![]() ![]() To save hassles I use the lazy Susan that I use to turn the pot on which is 250mm in diameter and as luck would have it, it makes a great template. Once you have a base of uniform thickness place a shape to cut around on your clay. If you don’t have a rolling pin long enough a piece of thick dowel or some 50mm diameter PVC pipe the right length will also do the trick. To do this knead up some clay and pat it out to roughly the diameter of the base you want, place a stick the thickness that you are looking for (I usually use sticks 10-12mm thick) on each side and then roll it out with a rolling pin if it will sit on the sticks. The olla is made by coiling so the first thing to do is make the base. You will need to hold it there until the plaster has set, then pull the ball out and leave the plaster mould a day or two to fully cure and dry out. Place the ball as close as you can to the centre of the mould and push down so that the “equator” of the ball is level with the surface of the plaster. ![]() Mix the plaster with water (it’s probably best to follow the directions on the packaging, the manufacturer goes to a lot of trouble to work them out) and then pour the plaster into the box you are making the mould in. To make the mould, find or make a box the right size, probably a bit deeper than you think it needs to be to allow for over filling. The mould is 330mm x 330mm and 160mm deep and the diameter of the half spherical shape in the mould is 270mm. Get hold of some plaster of Paris, (possibly quite a bit if you want to make large ollas) the mould I use weighs about 10 kg, so that gives you an idea of the sort of amounts you might need. It also supports the body of the olla so you can keep building the layers of clay up without any danger of it collapsing due to the soft clay.įind a ball or sphere a bit bigger than you want the belly of the olla to be, remembering the clay will shrink during drying and firing somewhere between 5% and 10% so making your mould oversize will take that into account. That adds up to somewhere near 70 ollas! Digging and refining the clay would add too much time to the project, so I am using commercial clay.īecause ollas have a rounded bottom, you can’t make them sitting directly on the flat surface as you would a flat bottomed pot, so the best thing to do is to make a round mould that the bottom can sit in and still maintain its shape while the clay is soft. They seemed to work well enough overseas that the concept was proven so I wanted enough ollas to be able to install four to six, staggered throughout each of my veggie patches. The problem is that I could not find an unglazed pot that looked anything like I wanted, so I decided that I would to make my own. They worked reasonably well but the genuine olla, because of its shape, would take up less space at the surface and provide a greater area moist water exchange area under the ground. ![]() Last summer I bought some thin walled clay plant pots and turned them into ollas to keep one of the veggie beds watered. The theory goes that the water then travelled through the unglazed terracotta slowly and into the soil, keeping the growing plants well irrigated. These pitchers were round bellied pots with a short neck and they were buried up to their lip in the soil and then filled with water and covered. In dry parts of the world such as North Africa or Sri Lanka (where they are called “Ollas”) they have used unglazed terra cotta pots to irrigate their crops, the so-called pitcher irrigation. Last Updated on Tuesday, 29 March 2016 10:37 ![]()
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