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Do you remember reading about the ambitious project some members of our Warrah community are working on? It is a spiral garden with a cob pizza oven as its centerpiece. We fired up the oven for the first time this week, and the student builders got to enjoy the smell of wood smoke and melted cheese, while they worked up an appetite.

Right now our TAFE Certificate in Work Education program participants are learning about shinkabe – a traditional Japanese way of building walls using a tied bamboo lattice base. The wall you see in the gallery below is being built using beautiful round wood turpentine. Sections of the posts will be left exposed and protruding. The team will cover the lattice work in a mixture of sand, clay and straw and follow with a fine finishing plaster. Many cultures around the world build in a similar way. Another example is the wattle and daub method common in the UK. The material is incredibly tactile, easy to work with and has a beautiful sculptural capacity due to the fibre (in our case straw) added to it.

By the way, the organic sourdough pizza bases were made in our very own onsite bakery.  Imagine being able to say that you’re eating food you made yourself from scratch, in an oven you built with your own hands and that the oven is positioned within a magical garden that you landscaped and planted yourself too!