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Working… Progress!

August 22, 2010 in Team News, The Build | No comments

I have been so slack at keeping this blog up to date – apologies but a limited internet connection on the campsite, combined with an unlimited work schedule has meant more doing and less writing about doing!

So here’s a run down of all the tasks ticked off the list this summer:

The basement door has been painted a tasteful silver grey and the ugly piece of pink polystyrene that was wedged in the top of the door to stop people hitting their heads as they enter has been replaced with a strategically placed piece of wood, nicely painted white to blend in with the building…

The kitchen is looking great!  All shelves, cupboards & hooks are up.  Now everything has its place and commonly accessed utensils etc are within easy reach.

The laundry sink is tiled!  It was a labour of love for Steve who patiently, single-handedly completed this project.  It has really grown on us and has become our favourite thing in the kitchen!  Almost the day after it was completed, guests arrived and innocently asked: “Can I do some some washing?” – “Yes!” we gushed! (and then ran off to quickly erect a washing line and dig out the pegs!!).  Despite our reservations about it not being wide enough, everything fits in it fine!  It’s great for scrubbing the big ole pan I use for most of the cooking and its a good place to leave pots and pans soaking over night.  This is a poor picture of it (taken at night with a flash) but you get the drift…

A scabby old cupboard we salvaged has been painted with white gloss and is a nice addition to the communal building.  Our eco books and Guest Book live atop and I try to keep fresh flowers displayed there too.  Inside live all the board games, packs of cards etc…

We have signs!!!  This one was artfully drawn up by Gav during his stay with the chalk board pens he brought with him from the UK.  A piece of old wardrobe is transformed into a posh sign, varnished and protected from the weather…

And here’s another of Gav’s masterpieces… A back of a wardrobe was painted dark green and became the perfect canvas for our roadside sign.  He even tried to reproduce the letters in our font and using a part of our logo:

The final sign is Mr Nik’s great work… The campsite name & phone number positioned here draws people’s attention to the bell (just above the sign) and means we can leave the site without worrying about missing business – people can phone and let us know they have turned up and we can dash back…  You can’t see it in this picture but to the right of the sign is a motion-activated solar spotlight.  It illuminates the sign and the gate at night and works brilliantly!

The last shower has been tiled!!!!!  All 3 showers are now in use, shower curtain up – job done!

A random shelf unit that we salvaged was transformed into a handy bathroom cabinet by Nik & I.  It’s a place for guests to put their toiletries and has hooks to hang shower puffs, back scrubbers etc…

Access around the site is an issue.  We really need purpose-built steps in lots of places down from one terrace to another but its just too costly right now so we are trying to do the best we can with the materials available.  One of the routes our guests want to take is from the basement down to the lower terrace, without having to walk up stairs, through the building and down stairs again or the even longer route of all the way down the garden to the steps by the stream.  Nik loves to work with stone and doggedly sought out the necessary stones, lugged them up to the building, wrestled them into place and created a set of steps that run down alongside the concrete steps from the building…  You can hardly see them in this shot but that’s a measure of how well they blend in with the existing stone wall!

Intent on tidying up the side of the building, Nik persevered with mattocking & raking the ground level and then barrowing loads of sand & gravel to cover the earth (which turns to a claggy mess when wet if not covered over!).  It was really hard graft but the look was still spoilt by the ugly side view of the steps.  Then I remembered the piece of bamboo covering we’d salvaged from Maja’s Grandma’s place and it fitted great…

I finally got my cork noticeboard finished and marketing material in place!  The signs inside the building still need to be branded with our logo etc but at least we have ditched the unprofessional looking bits of carboard and have decent, laminated signs in Serbian and English for all key messages…

Alongside all these projects we’ve done some tidying & prettying-up (made up word alert?) – the basement is a really nice space now with room for both laptops, a library for our guests, cushions for chairs and roll mats neatly stacked and easy to access.  The second plastic bottle window for the kitchen area has been completed and all these panels stack nicely in the basement.  The mess and disorder in the workshop finally got too much for me and I had a good old clear out.  The torn canvases soaked in mouse-pee have been removed (we managed to salvage some good pieces and scrub them clean); all the rags have been washed and sorted; the floor has been swept and boxes rationlised.  You can actually get into it and find what you are looking for without too much hassle now!  And the second wine bottle window that we decided not to grout around (it lets in more light this way) now has a neat wooden frame around it, courtesy of Nik the Carpenter, and its painted a nice dark green.  It finishes it off really well and has attracted approving comments.

Then of course there’s the ongoing maintenance of the site.  We’ve had to do some work on the greywater system and the compost loos have kept us busy too but these are for future posts in the autumn when I have more time – there is much to share here about our experiences of DIY green sewerage and toilet systems!

