If its the good-life you're after then a pizza oven in the garden should be high on your list of priorities. Having undertaken a course a couple of years ago in how to construct a 'cob' oven, we have finally had the chance to install one in a garden for real. The basic principle of cob is very simple. It is a combination of clay, grit and straw and has been used in the construction of buildings and ovens all over the world for thousands of years. In this case the clay came out the post holes dug in the same garden, for grit we used sharp sand and the straw was bought from a local farmer.
The oven itself consists of two layers of cob, with the outer one containing the straw to give tensil strength i.e to hold it all together, and the floor of oven consists of fire or engineering bricks laid on a solid base. A well made cob oven will have excellent thermal properties, reaching temperatures of over 600 degrees celsius and cooking a pizza perfectly in 2-3 minutes. So just make sure you have plenty of tomatoes and herbs growing nearby. Here are some photos of construction underway and we will follow them up later in the summer with some 'action' shots, in other words the important task of cooking and eating pizza!
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