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.