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!

Waiting..................

We still have no progress to report with the building! I´m starting to get a bit cross about it as there doesn´t even seem to be a reason for it, just the builders putting it off and putting it off. We´ve been back a month now  and all the materials for the next stage are bought and still nothing!

We´ve also had to make a couple of sad desicions because of hostel related business. We may have to relocate (the hostel) in the next six months or so and that could be a difficult thing to do if we´ve spent all our money on our lovely, ´green´ house. So, we´ve decided to build only the first half now and move in, hopefully by December (that is, if the builders actually do any work before then!) with the plan to chip away at the rest of the house as and when the finances let us. We were quite excited to have our house built and finished by this time next year but it seems business will have to come first this time. Anyway, we´ll still have our room, two bathrooms, a study and a laundry room (acting as a kitchen), so it´ll actually be similar in size to where we live now. The bulk of the expense will also be taken care of with the solar pannels, water harvesting system and filters and all the rest of it so hopefully it wont take too long to get things moving again, maybe 6 months or so after we move in.

On the positive side, the chickens are all healthy again. In fact we are the ones who are snotty and sniffly this week as summer has arrived and brought with it dust storms and hayfever. The veggies are also doing well and the tomatoes, onions, sunflowers and beetroots have started sprouting up, no sign of the peppers yet though. I´m making a second keyhole type garden to use up the rest of the seeds that I have left over as here it´s not easy to by less than a field´s worth of any one vegetable. We have also started getting our guests in the hostel to start helping with compost collection and so we should have plenty to fill up those keyholes. Watering is the issue with summer here. With no roof to collect rainwater off so far, we´re now carting tanks of water as well as the usual, buckets of compost, tyres for the forest stairs, old clothes, seeds, medicine for the chickens, building and gardening equipment, sunscreen and snacks. Lucky we dont have a nicer car. The poor thing is so full of junk that our mechanic sent it off to the car wash before he would check over a problem with the fuel pump! We tried to put bamboo poles on the roof at one point too but after a few nasty scratches, decided it was cheaper in the long run to pay for a truck to drop it off.

Our Ned Flanders neighbour let us play with his grass strimmer last weekend and now we can see what we´re dealing with! We missed a couple of bits and some other bits are completely bald but on the whole it´s a big improvement. I was toying with the idea of getting a grass cutting sheep but after reading about clipping and worming and suicidal tendencies, I was pretty much put off. Once we have grass, I suppose we´ll have to figure out how to cut it. Currently we just have weeds which we´re slowly but surely digging out.

Tony bought a mini wind turbine on ebay this week. I´m not sure quite how it´ll work here given that the staff at the hostel were complete puzzled as to how clothes can dry outside on a line in Scotland if it´s cold there. They have never experienced the common sight (especially where I grew up) of knickers wrestling themselves horizontally off of the line and finding their way into a neighbour´s garden 5 houses down the street. 100 mph winds are not that uncommon in the NE Scotland and in Popayan we experience around 8 mph winds once a year in July/August and dedicate a kite festival to it! Well, we´ll see how it goes, it´ll be a fun project anyway.

At the moment we´re looking for a chest freezer to turn into a fridge. The zeer was great and successfully cooled a cucumber for 2 weeks in the blazing sun, before it was eaten in a salad. It´s a few degrees warmer than you´d like your beer though and has a fairly limited capacity. Seemingly by bypassing and reprograming the thermostat on a super A* energy efficient freezer, you can create a pretty good fridge that consumes only a teensy amount of energy, not much more than the super expensive solar fridges and much bigger.

Other than that we´re just waiting (not very patiently) for the builders to get our house built!

Moving in...

We had a busy weekend last week up at the plot of land. We finally got the chicken coop finished and settled the chooks in on Saturday morning (after a night in our flat - big, smelly mistake!). They seemed very pleased with it and although we now realise that they can in fact jump out of the run whenever they like, so far they are choosing not to. They are three lovely ginger-coloured laying hens named after our sisters; Jenny, Lucy and Kelsey.

Unfortunately yesterday when we went to check on them, Kelsey and Jenny were looking a bit snotty around the beak and generally sad and mopey. Of course, I panicked a bit and got straight on the internet to check the symptoms and had fully convinced myself that they were all going to die (the usual ''headache + google = brain tumour'' situation). First thing this morning I went round to the farm supplies place where we bought them and the guy said that sometimes it just happens with a change in environment because they dont sleep or eat well and get a bit low on defenses, so we have to give them medicine for a couple of days. Hopefully they´ll be ok!

We also got started on the veggie plot and although the raised bed is less than beautiful, we´ve got some good, nutritious earth in there and have planted (in accordance with the moon phases) tomatoes and peppers straight away. From the 15th we can plant some beets and onions and then in a few weeks, at the new moon, all the leafy stuff like herbs, broccoli and lettuces. We´ve also tried to match up the veg with the right herbs and neighbours to encourage growth, deter pests etc. I dont know if it´ll work but we might as well give it a go.... although I´m starting to think that maybe less love and care gives better results. We went to such lengths with our hens; designing the house, painting it with non-toxic oils, choosing the perfect roosting branch, selecting the special hens who were imported from Cali etc etc etc. And they still end up sneezing snot all over the place! Our neighbours have happy healthy hens running about, eating scraps and living in the trees - no sneezing at all.

