Below notes and gifts from Jorie Kennedy, who I met when she was apprenticing at the North American School of Natural Building, last year (2011). You don’t need a book to make an oven. Best is a friend who’s built one, but for friends she hasn’t met yet, Jorie put her oven love into this “hot-n-dirty oven lovin guide.”

“Hott stuff for sure.”

Bill Whyte (homeowner / right hand man) and Nate Johnson ("retired" mason and author of this article) with their firebrick and cob heater.

When I was 27, I moved back to my hometown in northern Minnesota to start a small organic vegetable farm. I sold produce to the wife of a stone mason, and he was looking for help in the winters. I told him I didn’t know anything. “Don’t worry,” he calmly replied, “I’ll train you.” I learned, of course, that hauling an endless supply of block and stone from one place to another doesn’t take much training. But he also handed me a copy of David Lyle’s history of masonry heaters. Three years later I was working for Albie Barden, building heaters for Maine Wood Heat Company, and dreaming of small things, simple things, handmade things. Albie would feed me all sorts of facts and trivia about little heaters and experimental designs, and then we’d head off to build his next massive, beautiful masterpiece. I loved Albie, and also switched careers, finding contentment in the woods, trading my raucous diamond blade grinders and tile saw for a quiet canoe, axe and knife.

Last summer, I flew out west to take Cob Cottage Co’s complete cob workshop, taught by Firespeaking‘s Max and Eva. The project included a hand-formed, all-cob rumford fireplace, and I put myself right in front of it, working with Max on shaping it with nothing but sand and clay, for me a small miracle of simplicity. When I got home, I told my friend Bill about the experience of finally building a fireplace from raw earth, formed with only the background sounds of song, sculpted with bare hands. He pointed at the forgotten corner of his living room, a cinder block chimney next to splotchy walls hooked up to an iron stove, and said, “There you go. Have fun. Make sure it works.”

Forgotten corner of the living room.

We debated the merits of a rocket mass heater for a few days. Mark Maziotti, a rocket heater builder in Missouri, told me, “Rocket heaters are for tinkerers, fire lovers, people who don’t mind some smoke now and then and think it is fun to get down on their knees with a box of matches to mess around.” The next day, Katie, Bill’s wife, breezed into the room and said, “I don’t care what you’re doing, but it can’t smoke.” So it turned into something more familiar to me, with an actual door, a bypass to establish draft, and no salvaged metal barrels. It also became something more expensive.

My goals on this project were to see how cheaply I could build a modern-style heater, to find out how simple I could make it while still retaining the principles of contraflow design, to work by hand as much as possible with minimal power tools, and to avoid the use of cement.

I drove to Maine Wood Heat, rented one of their enormous gaping-dinosaur-jaw-wet-saws, cut the firebrick core and clay flue tile bench, numbered all the pieces, picked up a cast iron door and some gasketing, and drove it all back to New Hampshire. Bill got a couple tractor buckets of clay soil from a wet spot just below his garden, and for the next four weeks his employees found him hard to find at work.

Here’s some highlights:

I laid a base course with recycled brick in sand/clay mortar right on the tile floor. The tile floor is on a cement slab.

Course one. The front half of the heater will feed into the bench. The bench then goes back through the rear of the heater, under the firebox, and into the flue (which goes up alonside the cement block chimney before entering at the previous stovepipe opening, which I enlarged with a grinder.)

Course three / firebox floor. Set on a 1/4″ metal plate so that the floor of the firebox is totally removable if it starts to wear out over the years. Sloped common brick in the downdraft channels directing gases to front half of core.

Finished core and bench. To be clear about this – the gases go up the firebox, hit a refractory cap, go down the sides of the heater, under the firebox, through the bench, back under firebox, and enter the chimney at floor level. I had a local welder fashion a bypass, seen in upper left corner – when open the gases go straight into the chimney to establish draft from a cold start. I installed a secondary layer of 1 1/4″ firebrick splits on the back and side walls of the firebox. As they wear out over time, they can be chipped out and replaced without doing any damage to the full size firebrick that make up the structure of the core. It’s like, um, replaceability. There are four cleanouts, two in the bench at the front, and two on the side of the heater. I made custom notched firebrick plugs for each cleanout, and then Bill mounted a simple, removable pine board in the cob facing, which may or may not end up being painted/decorated.

