'Tis the season for elves...and fairies

by June

One spring, when the girls were about four, we were out for a walk in the woods. As we squished along in our boots, I said it was mud season now and soon it would be bug season. Blossom piped up and asked, "When is it gonna be fairy season?"

As it turns out, in our woods, it is always fairy season. And, thanks to Grandpa Hickory and his whimsy, it is not hard to imagine why our fascination has such deep roots: He builds fairy houses out of tree stumps. His granddaughters weren't very old before he had given them their own hickory-handled hammers so they could help too.

Blossom and Fern, then age 4, helping Grandpa Hickory

with a fairy stump house

We used to live in a pine forest, and as the trees came down in the big winter storms, Grandpa Hickory reclaimed the stumps for the fairies.

We're always sad to lose a tree. It was especially hard to hear that the 80-foot pin oak had died in Grandpa Hickory's back yard. Years ago, we had our last family reunion with his family under that tree. To ease the loss, he's built a mansion big enough for a fairy family reunion. We haven't yet made it home for a visit to Missouri so that Fern and Blossom can enjoy this gift from their grandfather, but we are told it stands taller than they do.

The girls can't wait to see the new fairy house...and the very special grandfather whose imagination soars with theirs.

Pizza oven part 4: The dome

by Birch

Most of the the work on our wood-fired pizza oven has been about the supporting structure—the foundation, the stand, and the insulating platform. Necessary stuff, but it doesn't have much to do with cooking a pizza. Last winter was a long one and when I was ready to start building the dome this spring, there was more delay as rain fell for a month solid.

It gave me time to consider the firebricks stacked on a pallet in the yard. A firebrick is larger and heavier than a regular clay brick and perfectly at home in temperatures that can reach 700 degrees. What makes them so unique at holding the heat is a heavy dose of aluminum oxide and silica.

There were no mishaps in transporting 200 firebricks home—just two trips to protect the suspension in our beleaguered vehicle. Along for the ride were three-50 pound sacks of heat-proof cement and a sack of fire clay (basically firebrick dust). Don't forget a shiny new diamond-tipped saw blade for cutting the bricks on a power-saw. (Yes, some use a special water-cooled brick saw, but I was going to try to use the tools I already had on hand.)

I set the oven floor first. I mixed one part fire clay dust with one part sand and enough water to make a thick slurry. Down went a two inch layer of the stuff on top of the insulated top of the stand, and before it dried, I fit together twenty bricks in a herringbone pattern tapping them in tight with a rubber mallet. This was where the actual pizzas would go! I'd be sliding those pizzas in any day now. (Right!)

Not so fast: There was a dome to build. The first course is half-bricks set on end, gently curving to conform to the diameter of the oven. I had cut a 40-inch round template from plywood and used the diamond blade to cut a half-dozen bricks through the middle. (I wore a respirator and safety glasses, and cutting the bricks wet helped keep the dust and flying particles down.)

With the first circular course in place, buttered together with a smooth heat-proof mortar, I began to shape the dome. I replaced my plywood template with a slightly narrower diameter to help support the first course of dome bricks and spread a thick wedge of mortar on half a brick. I set it with the finished edge tipped into the interior of the oven. So sitting on the four-inch tall vertical half-brick was a horizontally oriented half firebrick. It held. I set another one next to it, gradually moving around the circle to form the dome. So far so good.

Years ago in Florence, Italy, I stood with three college friends on a hill with a view of the Cathedral—the Duomo. Four million bricks and sixteen years of construction just to build the dome. Well, the whole idea made us all hungry—we were always hungry, and in Florence there was always pizza. Along the winding back streets of Firenze we discovered cheap wood-fired pizza made with buffalo mozzarella and fresh tomatoes. Somehow the Duomo and pizza became forever linked in my mind.

By the time I reached the third tier of my own Duomo I realized I was no Renaissance craftsman. Bricks slid apart as the angle of the dome increased. I cut scraps of wood to use as props for each brick to hold them in position. But I could only place a few bricks down at a time to keep the weight from shifting them. I worked my way around to a keystone that I had cut to an exact fit using a cardboard template. The keystone "locked" the bricks in place on the row.

As I made my way around the dome, I left an opening for the archway into the oven. I had stacked four bricks on each side as a placeholder. The arch would have to be finished before the dome. Now if I thought tipping bricks up was hard, the arch would teach me just how hard it was to go fully-vertical with a brick!

Next: The Roman arch takes shape.

