Eight months into 2016 and the fun and work never stop! We continue to do more building, more planting, more infrastructure development. We renovated an existing animal structure, turning it into a material storage area and added a large open-air workshop and locked toolshed.
We resurrected a tumbled-down house into a beautiful new guesthouse. We love our mason, Eddy, and since the end of March his team has built the guesthouse, the base for the dry compost toilets and the guest showers (to be solar heated). This week they started the sinks and laundry area. All this is outside under a canopy of large trees.
We roofed the old pig houses with the metal torn off the woodshop and turned them into our recycling/reuse center and holding pens for construction materials such as gravel and sand. No more piles all over the place, less loss, much neater. We opened up a back entrance for vehicles and solidified the road so trucks can deliver without getting stuck in the mud during rainy season.
Gerard is still doing a lot of designing in Google Sketchup. Such a great free tool (Sketchup, that is); it allows us to see our building details in 3D so no big surprise when we see them in real life. He spends a lot of time managing the construction, making sure the workers have what they need, and trying to stay one step ahead in design details.
In April I traveled to Costa Rica for a two-week permaculture design certification course (PDC), the same one Brett took two years ago. If you, or anyone you know, wants to get their PDC and can get to Costa Rica, Rancho Mastatal offers one of the best experiences around. Classmates came from all over the world and brought a lot of expertise of their own. It was nice to get away, immerse myself in the subject matter, make new friends, and network with lots of cool people doing amazing things.
With the Juans and Jose, I have been planting many more edible shrubs and trees. The nursery got cleared out and then filled up again with lots of new plant starts. Our beds and planting areas, having been heavily mulched, are turning into rich healthy soil full of life-giving micro-organisms. Mature citrus trees are getting some love, Jose is digging trenches and filling with leaves and manure. We are opening up the canopy to let in much needed sunlight.