OK, cob facing. Sand and clay, no straw. We didn’t use straw to keep the mix as dense as possible for best heat transfer and storage. It meant that it went REAL SLOW. Even a dry mix would start to slump after about 6 inches. So Bill did a lot of cob work in the evening after our afternoon layer had started to set up, in between stories told to his granddaughter. I went with 3″ thick facing on the back and sides for a quicker heat transfer, and 4″ thick in the front for a better door anchor. The door…I put a mess of pole barn nails, screws, and then a wire network out the sides, top & bottom. This is all embedded in the cob for stability. Strong like a janky spaceship. Pasted a thick layer of cardboard all the way around for an expansion joint between core and facing. Used two layers up near the top in higher heat areas.

We put a scratch coat of plaster with chopped straw to even things out, and to set tile (left over from the floor many years ago) on the heater top. At the last minute, I stuck a stainless steel pipe that my welder had laying around through the castable refractory capping slabs for overfire air combustion. Albie tells me the most efficient masonry heater burns now days are being done with secondary air combustion introduced into the firebox, 2/3 of the way up. My version is not in the least scientific, but it does make the fire rip when it’s in full burn. The rock on the heater top regulates flow into the pipe.

Final plaster with kaolin clay, mason’s sand, finely chopped straw, mortar pigment (“sand” color), and wheat paste. It burns clean, holds heat for up to 24 hours, and kicks out a lot of warmth for its relatively small size.

All in it cost about $1200 in materials. (Firebrick, gas for my pickup, saw rental, discount door, flue tile, firebrick mortar and castable refractory cement…little things add up in a hurry). Labor is a factor here, with the time needed to do the cob facing. I had visions of a $500 heater in materials, but that is for another time.

At a certain point, I started dreaming of a totally hand-formed heater, bags of fireclay mixed with sand for the core, slowly shaped up organically, a cob facing, no power tools, no metal, a simple clay door… If anyone puts one together, let me know. I’m going back to the woods.

A PDF with course-by-course photos

Further Reading:

• The Cabin Stove – A Small Masonry Heater at Aprovecho Research Center

Article Table of Contents:

• The Difference between Rocket Stoves and Rocket Mass Heaters
• The Book on Rocket Mass Heaters
• The MHA Experience
• Construction Processes with Commentary
• Rocket Mass Heater Build at WildAcres 2009
• Masonry Rocket Mass Heater at WildAcres 2010
• Impromptu Rocket Mass Heater at WildAcres2011
• Conclusion
• Some Links for Further Reading

The Difference between Rocket Stoves and Rocket Mass Heaters

First, a clarification regarding terms may be useful. The term “rocket stove” and “rocket mass heater” are often used synonymously and interchangeably. Especially as the conversation grows, I think it is worth clearly defining and distinguishing between the two. The rocket part they share in common has to do with insulated J- or L- shaped combustion chambers that allow for a brisk and relatively clean “cigar-type” burn. “Rocket stoves” are usually low in mass and focused on transferring the efficiently generated heat to food or water in pots for cooking or bathing. “Rocket mass heaters” focus the heat generated into heat exchangers that radiate and conduct the heat out into an environment. They often involve a hybrid of a quicker releasing metal heat exchanger (usually a barrel) with a slower releasing, heat-storing battery which offer sustained heat and often takes the form of a bench. This article is about rocket mass heaters and I hope that this distinction in terminology is helpful as we develop a global conversation about these different wood-burning appliances.