The waterless urinals are close to completion so I’ll report on this project, with pictures, soon.  There are only a few key projects outstanding in the building: tiling the toilet walls; making hand rails for the steps out of the building and tiling these steps with lovely old tiles donated by fellow eco warrior Paul.  Then, apart from the inevitable ongoing touching up of paintwork and further modifications to the kitchen to continue to use every inch of space to best effect, the communal building will be done, done, done!  We are very proud – knackered, but proud!

Having got this far, the work ahead for the autumn, winter & spring will all be focused on the grounds.  There is much levelling of earth to be done – we need more tent pitches and a level eating area for the 10 – 15 people we need to attract most weeks in the season next year.  There are also areas of the grounds yet to be uncovered – spoil from the building works remains and once this has been dug out and used to fill in and level ground we hope to create new nooks and crannies for: another hammock, shaded seating areas and at least one outside bathroom (we have one bath and an offer of another!)

Hopefully now you’ll realise that my lack of blogging is for good reason!  Wish us luck with the mammoth tasks ahead…

Grey days for Grey water

June 14, 2010 in Environmentally Friendly, Reduce Reuse Recycle, The Build | 2 comments

Things have not been going well on the DIY sewerage front!  Our ingenious grey water system was: a) leaking and b) starting to smell.  This was round about the time we had just finished installing the final piece of the puzzle – the irrigation system into the raised beds – all the baths were stone walled in and we’d declared the job done.  Ahhh.  Not so fast Professor!

We’d went into denial  for a bit, kidded ourselves the leak would stop and generally dug our heads in the sand whilst tackling other tasks.  We could put it off no longer and it was time to dig out the last bath to see what was going on in there:

Oh I get all the best jobs don’t I?!

The good news was that the root system of the plants in the bath was incredibly well developed.  The mint, reeds and grasses had established themselves and thrived on the nutrients in the waste water.  We took this opportunity to split some of the clumps of bamboo and grass up and redistribute the flora to maximise plant filtering in each bath.  The bad news was, it was pretty smelly and yucky in the bottom where the water had been sitting and it ALL had to come out to check thoroughly for leaks.  It was about this time that we got the call from Amy to ask if we could host the Naming Ceremony for Eloise, in 3 days…  Right, well we HAD to have the bath reconstructed by Sunday and all smells and open baths GONE.

Matt, as ever, was a total star and helped Steve to seal all the possible area where the water could be leaking out – particularly the oversized outlet hole and the area around the original bath plug hole.  With heavy hearts, they dismantled the stone wall Steve had built – they had to be absolutely sure that all the pipework (now buried under the stone wall and dirt) was intact and functioning correctly.

Having sealed everything, adjusted the pipework and tested for leaks, the boys confidently declared the problem solved.  The bath was rebuilt (hurriedly, it has to be said) and that, we hoped, was that.

No such luck.  At the end of Eloise’s special day when the system was being put through its paces with lots of washing up, there was still greywater seeping out into ground and now the second from last bath was backing up.  Disaster!

We thought there was a number of factors contributing to failure:

  • the tap onto which the hosepipe for the irrigation system into the beds fits was blocked.  Despite frequent cleaning it kept getting blocked as particles of muck were dislogded into the pipes from the soil in the baths being so badly disturbed
  • the hosepipe system that fed the garden was not perfectly positioned for a 2% gradient.  It was simply laid on the ground and had humps and kinks in places – through which the water was not flowing, contributing to the system backing up
  • the hosepipe into the beds was of smaller bore than the other pipework and therefor the water wasn’t running away fast enough

However we couldn’t be sure that the last bath hadn’t been damaged as it was rebuilt or the pipework dislodged.  Now very fed up with revisiting tasks that we thought were sorted, Steve dug out the last bath – AGAIN.

It was the right thing to do because he discovered that the bath was clay-clogged mess.  For the baths to function properly, filtering the waste water and acting as a  reservoir for the surge of water, it should be constructed of layers: big stones at the bottom, followed by smaller stones, followed by earth and compost.  These had not be reinstated properly plus there was too much clay and this was making it difficult for the water to permeate through fast enough.

We have left the last bath empty for the past few days, anxiously checking for leaks…

With the last bath not functioning, the system has been deprived of a vital reservoir in the chain in dealing with surges of water.  So the second from last bath has begun to back up as the water isn’t able to flow fast enough out into the garden.  There’s been much adjusting of the hosepipe system, encouraging the water through and clearing the blocked tap…

We are hoping that if we:

  • carefully rebuild the last bath, reinstating the layers and replacing the clay with soil and compost
  • take out the tap altogether
  • and level the hosepipe system on sand with the required 2% drop,

that the water will flow fast enough and the system will not clog or back up.

