It turned out that ducks eat slugs. So the first step in handling the slugs was to create a pond for the ducks. The big hole they dug was filled with the water from their sinks and baths, purified by a little marsh they built, complete with cattails and rushes. The water was fresh enough for goldfish and the two new ducks loved it. Since permaculture folks try to recycle and use everything on site, they decided to use the dirt dug out of the pond to build a cob office.
Cob is a mix of dirt, sand and straw which can be made into any shape.
The permaculture people called a building party. As the music blared, friends, students, kids and ducks danced around in the cob mud, mixing in the straw and then building up the walls. The messy creativity soon produced a curvy Hobbit-office with unusually shaped windows made to fit pieces of glass collected from a junk yard. Attached to the office, they built a cob oven in the shape of a dragon's head. The office became the dragon's body, its tail curving into a bench people could sit on to watch the fire in the dragon-oven's mouth.