The Book on Rocket Mass Heaters

There is a wonderful book on Rocket Mass Heaters. The book, which will soon be published in a new third edition, is the fruit of a collaboration between inventor Ianto Evans and creative publisher Leslie Jackson – with the hands-on assistance of two professed pyromaniacs: Kirk “Donkey” Mobert and Ernie Wisner. The drawings are excellent and together with the well-crafted text do a great job of sharing subtleties of wood-fired combustion, why this kind of “upside-down fire” works, and the basic process of building a rocket mass heater. The book strongly reflects the authors’ philosophy and involvement in the natural building movement which emphasizes a strong Do-It-Yourself ethic and the use of locally available and recycled materials. The main materials used for their model rocket stove are cob, a relatively small amount of firebrick, a recycled 55-gallon drum and recycled or new stove pipe. In some ways, this book like any other I presume that addresses a new subject, is very specific to the author’s experience and describes one kind of rocket mass heater that worked for them and birthed in them the conviction to share this promising idea with others. And this is exactly what has happened. The book has both inspired many to copy what the book proposes exactly as well as others to tinker further and experiment around the basic principles and shapes that it proposes.

The MHA Experience

During my time working with Ianto at Cob Cottage Company, I became familiar with the Masonry Heater Association of North America and decided to attend their once-a-year gathering in North Carolina. Due to a funny turn of events that involved a full airport parking lot in Denmark and a colleague missing his international flight to come and lead a workshop on one style of masonry heater, I was approached as I arrived and asked if I might lead a hands-on workshop on how to build a rocket mass heater. I accepted the invitation nervously knowing that I would be amongst many grizzled veterans of masonry and wood-fired heating. Well, as things go, the location chosen for the rocket mass heater was on the periphary, next to the lime-burning kiln that was being built in an adjacent workshop. We screeded sand to begin building on and laid up a classic J-shaped “rocket” combustion chamber.

Alex Chernov, a remarkably accomplished mason, came over and said: “Why don’t we put a bell around it?” I honestly hadn’t even heard of what a “bell” was in the context of masonry heating but the spirit of collaboration was rife and within a couple of hours we had built and lit a fire in a hybrid heater that combined years of experience gleaned in the temperate rainforest of Oregon with other experiences developed through long winters in Russia through the happy coincidence of people meeting and working together.

The most significant circumstance, though, was that that night happened to be a very cold night. The crew that manned the lime kiln through the night stayed very close to the heater and built wooden benches on either side of the bell to sit near it. The tangible usefulness of this quickly and simply-built heater, along with the rain, inspired us to continue experimenting. We ripped that heater down the very next morning, moved inside, and started building another one that would keep our group warm through that particularly cold annual gathering.

There are many stories that can be told but the one that I want to share here is about the experimentation on rocket mass heaters that I have experienced in large part through the collaborative and inquisitive spirit and support of members of the Masonry Heater Association. The experimentation takes the concepts introduced in the Rocket Mass Heater book as a starting point. This research differs in its use of brick rather than cob as its primary building block and in a departure from adherence to the idea that the flue path need to have a consistent cross-sectional area through the system.

Construction Processes with Commentary

The commentary only really makes sense if you first study the photo reports in these links:

Rocket Mass Heater Build at WildAcres 2009:

You actually see two rocket mass heaters built in this sequence. The first shows the very simple bell heater that was built. The bricks you see inside the bell were placed there to support “capping slabs” that weren’t big enough to span the whole distance as well as provide more thermal mass and baffling inside the bell.

The second heater was designed as we went and with consideration for the materials that we had. The rather confusing stove pipe was placed simply to test out the j-loop. We had originally planned to build a similar, if not larger bell, on the second one but when it became obvious that we needed to redirect bricks to the oven-building effort so that the oven could be completed for the annual pizza party, we de-constructed some of the bell and turned it into a bench. This turned out to be a great idea. The icing on the cake was to use the lime we had created a couple of days before to plaster the hot heater.