Tony and Eddie also built a retaining wall out of tyres which will hopefully give us a lawn-type area up by the house which can be a chicken and veg free zone, somewhere to sit out on the grass with a beer perhaps. We are just waiting for the builder to render the wall and then we can get the earth in to level it all up.

The builder still hasn´t got organized with the quote for the next stage (walls and electric and water piping) but he´s supposedly coming round in half and hour with the details so we´re hoping that we´ll be able to get started straight away!

One little green step at a time...

So we´re back here and into the swing of the usual routine again after our trip to the UK last month. Unfortunately our builder took another contract in the time we were away and it´s dragging on a bit so we haven´t managed to get back into the building with as much gusto as we would have liked. Nonetheless, it´s given us some time for planning and experimenting with a few things and generally sorting out what we should be doing to get started on the non-building type of things, both on our land and in our hostel.

The first thing we did was reassess our hostel to see if there are some ways that it too could become ´a wee bit greener´.

Popayan for the first time ever is introducing an official recycling system which is really great news and although it´s not up and running yet, we´re trying to figure out how we can coax our guests into separating their rubbish. We have also started collecting the coffee grinds from the free coffee we offer at the hostel and are chucking them into our composter. We´re also investigating building a green waste digester to dispose of scrap food, peelings etc from the hostel and use them to feed the soil up at our land.

The next step was to convince the staff that we can work with more natural cleaning products. Bleach has long since been a no no in the hostel (much to their grumbling) but having read about concoctions made from vinegar, bicarb of soda, citronella, lemon juice etc, I was keen to try as much as possible to move away from the toxic cleaning detergents that we have to use on a daily basis. Luckily they were very easily convinced as the products speak for themselves! They are even talking about using them in their own homes as it´s considerably cheaper and just as good as the shop bought options.

Up at the plot, we spent last weekend (with the help of some friends) building a hen-house so that we can get started with some chickens as soon as possible - hopefully we can pick up the three that we ordered tomorrow and get them settled in. The neighbours cant understand why we don't want to fill the coop up with 10-15 hens (the recommended occupancy for a coop this size here), but as long as our three are happy, healthy and productive, I reckon we´re onto a winner.

The sister of a friend of ours also has a bee hive that she´s not using and a contact who can teach us about bee-keeping (because we have no idea where to start!) so it´s looking promising for bees! Popayan has a honey co-op but I was worried that unless you are joining the co-op, they might be reluctant to share tips, sell equipment etc so this is the perfect solution, hopefully we can do it all independently. First though, we need to get planting some flowers so that they have something to eat.

We´ve also been reading a bit about Lunar planting and so want to get a veggie plot built this weekend to be in time for the next cycle. I´ve been looking at the ´keyhole garden´ designs that my mum introduced us to and it looks like an idea that we could use, given that our soil is fairly poor for planting. I think it´s an African model used to give good yield in small spaces with un-nutritious soil. Another idea we´ve been experimenting with from Africa is the ´zeer´ fridge. A clay pot with a smaller clay pot inside (or a plastic bucket in our case) with a layer of sand in between which you wet with water each day and then cover the whole thing with a wet towel. We´re still perfecting the model but it´s managed to keep two cucumbers nicely refrigerated for nearly a week now and we´re told that it can cool things to 6´C in optimum conditions, which is fine for most food products. The idea is that the water evaporates through the clay, pulling the heat outwards and in turn cooling the contents of the inner pot. It seems to be working and could be a big help given that the fridge is the main electrical problem with living off-grid.

It´s been a couple of weeks of small steps but on the whole we´re feeling that we have a bit more direction with things and although we´re frustrated that the building´s not making progress, it´s nice to know that we´re pushing forward on the projects that go alongside.

On the road research....

So, it's been a wee while since I've updated this... partly because there's not much to see at the moment as far as the building goes. It has been all foundations, supports and damp-proofing recently - not that interesting really, and most of it underground.

Also, we've been away for a month visiting family and friends in the UK. It was a lovely relaxing trip and in between cups of real tea and pints of real beer, we managed to use some of our time doing some research for the house as we went along.

Our first stop was Florida, a few days stop-over on the way home and a cultural experience we'll never forget! After a day or two with our hospitable friends in Miami, experiencing the sights (white beaches and glistening skyscrapers) and sounds (mainly salsa and Colombian accents), we joined the migration of RV dwelling 'snow-birds' with our rental car, tent and roll mats, and headed for the Florida Keys.

