May 2016 we ran an amazing cob building one day course here with Christian Cluever from Grow Your Own Home – not even the torrential rain stopped us. The first bit of cob was mixed by foot and put on the walls, hooray !!! And to go along with it the food from Elanor was amazing – a mixture of vegan and raw delights. Christian had made a few sample “cob test bricks” a few days before the course and dried them so we could see analyse the different mixtures.  A few different ratios of clay to sand were made to see which ones cracked or crumbled.  We decided on two clay to one sand ratio for the mix and off we went.
Water was added as well as straw I’d sourced from the tablelands earlier in the week. The sand I bought in and the clay was straight from the levelling of the house pad. The mix is all done on tarps with 1-2 people, mixing with their feet – very social and hand’s on process, it helps to have some favourite high energy music playing !!! One of my favourite’s to cob to is The Formidable Vegetable Sound System, love those lyrics & energy !! There’s not many songs about methane digesters, he he..  Then the following weekend I helped Christian out at the Eco-Fiesta, he had a stall there educating people on cob building and we did a sample mix with people interested.  Great day with live music playing, talking to people about alternative building materials, got to have a good boogie to The Formidable Vegetable Sound System and talk to Charlie McGee about converting diesel engines to bio-fuel (fish & chip oil), awesome !.  

Unfortunately this month we lost of beloved cat Fluff, after surviving a paralysis tick she was killed by possibly a dingo or snake, or goanna … unsure, there are a few predators here (RIP FLUFF). Since fluff passed we have had a sudden influx of melamies (native mice) and bandikoots rifling through our kitchen, we miss you fluff !!!