As several have commented, it was very surprising how well and hard that lime plaster set considering that it is contrary to conventional knowledge that a lime plaster applied to a piping hot surface and that dried in less than a minute would create such a stiff shell. We did not experience any cracking on this plaster single skin although it never really went through a cycle of cooling down and heating up since it was torn down while still hot. There was a lot of magic in this heater. Part of it came from the spontaneity and cooperative spirit in which it was born. Part of it from the synergy with the incredible lime plaster and the artists who helped render it. And a huge part of it was the real butt-warming heat it gave so many of us during a very cold and merry event.

Masonry Rocket Mass Heater at Wildacres 2010:

This was an interesting project. Jerry Frisch basically gave me free reign with materials and shop space to experiment and invent a heater that combined experience from both the rocket mass heater world and the masonry heater world. The heater’s design took into consideration people’s curiosity about alternatives to using a 55-gallon metal drum as well as the possibility of incorporating a safer, more enclosed, more visible, higher volume firebox. The brick work necessary to work in round shapes was perhaps overly fancy, especially considering that I cut all the bricks rather than sourcing an arch brick that would fit the shape.

You can see that we maintained the idea of an insulated heat riser by insulating with perlite between a stainles steel pipe and ceramic square flue liners. The combined layer of splits and fulls on the outside are a little confusing and reflect a token effort at addressing code considerations of a minimal thickness on the outside skin. The bench surrounding the heater was a little too shallow in retrospect and in general the heater was a little too delicate for my taste.

When Jerry burned it in his shop after a drying period, he noticed that the fire wasn’t getting enough air from the air-supply in the door. When we built it at WildAcres, we included Jerry’s suggestion of incorporating additional air in such a way that encouraged a vortex for improved mixture in the combustion process. In general, I think there were some interesting ideas explored in this heater but that it was the least succesful.

Impromptu Rocket Mass Heater at WildAcres 2011:

At this WildAcres, I had resolved not to be involved in a project in order to participate and learn from others’. Well, by the third day or so the buzz about a “Rocket” was escalating and Kathleen mustered enough committed volunteers for us to attempt another. This was my favorite build of this series. We literally threw this rocket mass heater together during the two hours before and two hours after lunch on a single day. There was absolutely no planning done beforehand and the basic layout was sketched out in real time on the ground as the bricks dictated a brick-based layout that was simple and required almost zero cutting for the entire project.

The basic premise of this heater was to really test the bell idea by making the volumes inside much bigger than would be determined by following the idea of having a consistent cross-sectional area throughout the system. Unfortunately, I am not sure that there are any decent photos of this heater finished which essentially show that it worked well, that it burned clean and easily, and that people enjoyed its heat. Note that there are two passage ways on either side of the heat riser that allow gases to pass from the first bell into the bench bell.

Conclusion:

The main conclusion of this essay is to affirm the application of the “bell” design principle to the construction of “rocket” mass heaters. It is a promising and interesting direction. Maintaining a consistent cross-sectional area in the flue path of a rocket mass heater, as set forth in Ianto and Leslie’s book, is not the only way to design a rocket mass heater that is successful and works well.

Some Links for Further Reading:

• Get the original book on Rocket Mass Heaters!
• A Basic Description of the Bell Design Principle by Alex Chernov
• A Paper by Igor Kuznetsov Introducing the Ideas of Free Gas Flow and the Bell system
• Interesting Information on Rocket Mass Heaters presented by Erica & Ernie Wisner
• Rocket Stove & Rocket Mass Heater Forum Moderated by “Donkey”
• A Study by Ksenia Chumakova & Norbert Senf of Temperatures and Flow in a Rocket Bell
• “Riding the Russian Rocket”, an essay by Alex Chernov
• and a Response Comparing Rocket Mass Heaters and Masonry Heaters by Max Edleson

Suggest a link!