When researching our Florida trip, we were slightly offended by the term 'primitive camping' used to describe us humble tent users.  However, after one night in a $45 a night state park (blasted continuously with air-con exhausts from RVs either side of us) and one night in a forest clearing on an Indian reserve (with no facilities), we happily accepted our place among the 'primitive' campers.

Saying that, despite their air-con, satellite telly, dishwashers and other mod-cons, the RV club are effectively living off-grid and there are great 'green' systems in place at the state parks. We attracted some funny looks checking out their composting loos, solar water heaters, lights and recycling systems.

Once back in Scotland, we started buying books, reading articles and picking the brains of friends and family about off-grid living and generally anything 'a wee bit green'. We travelled south to Plymouth to visit the Eden Project and loved their ideas about permaculture and alternative architecture. Mainly though, it was just nice to see a collective group excited about things like compost and low impact living and so happy to share what they have learned.

We also visited the Findhorn Foundation which is an alternative community near where I grew up. They have some great building and community ideas such as a natural sewage processor, wind turbines powering the whole village, straw bale houses and generally great local produce like bread, veg, honey and lots of crafty type things which they sell in the community shop. The only frustrating thing is that  newbies like us, in search of ideas and inspiration, find it difficult to get info on implementing these systems or ideas ourselves without attending one of their (expensive) courses or workshops.

On the other hand, the local council is introducing some great recycling projects. My Mum introduced us to the 'Green Cone',  a kind of composter/digester which breaks down all you household food waste. It seems really straight forward, it's a basket underground with a plastic cone sticking out the top with a lid which you lift up and chuck in all the kitchen rubbish. Then you can plant veggies around it because as the sludge breaks down, it seeps out and feeds the earth around the cone. Simple!

We made the most of our time in the UK choosing and being gifted some great reading material too. A few that we found great are:
Barefoot Architect by Johan Van Lengen - sold over 40,000 copies in Mexico and is full of great and simple ideas that we're looking forward to trying.
Off-Grid by Nick Rosen - A really informative read which lets us know that it's not uncommon to live off-grid, not crazy and not as hard as everyone thinks!
The Self-Sufficiency Bible by Simon Dawson - Brilliant for all sorts of things, however far you want to take it, whether it's tomatoes in a window box or hunting, skinning and gutting your own rabbits.
Henkeeping & Beekeeping by the National Trust - very funny and passionate books for smallholders - everything simply put and to the point.

I also think the following websites are great for their no-nonsense, practical approach to what's often portrayed as a romantic lifestyle:
www.aselfsufficientlife.com
www.selfsufficientish.com

We were left with a lot of great ideas and were really keen to get back and get started. Now that we're here though, it's hard to know where to start!

Plant Scavenging!

Once we cleared the sloping garden at the back that drops down to the forest, we realised that leaving crumbly soil on a steep hill, open to the elements, could infact mean that after a few tropical down-pours, we might not have much soil left at all!  And sure enough, we´re starting to see nice slippery water channels carving themselves out into the sludgy slope.

So now we´re on the hunt for the sorts of plants that nobody wants in their garden.  The ones with strong, spreading roots.  The ones that crawl all over flowerbeds and take over entire gardens, lift up paving and require heavy machinery to uproot! You wouldn´t think those sorts of horticultural monsters would be so hard to get hold of but seemingly it´s not that easy. Garden centres dont really specialise in them!

So far we´ve managed to get some ornamental bamboo that a friend has grown into hedge in his garden. We didnt realise why he was so reluctant to give us some until we watched him split the handle on a heavy duty garden pick trying to hack out a few roots for us to take away and plant! He also gave us some enormous cuttings from a rubber plant which was camouflaging his entire barbeque area and wood pile. The plant had wound it´s vines in between the bricks and logs!

Our Ned Flanders neighbour also donated about 30 lemongrass roots that he wrestled out of his garden last weekend which we´ve planted under the terrace walkway in the hope that it´ll stop it from slipping down the hill. We´re now spreading the word amongst all our friends and neighbours, we´ll take all your unwanted, leafy garden pests!

We also went round to the builder´s house the other day because he wanted to show us a way to use slopes for growing veggies.  He has lettuces, mint, herbs for teas, onions, plantains, lemons, bananas and all sorts of things growing in beds that they´ve made out of bamboo and filled with earth and compost.  We left with lots of ideas and a goody-bag packed full of fresh fruit and veg!

An unfortunate development this week has been the discovery of a colony of leaf-cutter ants.  They´ve taken a liking to one of our trees and have carved out a nice little path through our plants and nicely organised earth to get to it.   I can remember my first time in the Ecuadorian jungle, sitting for ages watching and taking pictures of these little guys carrying huge slices of leaf and other bits and pieces.   Now I´m less impressed by their strength and organisation and more worried for our poor, gradually balding tree!  We´ve tried making a spray from garlic, hot chilli peppers and soap and it does seem to have slowed them down a bit but they are still marching and munching on.  We´re hoping that we dont have to take the drastic step that the locals recommend... Setting their nest on fire with gasoline!