We are considering using a Y-shaped adapter in some places in the hosepipe so that 2 raised beds can receive water at the same time and therefore speed up the safe & non-smelly disposal of the water!  If all of the above doesn’t work then we will have to consider scrapping the hosepipe arrangement altogther and using larger bore pipe to carry more water.  We are reluctant to do this because: we’ve already invested in the hosepipe, which won’t be much good elsewhere; and because it will look ugly and clumsy.

It’s tough working all this stuff out ourselves.  Keep your fingers crossed for us folk.  We potentially have our first guest arriving in a few days and it has to be sorted by then…

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It’s All White Now (well almost…)

May 30, 2010 in The Build | 1 comment

So – time to paint the building, we thought… Hmmm – it’s very high!!!!  And the steps beside it make it very tricky…  Ladders just weren’t going to cut it.  Nope – scaffolding was the thing.  But where to get it?  How to put it up?  And more importantly how much would it cost?

During the limewash frenzy of the working weekend, I had mentioned our dilemma to Therese. She thought she could help.  A follow up call a few days later secured us an amazing deal: she would get scaffolding to us, complete with the men to erect it for us, in return for a few hours strimming of the garden of one of her properties and a meet & greet for some rental customers.  Done!

The scaffolding arrived the next day and within a couple of hours it was up.  Time to get busy!


We had only expected the guys to erect scaffold on the outside but they helpfully put up a structure inside the kitchen so we could reach the gable end inside too.


We were able to use the hefty, metal scaffold boards on top of the compost loo walls to reach the other gable end inside:


It was incredibly sastifying, turning everything from grey to white but the scaffold was a real pain to navigate around – Steve’s head was a patchwork of bloody scabs where he kept hitting it on low poles!  We raced to slap on the 2 coats of lime wash needed everywhere so we could get the damn stuff down. But wasn’t it worth it…

And this shot shows one side of the building painted too – Steve (of the long legs and long arms) managed to do this using only a ladder…

And the ‘well, almost’?  Well, we still have the other gable end to paint and are hoping to use the scaffold boards on top of the compost chambers and a ladder on top of those. The other side of the building is yet to be done but it is the easiest to reach and will only require a ladder.  Wednesday the scaffold will probably be collected so if we have time before then we might paint the workshop too!

We have saved ourselves 100’s of euros by using limewash as our medium.  We bought 2 big bags of lime which cost us just over 5 euros and that will be enough to finish everything inside & out & probably to paint the workshop too!  What a bargain!!!

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Progress report

May 20, 2010 in Camping News, The Build | No comments

Sorry if the last post was full of doom & gloom.  I’ve decided to cheer myself up by posting about all the stuff we have achieved.  This is a scheduled post as we are now back on the campsite…

I’d like to say this was an update on the BIG LIST but actually most of the things left on that list are staying there for the foreseeable future until we get a) good weather; b) a period of time with no events, no friends staying or other distractions and c) some more help (please let the promised volunteers actually turn up!).

We’ve decided to focus on the high impact stuff – doing the things that visually make a difference so that the place looks good, even if when you peer into the corners of the place they turn out not to be fully tiled etc.

So, here’s a little round up:

  • The glass bricks are mostly in – just the last window in the last loo to do.  We haven’t been able to tackle this up until now because the cables for the solar PV were threaded through the window.  Now that the solar cupboard has been made and the cables have been re-positioned through the wall we can get on and fill that last gap.  Here are some pictures of the windows:

  • We have hooks up for towels – by each shower and around the wash basins – and strings of battery operated lights adorn the wash basin area at night:

  • The basement is painted & has a lino floor down.  We took everything out, sorted & organised it and moved it back in.  We now have a wardrobe and chest of drawers for our clothes in the inner sanctum, which is also the storage area for tents & tiles.  The main room now has an office area with a desk we can work at; cushions for the chairs are neatly stacked & readily available; there’s a cleaning cupboard with all the mops & brooms; there are tables containing gardening stuff and an area for ‘illumination’ (candles, gas lamps & refills, solar lights etc).  I need to take more pictures but this is what it looked like with the walls painted and the floor down:

  • The solar fairy lights have been positioned around the site, lighting the steps and walkways.  The solar spot lights are up (bar 1, which will be installed any day now) so the entrances to the building are all well lit and 2 spot lights illuminate the kitchen area at night.  It’s a tricky ole job because they need to be positioned at night to ensure the angle and height of the spotlight is really lighting the important areas.  Here’s Steve up a ladder, drilling holes at night:

  • The solar equipment is all tidied away in a wall cupboard, which has been made strong enough to accommodate a second battery as we hope to be generating enough power in the sunny months to charge 2 batteries:

  • All the window ledges in the kitchen area have now been tiled, so we have a smooth surface to perch on and, more importantly, a neat frame for the plastic bottle windows to fit into.  This picture was taken on the rainy morning of the working weekend but shows the nice brown tiles of the window ledge:

  • And here’s the new design of the plastic bottle window and us making them (proper picture to follow when the entire window is complete and the rough wood frames have been painted!):

  • Most of the strimming, stumping & raking around the site has been done now, although this is a bit of an endless task and we have deliberately left some areas to let the new grass grow as long & as strong as possible.
  • The 45,000 litre water tank is pretty much full – just one more tank of fuel in our trusty pump and that should do it!
  • The wooden fence that will be planted with beans and provide additional screening for the lower camping terrace is finally up.  It looks great and its strung with solar fairy lights so its all lit up at night and provides a way-marker for the camping area.  Just got to get planting those beans!

This weeks tasks include:

  • painting all the grey cement still left inside the building
  • finishing the plastic bottle windows and getting them fixed into place
  • putting the last 4 glass bricks in
  • limewashing as much of the outside of the building as we can reach and as the weather allows
  • re-digging paths and using the piles of gravel and sand we have to create smooth, mud-free trails around the site

Watch this space to see how much we actually get done!

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Cow Proof

May 18, 2010 in Den, The Build | 1 comment

It was a lovely sunny day and I was tending the garden when I heard a cow bell that sounded too close for comfort…  Dressed in just a baggy t-shirt and knickers I wandered down to the lower terrace where the sound was coming from.  As I approached the opening to the land below our land, across which we had erected a 3-stringed barbed wire fence, I was confronted with the sight of a large cow being driven by Jovo.  Jovo owns the land beyond our boundary and is the strange character from whom we bought part of our plot.

As my mind whirred to try & find the right words in local language to say “Er, please don’t let your cow come any closer…” I was rendered speechless as I watched the great beast push its way through the barbed wire barrier, snapping one of the strands in the process!  Once on the land it headed fast towards where it knew green things lurked in earthy beds… Jovo pushed his way through after his cow and ran after it as I came to my senses and shouted “Moja bašta!” (My garden!).  He managed to steer the cow back but it lumbered off out of control and ended up wandering around the other side of the workshop.  In the end he moved pallets and bricks to let the creature through and he drove it through the main gate which I opened for him and then locked behind them, wishing I knew the Serbian for “Get orf my land!”.

At the time I was hopping mad as I thought Jovo had been deliberately herding his cow through our land.  I’m still not entirely sure but have since looked up the word ‘Nazad’ that I heard Jovo shout at the cow and it means ‘back’ not ‘forward’ as I first thought!  So maybe he was trying to control his cow but failing or maybe he caught sight of me and decided to act as if the invasion wasn’t deliberate…  Who knows, but what we do know is:

  • the barbed wire fence that we thought was so impenetrable… wasn’t at all
  • this is definitely a route the cow had taken before – it was a creature on a mission & seemed to know exactly where it was going
  • cows can navigate seemingly impossibly difficult terrain – the cow hoof marks are in the carpet laid out beside the workshop.  This area was strewn with twisted bits of metal and is very difficult to traverse, a narrow strip of land with a sheer drop beside it… and it posed no problem at all for the bovine bugger!

Despite the distress (and the embarrassment of realising the whole time I’d been prancing around like a madwoman barely clothed!) I was actually so glad I was there to see with my own eyes what a cow can do and for Jovo to see how displeased I was.

So now we had proof of the cow, time to make the campsite cow-proof…

We spent the best part of a day erecting a pallet fence all the way along the edges of the campsite where we now know  the weak spots are.  The pallets have been nailed together with lumps of wood and barbed wire wound all the way through the structure.  We have piled up brambles and spiky bushes all the way and will continue to do so, hoping in time that the vegetation will grow up and provide even more of a barrier.

It remains to be seen if a sufficiently motivated cow could still force its way through this hardcore barrier….  We have done the best with the materials we have available right now.  Stage 2 is to get the electric fence up but that’s a big job and requires us to buy a load of wood to make hefty posts so we’ll be moving onto that as soon as we have the time & money.

This is a scheduled post as we are back on the campsite – probably bbq-ing beef!

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The Green Grass of Home

May 3, 2010 in Camping News, The Build | No comments

There is a tradition here of going up into the hills to camp and light fires on May 1st, so we thought, what the heck – we’ll go up to our own hills and camp & light a fire.  So we moved into our other ‘home’ this weekend…

Our new tent is up and a couple of others too:

The kitchen is starting to take shape again after having been locked away in the basement for the winter (it now includes the new units we got from Mil):

The showers are getting lots of action as we relish soaking our bones in the hot (free!) water and we are generally getting the camp open again.  It feels good… and yes, the grass IS growing.