Photo Credits: Norbert Senf, John Rousseau

Some of Roberto Monge's family at the table near the oven

Roberto Monge’s father – Alfredo Del Transito Monge Menjivar – grew up dirt poor in a jungle village in El Salvador, one of 8 surviving children in a family of 14. By good luck and hard work, he earned a law degree, found paying work, got married and started a family. I didn’t know him, but according to his son Roberto, the elder Monge felt indebted to his campesino roots; when he had to choose between a military dictatorship or a revolutionary people’s movement, he chose the latter, later assuming the position of Attorney General of the Poor in the revolutionary government. His position made him a target. He fled for his life. Two weeks later, his friend Oscar Romero (also his parish priest and the Archbishop of El Salvador), was assassinated. (Raúl Juliá tells some of Romero’s story in a movie by the same name – the first major film financed by the Catholic Church, and a story central to current events). After leaving his beloved country, the elder Monge sent his family to the US, but after a few years as an expat diplomat for the revolution, he realized that he had to choose family or country. He chose family, and moved to the states to be with his wife and kids.

Roberto and son

What does this have to do with ovens? Roberto Monge left El Salvador in 1980, on his 8^th birthday. With his parent’s help, he grew up to claim a piece of the American Dream, getting an education and work, starting his own family, and buying a home in San Luis Obispo. But his father had always (even “before it was cool to be an urban farmer”) tended a backyard patch of corn, squash, and tomatoes. Roberto also remembered the dirt from El Salvador. After digging out from a flood, he recognized the same feel and color in his San Luis Obisbo backyard, and decided to introduce his kids to a part of their heritage. They started making adobes. Then he remembered the food, which had been baked in a wood-fired mud oven. They built a mini-oven. They got help and friends, and built a full-sized oven.

Roberto's son & daughter with mini-oven

A local writer recognized it as a story worth telling, and published it in Slo Life Magazine. I’m sharing it here, with permission, because it tells the deeper story of ovens, one that we all share, somewhere, somehow, even if it’s hidden. I also think it’s important – very important – to remember that what hides such stories are invariably experiences that have displaced us from our roots, from the simple sources of our food and familial and communal relations. I think we all share those stories, too.

The most interesting thing about writing Build Your Own Earth Oven, and continuing to work with dirt as a building material, is how the material itself – just dirt, and water – seems to revive common stories, common memories, and common joys. I find hope in that, and hope shared is hope doubled. (Be sure to look at the recipe for El Salvadorean quesadilla which follows the article!

When I asked Roberto to look at this introduction, he mentioned in his reply that an elder aunt from the village accompanied his cousin to his 40^th birthday party. “She was so happy to see El Hornito in use. She just loved the Quesadilla that came out and she said ‘Este hombre hace una quesadilla mejor que una mujer’ (this man makes a better quesadilla than a woman) – It was a very high compliment.  Although my father couldn’t enjoy my quesadilla it was great to have some of the elders give their nod of approval.  She was so happy to see the tradition continued and she told me stories about her mom’s Hornito.”

Below is the story as printed in SloLife Magazine. Here, too, is a link to Jordan (Hosea) at ncredible edibles, the oven builder, who Roberto credits not only for making the oven beautiful, but also for helping to make it into a community project.

Roberto has since added a little cast-iron chimenea to make use of leftover coals and keep folks warm while they eat on chilly evenings. The base was made of earth bags.

Roberto's oven; nice greens!

about 300 pounds of masonry makes a small space comfortable for 10-24 hours on very little fuel. It's also hard to make it burn dirty – within minutes of ignition, there's no visible smoke from the stack, and you never damp it down.

This little heater hat has worked superbly! I think it’s a great do-it-yourself option for anyone interested in turning their box stove into a much more efficient, cleaner heater for their home or shop. However, I’m reluctant to publish formal plans or how-to info as I’ve built just a couple of heaters, and I consider this one to be an experimental prototype. (If you’re inspired to try something of your own, take good care; be sure to include a better clean-out design that what I allowed for here, and send photos!)

A heater in the home poses serious risks — potentially much greater than what you’d expect of an outdoor oven. That said, it’s not rocket science; masonry heaters were developed and designed by amateurs — people who work for love, not money (for the whole story, look up David Lyle’s Book of Masonry Stoves: Rediscovering an Old Way of Warming).

