Birds...

Since we filled the pond and the Botones de Oro have grown up around the edge of our garden, it has been amazing how many birds have started to come to our garden.  Some of them just sit in the trees at the edge of the forest but others swoop down to eat tadpoles from the pond or roll themselves around in the puddles.  There are always a few on the lookout for any scraps the chickens (and Ally) over look.

The following photos are not ours but they are photos of the birds we see on a fairly regular basis around out house.  I´m trying to get better at identifying new species but from what I can see so far, there is lots of variety!

 This is a Vermilion Flycatcher and you see them everywhere, even in the centre of town. I dont think it´s especially exotic but it has a lovely bright red colour.

 This is a Flame Rump Tanager and is totally unimpressive until it flies and flashes it´s whole back beneath it´s wings which is bright or sometimes rusty red. We see these from the house and garden often darting in and out of the trees.

 Green Jays. These are my favourites.  They have a fairly horrible voice but always hang out in groups and and are very vocal and playful. They croak and chirp and do a kind of dance where they bob up and down. We see them almost every time we walk the dog because they seem to like a couple of trees round the back.  They also dance around in the trees outside our house often. You always know they are there because of the noise!

 The Andean Motmot is known as a Barranquero because it nests in burrows in the barranco (verge or slope). It´s very beautiful and quite big.  We sometimes see them around the house in the trees after the rain.

The Squirrel Cuckoo is a regular in our garden and really looks like a huge squirrel because it seems to run along the branches - although I imagine it actually hops or flies. It swings its tail from side to side like a pendulum which is why they sometimes call it a relojero here, reloj meaning clock.

Under Attack...

So as I mentioned in the last post about the bees, we had a couple of niggling concerns about ants creeping up onto the hive.  We decided to cast these doubts aside after a conversation about who would win in a fight? A bee or an ant?  We decided that a bee would definitely win having a stinger, the advantage of flight and everything.... wrong.  According to trusty google, an ant colony can destroy a hive in under two hours removing all the honey, wax and brood and generally clearing the whole place out. I cant remeber if they actually eat bees or not or if they just flee the hive. Bees cant sting ants seemingly and ants are very determined (as we know from the leaf-cutter fiasco a couple of years ago now).

Thinking that our analysis of the situation was accurate, we didnt even bother to check on the hive for about a week, until on a boring afternoon in the hostel, I googled it to dicover the bad news.  That night when we got home from work, we went down to check on the hive with a torch in the dark and found what we were most dreading.  The hive was absolutely covered in big black ants!  Some with wings even, voiding our advantage of flight theory. There was no buzing coming from the hive and there were no guard bees patroling the entrance as there usually are - just thousands of ants racing around all over the place.

Thouroughly depressed, we half-heartedly tried out a googled suggestion of covering the hive in powdered cinnamon and brushed off as many ants as we could in the darkness and left it at that. After the considerable investment involved in setting up the hive, getting the kit and studying the system, it was a bit of a blow to think that we had failed as beginner bee-keepers.

As the following day was Saturday, Tony went down to the hen house to get eggs for breakfast and at the same time went to check if the cinammon had had any effect on getting rid of the ants, making it easier to salvage the hive to start again.  It had!  It´s true that ants really dont like cinnamon, I read that it burns their feet. Whatever it does, they left... But better than that!  There were bees everywhere, zipping in and out of the hive, legs covered in pollen! Maybe it was the case that they lock down when under attack and seal up the entrances or maybe they were all asleep and not buzzing the night before.  Whatever the reason, it was a great relief to see them!  We also checked on the progress that day too and they are working very hard and have made a lot of honeycomb on the new panels that we put in only a week earlier. We´re still not sure exactly when we´ll have honey on the go but we´re happy enough for now just knowing that the ants didnt manage to raid our supply!

Tilapia and frogs..

It seems like we have been talking about our pond forever and had never got round to actually getting on with it and and finishing the job. There always seemed to be something else more pressing on the go or maybe after the back breaking job of digging the hole and then the neighbour´s dog destroying it, maybe we just lost enthusiasm.

