This is the traditional clay oven I built in my garden. It has been absolutely brilliant for cooking pizzas, roasting meats and baking bread. If you fancy building one yourselves you can read how-to at my blog: http://clayoven.wordpress.com.

Cheers

Simon

Help!

I've started building my outdoor bread oven from Denzer's "Build your own earth oven" book (the base has come along nicely!) but I didn't realize I was going to have such a hard time buying clay or a clay mix for the oven mix. I was hoping that digging on my property would turn up a decent mix, but it was all sand.  I've called around landscape and brick suppliers and can't find any powered/dry clay or 'builders mix' that is specified in the book.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?  I'd like to buy it locally (and would LOVE to buy it this weekend!).  Even if you could point me in the right direction of what type of places would sell what I need, that would be great!

I have a cob oven in my back yard and when I went to light a fire recently I noticed a missing brick near the back but upon further inspection I found that the floor had collapsed beneath the bricks. The drought of this past summer/autumn had caused a crack to open up near the back of the oven and I figure the crushed rock and gravel had shifted and caused a sink hole in the sand bed under the bricks.