Back in the swing of it...

It has been a looooong time since I have posted here and progress on the house has been slow but steady over the past few months.  We are still experiencing a long and dry summer, in fact there has been virtually no rain for over 4 months - not the best news for an off grid house which depends on rain water harvesting.  Our neighbours have been really helpful and continue to help us with our water shortages and we have taken steps to ensure that we wont be stuck in this position again.  We now have several more water tanks and could effectively live for 2-3 months with no rain just relying on our stored water - but it does still have to rain in the first place!


On one hand, lets hope it doesn´t rain so we can get the roof on before the water gets in but on the other hand, its sad to see everything yellow and dry and know that only a few of the plants are going to make it through - apart from the orange and lemon trees which are flourishing! Rabbits and hens are also doing fine although the summer egg production is not as good as the winter it seems.



Since I last posted, all the walls are up and the roof terrace is on top of the kitchen.  The walls are all rendered, the garden wall is finished and we´re waiting for a builder to get started on the roof hopefully this week or next for the remaining part.  The carpenter us supposed to come and measure for the windows and doors this afternoon and a guy who cuts trees is going to come and tidy up the forrest then use the branches for fence posts to finally close off our garden.

We just got back from a month visiting the family and so have a new enthusiasm and energy for the project which hopefully will carry us along for a bit.  We also have a visit from Tony´s family planned for February so it´s great to have a real deadline to work to. Hopefully you´ll see some real progress in the next few posts!

Summertime...

Summer has truly arrived here.  Warm weather, happy people outside enjoying the weather, birds and butterflies flapping about, motivated builders and generally a smily sort of feeling about the place!

There has been some major progress over the past week as far as the building work goes!  We have a little team of four hard working bricklayers, 5500 bricks, about 16 sacks of cement and a heap of sand and rocky sand piled up outside the house.  The idea is to get cracking on the remaining walls and also build a small garden wall to mark the front of the garden, the aim being to relocate the public dog loo which has established iself on our grass. So far so good! Pretty much all the walls are up and only one door in the wrong place, which by our track record is pretty good.  It has also made things much more private for us as before whenever we stepped out of the house we were standing on the platform in plain view of the neighbours, which seems to tempt them to come down and talk to us while we´re having our late Sunday morning breakfast in the sunshine. Now we are hidden by walls and can eat in our pjs in peace.

With every step forward there is inevitably a step back in this process of building a house but at least this week`s mini disaster wasn´t too serious.  We have had our doubts for a while about a few of the installations put in place by our first builder and with the warm wether, a few whiffy smells had started coming from our bathroom plumbing. Tony decided it was time to check on Old Rodrigo´s grease-trap for the showers, kitchen sink and wash-hand basins.  As this was an add on to the original designs for the house, we sort of forgot where it was located exactly and so Tony spent the day on saturday like a mole, digging here, there and everywhere trying to find the grease-trap.  Eventually he did find it and sure enough it was blocked, over flowing and stinking!  After a couple of hours up to his shoulder in it, he decided to forget it altogether and make a new one. By carefully selecting a container, stones, sand, netting and some bits of pipe, he put it all togther just in time for the washing machine to evacuate and slosh the whole lot into one big sandy soup.

Hopefully it didnt do too much damage though and once everything settled it seemed to be working fine, just struggling when over-filled.  The washing machine is proving difficult all round.  It over fills the grease-trap, it uses an massive amount of water and it´s pretty heavy on the power.  The lights flicker and as I learned (on Saturday at 6.30pm once all of the hardware stores were closed for the weekend) it can burn out all the fuses in the invertor if left on at the same time as other heavy appliances, leaving you completely in the dark with a fridge full of warming food.  Lucky cars have fuses and we were able to at least get our lights back on!

On a more positive note, I spent the day on Saturday painting what will one day be our guest room and it´s great to now have at least one space pretty much finnished and without mess and clutter.  Unfortunately it doesnt have curtains or furniture yet so we haven´t been able to enjoy it so far.  Soon though.  Our bathroom which we decorated the weekend before is looking very nice and now has all the bits and pieces (and if I´m honest clutter and mess) in there.  The solar water heater is working a treat and we met a woman last week who makes natural, eco friendly soaps from olive oils and natural flavours which dont clog up the grease-trap supposedly so we stocked up on a couple of those.

