Cob: commercial clay

[Amanda Peck]

Commercial clay would be @#$!^!!%*!!  expensive.

I thought that the $110 for TONS of good red clay that the local limestone 
quarry had scraped off the area they wanted to quarry next was 
outrageous--even if it broke down to $100 delivery, $10 for the clay.  And 
you'd need a bunch of those to do a cob house.  Up in the Boston area, seems 
like someone was mentioning recently that the blue clay dug out of some 
building project (The Big Dig?) was free--all you needed was a dump truck.

It's also possible that some of the dug-on-site stuff--just off my property, 
there's a really nice vein exposed, and everytime anyone (ahem!) gets some 
another tree falls down the hill across the guy's logging road--is almost 
the right sand/gravel/clay consistency so one wouldn't have to do major 
amendments to get good cobbing soil.

But yes, especially for finish layers, people ARE using clay in colors.  I 
want to see the green!  And I keep hearing about putting different colors in 
as designs.
............
Brad asks:

I gather most people are using clay dug on site.

Has anyone tried using clay from a brickworks or some other industrial
supplier?

Or are people getting clay from some building excavation site?

I live in suburbia and don't really need to dig a big hole in the ground.

And what about sand?  Do people use bricklayer's sand or something like
that?


Has anyone tried white clay with white sand?

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