Completions

Summer is bumping up against us, nudging us into her heat, and opening us up in unexpected ways.

Our 13th internship just completed. Thank you to the great interns who shared the experience and gave so much love to Mama Roja and themselves.

We had workshops on those rainy days, making herbal medicines, liqueurs, soaps, etc:

The inside look at our homemade Fire Cider: onions, garlic, horseradish, tumeric, ginger, cayenne, honey, and apple cider vinegar... delicious immune system booster.

 Soaps: old time hand soap, glycerine, and aloe vera too

 Kitchen on the go... meal-time prep flurry.

 

 Bloom pause.

 Building the back cabin; bottles going in.

 Plaster going up...

 

A tree comes to life...

 School group visits....

 Field trip to the Chacra Suiza... fields abloom...

 The sweat lodge rebuild and a lovely prayer ceremony.

 Pizza party costume Fiesta...

 THANK YOU! to a great group of patient and extraordinary beings who came together to share this surprising and beautiful experience!

And Thank You to the water who abounds around us, refreshes us, gives us her music and her beauty, and occasionally washes us clean. 

shadows in the sundial

Spring is full of flowers and roots, work and play, songs and fires, bunnies and dogs...

Sweet insistent Tumeric, oh how you keep surprising us in the garden! Numerous, generous, a fantastic harvest.

The garden is full of delight. Even the butterflies plant themselves in the beds... of course, bunny manure is seducing magic...

Making Micro-Orgasmic Cocktail fertilizer for the new beds... eggshells, leaves from the forest, yeast, cane sugar, bunny manure, cow manure (aged for added fragrance), grass clippings, wild plants, and a little anaerobic patience, and voila! Excellence for the soil!

 Also, we've been exploring natural paint making...

 ...and testing it on the walls of the back bedroom in the House on the Hill.

 Forking... leads to spooning?

Eating mulberry pie! Mia, the kitchen goddess, is full of surprises!

 The elephant grass, alas, found another use... mulch!

Double-digging the new gardens (aka, the work)...

Sheet-mulching (aka the play), with chopped banana stems and leaves, humanure compost, sawdust, bunny compost, chicken bedding, and elephant grass mulch. Ready to go! 

 Maria being discreet.

 The new mud cabin, getting bottled up.

 Dreamy wall building...

 Excursions in the forest to find medicine plants...

 And wild mushroom harvesting!

 Never too much elephant grass...

 Bunny love!

the pause in each breath

 

There has been a pause in these blog entries, during which time we have been taking a breath, making new projects, finishing some old ones, and preparing ourselves for the imminent inhale.

Meanwhile, the jungle goes on... the flowers of winter are giving way to the flowers of spring. The fruits are plumping up on the papayas that didn't freeze over winter.

 

The citrus flowers are perfuming the air (too bad this photo can't be a scratch-n-sniff.) 

And the ginger and tumeric roots are literally popping our of the ground, desperate to be harvested.

 The forest is also producing a rainbow of colors in all its hidden corners.

 

In the animal world of Mama Roja, Taca is still on the roam, now with parrot friends, a breakthrough! He still comes around everyday for his beakful of seeds and some cooing and coddling from Kim.

 The rabbits are turning out bunnies; the latest ones here in their fur-nest are Yin and Yang. 

The chickens' favorite time of day is still Happy Hour.

And we humans have been hard at work doing some remodels and fancying things up, with mud of course.

 The community kitchen got a new paint-plastering.

 And a new dish-washing sink...

 And a little Mexican tile and paint.

And since this winter has been fairly mild, we have been able to enjoy the river with our visitors and friends. River baths, waterfall dips, music circles, and more.

A "where's Rambo?" final shot:

Wild and Precious

Summer is trickling to an end, and as usual, the butterflies are soaking up the sweet nectars.

 Flowers abound, even the giant bananas are hanging their blooms.

When we are not lost in our siesta dreams or soaking in the river, we have been working on the new cabin with our kooky interns.

 Adobe walls going up....

Fermenting is always a great summer activity: all those yeasts are partying it up in this heat! Here our ginger bug for homemade ginger beer, and a roselle flower ferment for exquisite and refreshing juice.

 Ginger flower in the gardens...

 Tumeric flower...

 Santa Lucia flower with guest...

Other activities:
Here's our new sweat lodge/ temascal getting its bamboo frame tied together.

The cob-n-bottle wall in the new chicken coop/rabbit apartments.  Excellent recycling project!

Speaking of rabbits, here we are tanning some hides. We plan to make some crafts with the furs, so we can really use the whole animal.

 The wood counter top goes into the house on the hill.

 Churning out oodles of our favorite snack, peanut butter!

 Mama Rabbit birthed 5 more little cuties.

The garden is fairing okay, considering the rain and intense sun of this season. The grasshoppers still think everything is delicious.  Now we start planting again!