Hello!!
Everyone doing okay out there?!? We've been silent for a while but that doesn't mean we ran out of things to do ;-) We've been chipping away at The Rock as usual. Here's a 'mini' round-up post with a glimpse of how things have progressed at La Roca for the first half of 2020.
Everyone doing okay out there?!? We've been silent for a while but that doesn't mean we ran out of things to do ;-) We've been chipping away at The Rock as usual. Here's a 'mini' round-up post with a glimpse of how things have progressed at La Roca for the first half of 2020.
First - as you may or may not know.. by end of March we decided to pack the family up (Grapes of wrath style - to the brim!) and head up to our land and use the time to our advantage. And we did!
Andres built his first ever 'chicken tractor' and we had our first go at owning and rearing eight wonderfully entertaining and generous hens.
We got at some general maintenance and emergency tree harvesting as this spectacular albeit, dangerously hollow maple needed to come down :(
More tree harvesting. Moving these skinny poplar weeds out of the way to make space for the beginning of our edible forest garden.
Chipped the poplars with a rented machine and mulched the day away with cardboard and these glorious poplar wood chips.
Finally put our apple tree babies in the ground!
We worked in the garden a LOT. Reclaiming it for the most part. And slowly transitioning it to a mini perennial paradise.
We finished plastering this baby.
And Andres started and completed our first rocket mass heater!! Check it out(!!):
We are pretty excited about this. For once we felt 'on schedule' and not rushing against the clock to get something done before a season ended where we'd normally be counting on that system to be up and running by a certain time. No, no - we built and completed a heating system in June!! Don't know if you know what I'm getting at here but we felt very satisfied with that accomplishment. Saying that - we've only given it a minor test as it was way to hot out to fire it up to the maximum and test the thermal mass heating involved. We'll see how it goes later this year :)
Andres upgraded the girls' playground ;-)
And we knocked up another outhouse...
Come have a seat and give it a test.
Oh yes, and we made bone sauce.
Well, that's it. A few of our highlights from the past few months. Andres and I have been discussing many things lately in terms of how we are proceeding with this whole project. Things certainly have not happened in the way we imagined or hoped but things have still happened and we continue. We are entering a new phase and look forward to sharing the journey with you all. It seems a lesson that the universe might be trying to teach us is 'patience' as that is what nature is truly about and how she works... difficult when there's this constant feeling of urgency all around us and of course our own desperate desire to break out of the status quo and get at living off the land once for all! Oh well, we get it, take it easy, go with the flow.... we are maSLOWski's afterall... but we're not maSTOPski's! LOL