When Tony´s parents were here however, they got straight into the garden, planting and tidying and so riding that wave of enthusiasm, Tony and his dad finished the pond. They made the slopes more gradual, evened it all out, put a liner and waited for the rain to fill it up - which it did over the course of a month or so. We have a great little solar water pump with it´s own battery and mini solar panel which switches on and off throughout the day and night discouraging the mosquitos and the plan is to order a truck load of rocks to cover the liner round the edge and make it look nice.

With the pond made and filled, the next logical step seemed to be fish. Luckily we have a keen fish breeding friend, Diego, who quickly sourced us some baby tilapias and although most of them unfortunately didn´t survive the journey from the Patia Valley where they were born, we were happy to recieve the remaining 5 plus a handful of river snails and 3 cleaner fish, the name of which I cant remember - looks a bit like a cat fish.

About the same time as the fish arrived, so did two big and very noisy frogs who proceeded to lay about a billion tadpoles in the pond while singing very loudly everynight from dusk until dawn. From what I can find out, tadpoles wont harm the fish but they do seem to be eating most of their food and although the parents are not keeping us awake at night, we do have to turn up the tv sometimes to block them out!  We´ll have to wait and see what happens to them, hopefully they wont take over the garden and nature will somehow control the population and not let them starve out our fish!

Bees...

The bees were delivered a while ago now and as we were caught a bit unprepared having no kit (mask, suit, smoker etc), we were glad to have Jose the bee man on hand come and install our new pets. Having brought a box with 4 frames and about 20,000 bees down from the mountain village of Coconuco, Tony picked him up in the car and brought him and his buzzing travel companions up to the house to show us how it´s done. Unfortunately I missed all the action as I was at a meeting with the neighbours about all sorts of petty and administrative niggles within our neighbourhood. Tony however, got right in there, eager to learn how it all works.

First Jose set up the smoker with some leaves, sawdust and bits of wood and lit it, using the bellow-like part to keep the fire smoldering. He also got kitted up in his astronaut-like suit, special bee tool in hand and after inspecting our hive and considering it appropriate, opened the box of angry and disorientated bees. All 4 frames got placed into top section of the hive along side the other 4 or so frames that we had already kitted out with wax sheets with the idea that over time the bees will extend their building work onto the new sheets. 

 All the while, Tony was taking photos and watching closely - maybe a little bit too closely.  In the chaos, one of the bees stung him right on the eyelid which although painful, didn´t seem to deter him much.  It was only 3 days later when he still had a protruding eye and was provoking fairly horrified reactions from people in the street that he decided to take the general advice and get some medical attention. Turns out it was nothing too serious, that´s just what happens when a bee stings you in the eye - you react.

A few weeks later Jose told us that it was time to add in some extra frames to get the bees expanding the hive and increase productivity. More prepared this time I set off, smoker and bee tool in hand and astronauted up... fairly terrified if I´m honest... to open up the hive and basically invade and destroy their perfect and intricate work. It was totally fine!  It was cloudy and drizzling slightly which might have had something to do with it but the bees were very relaxed about me poking around in there, they didnt try to sting me at all and although many of them did come out to see what was happening, a lot of them just keep on with what they were doing.  Which actually didn´t seem like very much!  Since they were installed a month before, they hadn´t touched any of the new frames and didnt even seem to have created much more honeycomb than I could see in the original photos. Either way, I considered the excersise a success and like the bees even more now as they really dont seem to be that agressive at all considering the fairly dramatic nature of honey harvesting.

Lat weekend, only a week after I suited up, Tony set off to check on the bees and the productivity did seems to be considerably better with the new frames.  The bees have built the wax structure over half of each of the new frames we put in the week before. Again they seemed very relaxed and there were no stinging attempts and I could watch from about 3 meters away with no mask or jacket without them even seeming to care.  Unfortunately though, the lid was covered in large black ants!  From all the internet info I have found, that seems to be fairly bad news as it seems that ants can totally destroy a hive and steal all the honey, brood and wax in a very short time. Tony gave them a good blast with the smoker and scraped them off the lid and as far as he could see, there were none inside the hive but we´ll have to wait and see what the verdict is this weekend. Hopefully it wont be too serious. Hopefully the bees are not as easy going with the ants as they have been with us so far.