The ants loved the grass seed: they collected it in mounds and took it to their nests.  We sowed more.  The soil was too poor to sustain growth.  So I collected soil from surrounding woodlands and lugged it in buckets to the worse areas.  The rain that had been a feature of most of April stopped round about the time we sowed our grass seed.  So we have been watering it with a sprinkler – diligently.  Love has made the grass grow!

Now that Steve’s kicked his various bugs, we are hard at work again.  We have started tiling the last shower:

We’ve tiled the window ledges in the kitchen area so they will be smooth surfaces to perch things & bums on.  Most of the glass bricks are in the windows in the loos – just one more to go.  We’ve experimented with limewash and are pretty happy with the results:

We’ve started the long, slow process of strimming, stumping, raking and picking up the stones around the garden and on all the camping terraces:

The BIG LIST is getting smaller… and we are looking forward to a productive weekend ahead as a bunch of our friend have agreed to help us tackle some more big tasks.

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BIG LIST update

April 15, 2010 in Frugal Living, Organic Gardening, Reduce Reuse Recycle, The Build | 1 comment

Back in November last year we compiled a BIG LIST of all the high level tasks and I outlined them in this post, promising to update our progress every month…  Mmm, I’ve been a bit rubbish, haven’t I???

Well, nearly 6 month later, here’s an update on progress and the latest news of what’s on the BIG LIST now…

  • drainage

Ur, well, the first item on the list & that’s where it all started to go wrong!  The drainage ditch turned into our Elephant Task and no matter how much we broke it into bits, we got so tired of chewing those chunks!  But the drainage on the main campsite is now DONE.  We still get soggy patches where underground springs mysteriously appear when the water table rises, but things are better.  It’s still a quagmire when it really buckets down but that’s mostly because of all the distrurbed earth which Nature needs to knit together again. 

  • installing our rainwater collection systems

This is a tricky one.  Water is so precious, of course we should be saving every drop.  But unless we can salvage a couple of big water butts from somewhere, we simply cannot afford to invest in the materials needed to install the system properly.  Our first check list for whether we do a task or not is: how much will it cost?

Thankfully, the water tank we filled up at the start of last summer is still half full!  So having enough water for everything is NOT an issue, in fact we are desperately trying to empty the tank so we can fill it fresh from the spring before it dries up.

  • finishing our greywater irrigation system

We started with grand plans for this project but the cost of fancy joints and weird plumbing bits was crazy so we are going to make do with bits of hose and ’stuff’.

It’s been a stressful time on the greywater front.  We were keen to cover the ugly pipes and protect them, but were concerned about piling mud on them and screwing up the levels.  These pipes have been lovingly positioned and levelled to have a 2% drop all the way along – not too much or the water will rush through the system and not be properly filtered, nor too slight a gradient or the water will not run fast enough and stagnate.  After enclosing them with earth we waited for it to settle and then had to tweak the system a little, straightening the pipes and inserting stones as rests in places.  The system still works; the water flows through well.  The problem now is with the last bath.  We noticed a slight leak when doing the landscaping around the end of the system.  It was too wet to use Plumber’s Mait or other good stuff so Steve cemented over the entire piece where the pipe exits the last bath through a rubber bung.  Our mistake was then carrying on regardless, in denial that the fix may not have worked…

It still leaks, really badly.  And now there’s a frigging stone wall enclosing it and a load of dirt!  The only hope is to dig the bath out and attack the problem from the inside.  Watch this space to see if this works or if we have to dismantle the entire stone wall:

  • levelling ground to create flat terraces for outside eating areas, a  Boules pitch and lots more tent pitches

We’ve levelled a lot of ground dealing with the spoil from the drainage ditch.  The area we played Boules on last year will be less lumpy & bumpy & sloped than before, if not pristine!  Ideally, we’d like to build a proper pitch – a frame filled with sand maybe – but not exactly a priority for this year.

We’ve cleared the ugly pallet fence between the raised beds and the stream so there is a bigger space there for tents and Steve has great plans to use the last of our sleepers and level earth on the very lower terrace.  But even if this doesn’t get done, with a little stumping, strimming, raking and mowing we can accomodate up to 30 people quite easily.  More level ground would enable us to space the tent pitches out much more, but even so tents will still be less cheek by jowl than many campsites!

  • making a rough, covered outside kitchen near to the eating area and BBQ

No progress made on this at all but we have all the raw materials: sink (reclaimed from the side of the road); pallets to make rough decking; an old table for a work surface – and it will be one of those projects that just gets done because it HAS to (hopefully in time for the Full Moon Party!).

