Just living life...

It's been 11 months living here on the farm, I have absolutely no idea how, but it has and I have enjoyed it.

We decided a while ago that we would start working on the Kitchen first as this is where we felt the hub of the house really is.

So far we have achieved:

• New windows - House & Kitchen
• New roof - kitchen
• Rendered walls - kitchen
• Pointed stone wall - kitchen
• Usable workshop (was the pigshed)
• Re-built stone wall & roof on lean-too
• Built up wall outside house & rendered
• Semi-finished drive 
• Guttering 
• Pointed stone wall - downstairs in house

Other stuff: 

• Longer dreads
• Muscles I didn't know I had!
• A Tan... 
• More of an understanding of the language
• Tools, tools, tools... and Power tools!
• Greater understanding of the massive challenge that beholds us/me every day...
• a puppy
• An understanding that stuff grows insanely quickly here!

The view is still amazing, the water never stops running. Life here is not a walk in the park. There is constantly something to be done here, be it in the house or around the land. Time never seams to be slow, it always seems to vanish and we find ourselves knackered at the end of the day, sometimes with a lot done and sometimes with seemingly very little.

The ability to see what it is we are doing here sometimes gets lost in the gravity of what it is I would like to achieve.

The more time I spend here the more I realize what it is I feel we want as humans.
It is the connection, the connection to our tribe, our family, our people that makes us want to strive and push forward.
As time keeps progressing, I am realizing that I must remember to love myself and to show the people that I know and care for how much I love and appreciate them and what they mean to me.

I am learning that the land can be molded and changed at a whim, you move earth from here to there, if you don't like it you just change it back or something else naturally occurs.

There seems to be so many lessons that the farm shows to self!

You water the land, it grows... You don't water it, it quickly shrivels and dies...

Having to be aware of the constant flow of water that never ceases to exude from the mountain has been something to behold. It's taken a while to get to grips with what it is exactly that I have here. In fact it was only a couple of months ago that I suddenly realized what it was that I had running through the land 24/7. It reminded me of playing Pipe Mania on the Omega when I was 9-10!

You make a gully, with channels leading here and there, open the flow and close/open various parts of the gully pipeline that I have created. In doing so, life springs into the soil and an abundance of plants grow. You quickly see how fast life appears from what at first appeared to be just dry, sandy dirt.

We have created a fenced vegetable garden (to stop the dogs). In putting a fence up (Massive Thanks to Gary, Max & Nath) it was the weirdest feeling to be standing on that part of land, inside a fenced off area! All of a sudden it felt like a separate part of the farm, disconnected from the rest.

As the land is all terraced there is a natural lay to the land. Everything looks flat, but there is a slight decline happening throughout. This plays a massive roll in how you can design the water systems as gravity and pressure are the tools that we have available. The water storage we have holds around 5000ltr along with another 2nd tank that holds around 8000ltrs (access to the 2nd tank is for 3 days a week). When I open up one of these tanks, there is a torrent of water for a good couple of hours, which means I can water a lot, assuming I have designed the water ways well enough!

I have come up with a design that takes more work to put in initially, but less work once installed and we want to water. Simply opening up the water way and just letting it run throughout the field, watering the trees without having to open and close any gullys individually to each tree.

There is a lot to learn here, I am enjoying the challenges that appear. I have always had a knack for working out problems and generally seeing things in an entirely different way to how others would do something.

The New Veggie Garden

Peace 1 <3

WMD

3 months...

3 months into this life changing experience.

Life is just happening as usual.  The obvious differences are not seeing any familiar faces or going out with friends and not speaking the native language (although, this hasn't actually caused us many problems so far). So socialising in general has basically stopped altogether.

The pluses however are the spectacular views surrounding the land, the clean air, fresh mountain spring water and getting to spend time on the land and be with Mum.

Since the new year we have started eating vegetarian, it just kind of happened, it also helped that we met up with some friends I first met at the Be-In Gathering last June. They live near Lisbon. So, on the 1st Jan, we headed off to their little village. They promote healthy eating and eat a raw veggie diet (Hi Shayna & Steven). Shayna made a lovely raw food salad with a starter of freshly picked (from around the area) various green leaves, grasses, etc that were juiced into a lovely power shot (Thanks Steven). It definitely kick started our year right.

Another friend I met at the Be-In Gathering came back with us to the farm to stay for a few nights, get away from the hustle and bustle of the Lisbon city life and generally chill (Ola linda Sofia). Sofia is vegetarian, which also helped me and Mum to eat veggie foods. Since Sofia left we have both felt inspired to stay on the vegetarian path.

I will admit, we have eaten fish a couple of times in the last 16 days... It was in the freezer, it's not like we were going to throw good food away! Our stomachs definitely paid for it the day after or so... Hmmmm

The sun has come and gone, some days are grey and rainy, some days are bright and blue skied, most mornings are currently bitter cold. If there is a wind blowing, you really know about it.

Not having any central heating in the house (it's not a done thing here) we only have the wood burner (in the lounge) and a gas heater (in the kitchen). All we can do for the moment is lots of layers, in fact, as many layers as you can wear is advisable!

I finally plucked up the courage to get the horse box on the land. The dirt track we live at the end of is quite small, however, I managed to get it here, in one piece too! I then realised that I could turn the horse box into my DJ studio! I had to do something with it didn't I...

Around 6-7 weeks living on the farm I decided to see how good my handy work was. So I crafted some stairs... I can tell you that they're very useful and sturdy, I impressed myself! They're used everyday, making life that little bit easier. Not being a builder type, I am having to learn a lot. But seems to just make common sense most of the time...

Learning new skills has definitely been the main highlight for me. I had forgotten how much fun learning something new could be, especially when the results are in front of you by the end of the day. Hopefully I am creating a nicer environment for us to live in.

Some photo's.

 

Thanks for getting this far...

Peace 1 <3

WMD