The videos below are the best explanation I can offer for how I did it. In addition, I’d recommend you look up the Masonry Heater Association, and Alex Chernow’s website. Alex has been developing bell stove designs, and has links to a Russian heater builder who makes brilliant sense of the theory, which is really just flow — think funnels full of water, then turn ‘em upside down and re-envision the water as hot gases. Everything goes from there.

The big trick, I think, really has to do with getting bricks and mortar right, especially if you’re only building a heater that’s a single brick thick. The goal is to limit (even prevent!) cracks in the masonry that could compromise function and/or safety (I do have some cracks in mine, but they don’t seem to be causing harm. I am planning on doing some maintenance/examination, but not until the heating season is over.)

If you build something like this, again, please do take notes and pix, and please share! I would love to publish a collection of stories from folks who have successfully done it themselves — that’s authoritative in a much more important way — taking responsibility for one’s own experiments, as well as one’s own heat…

At the age of 11, Lily Gordon started raising funds for the village of Shirati, Tanzania. For her 11th birthday, instead of gifts, she asked her friends to bring money for the children of Shirati. The party raised $1,300. Behind Lily are many others, particularly a woman named Christine Nyanda Chacha, a Tanzanian woman who decided that lack of parents and money didn’t need to prevent her from going to school, getting a degree, moving to America, and becoming a teacher in Berkeley — where she sought ways to help her students think past the bounds of affluence and entitlement (for more of this story, click here). Lily is just one of many students who have had this experience, thanks to Ms. Nyanda Chacha. Watch the video to hear Lily tell the story:

Rainer Warzecha (at left), with fellow builders in Jähringe, Sweden, in 2008. "Gertrud, who lives there, was a super cook and host. We had fine meals. Gertrud still fires the oven and loves it. We had a holiday with our first daughter there, a year later."

Some years ago now, I got an unexpected email from Elke Cole, a German-born architect now living in Canada, whom I had originally met at the first Natural Building Colloquium in Oregon, in the mid 90s. Elke was traveling in Germany, where she’d come across a public art project in a park in Berlin. It was full of earthen sculptures made by a German artist named Rainer Warzecha. At the time, I was collecting stories and photos to expand a little pamphlet about earthen art projects (Dig Your Hands in the Dirt). But most of what I had were small scale projects: benches, ovens, and things made with kids in schools. Rainer’s, however, was huge! Not only was it at the center of a major urban park/playground, it was the focus of an annual week of public art and mud work – a modern incarnation of traditional village-building, with Rainer as “arch tecton,” literally, the “head builder.” I sent an email asking if I could include some photos of his work in my book, and got a quick reply – in English! (I was grateful, not having any German myself.) Not only did Rainer send wonderful photos, stories, and inspiration, he also provided apt and timely advice regarding my layout and design for the book. More recently, he helped Ian Miller with feedback on the German edition of Build Your Own Earth Oven. I still haven’t met him, but Rainer continues his work in various areas, including oven-building, and has a website in both English and German. It’s about time I said a proper word of thanks.

Rainer, working in Lübeck, 2009, building with a class of a secondary school students. "They were very enthusiastic and the whole process was a lot of fun. Especially the first fire in the oven made them jump around; it's always magic with the element of fire."

Ready to make the first, or thermal layer. Note the roof model in foreground.

Ian Miller with his baby daughter Iantha in front of one of his ovens

Ian’s Miller’s oven story (adapted from his translator’s note for the German edition of Build Your Own Earth Oven):

I saw my first earthen oven in Santa Cruz, California, where I was studying Agroecology. The fellow student who built it had a small bread business selling bread that he baked in it. My studies in Santa Cruz led to an internship on a biodynamic farm in Austria and there I got to know whole-grain sourdough bread and learned to bake it. I eventually learned that this bread was best out of a wood-fired oven but since I had never built anything in my life at that point, I couldn’t imagine affording or building a brick oven myself. Then I happened upon Kiko’s book and it quickly became clear that this was something I could do myself!