  • repairing the critical collapsed terrace walls with planted tyre walls

Mmmm.  We have tyres.  We have tidied up the area around.  That’s as far as we’ve got and in truth we may not get an entire wall done this season.  After all the inside jobs have been done, it’s next on the list…

  • tile the last shower & the urinals

We can’t put the tiling off any longer!  We need to get the building functioning again.  Everything was moved down to the basement or back to Topla and the shower block has been left empty and abandoned.  We need to be living up there as soon as possible so that means finishing the last shower, tiling the laundry sink, installing the urinals and tiling around them and half tiling the loos so they are easy to clean.  We also need to fix the position of the cooker so we can tile around it for ease of cleaning and that means fixing the position of gas fridges & more cupboards in the kitchen.  Then we can lime wash all remaining bare plaster, move all the furniture and stuff in… and enjoy!

A new addition to the BIG LIST, all wrapped up in being able to move on site soon is:

  • clean, mouse-proof and limewash the basement

We need a proper usable space to set up an office, store clothes and things, have a cold store for food stuffs etc and the basement is it.  We need to tell the resident mouse (there’s only ONE mouse, right Kirst?!) to move on and get it cleared, cleaned, painted and organised!

  • paint the outside of the buildings

This is one of the tasks on the list for our work day on 8th May.  I painted a patch on the back of the workshop in limewash last year and it still looks great, even after all the ravages of winter.  A bag of lime is pennies (in comparison to the price of paint here) and will make loads of wash, a real cheap option for us and less harmful to the environment.  Having a sparkling white building will make an enormous difference – and help us sell the site in photos better!

  • plant the flower & veg beds

Made reasonable progress on this task.  There’s still lots to do and there’s a bunch of plants queuing up to put their roots down but there’s no chance of doing much more until the rain stops.  We desperately need some hot dry weather to follow the deluge of the last few days.  We haven’t been on site for the past 3 days due to the appalling weather and I dread to think what’s going on up there….

Since we are determined this year to keep greedy cows and intruders out, there’s a new task on this list:

  • secure the boundary

In practice this means: running barbed wire along the edges of the boundary where a cow can possibly invade and electrifying the main fence to deter the village kids and travellers who got on site, poked around and stole stuff last year.  If the barbed wire doesn’t get them, the x 1000 volts will!

Another key task is:

  • build a generator shed

We need a proper weather-proof, sound-proof, easy access structure to contain our trusty genny.

We have been gifted some great wooden stairs from Keith & Maja so now we need to treat them with wood preservative and install them firmly but that takes care of:

  • create safe, stable access at each end of each terrace

We now need to start making some rope hand rails or some such stuff to help support people safely down them!

Finally (well, never ‘finally’ because the list never ends but…) now we’ve dismantled the old compost heap we need to:

  • build a new compost

Gulp!  Still a bunch of stuff to do.  Thank God there’s no guests arriving until end of May!  And we are feeling a little less over-whelmed since we’ve had news that a potential volunteer, Jaime, will be joining us in May for 1 or 2 weeks; a volunteer from Spain, Pedro, is looking to join us in June and will possibly stay for a couple of months if we all get along well and last, BUT NOT LEAST, Nik, dear Mr Nik, without whom it all wouldn’t have been possible last year, is coming back this summer.  Hurrah for willing helpers!  Anyone else fancy it?

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Eating a very small Elephant – with a side dish of veg!

April 12, 2010 in Nature, Organic Gardening, The Build | 1 comment

The elephant task of dealing with the ditch and its resulting spoil is almost done.  There’s just an ickle little (not-so) jumbo Dumbo left!  We’ve been so busy working, my blog’s been abandoned and now I’m struggling to catch up with myself…

Most of the landscaping on the first 2 terraces (well 3, if you include the flower garden by the palm fence) has been done.

This is the view of the newly levelled ground, covered with as much top soil as I could find in the surrounding area (no budget for loads of bags of compost) and then sown with grass seed.

This terrace is doing ok, but the one below it has been ravaged by ants.  The day after we sowed all the grass and watered it in, we arrived to find mounds of seed everywhere that the ants had found, stockpiled in one place and were ferrying down into their nests!  We’re just hoping some germinate before the busy little workers get them all!

Steve continued his dry stone walling all the way to the raised beds, so all the greywater pipes are hidden under earth and contained within mini stone-walled beds.  There’ll be a separate post on the greywater system, coming soon.

To finish the whole series of stone terraces off and link to the garden, he found a railway sleeper bowed perfectly to fit the space and give an attractive curved finish:


We’ve done a ton of stuff I haven’t got pictures of, including:

  • moving the pallet fence monstrosity that contained our compost heaps.  We now have a bigger grassed area in between the stream and the garden, a perfect 4-man tent pitch.  (No new compost heap yet though, a new addition to THE BIG LIST!)
  • tidying up the remaining soil and clay we haven’t had a place to put yet by cutting rough steps into it so we can more easily access the flower bed & orchard
  • raking, tidying and sowing grass seed all over
  • planting flowers (marigolds, cinias and geraniums) in the new bed at the bottom of the stream steps
  • making a start on cow-proofing the boundary with barbed wire

We also had a tidy up of railway sleepers but needed some hunky lads to help us shift the buggers.  Shame we could only find these lot!