Pizza Oven Part 3: Birch's big truck

by Birch

Anyone who has rented a truck at a big-box home store knows the Zen koan: Do you shop first or rent the truck? Fortunately our local big-boxer will hold the truck for a half-hour while you shop, then start the rental clock after you've loaded. And with a fork-lift, a pallet with sixty-five concrete blocks loads fast. Along for the ride with my blocks were twenty bags of ready-mix concrete and a few ninety-pound bags of Portland cement. There were also five ten-foot lengths of rebar. To the casual observer, I had the makings of a fine underground nuclear fall-out shelter. But it was the stand for our pizza oven that I was aiming for.

The blocks were stacked hard against one side of the bed, which made for a precarious load, but I took off anyway. I was anxious to get everything unloaded at home and return the truck while June, Fern and Blossom were at the beach. The truck drove fine out of the lot, but when I came to that first turn into traffic, I took it too sharp. Down went the concrete blocks. Funny how a ton of bricks—or blocks in this case -- falls just as hard as they say it does. The truck wagged dangerously. One concrete block clunked to the street, almost hitting someone's new Prius.

I hit the flashers and scurried out to retrieve my block. The rest of the blocks had stayed put in the truck bed, blocked by the bags of concrete stacked next to them. Fortunately, I had bought a few extras, but I hadn't intended to leave them on the street like a breadcrumb trail.

I made it home without further incident and pried the jumble of blocks, sacks of concrete, and rebar off the truck. Maybe I wouldn't have to admit my trouble to anyone—especially June. (So June, if you're reading this, when I said renting the truck was okay—well, it nearly wasn't.)

After I established a level back corner with a trowel of mortar, I set the first block in place. I was going five courses across and four up, dry stacking the blocks. At the front of the stand, I used half-blocks to create a three-by-three foot opening for wood storage. A heavy piece of iron creased with a right angle would support the fourth course of blocks over the opening.

When the blocks were stacked and leveled, I cut up my rebar into equal lengths and mixed my of concrete. I filled every other core of the hollow block with concrete and rebar. A few days later when it was dry, I began the concrete support table for the oven.

I cut two pieces of one-half inch thick plywood to fit inside the blocks that formed the stand. I built props from two-by-fours and fastened those to support the plywood. And that plywood needed help because I was about to load several hundred pounds of cement on it. I built an eight-inch tall frame around the top of the stand and filled it with five inches of concrete mix and rebar. When that was dry, a three-inch insulating layer made up of vermiculite mixed with Portland cement was smoothed over the concrete table. This would help the oven maintain its heat.

With the oven platform completed, I was ready to build the oven dome. But early below-freezing nights and a fall snowstorm managed to interrupt my carefully composed schedule. There would be no wood-fired pizza to warm us that winter.

Coming up next: Spring brings firebricks.

With a little help from my friends

by Birch

Sometimes you just can't get it done all by yourself. On a recent Saturday, I put my weekend "To-Do List" aside and spent the day helping a friend start a new life in a new city. There was a rental truck to maneuver through urban streets and dock at the front door of an apartment building. We worked all afternoon unloading the truck with some impromptu help from a couple of college students who were moving out of the building. It was one of those city barters born out of expediency--heavy-lifting (there was a piano involved) in exchange for cargo space in our truck and a ride to their new digs nearby.

Belongings mingled on the busy sidewalk. We kept watch as we lifted. The elevator neared overload, but chugged upward every time without complaint. The rain held off until every last box was inside.

Little did I know that Fern and Blossom were back at home working to surprise me by dispatching a major item on my "To-Do" list. I had started a project the weekend before to set up a short run of stockade fencing to wall off a utility area. After the posts were set, the fence needed to be painted. I had finished one section with two coats of white and set it in place. It looked good, but there was more to do. While I was away, Fern and Blossom got to work on the second section which was propped up out of the rain. June reported that she painted some of the top of the fence that was out-of-reach, but that the girls mostly stretched on tippy-toes to do it themselves.


When I arrived home late that night, it was a happy sight when my headlights alighted on that freshly painted fence. Cross one off the list thanks to Fern and Blossom!

Pizza Oven: Step Two

by Birch

I knew nothing of concrete, except that it came in an eighty-pound paper bag that was sure to give me the hernia my grandmother had always warned me about. It was high summer, and I had just finished digging a hole in our heavy clay soil the size and depth of a kiddie pool and it needed to be filled with a whole lot of those eighty-pound sacks. Or I could just call up a concrete company for a delivery. Wasn't pouring concrete slabs a job best left for professionals and organized crime hit-men? To the Yellow Pages!


The foundation work specified in Forno Bravo's plans for the Pompeii pizza oven seemed like serious overkill. But then again, there's no doubt that a solid base is needed to keep the oven stand and the cooking dome from shifting, which would cause the pizza oven's masonry to crack. Several tons of firebricks and refractory mortar need to be supported by something equally solid! So I decided not to improvise this time and follow the plans precisely.

