[familyop]

"The garden and the mud-brick bread oven eat up most of my outside time right now."

Those are great things to do. We've started looking around for parts of designs for an outdoor rock oven for winter baking, dehydrating and other cooking. It'll probably be a monster with the various kinds of cooking desired and for extra thermal mass against the winter cold. We'll use a solar oven for summer baking (always fire bans). We've become bored of frying everything and haven't been able to keep rodents out of the propane oven, even with numerous baits and traps around. Huge rodent population with Hantavirus and Plague.

Most people don't bother trying to garden up here. For the garden, we finally designed a cover using barbless wire and small PVC conduit. The wire grid between lengths of conduit and anchored at the ends should hold it together enough to protect shade cloth and thinner, cheaper plastic from high winds and mid-summer hailstorms. Won't use much plastic (mostly short season, cold climate heirlooms)--mostly shade cloth. Nothing more than simple, homemade box traps for garden rodents so far and looking for more ways to deal with them.

[JRandomFreeper]

I did over a year and a half as a mountain man in a shack with no running water or commercial electricity. Rodents ARE the #1 problem up there. I had some sunflower heads stored hanging to dry them out, and the little bastards got them anyway.

I've missed the wood-fired horno since I left New Mexico, and decided I'd build one here anyway. I've got 12" of topsoil, 8" of sand under that and lots of clay underneath it, so material comes from the property. It's just a matter of digging it out, mixing it up and building the oven.

I had some adobe lessons while I was in New Mexico, so I know the basics.

I've cooked in several types of wood ovens over the years, but the best bread I ever baked was out of a mud-brick horno.

/johnny