June/July 2018 — Summer projects and growth

What a whirlwind of a Summer! Work, play, sunshine, rain, work-awayers galore, time away and last but not least time with just the two of us on-site to reflect and plan for the coming months. 

Improved access to the Creek

We’ve had anywhere from 0 to 12 work exchange volunteers on-site at any given time over the Summer. We’ve been fortunate to host some wonderful people from all over the world — Portugal, Australia, France, Russia, Italy, USA, Germany … to name a few. They’ve all offered unique talents and personalities. With their help we’ve checked many projects off the ever growing and never ending project list. 

An after work cool down session on the river beach

Most recently we even had family over lending us a helping hand during their little back to nature work holiday :). Trina, Matthew and Dylan stayed for a week. Trina was so helpful with the daily chores of watering plants, feeding the animals, etc. The boys helped Rory with picking up and unloading tiles, working on ruin number 1, building up the weir on our river beach, and more. They adjusted so well to our rustic lifestyle, and were lovely to have.

With all the comings and goings of workawayers that June brought we managed to complete the fence for the future garden, start the interior framework for the bottom floor of ruin 1, build a “walopini” — our future green house — , fit the canvas onto the tetrahedron, and more. 

WatersEdge has also made a major dent in building our natural swimming pool. Here are some photos of the progress… It has come along beautifully so far!

Big thanks to Alex and Jo for their meticulous work on the fencing for the garden, and all the other projects they helped out with over their 3 month stay. It put our minds at ease to leave the place and animals in their trusted hands while we were away for 2 weeks in July. They’ve moved on now to other projects and work; however, we’re very grateful for all their work during their stay here.

Since arriving back from our trip to the USA Rory build a gate to the fenced area while I wired up the electric. We now have 2 female pigs sisters and 4 hens. Our hope is that they’ll turn over the land and fertilize it to be our future vegetable garden.

In the meantime we are nurturing our small garden — growing some tomatoes, herbs, and roses in the huegle beds just in front of our temporary kitchen. We’re also still nurturing our avocado trees, olive trees, pear trees, and blueberry plants in pots. Bonnie built a little fence around our tomato plants to keep the dogs and cat from walking on them, and they’ve really flourished. Very tasty and exciting trying our own grown food. We’re really looking forward to expanding the garden season by season.

For the bottom floor of ruin 1 we used some of our own eucalyptus trees as posts and beams. Firstly stripping and sanding them. Then fitting them, treating them with borax and linseed oil, and getting them in and adjusted to fit perfectly. They’ll add charm to the cozy reception area that it will be in the future.

The wallopi was build from geo-desic dome kit using the kit and our own mimosa trees here on site. The …. kit gave instructions on what lengths to cut the branches to, and pieces to then link them together. Luke, Michael, and Kevin worked hard on building steps down to the existing hole and digging it out. After cutting and preparing the branches, linking the wallopi together, and placing it on top of the hole, they made wooden garden beds for inside. It came out beautifully, and will allow for year-round growing. The idea being that in winter we can fit plastic over the top to create a hot house, and in summer could swap out the plastic for shade netting for a cooler area for plants.

All the workawayers also all helped in welcoming and loving up on the new fur babies… — a kitten we picked up at a local market, and a puppy whose previous owner wanted to find him a life of freedom to run and play all day. We couldn’t resist either one, and neither have disappointed! “Thunder-Stripes” aka “Tess” aka just “cat” was named by Rafa for her stripey coat and for how fast she is. She’s tiny but with a huge personality, and rules over the dogs. Louie is the perfect play mate for Hank and refused to have it any other way besides to fit right into the pack. 

We’ve been taking some time off having volunteers and working ourselves for a couple of weeks. Although it’s helpful to have workawayers, it’s also important to have some time to reflect and refocus. 

For the coming months we have friends joining us to lend a helping hand here and there. And Pablo is coming from Guatemala to stay for 3 months to work exchange which will be awesome. Our plan for the coming weeks is to finish the interior of the tetrahedron, finish up the first existing ruin and get it ready for winter, and tackle the mimosa which is starting to sprout back up.

Follow us on Instagram and Facebook to see photos of our progress. 

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😀.