On the Sunday the mission was to finnish the pond but at a scorching and windy 28`C we couldn´t face it!  We dug for ten minutes, altered the plan to leave it pretty much the size it was, called it a day and went swimming in the river along from our house.  A much better idea!  This weekend coming, we wanted to measure the pond and buy the plastic liner so that we can get started filling it and planting stuff in it but it´s now Friday and we still haven´t measured so it´s seeming a bit unlikley.  It also still hasn´t rained since my last post so seems a bit pointless to waste our precious water on a pond that we cant drink or wash in at this stage. We´ll have to see, a flash flood could change everything!

So this week, fingers crossed for rain (as a Scot I never thought I´d be heard saying that!) and also for a good bit of building work from our guys!  Hopefully by the next post there should be some good photos to show.

Hot water - Clean water - No water...

The water heater was finally installed the weekend before last and we let it sit and soak up the rays for a full 24 hours before hopping in to test the shower temperature.  It was majorly disappointing actually!  Tepid just about sums it up.  Pretty frustrating after having spent a small fortune on the kit. The water pressure was also shockingly bad so we went to sleep a bit disheartened that night and didn´t really know what to do.  It wasn´t until the following afternoon when Tony tried the water again and just about scalded his hand that we cheered right up again!  It seems it just takes a while to get 150 litres from cold to piping hot but now that it´s heated up, it´s averaging a nice and steamy 65´C which is just perfect!  We even have to mix it with cold water and that´s in the morning, having had no sunlight all through the night.

The only minor problem we have been having is a bit of a water shortage.  It has hardly rained in two weeks and the tanks are getting a bit low, especially with the showering time increased significantly with the temperature.  One big storm will fill the tanks and usually there´s one every few days but not this week.  It´s funny actually because it´s the first week we have everything up and running, we have the water heater, we bought a fancy drinking water filter with about 8 different filter stages, figured out the washing machine problems (electronic panel machines dont work because of the dirty electricity from the AC/DC convertion), the float switches are installed in the tanks to make sure the pump stops and starts at the right time, put a new filter in the down pipe and washed the gutters, even installed an automatic water system for the hens............ but no rain!

H for HOT water!!

Meeting a green family...

Now back into the swing of things after our trip to Bogota and well and truly skint thanks to all of the unexpected expenses of the past couple of months (visas, car troubles, extra staffing and suprise costs at the hostels), we have turned our attentions once again to the things that we can do for free (or nearly free) around the house.

The past two weekends have been spent weeding, burning scraps, digging the bio-pond, leveling the driveway, tidying and retidying after the builders and generally pottering about in the garden.   We also tried to decipher the gender of the chicks using the ring-on-a-string technique. Results proved inconclusive. It has been really nice actually and although we initially though that we would prefer to be doing something fun and expensive, it´s been really nice to enjoy the free stuff; the sunshine, the ´super-moon´, the birds and that great feeling of exhaustedness after being outdoors all day.  The cold shower is almost bearable, maybe even refreshing on a sunburn!

The solar water heater has arrived and is taking up one of our two rooms while we wait for it to be installed.  The tubes are all fitted, the sun is shining and we´re good to go.  We just need the guy to come and install it for us.  Hopefully in the next couple of days.

A friend introduced us to a great little family who live in Popayan last week and we went out to their house, not too far from where we live, with the plan to have lunch and visit a waterfall.  When we arrived however, we were amazed to see that they too are a wee bit green... actually, quite a big bit green!  They built their house from scratch with traditional techniques using clay and bamboo, plus local and recycled building materials.  They have even solved the lime paint puzzles which have been plagueing us for months by using earth dyes that they dug out of the ground around their house.  The house is mains connected for water and electricity but has no black or grey waters as the grey waters are filtered and used on the plants and the black waters are non-existant as they use only a compost loo which all goes back to the earth once composted down. Needless to say we probably wont be invited back after bombarding the poor hosts with questions for the entire afternoon.  We didn´t feel very green at all after talking with these guys! I think that green splits off into a few different categories.  I´d say they are more hardcore rustic green while we´re more moderate high-tech green and I´m sure there will be many more variations to come accross. The family are very helpful and nice people and although there are many of their systems and ideas that we dont want to or cant implement, there are loads that we do want to and they have said they are very happy to help with whatever we need.  They are our new green gurus!

