Log Cabin: Primitive Clay Daub and Wood Fired Cast Iron Pizza

Description

Mixing clay, sand, wood ashes from the fireplace, moss and grass to make a mortar to fill in the gaps between the logs, I spend three days weatherproofing the cabin against the strong cold winds of winter in Canada. This is very primitive technology and could be used to build an entire cabin with support from wattle, a lattice pattern of small sticks. I will be incorporating more primitive technology into the other buildings on the property where I will build with stone, clay and wood to make a root cellar, cheese cave, bath house (sauna and shower), wood shed, workshop, maple syrup shack and more. I have found a source of free pallet wood and scrap wood within about 40 kilometres of the land that the cabin is on, so I may start gathering that when I'm in town so that I can build a small pallet wood cabin or shed to store wood and tools near the road. I have a shallow drilled well near the road where I park my truck, so I plan on building a wood shanty around the pump to keep it protected and so that it doesn't freeze as deeply in the winter. Basically it will be a pumphouse with storage room.

It is so cold outside that the rivers are freezing even where the current is strongest, and the shallow slow moving creek behind the cabin re-freezes after a few days of unseasonably warm weather.

At night, I continue working inside the cabin by headlight, and since I'm off grid, I light the tiny house with lanterns and candles. The hot fire in the wood stove keeps the cabin at a comfortable 20 degrees Celsius, even during the coldest nights.

For dinner, I make sourdough pizza dough and cook it on a cast iron frying pan on top of the stove. My wife made the whole-wheat sourdough bread and dough and the mozzarella cheese she made from raw milk using traditional methods.

To see what I’m up to during the rest of the week, please follow me on my other online channels;

Website: http://myselfreliance.com/

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/MySelfReliance/

Personal Facebook Page (Shawn James) – https://www.facebook.com/shawn.james.msr

Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/myselfreliance/

Mailing Address:

P.O. Box 20042

Barrie, Ontario

L4M 6E9

Canada

Tags: Self Reliance,off grid,log cabin,diy,survival,primitive,bushcraft,camping,cabin,tiny home,woodworking,maker,wood,My Self Reliance,asmr,alone in the wilderness,TA Outdoors,Pallet,mancave,primitive technology,shelter,shack,wranglerstar,cabin living,pure living for life,pizza,cast iron,cooking,clay,shawn james

Video Transcription

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making a pizza for dinner I have this sourdough sourdough starter still smell sour I didn't feed it in the last few days and it's pretty cool because it's down in the Xbox so I'll have to see if I'm going to be able to get this pizza dough to rise at all if not I'm basically gonna make my flatbread pizza it's 2 o'clock now I thought I'd get this started let it rise form a nice dough over the course of the day and then I could cook it at 6 or 7 o'clock this wind it's quite cold have that cold front moving out it was my plus + 9 Celsius yesterday plus 9 Celsius and dropping down to minus 22 tonight probably more like minus 30 something with the windchill but the wind is actually coming through every little gap that I don't have sheep yet so kind of trying to get started here get the cabin warm enough that I can chink and that it stays warm off overnight to dry properly so that's the plan for the day I wonder if I need flour for anything else I need to get at any grocery store and pick up some more that's all I have 100% whole wheat organic flour it's good enough for a feed set for sure I stay gonna feed this Sara don't start I'll just set down there on the top as it needs field it breathe and get some leave a little gap even it's East out of here

ash from the fireplace I know I need to do throw I just have got into a hardware store to get something bigger can't use the normal pointing trial look somebody just adjusting this is have to get that in there and pack it in before I spread it in maybe I'm wrong I can't see a different tool

other than a bigger one oh well this is my dough it turned out pretty good I rose a little bit it's part of a flatbread pizza anyway I'm just gonna form it into the pan here I have some mushrooms tomato onion a branagh have a pizza sauce but my own pizza sauce I am tomatoes because I was working on the cabin this summer I didn't get a very good garden planted so I didn't have enough tomatoes to preserve them so I had to buy a can of this pizza sauce not it's okay I mean it's like 10% of my sodium in that in a quarter cup of this so gotta be careful with that when I make my own and I'll put much salt in it if you want to see my recipe for some of my tomatoes sauces and stewed tomatoes and stuff like that I think I've got recipes on there but anyway if you go to the link below take you to the website and I calculated how many tomato plants I had to grow and how many tomatoes I needed to feed a family of four so if you're interested now you can check out the link below like I said take you to the website now gives all the calculations there oh geez this is the special stuff this is a this is a mozzarella that my wife made and when she makes these she gets about four of these packages I don't know how much that weighs it's over a pound for sure of mozzarella cheese to get four out of each batch that she makes with I think 16 liters of raw milk it's mozzarella boy so much flavor in that it's such good cheese so we'll put that in the freezer

that'll last like two years that's get a pilot I just uh flown here that's hot it's gonna be really hot dried onions to extra flavor here that window with their still you