Meanwhile, my calls to local concrete companies were not being returned. Everyone was running full out in the summer construction season and didn't have time for a piddly bit of work. (This was last summer, before the economy cratered.) But I got lucky when a neighbor who had just finished digging the foundation for his new garage came to the rescue when I shared my concrete dilemma with him. The weekend before the crew he had hired was ready to pour, he sent them over to me for an estimate.

Two guys with Popeye forearms swung by to survey my site. They shrugged. I hoped to move negotiations along by suggesting that maybe they could add a bit more concrete to the neighbor's order and take care of my project. The boss nodded without commitment and sucked on a toothpick. Finally they hit on an excuse for their reluctance, explaining that they would have to move the concrete across the lawn by wheelbarrow since they couldn't get the truck close enough for the boom to reach my site. Fair enough, I thought, and I agreed to cover their time for the heavy-lifting. They took my number without commitment. They'd call after they poured the concrete for the neighbor's garage on Monday morning.

Convinced their visit (and word) was golden, I finished the preliminary work over the weekend: spreading a two foot base of crushed stone to level the hole and provide some drainage. Then I built a form from 2 X 6 lumber to hold the concrete in place at the top of the excavation. I covered the stone underneath the form with a plastic moisture barrier, using old shower curtain liners that I had been saving for a good purpose. Then I used a masonry blade on my power saw to cut lengths of iron reinforcing rod, also known in the trade as "rebar." (Note to fellow amateurs: Throwing around the lingo doesn't impress anyone.) I lay the rebar onto plastic spacers that would hold each length four inches into the concrete, criss-crossing the bars into a grid that would add support and strength to the concrete. When I was done my hole looked ready for the pour.

Monday morning brought the threat of thunderstorms, but no phone calls from the concrete guys. That's okay, I thought, they'd come over when they were done. The crew was working across the river, and I could hear their truck's diesel engine rev as the concrete tumbled in the huge barrel. They worked for awhile and by lunch-time, they were gone. Lunch break, right? Nope, they were on to the next big job, and I still had a hole in the backyard.

I could do this, I decided. Two trips to Home Depot with a thousand pounds of Quikcrete dragging bottom in the family car. I stowed the thirty-five bags in the garage on an old wooden pallet. About this time the summer rains hit. Day-after-day of heavy showers made it impossible to mix and pour the concrete. And I wanted to be done.

For years, early August has delivered June's Dad, Hickory, cross-country for his annual visit. He's always quick to help out, especially when there's a hard-to-hide hole in the backyard. Hickory is a super-hero of a father-in-law, and he never fails to help us out of a jam. And as always, he was full-in for helping me out. So I attempted to rent a cement mixer from our local tool rental, but the ground was too muddy to drag it across the yard, so back went the mixer. We set to work by hand with a wobbly wheel-barrow and mixed all thirty-five bags by hand.

Fern and Blossom marked each corner with their footprints and names. And by evening, the whole thing was done. Oh, and then Grandpa Hickory went back home and saw a chiropractor to straighten out his back, and he couldn't sleep for two weeks, but that's a whole other story for a whole different sort of blog.





Coming up in Step Three: A crushing blow with concrete blocks on a rented truck!

Pizza Oven: the first step

by Birch

When we left New York City in a rented Jeep and headed cross country, the round pizza stone we used in our apartment's tiny oven ended up not in a box at Manhattan Mini-Storage with our other stuff, but in the back of our Jeep. We were that serious about our pizza.

So when our road trip landed us in Maine, we slid the pizza stone in our very own oven and we were home. But our homemade pizza still wasn't right. We were pizza-spoiled by our pizza-hero, Patsy, who was three-hundred miles away under the Brooklyn Bridge at Grimaldi's. The crust there is crisp--not too thin and not too thick, and they use only homemade ingredients. Pizza perfection only happens above 700 degrees in Grimaldi's coal-fired oven, which is not home oven territory.

We decided we needed an outdoor wood-burning oven and ordered plans from Alan Scott at Ovencrafters, who for thirty years built brick bread ovens in backyards around Berkeley, California. Alan Scott retired to his native Australia a few years ago and, sadly, died there earlier this year. His plans were beautiful and brilliant, but I hadn't the vaguest idea of where to begin. I needed hand-holding and lots of it.

Along came Forno Bravo and its step-by-step plans to build an Italian-style brick pizza oven called the "Pompeii." The plans are based on an ancient domed design, which heats up quickly for pizza and can be built for a reasonable cost. There was an on-line forum for newbies where I could get lots of help planning my oven.

