Updates..

The walls are all built for the first half of the house. It`s starting to actually look like a house now and we`re beginning to imagine what it`ll be like to be able to live there sometime hopefully not too far off in the future. 

The hens are doing really well.  Jenny, Lucy and Kelsey have caught up in size with Lesley and Jane and all five are laying an egg every single day. We`re going to start selling eggs in the hostel because we`ve realised that we just cant eat that many eggs! They have figured out how to get out of their pen though and in one afternoon, ate all of the sprouts and shoots that I had carefully planted in the veggy patch. Some things, like the peppers, have been gobbled up entirely, right down to the seeds. Other things like the sunflowers are still standing but have had the leaves completely shredded. Between the hens and the drought at the moment, we decided to leave further planting until the rainy season and when we`re able to be more hands-on with watering and chicken proofing. Saying that, I`ve been collecting chilli seeds, pineapple heads and papaya seeds to plant so I might make an exception for those!

Because there are talks of neighbouring plot owners planning to start building in the nearby plots, we`ve decided that the time has come to fence off our land. It`s been marked by the topographer already so we know where the limits are but we never got round to a fence or hedge or anything. Also it`s getting a bit tiresome having all the neighbours dogs wandering in and leaving their evidence behind. So, we`re going to start with the part behind the house where the chicken house and veggy patch is, that way we can let the hens run free and not worry about them (or our plants) getting eaten. It`s not going to be a beautiful fence, just some bamboo poles with plastic netting stretched between, but hopefully we`ll get a few plants going and it wont be too noticeable after a while. The front part we hope to invest a bit more in eventually and get it looking nice, but there`s no point until the building is finished because it`ll just get wrecked.

We`ve had to focus our attentions and finances on the hostel over the past few weeks and probably into the next few months because we found a new location for the hostel and it`s going to need a fair bit of work and investment to get it up and running. Hopefully we can still aim to be out at our house by Christmas but it`s hard to say how the hostel will go in the new local so we`ll have to wait and see. Today we`re off to Cali to get some supplies and we`ll try to get our freezer (to be set up as a fridge) at the same time because we`ve sourced an efficient, small chest freezer that should do the job.

So that`s the plan for the weekend, shopping for the stuff for the new hostel and fencing in the land. We also have a bunch of `out of control plants` which we were given from a friend so we`ll try to find a spot for them too.

Another brick in the wall..

We finally have the beginnings of walls! The builders got started on Friday (just in time to take the weekend off) and this week they seem to be pushing on with walls and columns. They are easily distracted and decided to dedicate a fair bit of time to redesigning our chicken coop but at least there´s progress on the walls too.

We visited our friends who have a farm last weekend and they gave us heaps of things to plant like plantains, herbs, helaconias and some cactus type things. We planted them all in the garden without guidance and it turns out we´ve done it all wrong. I´m being stubborn about it though and am going to leave them how they are to see what happens.

We also bought two chickens off the workers at the farm, black laying hens that are six months old and already lay eggs. They are lovely and glossy with red dangly bits on the head and chin. We have named them Lesley and Jane after my aunts. Unfortunately, they haven´t taken after their namesakes in character. They are ferocious and are really mean to the red ones, they bite them and wont let them into the coop through the day.

As soon as the sun goes down though they all put aside their differences and hop in to sleep side by side, very fickle. We had to decorate the nests with plastic bottle caps to stop the hens roosting on the nests but it didnt work, they keep cramming on in and pooing all over the nests. We´ll figure something out.

This week we started our full on ´hostel goes green´ project. We are now using only vinegar, bicarb of soda, and citronella to clean the hostel, we have a whole bunch of recycling bins and we´re trying to encourage the guests to be energy and water aware. They seem to like it and it´s amazing to see how many things you normally just throw out - for example we collect a laundry basket full of plastic bottles every single day. Hopefully they will become a greenhouse for us to grow pineapples! Because of the self-catering kitchen and our veggie munching guests, we have LOADS of compost.

Unfortunately the insects love it. First it was too dry and got infected with ants and then I chucked a heap of water in and now it´s writhing with maggots. I´m not sure how to combat that. Maybe it´s time for some atomic chilli mix.

We´re now at the stage of designing our rainwater harvesting system. We are clashing heads a bit with the builder because he has some different ideas about how we should do things and doesn´t like our ideas. He thinks that chlorine is the best way to treat water whereas we want a biosand filter system with holding tanks so that we can limit the use of chemicals. We´ve been reading a LOT about it and we´re pretty convinced that´s what we want - Rodrigo says no. I dont know exactly how we´re going to get around that but further discussion is clearly needed.

Anyway, a much more productive week this week and hopefully by the next post we´ll pretty much have the structure of the house sorted!