It's really hard to know where to begin. The workshop was fantastic. Basically, cob is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw. Depending on the purity of the materials, the exact ratio will change, but you are basically looking for about 10-25% clay to the rest sand. You mix it together (by foot/hand seemed to work quite well) and then you build with it. Simple enough.
Cob can be built, as far as I know, in many or most climates. They make cob houses in Africa and they have entire villages of cob houses in England (Devon, I think) - that have been continuously inhabited for centuries. Cob can be suitable for the prairies as well as the wet climate of the west coast. Protection is what you need - large roof overhangs, plaster on the outside walls, and a strong foundation. You want to keep the cob off the ground - at least 6", preferably 18", as I understand it, and make sure your foundation is below the frost line. Cob does have earthquake resistance - there is a large 19th century house in New Zealand that has withstood major earthquakes with minimal damage.
At the workshop, we established a daily routine. Each day we would start with yoga at 7:30, breakfast at 8:00, lecture/instructional at 9:00, workday would formally begin at 10:00. We'd work from 10-1 with a coffee break at 11:00, lunch from 1:00-2:00, and then work through from 2:00 'til 5:00. Free time from 5:00 - 6:15 or so when dinner would be served. In the evenings were various presentations, movie night, conversations, etc. All in all, the days were full, especially with the kids there. Meals were signalled by the harmonica off the deck of the house... imagine being awoken by the sound of a harmonica being played. :)
The property is a 5 acre organic farm with 3 ponds. The largest was the most popular in the hot afternoons - people would jump in and get wet before going back to work. We camped in an orchard with long long grass (I haven't had to take allergy medication in quite some time, but succumbed within an hour of being on-site. I had a rash and my eyes were itchy within an hour. Craziness. So I stayed on allergy medication all week.) - fifteen tents spread out over half an acre. We went without running water or electricity. Our toilet was a 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat over top. After going, you covered your deposits with cut grass and when the bucket was full it was dumped in the nearby humanure compost pile. (For more information on composting human waste, read The Humanure Handbook; it has lots of info on this perfectly safe method of recycling our waste). The house itself had a large covered outside deck with seating and toys for the children.
I think there were about 15 of us on the course with 9 children between us all. It was so fantastic that childcare was included and we were blessed with a wonderful MudGirl looking after the kids. She was very skilled in nonviolent communication and redirecting the kids to something more appropriate when things went awry. Very patient and calm. We had a 3 month old diaper-free baby boy, a 21 month old boy, two 2 yr old girls, 4 yr old girl, 7 yr old girl, 8 yr old boy, 9 yr old girl, and 10 yr old boy. We all traded off to help our MudGirl with childcare - two of us every morning or afternoon. It was great to see people who didn't have kids of their own pitch in to help those of us who did have children; without the childcare offered by mudgirls, I really don't see how I would've been able to take a cob workshop.
The building we were working on was a two story small cabin - exactly 107 square feet so that no building permits were necessary. (I'll try to remember to write more about this later). When we arrived the first story was built - last year the mudgirls had put up the foundation and post and beam structure and roof in about one week, I think, and then they had two one-week workshops to get the walls up to the first level (with ~10 people each week). In our workshop, we had probably between 15 & 20 adults working on the walls, 6 hrs a day, for 7 days when we finished the walls. So cob is labour intensive, but not intense in terms of money (for resources) or skills necessary. And it's slower than stick-frame, but you don't get the same energy from a stick-frame building that you do from a cob building. No power tools were used.
I'd like to write more, but I think this post is getting unduly long. I'll write more in the next while about the workshop.
It was a very empowering experience overall to be able to gain the skills necessary to build your own house in just one week. It was an incredible experience as we built community and worked together - the socialness of the building process was awesome.
Good starter books are the Becky Bee book (she's the author; I can't remember the name of the book) or the Hand-Sculpted House (Ianto Evans and two other authors). Or there's another book by Clarke Snell (can't recall the name) - where he builds a cabin with different walls - cordwood, stick framed, cob, and straw bale, with a living roof on top. Kiko Denzer has a book written specifically about building a cob oven (good starter project). Anyways, good places to start if you're interested in reading more about these natural building materials.
Oh, and the plaster I mentioned yesterday? It was a 2:1 mixture of horse manure to clay. That's right - horse poo. We were smearing this mixture on the walls with our hands and trowels and it looked amazing. Go figure.
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