A couple of things that we have taken from our visit with a plan to implement straight away is to make an animal / garden shed type thing in a corner of our garden.  The idea being to keep all of the things which help each other together.  It will be a small structure in bamboo with a solid floor and a roof (I think 2 msq should be plenty), divided into three parts.  The back half will be for the chickens so that they can have an organised indoor area where it´s easy to feed them, collect eggs and clean out the poo which we want to start composting for the plants.  The other half will be divided in two and will have an enclosure for Florence (the second hand rabbit we should be aquiring next month) with a poo collecting system and storage for her and the hen´s food. The little section left over we want to make into a little cubicle with a compost loo, just as an alternative for when we´re out in the garden or when we know (thanks to Tony´s weather station!) that we are entering or in a period of drought.  That way we wont have to waste so much rainwater in just flushing the indoor loos as often.  I´m also excited about the idea of dirty wellies not traipsing in and out of the house just to use the loo all day long.  The idea would then be to make a composting area right next to our shed which would in turn be right next to our plantain trees and veggie plot.  It´s all still in the planning stages so far but it shouldn´t be too difficult to do and it´ll be great to have everything more organised.

 Speaking of organisation, I´m just about at my wits end with the builders!  They dont tend to do things room by room but rather one job at a time.  That means sanding everywhere one day and painting everywhere the next, then drilling eveywhere, then grinding everywhere.. you get the idea.  It means mess everywhere all the time! Not even one corner where you can hide things so that they dont get covered in dust or cement or wood shavings.  I have given up even cleaning up after them and there´s nowhere to put anything anyway so we are living like pigs... or more like snowmen at the moment with everything covered in white dust!  They promise that by Monday they will be finished and will move on to the outdoor things again.  That´s the plan anyway.  On Monday we start building again, more men on the job with the plan to get a few more columns and walls up this month. Meanwhile, though, the relaxing has to be done in the garden!

A wee bit green living...

We are now full time living at the house and although the place is a complete mess, it´s great.  We had a few friends round for Tony´s birthday last week and cooked a Colombian potato stew on a wood fire and spent the whole day outside, took a walk down to the river too.

We now have ceilings as of this week - so if there are still bats, at least we cant see them - and indoor doors which is a nice improvement.  We also have a makeshift kitchen, bodged together with all the bits and pieces found lying around including an old kitchen counter from the hostel.  It´s a long way from perfect and doesn´t really inspire much culinary creativity amongst the mess but it´s great to be able to make a pot of coffee, fry a couple of fresh eggs. Washing dishes somewhere other than the wash hand basin in the bathroom is also nice.

The solar panels are working well and we seem to be using less than 25% of what we have each day.  There are a couple of issues with the regulator though as it can only handle peaks of up to 1800 and although our fridge has been doctored to a low consuption, when it boots up, there is a momentary peak which trips the system and sets off an alarm.  What follows is Tony scrambling about with a torch, positioning the ladder and wriggling into the roof cavity to reboot the regulator.  It happened at 3am this morning.  He says that he has found a system to fix that inconvenience so hopefully we´ll get that fixed shortly.

The water situation is close to perfect though, we have way more than enough water just from the rain - April is one of the rainiest months here though. There´s a bit of dust making it´s way into our tank but it falls to the bottom and what we pump into the header tank seems to be free of sediment.  The only real complaint I have at the moment is temperature!  We dont have our solar water heater yet and I´m a bit of a Jessie when it comes to cold water showers.  It´s not that cold by most standards but it´s definately not warm and even less hot.  If I feel tough, I shower there... if not, I take my soap and shampoo to the hostel.  Tony calls it invigorating and thinks it´s good for the health. 

We planted some more grass a couple of weeks ago and made a little platform, planting reedlike things around the edge and that seems to be coming along very well.

Tony has also started digging a pond to bring some more birds and maybe frogs to our garden.  It´s very hard work as the earth is very compact and is that reddish yellow clay type stuff but he has managed to make a pretty big hole.

Then, this weekend we visited some friends who have just finished their bio-pool which is AMAZING and now I wonder whether our pond is really big enough! First things first though... we should really have a shower with hot water before we think about bio-pools!

.... And we're in!

Yesterday was a big day for us because it was the day we moved into our house!  Admittedly it was a bit premature as the hostel was full and there was nowhere for us to sleep but it was great to take that step and sleep over in our own (half built) house.  Things don't work perfectly and there are about a million niggly things that we realize haven't been done or now need to be done after having spent a night there, but on the whole, we are thrilled! It's a great feeling to be in our own space amongst our own things and even cooler to think that we are even using our own energy and our own water (well sort of).