But they were super stars, helping chuck the sleepers down 2 terraces for Steve to use for his tent pitch project.


I’ve been busy planting flowers & herbs all over the place.  You can’t really see much in this photo but trust me, this new bed around the first bath in our greywater system is full of aromatic herbs: basil, coriander, fennel, chive, mint…

My veg plants romped away well on our sunny terrace…

This year we have taken more care to harden the plants off before planting them out and resisting the temptation to plant them too soon.  The ‘babies’ have become my new obsession, lots of veg on the menu to help digest the last of that elephant!

So far we’ve planted out:

  • sweetcorn
  • 6 types of lettuce (might be too soon for them, but it’s a small window of opportunity before it becomes too hot & too late)
  • cucumbers, this time around a trellis so they will climb UP   (the way the locals do it,  saves space in the garden and makes them easier to pick when they hang down)
  • courgettes (ditto as above for trellis)
  • runner beans
  • marigolds – everywhere as they were the perfect companion plant last year to just about everything and were such good value, flowering for months

Pumpkins, cabbages & sweet peas should have been planted out today but the torrential hailstorm rather put a damper on those plans.  Hopefully tomorrow!

Andwe have  sowed:

  • peas (not a single one has come up having been planted direct into the ground – have sowed some in pots today as insurance!)
  • carrots
  • radish
  • rocket
  • various herbs: dill, parsley, oregano, basil, coriander, fennel, chives

(Beets should have been sown today after soaking overnight but they’ll get sown on the next dry day)

The melons, tomatoes, peppers & chillies will be ready to plant out soon and I’m sowing more sweetcorn and beans because I want lots of them!  Failures this year were caulis (again!).  Lesson learnt: don’t plant these in toilet roll tubes – that method is only for things that germinate quickly (like corn & beans).  Also, parsnip seeds didn’t germinate – they were gifted by a local friend and I think they were old seeds).  Successes: peppers & chillies using last year’s collected seeds.

Today I read a great post over at the Simple, Green, Frugal Co-op which is very timely because it’s given me some new ideas for companion planting and there’s still time to juggle my planting plan around to accomodate some ‘helpers’.  Interestingly, I read that you should avoid putting carrot in the proximity of dill.  I’m sure last year I read something to the contrary and planted dill in my root veg bed.  The dill flourished but the carrots did not!  Time to try something different and see if we get better results.  Aliums are good companions apparently so will plant the last of my onions there; peas & chives will be fitted in too, as healthy helpers.

I have a few random pots with seeds of fruit I’ve collected (plums, dates, tamarind, japanses apple).  Nothing’s really sprouted but a walnut that Steve stuck in a pot last autumn has!

So now it’s time to sit back and let nature do it’s stuff… let the grass grow over the elephant, let the vegetables flourish in a cow-free zone and let the flowers & herbs blossom to attract nicer beasties like birds, bees and butterflies.

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Green shoots of hope…

March 30, 2010 in Nature, Organic Gardening, The Build | No comments

Monte welcomed us back with warm sunny arms.  When we left England it was in it’s ‘yellow phase’ – the daffs just blooming, forsythia about to burst forth, broom blossoming – whilst here in Monte the wild narcissi are nearly done and everything is white (daisies, star flowers) and pink & purple.  We stomped around the land admiring nature’s new growth and were delighted to see the orchids were back…

In some fantasy, I imagined returning to the site to find the garden aburst with flowers and green lush grass covering the clay.  But it had only been 10 days and who was I kidding…  The clay was still there, looking very un-green, just dried up rather than claggy.   And on first glance nothing appeared to have changed in the flower garden at all.  Gutted…  But on closer inspection I noticed lots of tiny green shoots!  There are lots of little flowers-to-be and if I close my eyes tightly I can see the bright hues and pleasing forms…

There were more hopeful green shoots in the garden where the garlic was getting big and the onions were taking off:

Unbelievably the cabbage that got munched last year was still holding its ground and putting on another growth spurt!  (If you concentrate, you’ll be able to smell the very niffy animal dung that we have spread around the beds that you can see in this picture)

We daren’t sow the seeds for this years crop before we went away because they’d need too much tending in the early days, so it was one of the first jobs we did having got settled back in.  Here’s a picture of our bedroom which will now double as the nursery for the next few weeks:

We have sown runner beans (enorma), tomatoes (local variety this year), peppers, chillies, sweetcorn, cucumbers, courgettes, cauliflowers, cabbage, melons, pumpkins, a whole host of different lettuces, lots of flowers (sweet peas, cinia, marigolds) and a some fruit stones saved from plums, dates, japanese apple and tamarind.  I am trying to chit parsnips and we have a bunch of other seeds that will be sown directly into the ground in the next month (carrots, beetroots, radish, more lettuce, rocket, more lettuce).  I was aghast to find I had NO marrow seeds!  Our marrows were the STAR crop last year (see… this post) and I can’t believe I committed the fatal error… I didn’t save a single seed!!!!  All those marrow!  All those seeds!  And now I have to get a packet of seeds bought and brought over from the UK (they don’t do marrows in Monte!). BIG lesson learnt.  Luckily the lettuces cheered me up, bursting forth in just 3 short days (this is a crap picture, but trust me, there are tiny green shoots here & yes, this is an old egg box…):

Shorts on & shirts off, we were back to work on the campsite where the next new terrace wall is taking shape:

Here’s a shot of the old wall I’ve been uncovering.  I started chipping the clay away from the wall at the point where the spade is and have uncovered about 2-3 metres of old stone…

Having cursed the claggy clay that had to picked up with hands and thrown, we are now cursing it’s dried up form which is rock hard and has to be whacked with a mattock to be broken up.  But as we see the land really taking shape, nothing can stop us now.  We are spurred on every day by the appreciable difference we are making.  We are desperate to get all the new walls built, all the clay shifted, all the ground levelled and then to sow grass seed mixed with compost and muck, stick the sprinkler on and keep everything crossed as we move to indoor jobs and let nature take its course.  We are hoping against hope that green shoots will appear and the newly landscaped land will be carpeted with something other than clay chips!

We should be ready to move onto the internal works (tiling & painting and kitchen-building) in the next few weeks.  We’ll have to see how much work we can do whilst holding our breath and compulsively checking for signs of growth!

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Eating an elephant – an update

March 9, 2010 in The Build | 3 comments

We’re getting a little sick of eating this elephant… it’s stuck in our teeth, we’re choking on it & it doesn’t matter how small the chunks, it’s still taking ages to chew.

But we are getting there – slowly but surely.  We have had a run of dry days which helps enormously with this enormity.  Here’s the view of the side of the shower block a couple of days agao – mud all levelled out & looking tidy:

However, there is still much mud to be moved and we have been agonising over what to do with it.  The first priority was to cover & protect the grey water pipes that protrude from the baths and run our waste water to our gardens.  First the pipes had to be levelled again and thanks to Nik we had a spirit level with blocks attached that give us the level for the 2% drop required.  I am reminded again at what a legend Mr Paddison is.  The grey water system is a triumph largely due to his patience, perseverance and effort.

Steve had a vision of a new terrace wall to give us an edge to level to and to hide the 3rd bath in an attractive structure mirroring the one he had built around the grease trap and first bath.  I have to admit, I was not a fan of the idea.  More rocks to move… my muscles ached just thining about it.  But it was a great way to use some of the excess soil and it would look great.  Here is the start of the sub-project that this elephant task has created – you can also see the mud heap to the right that safely hugs the greywater pipes:

We are in the process of uncovering terrace walls that have been hidden with mud for more than a year so we trawled through old photos to see what the walls looked like before clay mountain.  It was incredible – the land has changed beyond recognition.  That’s a measure of how far we have come…

Today was a beautiful sunny day and more things seem possible with the heat of those rays warming our bones.  So we plodded on as the birds and butterflies painted the sky with bright colours – fragile wings beating orange; yellow wagtails; blue tits; red robins.

I set about prising the mud away from the terrace wall below the baths.  I felt like an archeologist on a dig, gently chipping away at the piled up earth to reveal the stone wall:

Meanwhile Steve was building an awesome wall.  Here’s the view from the side:

The plank was our makeshift ramp for rolling up some of the massive rocks.  Jeez, I’m doing weight training++ at the moment shifting these buggers!  Despite all the agony – cramping hands, aching back etc – it was all worth it when we reviewed our progress at the end of the day:

You can’t really tell from these photos but we have a reasonable wall here (saving us a lot of time as the tyre wall now won’t have to be so long) and we have regained width on the terrace itself – it will look sooo great!

And this is the really cool shot of Steve’s fantastic new terrace wall that made me thank him for insisting – he was right and it will look great.

At this rate we will finish filling this area in with soil on Thursday.  We will sow grass seed and let nature be for 2 weeks (we are off to the UK for Steve’s birthday and fun with friends & family), hoping beyong hope that we will return to green shoots of growth everywhere…

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