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so in case you're wondering why I'm doing Maus as well as the clay sand mixture clay sand would I and moss make sure is that need a thermal break so if I was just to put the clay on the inside and the outside and wherever the gaps in there logs are wide enough that that touches the cold just conducts right through that there's no fur value at all to the to the cement basically fit what it is mortar so the frost just transfers directly through it so that Moss has acts as a thermal break in the middle it does house have some insulated properties because there's air inside the fibers little air pockets are what give you your your insulation values so if you know a worst-case scenario or I don't have the moss if there's clay and clay and an air barrier between them and it acts like a double pane window for example so very low r-value like in this very little single digits but at least there's some kind of insulation you just don't want the clay on the inside and the outside to be touching so I'm filling in the gaps where it's dry it would starting to fall out and that I'll put that on mortar over top of it still here no way I'm still here but I'm sure what you're still here watching this is long and boring and hard on the wrist and I know you Mason's earth cabin builders are gonna say something about this little trowel no I just haven't had a chance to get to her hardware store pick up a new one not sure if this is a hey Sam or a sound or her nails on chalkboard sound

I don't mind it actually I'm not sure what it sounds like you guys [Applause]

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all right judge me for the cheese quantity in the cabin here a couple of things I going to do very next now that the chinking is almost done in the cabinet it will be done there tomorrow that's to eat more sauce in there give that bench meat behind you over on that wall then I can push the table over a little bit and have that bench which is also going to be a bed for guests but it brags

put some pepper yeah garam masala all the onions are good on there driving us dehydrated finely ground pepper let's just forget that one talk me how to weight the diet around no it's actually still pretty good sourdough bread nothing but whole wheat flour in that is uh just a tiny pinch of salt and that is it in the bread so it's literally flour and water fermented greens sourdough not on top of that I've got mushrooms onion tomato and the cheese is that mozzarella that my wife made from raw milk you know again if you look up the nutrients and raw milk compared to pasteurized milk homogenized pasteurized milk this is from one dairy cow a dexter cattle dexter cow and everybody has an opinion about what the proper diet is literally if you go through the comments complete opposite contradictions to one another to be and to be fair different diets different ways of eating work for different people whatever works for you and you know healthy diet and self-reliant diet might be two different things too and also the variety and the type of food you have in your diet ur obviously location related whether that's cultural or does climate related access to different types of foods up here a very short growing season so we tend to eat more meat for example

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morning by the way man it's a well-made bow had that custom-made for me 52 pounds of 28 inches by Don Jackson long ago I don't know maybe 12 22 years ago something

so smooth

the thing is straight and true that was when you made it anyway good place for up here

you have no idea how many weeks I compiled my video footage from the the previous week and I look at it and I wonder if it's worth putting a video together this is so this is one of those weeks and one of those tasks in particular I'm doing this week that just reminds me of butter or tendency to want to be instantly gratified these days and this is quite the opposite of instant gratification now it makes me wonder how many of our problems are are caused by this this instant gratification this getting basically everything we want or a lot of what we want everything put it this way there's things that we want that we shouldn't have we shouldn't even have access to that we do in this day and age but there's so many things that we wish for that we don't need and we don't appreciate the things we do have you know we want so much we see so many things we want we see may so many places and so many people doing things that we wish we were doing that we want all of it we want to go and do that thing and we want to do that quickly then we want to move on to the next thing and we end up not appreciating anything enough not appreciating something that we've attained because we didn't really work all that hard for it and of course this cabin is a complete opposite of that I've been working on this essentially since I cut that first trees down and that balsam fir that you've seen me post in the beginning of the video I'm not going to show it again because I've used that clip of four or five times the center the king post here is that tree and then that other tree that was in that clip as well will be the latter I'm going to cut it cut it into length and then split it down the middle and then put runners between it rungs to make it a ladder to the loft so imagine cutting something down or preparing something you know it'll end up being a year prior before I actually put it to use that's the thought that keeps popping in my mind is about that instant gratification and I wonder how much the boredom created by getting what we want as soon as we want I wonder how much that boredom that searching for something more cause the sort of a mental illness in us where we're but we become so bored and unfulfilled that we try to find other things to fill that space to fill that void

sometimes that void is filled by addictions and sometimes it's filled by just a lack of purpose which leads to anxiety and depression so I do wonder if we were to return to doing things more manually slower if not a you know our workplaces or because their productivity goes down and we can't compete on the world market

I wonder if personally we can do that with our free time we can start to spend more time and slow down and do things and doing one thing instead of ten things how much more happier we'd be if we did

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