So the stage we are at now is: walls for the first half all built, rendered and stuccoed with wiring and piping all fitted.  The roof is on and sealed and the gutters are more or less collecting rainwater. The pump is installed to fill the header tank, the solar panels are on and connected up.  The floors are all laid and one of the two bathrooms have been fully installed. The windows are all fitted and the interior doors are bought and ready, just need to be screwed in. All of Tony's gadgets are working, the weather station, the water level meter and the wind turbine was working fine until it took it's second and more dramatic fall from the roof, breaking off all of it's wings.

We are still missing the fuse box, a kitchen and basically all the furniture and decorative stuff, including ceilings! We are also having some water filter issues and are still having to borrow mains water from the neighbours. But we're getting there.


The sunset over the trees is great with plenty of birds swooping in and out and the smell of damp, fresh, country nighttime is delicious.  There are millions of stars too and the moon is much brighter than in the city. We sat outside and had breakfast watching the sun come up over the volcano this morning and forgot all about the stresses and frustrations of the whole process so far. Our dog Ally spends every spare minute bounding around in the grass and ferns, day or night and the hens are allowed to roam freely when we're there. It really feels a world away from Popayan and the hostels and although the whole place is a complete mess and quite a way from finished yet, we're feeling really pretty pleased with ourselves.

Through the night however, we discovered a couple of minor set backs: 
- We found a huge spider that Tony was not prepared to remove from the house.
- Our toilet leaks into our garage below when flushed.
- The electricity can just switch itself off without warning because of a loose connection.
- A bat spent half the night flapping around in our ceilingless roof.
- The neighbour's dogs do in fact bark all night long and when they do finally go to sleep at around 4.30am, Silvio the friendly neighbourhood mini-rooster takes over. There's nothing mini about his cockadoodling.

Despite all of that though, I cant wait to get back there tonight!

Chicks!

After 22 days wait, the chicks started hatching! You read so many contradicting things on the internet and so much information about what can go wrong that I had almost convinced myself that none were going to hatch and I'd have to buy some day-old chicks to sneak into the nest so that the whole project wasn't a failure and so that Lucy the hen didn't feel bad... But finally, they arrived!

Yesterday when we went up there were only three chicks and two of the eggs had cracks where the others were trying to peck their way out. The yellow chick was still a bit wet and sticky so I think it had hatched just before we arrived.

Today when we went up, there were six chicks!  four black, one white and one yellow. Out of seven eggs, (there were eight at the start but one disappeared, I think maybe she ate it!) six hatched so I think we did pretty well.  The other egg I've left in there for another day or so just in case but there are no cracks so I think it's unlikely it will hatch.

We moved the hen and her chicks into a new enclosure under the shelter and at ground level so the chicks cant fall out and although they dont walk about much yet, they are eating chick food and seem quite lively. I can fit four in my two hands easily, they're so tiny!  We got a new water feeder and filled it with small stones before puting water in because I read that they can easily fall in and drown.

Seemingly there's no way of knowing if they are girls or boys until they lay an egg or start cockadoodling so for the meantime they will all be kept together, growing and fattening in their enclosure until we see who's destined for which role in the future.  For now though, we'll just enjoy them as new pets!

The Birds and The Bees!

I know I talk about the chickens alot! Anyone who hasn't had chickens probably thinks I'm mad and those who have, could well think the same, but they really never cease to amaze me!  Although growing up I had a fair amount of contact with the countryside and farms I never really paid much attention to what was going on around me and from the questions people ask us about our hens, I can tell I wasn't the only one who didn't know anything about the birds and the bees, or rather poultry and apiculture!

Firstly it didn't make any sense to me that hens can lay eggs every day without ever coming into contact with a cockrel - but they do, it seems very pointless to me and a lot of effort on their part (not that I'm complaining!).  Also they hardly seem to eat anything compared to how much they poo and then on top of that an egg a day has to come from somewhere, it's a real mystery to me how that works. I read the little book from the National Trust about keeping hens which was great, explaining all the science behind things and teaching us how to be responsible hen owners. I thought I had it all sussed until one of the hens went all weird and stopped eating and just stayed inside, sitting on the eggs and biting me when I tried to move her.  Through my conscientious studies of the little hen book, I recognised this as broodiness. This is considered by the book to be an unusual thing in laying hens as the maternal instinct is pretty much bred out of them so that they will continue to be loyal egg producers all year round.  The book says that broodiness is generally a BAD thing which should be discouraged.