Awaiting bees...

When our friends were visiting over Christmas and New Year time, we spoke a lot about bees.  Katy has set up two hives in Ecuador and so we were eager to exploit her know-how and get a hive of our own set up while she was here. Unfortunately thanks to New Year, the local Carnival, a bank holiday and the city´s aniversary all lining up together to mean Popayan is pretty much closed for business for the first half of January, we weren´t able to buy the kit we needed to get set up. Katy and her 2 year old daughter Luna did however scout the area for bees and having found plenty buzzing around, gave us the encouragement that we needed to make the decision to go ahead with it as soon as the bee Co-op opened again after the holidays.

 OUR BEE EXPERTS

Although a little stern to begin with, the bee lady at the co-op was happy to take time to explain to us newbies about what we should do to be responsible bee-keepers.  She sold us a hive (a national hive to those in the know) with beeswax sheets set up inside and we raced home to set it up in the garden. We had to order a nucleus which is effectively a little bee family to get started with but that takes about a month for the co-op to create so we have plenty of time to read up and figure out what on earth we are going to do with thousands of swarming, stinging insects in our garden! I bought a little book by the National Trust a while back so we looked that out and are now saving up for all manner of things like bee smokers, bee suits and all sorts of spatulas.

 THE BEE BIBLE - A LITTLE CHEWED

 SO FAR 16 FRAMES, 4 WITH WAX SHEETS

I cant say I fully understand the bee thing yet. It makes chickens seem very straight forward! I will make sure to post here as I go along because it seems very interesting.

You say potato, I say DIY nightmare...

Last weekend was our first weekend in a long time home alone.  Well, I say home alone, the builder was there until 5pm on Saturday but Sunday was a blissfully lazy and relaxing day... until we started to repair and finish the kitchen units!  What is it about couples that makes sharing DIY tasks impossible?  I have spoken to several couples about it now and am relieved to hear that it´s not just us who have major falling outs over flat pack furniture, appliance installation and just DIY jobs in general!

Anyway, we now have a real kitchen which is a cause for celebration after almost a year using our makeshift laundry/kitchen and storing everything in stacked up tupperware.  It still hasn´t been painted, the floor´s only half sealed and we´re definitely missing heaps of things but it´s so nice to have space and storage and an oven finally! And it was great timing because we were getting low on water having had a house full of people during a dry spell and thanks to our ridiculous attempt at a rain dance (thanks ehow.com!) it rained all night and half filled our tanks up meaning we can start cooking and washing up again without being as cautious with the water.

Now that we´re approaching the end of the really big building jobs we started keeping an eye our for furniture to go chipping away at what will be the expensive job of furnishing the fairly sizeable house.  In our search we found a nice set of six old diningroom chairs in need of a sand, paint and upholstering so that´s our next DIY task. Tony´s parents are visiting in a few weeks and we´re hoping that they´ll give us a hand with that job or at least mediate for our couples DIY!


Skirting boards are hopefully being put in today so that will be a momentous occasion seeing as it´s that last thing the builders need to be constantly inside the house (making a mess) for. Cant wait!

More chicks..

Just before Christmas two of our hens went broody at the same time and snuggled up into a nest together, hopelessly incubating infertile eggs. After the hen/rabbit massacre by the neighbours dogs just a few weeks before, we were less than excited about the prospect of having to care for more potential victims. It seemed like strange timing on their part but then I started to wonder if trauma might spark those sorts of instincts. I read an article about people rushing to have kids after the September 11 tradgedy and although there´s not much of a parallel to draw there, it made me wonder if maybe Jenny and Whitney just decided that life´s too short!