I began last July with the first step: The oven needed a solid foundation so there would be no shifting and heaving to crack the brick dome. That required excavating a six-by-seven foot foundation deep enough to provide a stable footing. In our heavy clay soil, I dug by hand until water began to leach from the clay at about thirty inches. More than one local expert I asked said I should go down to forty-eight inches, the

frost-line here in Maine. But an equal number of amateur backyard diggers advised a shallower "floating-foundation." There was no consensus and Forno Bravo plans suggested I yield to local custom, so I split the difference.

After the hole was dug (and all that extra dirt was used to level holes around the yard), I filled up the foundation with crushed stone, leaving about six inches at the top. This was where the wood forms would go to hold the concrete for the foundation. Stay tuned for my adventures, ahem, pouring cement...

Home-made Maple Syrup

by Blossom

We wanted to make our own maple syrup, so we started to look for a tree that had a U-

notch in its leaves instead of a V-notch. We had to dig around in the snow to find old leaves from

last fall. We also looked for light gray bark that had ridges. When we found a tree that had those details, we were really lucky because it grew in a clump with five trunks.

Daddy drilled a hole in three of the trunks and tapped metal spouts through the bark. He bought the spouts at Blue Seal; they cost two 

dollars apiece.

As soon as he got the spouts in, the sap started dripping immediately! It was so clear it looked like water. Fern volunteered to taste it. She said it tasted sweet.

The first day we collected about six gallons. We will need nine gallons of sap to make one pint of syrup. But the sap fills the buckets quickly. When we went out the first morning, some of the sap was frozen. Maple slushie!

A Work-in-Progress

by Birch

Once upon a rent-controlled apartment, the only tool I had was a small hammer with a broken claw, suitable for driving no more than a picture nail. My world has changed for the best since we moved from the city to the piney woods to fend for ourselves.

Of course in the last years, my tool collection has expanded considerably. (Visiting friends from NYC once asked in measured seriousness if our wood-splitting axe was for protection against burglars.) But I do miss Louie, our building's landlord, handyman, and the neighborhood's amateur historian. One call and the leaky kitchen sink would be fixed by the time June and I rode the D train home.

Now I'm the Super who gets the call to be Mr. Fix-It. And living on a budget in our 1890s house has stretched me into some projects where I am in way over my head—bathroom renovations, electrical wiring, winter-night furnace repairs, and even a Thanksgiving holiday septic-tank rescue. Yes, some might say call a professional, but in Maine that's just a public admission of defeat. Exasperation and exhaustion have more than once made me want to turn in my tool belt and lift up the phone. (I did call a plumber just after we moved in, and when he was finished laughing at my predicament he offered to rescue me for an outrageous sum.)

Late one night I explained to anyone who would listen at Home Depot how the bathtub hot and cold didn't fit into the new shower-tub control valve. Finally, the retired plumber on duty plucked a few fittings from a bin and promised me the fear was all in my head. I came home with the parts and a sense of renewed confidence. That was enough to get it done.

But breakdowns (emotional that is) are inevitable, and once I howled at June that she had married a "Condo in Boca with a Super" kind of guy. Geez, that was a bad night...

Still, I've persevered. My latest project is an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven. I started it last summer in the rain, worked steadily, but got totally stalled by early freezing weather. I'm a slow, methodical worker, so I can't blame it all on the weather: July was spent digging the 6 x 7 foot foundation and lining it with a plastic vapor barrier covered with drainage stone. Then, in August a concrete delivery was promised every week, but never arrived.

Finally I took it in my own hands and overloaded the minivan with bags of ready-mix, made two trips on sagging springs and still came up two bags short. When the concrete-vermiculite insulating blend was finally dry, I was ready to build the 36-inch oven structure, but by then the freezing night-time temperatures made working with concrete impossible.

But as multiple feet of snow piled up, I made the most of the season. I spent the winter perfecting my pizza dough recipe. Bring on the spring!

Snow, glorious snow

by Birch

Fern and Blossom slogged into the heavy snow this week on their cross-country skis. They packed a sleek, fast track but not without a lot of giggling tumbles. I can't help but recall the effort of pulling them behind me on a pulk sled when they were toddlers. They loved it, but it was work to ski with two bundled babies in the sled -- though not as much work as when they got their own skis at age three: Our family of four meant eight skis, eight poles, eight boots to buckle and snap into place. Today the girls gear up and zip around the meadow, confident in their expertise, and I'm the one who can't keep up. All afternoon they kick-glided along the circuit. When they came in for hot chocolate, they reported they had made fifty loops!