Intrigued by the whole thing and with the plan to buy a couple more hens anyway at some point soon, we decided to go against the recommendation of the chicken bible and see what happens. We borrowed a cockrel from a friend and after his week of wild parties with the other girls, we started collecting their eggs to slip under the broody hen who up until that point was absolutely focused on what she considered her important task of keeping unfertile (and sometimes imaginary) eggs warm.  We moved her to a solitary, improvised 'maternity ward' with eight (hopefully) fertile eggs collected over three days but all tucked under her on the same day (so that they should all hatch at once. If not, she might abandon the eggs at the sign of the first chick) and she got to work organising and warming the nest straight away.

Seemingly hens can lay fertile eggs for up to three weeks after just one 'intimate moment' with a cockrel but that until the eggs are warmed steadily and consistently, they wont develop. She has to decide to sit on them and she'll only do that when she wants to, it has nothing to do with the cockrel, some hens never sit on eggs. That's why I decided this was a chance we shouldn't miss! Eggs can lie there for days, fertile, waiting for a hen to incubate them but once she's on, she has to stay on or it's all over, the chicks die half formed.   Our hen seems to know this as she wont even come out to eat or drink. I put food in her 'ward' every day (avoiding her sharp beak) and she eats as if she were starving but refuses to come outside.  In the wild I think she would have starved by now.  I don't really understand how that works, although much of the time she seems to be in a kind of trance, like they go into at night, not asleep but very slow and starey, so maybe she saves energy that way.

We're now two and a half weeks into the three week incubation period, so this weekend, if all goes well we should have some chicks hatching. I have read that the success rate is fairly low without an incubator and especially with laying hens so I'm trying not to get too excited about it. It'll be brilliant if it works though! Cant wait!

Bees seem altogether even more amazing than hens and I did in fact buy a bee bible too from the National Trust but I'll wait until we get bees to go into all the details on here!

So finally, I can say with some confidence that I'm starting to understand a bit more about 'the birds and the bees' and it's  much more complicated than I originally thought!

Rain Water Harvesting...

Tony is designing a rain water harvesting system for the house and it's nearly finished.  Here's a summary of what he's been up to:

The roofing material we chose specifically as it is recognised by the World Health Organisation as a suitable material to collect drinking water for humans and animals. It doesn't release any particles or chemicals like some rooves and it has no nooks and crannies where beasties or algaes could collect. It's also made from recycled and organic materials which I think wins it some extra points too. It's called Onduline and is available in brick red or dark green.

The gutters were installed a while back and although we have a slight gradient issue, they are generally pretty good.  They are PVC type material and are white which is supposed to prevent them heating up too much in the sun and preventing algaes and germs from growing. 

There's only one downpipe so far and it goes down below the house, round the back, where it channels the rainwater into a first flush system.  This is a 50 litre tank which I think used to be used to tranport some type of vegetable and has a tightly sealed lid (or should have had - in the end it took a bit of work to find a seal to make it water tight). On top of the tank there is a 2 inch pipe, fitted onto the lid with the help of the neck of a water drum to connect the two. There is another pipe coming off at a right angle to divert water to the storage tanks. On top of the pipe is a catchment tray (half a gallon water bottle) with a rubber filter on it to allow the water from the down pipe to pass into the tank but to divert away the beetles and leaves from the roof. They basically just slide off the filter because its at an angle.

Inside the first flush tank is a plastic ball which floats when the tank fills up, blocking the neck of the tank meaning that any fine sediment which got through the filter cant slosh back up the pipe but rather stays in the tank. The tank also has a tap at the bottom which allows the water to dribble out slowly after each rain meaning that the first water from each rainstorm will always go into that tank, repeating the process each time. Once the tank is full, the rest of the water from the down pipe is then diverted along another pipe which comes off the first at a right angle and flows into the top of one of the 1000 litre storage tanks.  On the top of the storage tank is a very fine, stainless steel filter which will catch any unexpected flies, grit etc so that they dont contaminate our water supply.

We are just waiting for two more 1000 litre tanks to be delivered so that we can connect them up in sequence and have our water storage organised.  Some sources suggest clorinating the water and others say that it's fine as it is for household use.  I'd rather not clorinate as we plan to have a filter system for the kitchen anyway, either UV or the standard carbon systems that you see in a lot of houses here.

The house is already plumbed up. There aren't any loos or sinks or anything yet but we are assured that everything is in place for the moment we install them.  The header tank is back on the roof having taken a short flight into the neighbours garden a couple of weeks ago and the pump is wired up to the solar panels so that with the switch of a button, water starts making its way up to the roof giving us clean, pressurised water straight from the tap - or it will when we install one!

