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 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