At that point I was in Iowa with my wife Andrea, who is from Linz, Austria (we met at the farm where I’d interned). We started telling people about our dreams: to build an oven, grow grains by hand (I’m a passionate scythe mower and even trained with the Austrian Scythe Association), baking Austrian-style bread and selling it at farmers market to make a meager living. An older homesteading couple said they’d like to see that happen at their place, so we moved there and built our first oven, which took us a month. There was a lot of rain and flooding that year, so I used sand that the floods left behind and gravel that washed off the roads into the ditch. I built the foundation out of limestone that crumbled off of roadside outcroppings. This 32.5” oven cost about 50 dollars, the only expense being the firebrick.

We quickly started making test batches of bread and just giving it away. When we were confident that we could reliably make good bread, we opened our stand. This was the last open question: would Americans in a small town in Iowa want to buy our bread, the likes of which they’d probably never seen before? Well, the first week we sold out and eventually we almost couldn’t bake enough bread to meet demand. The most we ever baked on baking day was 50 1.5 pound loaves on three bakes with one firing. The first load was done in 20 minutes, the second in 45, the third in a little over an hour. They sold out at 5 bucks a pop.

I’ve now built about ten ovens, four of which were built in workshops that I gave. Together with my wife I’ve also built a balecob cabin for ourselves and I’ve worked on several other earthen buildings. Andrea’s also built a small cob rocket cooker, a cob bench and a straw/cob sweatlodge. A few short years ago, we had never built anything, but through Kiko’s book, we realized that anything was possible with natural materials. Reading Build Your Own Earth Oven took my life in a new direction and even pointed the way towards a new way of nourishing my body that has helped me overcome chronic digestive problems.

My point here is not to brag, but rather to tell you what has been made possible to me through this book and will hopefully be possible for you too. This book changed my life and it is an honor and a pleasure to be able to offer it to the German-speaking world.

The cover of the new German edition (and my lovely wife Hannah in Canada before we met!)

Out of the blue one day I got a phone call from a guy named Ian Miller. He said he had built a few ovens, baked a fair amount of bread, was married to an Austrian and (among other things) interested in translating Build Your Own Earth Oven into German. With that began an adventure that is now resulting in a new (German!) edition of the book, published by Stocker Verlag, out of Austria (they also publish Austrian permaculturist Sepp Holzer, which makes it even more of an honor). Very interesting to let go of the book and let someone else take it all apart and put it all back together again in a language I can’t read or speak. But in the process of doing it, I realize there are some good stories I haven’t yet shared — not about translation and books, but about ovens and their people. So, while it’s late (especially in terms of giving credit where it’s due for previous projects) I hope this will be a start.

Starting with the most recent (and hoping for a chance to profile each person in greater detail), folks and their stories include:

Ian, who not only translated the book, but got the whole project going.

Rainer Warzecha, an artist and builder in Germany who has helped with the translating, and also contributed photos and stories of his wonderful work in Berlin’s Britzer Garden for Dig Your Hands in the Dirt. His website is www.interglotz.de – worth looking at!

Hendrik Lepel, a German born builder and jack of many trades who’s building ovens and teaching mostly out of ireland, and who read the German text. His website is bakehus.com

Holger Laerad, a Canadian of German heritage, who builds many beautiful things of mud and wood, including ovens, heaters, and more. I don’t think he has a website, but if he does, I’ll get it added on…

And Elke Cole, a German architect and mud-builder living in Canada, whom I’ve known for years now, and who one year sent me amazing photos of amazing mud work in Germany (at Britzer Gardens, which is how I began a correspondence w/Rainer, who not only contributed to but also helped tremendously to improve the layout and design of Dig Your Hands in the Dirt.) Elke spends a lot of time traveling, working and helping in Africa, but also took quite a bit of time, from the sounds of it to help Ian with the translation. More about her and her work at elkecole.com

Thank you thank you thank you all!

more later…