The platform is there by the water tank ready for the solar water heater and all we need to do is climb up and hook it up to the water when we get it.  We also saw a solar water heater on show a couple of days and they had it out in the open, it was not especially sunny but it was certainly not dark either and we tested the water, it was piping hot! I'm now more hopefull about the whole thing as up until now we hadn't really seen one in action and I had my doubts about how warm the water would get - now I'm wondering where we can get mixer taps because we could be at risk of a scalding!

So, we're getting closer!  Tony's itching to get the water tanks delivered because it's raining torrentially most afternoons and with his system pretty much done, it's frustrating to be giving the hens mains water from the neighbours!

Long time no see...

It has been a long time since my last post and I´d like to say that there´s a lot to update.... but there´s not too much really. Christmas, New Year and January (Carnival season here) is always a hectic time and with two understaffed hostels to keep us busy, we didnt have too much in the way of time or money to throw at the project.  As soon as we were out the other side of Carnival, we dashed off for a couple of weeks holiday/ promotional roadtrip for the hostels and had a brilliant time driving all around the Andes and the coffee region as well as visiting a lot of friends who we haven´t seen in a while and trying to take it easy in between.

Anyway now we´re back and it´s back to work on all fronts.. The hostels are getting painted and fixed up, a few new appliances have been bought to replace lost or broken or missing things and the staff are all rested, happy and back into the routine.

So back to the house.  We had a bit of a falling out with our builder about timekeeping, budgets and general lack of perfectionism so we took him off the job and hired a new, fresh, young builder who had done a few small jobs for us in the past and seemed like a decent bloke.  We tested him on the rendering of the back wall, the bathroom and the patio to see what he was like and he seemed good.  He sub-contracted a couple of guys to do the stuff he didnt have experience in and it all seemed great so we contracted him to render the rest of the house (we had to go with cement render rather than lime unfortunately because of the wonky walls and for lack of anyone who seems confident to do it well).  Then the trouble started... quotes started coming in slightly more and more expensive and labour costs started being quoted as considerably more than the last stage so we started to get suspicious.  Sure enough we were there when the materials arrived on Saturday and the receipt for what was ordered was considerably less than what we had been told. Also there were things missing.  We confronted him about it and got a whole bunch of weird and wonderful excuses but the bottom line is we´d rather not contract him again after this stage is finished.

So far we have the walls for the first half of the house up, all the plumbing sorted out (as in pipes, not installations), the roof on and the rendering underway.  The gutters are also on now so we are able to collect water. The filter and pump is not quite finished so there´s not really running water yet but we´re not far off.

The solar panels arrived in January and were installed a couple of days ago.  We dont have the wiring done for the house yet but the guys who installed the panels were using drills and equipment off the system so it definately works which is very exciting! Hopefully we´ll get a couple of rooms wired up and we can start spending a bit of time out there.

The corn that we planted just before my last post is now about 1.50m tall and has little seed corns coming out of the top. I have no idea what we´ll do with 40 corn plants each one producing three cobs but I feel proud of having grown them at least!  The hens will enjoy a few I´m sure.

The hens are doing well and the eggs are selling really well in the hostel, we cant keep up with demand sometimes! One of the hens has stopped laying and has gone all weird and broody, just sitting all day in her nest and forgetting to eat unless you kick her out once a day for some water and corn.  We decided to let nature take its course and have borrowed a cockrel called Gerard from a friend.  He´s having fun with the others and on sunday we have to start taking eggs out to put under broody Lucy so she can incubate them for three weeks.  I worry that she might not be very good at this though as she has a very short attention span and the worst thing would be if she gets fed up half way through and gets up, leaving behind half formed chicks!  I´m already having nightmares about it!

The other wildlife at the house seems to be doing well. We have a mouse living in the garage and the weeds are growing out of control.  I cant even find the coffee plants and mandarina trees under the grass and ferns!  Everything has been a bit neglected of late.  Tony has spent a couple of afternoons up there this week digging and flattening the area where the hens used to live so that we can plant some grass so that´ll look nice when it´s done and then we have a strimmer which should arrive any day now so that´ll sort out the jungle in an afternoon. He also dug a couple of drainage channels to stop the rain water washing away the grass we planted by the house and it seems to be working pretty well.

As far as the building goes, the next stage will be to install a loo and some kitchen type things so that we can maybe spend weekends up there. I hope it´ll be at that stage by Easter partly because living in the hostel is getting a bit old now and also because of the crazy Easter celebrations in Popayan, it´d be good to be able to rent our room in the hostel for that week.  So that´s the goal.  We´ll see how it goes.