Autumn Crazy

Prince Edward County is a crazy place to live in the summer. Crazy-beautiful. crazy-touristy, crazy-busy. Yet throughout it all, there is an understanding that come Autumn, the leaves will turn brilliant colours and things will slow the hell down. Apparently our lives did not get this memo (although the leaves did change colour).

September saw us hosting Stickfest, another Creative Rural Minds networking event, plus trips to Calgary (my sister's surprise wedding!) and Barrie for Culture Days, where we built a cardboard village with a few hundred strangers. 

October saw us hosting our annual Scarecrow Festival, and I dashed off to Toronto to work on Clay & Paper Theatre's Night of Dread as I do every year (great photos HERE).

Me & Sandra Henderson have been working on
Night of Dread together for 7 years!

Then there was the Picton Zombie Walk, presented in collaboration with the library, which has over the past four years turned into a hilariously family-oriented activity. 

Me and my ghoul-friends post-Zombie Walk

For months, Milé has been working on an epic painting project, To the Sound of Trumpets, commemorating the centenary of the start of WW1. 

The 100 paintings he's created have an incredible range both in content and style. The show opens in Picton November 11, 2014; details HERE, great article from the Toronto Star HERE.

November 15 is right around the corner, bringing with it the Firelight Lantern Festival. We're in the midst of hosting 20 lantern-making workshops all over the County, and planning a very special celebration for our community. A few days after that is over, I'm flying to Cambodia, bringing my project Puppets Without Borders to a group of 100 kids in collaboration with Let Us Create.

I have to admit, it has been a little much, all this muchness. When you're a freelance artist and a generally yes-minded person, it is difficult to say no to anything.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, as it were, it's time to get ready for winter. The firewood is piled high on the front porch. 

Yesterday I took down the silo banner. Normally our old banners get ripped up to be recycled into puppets and things, but I wasn't ready to say goodbye to this gorgeous woodpecker by Leanne Shea Rhem, so I hung him up in the barn.

A soft rain is falling today, and there are no appointments on my calendar. I'm going to sit by the wood stove and enjoy some peace and quiet. All this work provides much to reflect on. What I've been doing, and what all of these activities add up to. Snatched from the jaws of busy-ness, days like today are to be cherished.

Sumac against naked silo

Building an Outdoor Cob Bake Oven

We've just completed building an outdoor cob bake oven at Small Pond Arts!

Why build an oven outside?  I don’t remember encountering an outdoor bake oven until 2006 when I started working with Clay & Paper Theatre in Toronto’s Dufferin Grove Park. Even then, I never put any real thought into bake ovens until I did an internship with Bread & Puppet Theater in 2008. 

On my first day at the magical Vermont farm, artistic director Peter Schumann gathered us around his outdoor bake oven.  He told us about the important role that bread and community ovens played in his childhood in Silesia. Peter, now 78, bakes bread in his oven every day, rising at dawn to mill the grain, and marking every loaf with his family’s bread mark – a sun.

Eating Peter’s bread for five weeks that summer planted something in me, and not just in my stomach.  The philosophies around the care that goes into baking bread, the act of sharing it with others, the warmth of the fire and the nourishment of the loaves…  an oven is more than just a utilitarian appliance. It is a symbol of life and community, a throwback to ancient times and a pebble on the path to a sustainable future. 

I wanted one.

I ordered the book Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer and read it cover to cover.  Three times. This would be our bible. 

We started digging the pit for the foundation in June 2011. Our soil has a lot of clay in it, so as we dug this foundation we saved the clay/soil in buckets. We then filled the hole with rocks. Having a stone foundation prevents groundwater from wicking up into the clay of the oven. Then we started building the first layer of the foundation by setting out a ring of large stones and cementing them together with a clay/sand mix.

Then we got busy, as tends to happen here in the summer, and the oven… well, the oven got put on the backburner.

As Spring 2012 arrived I was determined to get the oven finished, and I spent weeks gathering rocks from all over our property, chopping hay, and sitting in a large hole digging out buckets of clay. I adopted a new mantra. In the words of Gandhi: “There is more to life than increasing its speed.” Some things just take time, and building an oven with your bare hands is one of those things.  We live in an era where instant gratification is the norm; I found this reminder to let things unfold in their own time immensely reassuring.

So after weeks of preparation, we were ready to build. I put out a call for volunteers and had a number of people come out to help us over the course of three days. Everything is more fun with friends around!

