May 2018 — Many Hands, Many Projects

May has been another fun and productive month here at Cara Creek Eco Lodge. We continue to have many helpful workaway volunteers to keep the various projects moving along — working with cob, fencing our future garden, and yes still more clearing of mimosa tree piles.

A recent photo of the view from the other side of the river.... My has it changed!!!

We were able to source some straw; so instead of building the spiral shower from rammed earth as planned, we went with cob. The difference is, rammed earth is just sand and clay mixed without the straw. Then it’s rammed within shutters to build up the wall. But by using straw in the mix it serves as fiber to hold the clay-coated sand together by just layering it on. So once the stone and lime-crete foundations were completed we began our trials with cob.

Although it’s fun to mix the clay, sand and straw with our hands and feet it is not a very sustainable use of human energy, as it is a lot of work for not all that much! For the amounts of cob we'll be using for our project, we really needed to create a more sustainable way to mix it. It was a bit of a learning experience to figure out how we could mix large quantities of good quality cob, but at last we arrived at a pretty good method with the help of our old faithful digger.

We basically created a “cob mixing hole” that has a sandy floor and is the exact shape of the digger arm bucket. We then add in clay, straw and water and keep mixing and adding what we need until we create the perfect mix. The exact ratio of the perfect sand/clay mix, which we know is about 3 parts sand to 1 part clay, is a bit hard to measure perfectly when we’re mixing such large amounts. Thankfully, we have an idea of what that perfect mix feels and looks like, so we test the cob intermittently using the drop method. Make a ball of mix and drop it from a decent height. If it splats and totally loses it’s shape, there’s too much clay. If it cracks, there’s too much sand.

Once we have the perfect mix we scoop out one bucket at a time with the digger arm, and load up either the pick up truck or trailer to drive it up closer to the spiral shower area. Then we unload it and add on cob layers by hand. We can only build about 30cm (a little less the 1 foot) at a time, before we have to let it sit and dry. With that said we’ve made some serious progress and it’s starting to take it’s shape beautifully.

Pre Cob...

Pre lime-crete Foundations

Digging out the shape

Shape done, Foundations to be laid...

Design - outside view

Design - from the top view

As far as gardening goes I hadn’t planned on planting too much this spring because without proper irrigation, it’s difficult to keep up with watering during the heat of summer. But then friends who have a gorgeous organic farm (Quinta da Cerca) gave me some of their own baby tomato plants so I couldn’t resist. Where we had some “Hugle" beds last year just in front of the temporary kitchen, I weeded out and planted the tomato plants and some herbs. We also have some avocado trees and blueberry plants which we're nurturing in pots until the autumn.

We’re preparing our larger scale, long term garden in the meantime. It’s a terrace that already has a water source to set up good irrigation. It’ll also be protected from the dogs and others who might be interested in our vegetables because firstly, we’re building a fence. For that, we’re using what we have which is more than enough Mimosa tree cuts. The thicker ones were first cut to 2 metre lengths and sharpened with the chainsaw at the tip to be sledge hammered into the ground as posts. Then we drilled holes into the vertical standing posts, and slightly thinner branches are cut and thinned at the ends to insert horizontally into the holes and create 3 or so posts across. Finally, the young and freshly cut mimosa shoots are woven vertically between the horizontal ones.

It’s nearly finished. As is the shelters for the chickens🐓and pigs🐷. Yes, we plan to get chickens (finally, I’ve been planning this for quite some time!)… and pigs too in the very near future… Exciting stuff! Rory even dug a pond out for the piggies. They’ll work the land for us and make it nice a fertile for planting in September, and then they’ll be kicked out of the garden and have their own little paddock else where.

And yes we’re still tackling these never ending piles of mimosa trees. We burned a few of the “mulching” piles while we could. The ash will be useful in the garden too, and apparently you can make natural soap from it too. There’s now a fire ban in place until the autumn, so we’ll be putting the rest through out chipper. We have endless amounts of firewood for years to come. Some of the large ones will be used for building too, such as the large posts for the garden and pig house.

WatersEgde is starting this week so stay tuned on how our natural swimming pool is coming along,… and so much more! 

If you want to come help or know someone who would like to live and work in exchange for food and accommodations at Cara Creek Eco Lodge here’s our workaway page link with more details. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook too for more frequent updates. And as always thanks for reading along as we build and live our dream😀.

April 2018 — Team Clearing and (nearly) Summer Weather

We kicked off April with the most epic Easter egg hunt here at Cara Creek Eco Lodge, and continued adventuring and exploring, rain or shine for the week that Rafa was here. He loves the fact that just simply living here is one big adventure. Rory’s mom, sister and nephew joined us for a few days too. We met them in Porto when they arrived and enjoyed a day of exploring there before all heading back to the foot hills of the Serra da Estrela. We absolutely loved showing them the progress we’ve made so far at Cara Creek, and better describing our upcoming plans for building this summer. 

bedtime stories with a head lamp🔦

Since then, we’ve been lucky again with some fabulous Workaway volunteers who arrived the second and third weeks of April. Fortunately for them the rain has lightened up, and it's been summer type weather so plunging in the river after work has become part of our daily routine. Well besides the afternoons we’ve had random rain/hail storms😬... But we're getting there⛅!

All the mimosa trees have been cut down for some time, but it’s a whole other beast to now clear up the piles of firewood, small trees for mulching, and rotten wood. Over the last couple of weeks we've made quite a dent in our piles thanks so the help from our awesome volunteer crew. We have plenty of mulch that will be used to shade out the mimosa trees, and for our future garden. With a bit of wet weather we’ve been able to get through some of the larger piles by burning them, which goes a lot faster than mulching.

Jenny and Ben (aka Benny and Jen) and Adrianna have also continued with the supporting wall for the spiral shower. Aurelie and Jerome (who designed the spiral shower) are returning from their holidays -- and by then we should be ready to begin the rammed earth process. Alex and Jo have decided to commit to staying with us until mid July, and focus on helping to develop our permaculture based organic garden. If you or anyone you know is interested in coming to join our team please follow the link here. We continue to love meeting volunteers from all over the world -- at the moment from UK, Mexico, Australia, Portugal, and France and Netherlands once Aurelie and Jerome arrive back next week.

Rory’s still making some finishing touches on the octagon deck such as posts on every corner to then put a shaded roof, and some hand rails on every other side. But it’s totally usable in the meantime so it’s been wonderful to host some yoga classes down on the river. Everyone has raved about practicing there so far.

As we begin May, we’re looking forward to getting some consistently good working weather. We have plenty of volunteers booked with us through May, so there will be lots of progress in the coming weeks. If you want to join our adventure see some detail here and contact me with any questions! Follow us on Instagram and Facebook for more photos and frequent updates! As always, thanks for following along!