Jewels in the Jungle

Heaven in the jungle... butterflies floating through the frangrant spring air... adobe bricks stacking into a kitchen wall... old wine bottles repurposed into window-jewels...

 The dream of the community kitchen is mudding its way into reality:

 Window lintel installation.

 View of the kitchen expansion:

 The walk-in pantry!

 Peep hole... or future shelf hole support?

 From wine vessels to windows... the pleasure of bottling up the walls:

 Preparing for the arching doorway:

Pause in the blog post for ridiculously cute kitten photos:

Okay, now with that out of our system, we can proceed onto the other things we've been doing:  Nettle beer!!  We've also been fermenting our mulberries into wine, and our ginger into ginger ale! 

 Soap experiments:

 Always new friends popping in for a visit.

And why not?  A halloween pizza party, jungle-style, complete with costumes, dancing, live music, and even a little fire-juggling and -spitting! 

To Scare, to Plant, and to Build

 The internship is underway, and the gardens are really growing!

We had to get a handle on the misbehaving birds, who are enjoying our gardens a little too much.  We spent an afternoon making bird scare devices out of recycled and repurposed things.  We had some very creative and truly scary inventions:  an old potato wearing chicken feathers, a headless scare crow with extra large boobs, tinkering tin cans, a pirate plastic ghost, and lots of old cds to flash in the eys of would-be seed stealers! 

 Tumeric planting!

 Purple carrot harvesting!

Poor interns, suffering from so much work after making a Hugelculture squash bed. 

 Mandala gardens resurrected and replanted!

A happy haven for our redworms in the works, with recycled tires and a liquid compost catchment system! 

 Peanuts coming up in the fields!

 The kitchen extention is rising up!

 Lots of mud and bottles--over 200 so far!

 Cob'n'bottles. A good excuse to drink more red wine!

 Always time for siesta time crafting and spanish lessons.

 Of love and mud.

 Up, up it goes.

More building photos to come soon!

Bonus photo: El Arbol de la Vida - The Tree of Life, mud sculpture in the house on the hill.

The blues and greens of spring

 Spring is finally here.  Pollinators abound...

 And the jungle is breathing sweetly.

 The trees are budding nips of life-vibrant green.

And we've added some trees to the forest too.  We planted fruiting and flowering trees inbetween the adolescent native trees.  Food forest on it's way!

Kim and Marcelo's bedroom is finally plastered, planted and sealed! This picture is of the closet wall freshly clay-and-starch painted, and the wood sticking out is for the built-in shelves. (Better photos to come, with us installed.)

 The internship has started, and the soil is brewing.  New pallet-walled compost to complete the circle, feeding our relationship to the land.

 And speaking of earth, we're back at the mud-stomping.

Laying adobes for the kitchen expansion and walk-in pantry!

The gardens: full of blooms...

 ...and worms!

 Bonus photos: Curious friends.

 Copulation on crystals.

Of Cows and Ducks.

True to the sub-tropical winter weather patterns, the butterflies are drying their new wings in the wave of heat that heaved in just after the frost.

We harvested the "culantrillo" (english name, anyone?) that was growing in the sweat lodge floor to make a tincture.  And of course we have had some winter sweats already... and quick dips in the river, oddly refreshing, and bursting with extremes.

Big news on the animal front... we are building a new animal sanctuary/barn/house.  We will be breaking ground this week!  And we now have a new black duck 9traded one of our white ones with a neighbor), who is refusing to be around the old aviary, except for breakfast, even though he has a gorgeous lady duck throwing him the flirtacious tale move and awfully long glances.  I think he thinks he found paradise swimming around in the waterfall pool. 

And our neighbors are loaning us their cows to help us clear our field for spring planting.  Elephant grass in, fertilizer out.  Good for everyone.

 And we get to milk the mama cow! 

 This means dulce de leche, cheese, and hot cocoa delights!

 That baby cow is cute, but he sure is Ornery... so that's what we named him.

 Fresh cut banana stems, the leafy greens frost-bit and turned into mulch.

 Which one's the duck egg and which is the chicken?

 Hey, we're not the only ones living in a mud house in the neighborhood. Except how'd they get theirs in a tree?

Bonus photo: My first view in the morning.  Full teets.