On our first workshop day we built the base. We used larger rocks for the outer ring and filled it with small rocks and rubble. I got the idea of a wagon-wheel doorway from a Bread & Puppet book. We just so happened to have a couple of wagon wheel rims around (weird, I know) so we embedded one halfway up our base.

When the base was almost waist-high, we laid in a bunch of wine bottles on their sides as insulation. In a wheelbarrow I mixed watered-down clay with hamster bedding and chopped straw; this insulation mix was packed around and over the bottles.

On a big tarp we mixed clay and sand and stomped it with our feet. I cannot even tell you how much fun this was, feeling the primal satisfaction of mud squishing between toes with mothers and daughters, children and adults stomping around together. Pure joy!

We put a thin layer of this sand/clay mix over the bottles and insulation mix… and decided to call it a day.

On our second day we started out by leveling the oven floor with a thin layer of sand, and carefully laying two layers of firebricks to retain the heat.

We drew a chalk circle of the shape of our oven dome right onto the bricks. We built a giant sandcastle within this circle – taking up the space that would eventually be the cavity of the oven. We covered our sand-dome in wet newspaper, and then covered the whole thing in sand/clay mix… And then we called it a day! Thank goodness for my patience mantra, because everything took twice as long as I thought it would.

On our third day we made another muddy mix – this time it was clay and chopped-up hay. The consistency was very dense and easy to build with.

After waiting about a week for the oven clay to dry, we shoveled the sand out. We covered the whole thing with a tent and tarps to protect it from the rain, and we waited several weeks as the oven cured.

We were planning to build a roof structure over the oven, but decided that we would save that project for another time. But we did need to weather-proof the oven, so Milé mixed up a lime plaster and applied two coats to the whole oven and base, about a week apart.

I made a firing door out of an old piece of plywood and wooden knobs; the inside of the door is lined with a piece of scrap sheet metal.  The door has an opening at the bottom to let air in; as our style of oven has no chimney, this opening will help keep the fire going.

Thank you so much to our many helpers who pitched in with their hands, hearts and feet to make this dream a reality!

We’re going to start test-baking tomorrow, and I have a feeling that there's a whole other learning curve ahead of us! The oven will have its public inauguration at Cornography on July 22, 2012, 2-4 PM. Hope to see you there!

The Speed of Winter

At Small Pond the summers are crazy busy, but winter is a whole other speed: S-L-O-W.  The visitors are few and far between.  Sometimes we don’t change out of our pyjamas. The quiet is deep in the absence of the crickets, frogs and the buzz of artists at work and at play.  In the fall we mentally prepared ourselves to “hunker down,” anticipating the long months we would spend gazing through frozen windows over fields of snow.  But winter has been decidedly non-committal.  Does this look like Ontario in mid-February to you?

We’ve seen hardly any snow all winter, and when it does snow it is usually gone within a day or two.  Sure, it makes things more comfortable for us, but it’s bad for farmers, and probably for plenty of things in the natural world.  It also makes you wonder if climate change is starting to make itself known in ways which we can no longer ignore.

During these tranquil months we’re keeping busy, including making a few improvements around the house.  We just got a wood stove put into the dining room, ensuring the coziness of future winters.

I’ve been sewing some funky garlands to hang up come spring.

I’ve been visiting schools and doing shadow puppetry workshops. This last week I was at Quinte Mohawk School where I worked with four classes to tell the story of Creation.  It was a very ambitious project, but a ton of fun.

Last month I spent a week in Toronto writing a new play with David Anderson.  This is the fifth play we've written together.  The History of Forgetting will be produced by Clay & Paper Theatre and play in Dufferin Grove Park through July and August 2012.  David’s in Africa right now; we’re going to finish the play when he gets back.

I’ve also been teaching myself to play the concertina!  Trust me, I’m as surprised as anybody.  I’m working on playing my first song, Shepherd’s Hey.  I’m practicing for about an hour every day and things are really coming along.

Meanwhile, Milé has been painting up a storm.  He’s working on his last 2 paintings in a 15-painting series entitled Barnscapes.

They're oil paintings of barns and landscapes, based on his own photos taken around Prince Edward County.   You’ll be able to see them in the coming months at Arts on Main gallery in Picton, and of course at the gallery here at Small Pond.

But it hasn’t been all work.  We’ve been reading and watching movies and baking and visiting with friends and staying up late and sleeping in. So as slow as it is here in the winter, we manage to keep ourselves occupied and enjoy the down time; spring is just around the corner, and we'll be suitably rested to switch back into high gear.