound redundant to say I had a magical time at the farm today. In any case, it was an excellent day for pretending it was a great day to cob an oven: clear skies, good company, and a temperature of 45 degrees. But though the straw, clay, and sand we used were damper than ideal, conditions were ripe for testing the endurance of our foot soles as we slammed our bare heels into the mixture.

After thoroughly blending the mentioned three ingredients, we slathered a layer over the existing structure of urbanite and cob to create a regular contour. The surface of this layer was gritty enough for a next layer of just clay and straw to latch onto; to which the final layer of clay and sand snuggled right into.

A brave team of barefoot farmers danced atop the mixture and slathered layers of it onto the existing cob, in turn losing their own layers of dead skin and fear of cold along the way. Whatever value that may have, Hayes Valley definitely benefited from a fresh crop of cob monsters requesting the use of bathrooms at its fine dining establishments. The beauty of this project really is in the community it builds.

And that was a message that resonated with a group of students from Gateway High School, a local public school, on their tour of the farm this afternoon. After their  tour, some of the students stuck around to volunteer creating a mosaic from repurposed glass on the freshly cobbed oven and moving dirt around in the creation of new berms for planting. How beautiful to observe the inevitable transformation of facial expressions that occur in going from a day of indoor classroom lectures to outdoor mud-handling.

Photo: "Cobstruction" by Jay Rosenberg, Friday January 7, 2011

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