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.

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!!