In the end we asked our friend if he could give us just a few fertile eggs from his hens to satisfy our hens maternal instinct and left them to it, free-range style, no separation from the others, no special feed, just popped the eggs under and forgot about them. As you would expect, three weeks later the squeaking and cheeping drew our attention and five of the six chicks had hatched out although one unfortunately got crushed by the neighbouring hens trying to get into the nesting box. Tony picked up the egg left behind once the mother hens had abandoned the nest and noticed that it had a little chip in it and little cheaping sounds were coming from inside so we took it inside, popped it on a hot water bottle and watched it hatch out all afternoon before sneaking it under the mum at night. The next day she didnt even seem to have noticed and was bossing him around just like the others.

The major downside to having broody hens and/or chicks on the go is the lack of eggs. Especially if the broody hens are sitting in the nest boxes of the other hens.  It seems that the more dominant hens just push the broody ones off and lay there anyway, sometimes crushing the eggs or chicks and at first we thought that the more timid hens just went off laying to avoid conflict because the egg production went right down for that whole time. That was my top theory until yesterday when I went outside to see what one of the hens was screeching about (as they sometimes do - for no appartent reason) and I noticed that she was almost completely hidden in some long grass. On closer inspection, it turned out that she was teetering on top of a pile of 25 eggs, attempting to add to the collection! Having been driven out of the nest boxes, it seems the younger hens found a new spot which is great news for us and even greater news that when we tested them in water, none of them float, meaning they are all good to eat still.

Scrambled eggs, omeletes and french toast all round!

Happy New Year...

So although we´re 5 hours behind a lot of our friends and family, we have made it into 2013 too and along with fireworks, dancing and drinking come the resolutions! I thought I´d get started on mine straight away and get things moving with this blog.

Since I last posted, the house has pretty much been finished structurally.  We found a reliable a builder as builders go and pushed forward with the roof, the plastering and the floors throughout the remaining part of the house. Our carpenter slowly but surely put together our windows and doors just in time for Christmas and we got our land closed in with some wire fencing after an unfortunate incident involving our rabbits, a few chickens and a couple of the neighbour´s dogs. The exterior walls are all now painted with lime and look really good and although we haven´t started any gardening yet, the rains came and have left everything nice and lush and green again. We also bought some turf for around the front of the house and that´s made a big difference.

Tony has tweaked the water harvesting system to handle the sometime torrential rains we get to allow us to make the most of the wet seasons (having learned from the last dry one!) and it seems to be working really well seeing as in a fairly minor rain a couple of days ago we collected easily a 1000 litres. That´s with only half of the guttering on too.

We´re also having the chance to really test the house´s coping ability at the moment, as well as our friendships! We have had a few visitors over Christmas and New Year and the poor guys have all had to spend their holidays on the building site with us. The hot water system which is perfect for two of us, struggles a little bit with 6 people and showers have to be staggered and although we have plenty of water at the moment, we would have to be careful having guests at dry times of year.  It also doesn´t help that one of our solar panels seems to be malfunctioning and may have a problem with a diode or something meaning we dont have as much electricity as we should and having upgraded the inversor, we are now finding that we dont really have enough power sometimes. All said though, the house is holding up very nicely and it´s fantastic to have our own space to spend our free time with friends.

So, what next? The kitchen!  We are still using our make-shift kitchen at the moment and have bought a fairly cheap, standard kitchen kit to install in our beautiful, spacious, one day, kitchen/diner.  Having made a frustrating and almost relationship destroying bathroom cabinet of a similar style a few weeks back, we decided that the builder might have to take charge of this one!  Unfortunately he discovered that the wall wasn´t perfectly square and so out comes the cement again.  Every time we feel like we´re getting close, there´s always a step backwards just around the corner but we are definitely getting closer now.  The floors are looking great and just need to be sealed to stop them getting marked or stained and there´s a lot of painting, gardening and furniture buying still to do but we´re nearly there! At this point it´s tempting to just kick the builders out and say it´ll do! but we´re going to persevere and hopefully in a month I´ll be able to write on here about trivial things like planting herbs or shades for curtains rather than how to have a bath in a teacup of water, squeezing more power out of dead batteries at 10 o´clock at night or tricks to make crooked walls square up to a pre-fab kitchen unit!

In the meantime, a happy and green new year to everyone. I have a feeling 2013 is going to be a really good one!

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.