Spring Peace

The month of September has been relaxing, refreshing, decompressing, full of love and wonder, new discoveries and appreciation for where we are and what we've been able to do so far. We have been working some, prepping for the upcoming Internship, and relishing in the delights of spring. A few funky creatures have popped out of the forest, as well as some lovely aromatic flowers to fragrance our days...

A Tung tree flower...

This is just an itty bitty baby snake, could fit in the palm of my hand... not that I tried...

This little guaviroba flower is the best fragrance for hammock-hangers.

The translucent, trancendental grasshopper and the giant pecan...

In a nearby town are these inspiring hand-built and -sculpted ruins left from the idealist Jesuit-Guarani community built in the 1600s. It was a place for protection, communal work and living, and peace and worship. Kim took a little side trip there to see and feel...

This is one of our neighbors... a gigantic Grapia tree that locals say is at least a thousand years old. A tall, silent witness to the changes of this place. Oh, the stories it could tell, I'm sure. Would it not weep for so many lost friends, cut down for modernity and replacment by non-native pines and eucalyptus? Would it not scream in anger at the selfish acts of human greed? Misiones is a still place of wonderful forests and water, but that is quickly disappearing. This tree stands as a momunment and a reminder...

ArmadillosMoreMudCrystalLove

This last month has been a busy one... working in between the lovely spring showers and enjoying warmer weather, getting ready for more planting and our upcoming internship! The field of oats, spelt and rye look great after so much rain, and we have added some quinoa and mandioca too। Planting seeds.. tomato, eggplant, peppers, jalapeños...

Expanding our gardens, double-digging into the super rich clay red earth...
The fenced veggie garden has 3 beds now, and we are adding another 4 super long ones for our springtime delights. Just behing the garden is the mud pit for making Earthen bricks, mortar, plasters, etc. The existing gardens are still producing beets, carrots, lettuces, etc etc...

The peas are climbing up the bamboo trellises!
The adobe bathroom is coming along... slowly because of the rain... but still on its way. Looking great, if I do say so myself!This is not the final roof (just a covering for the rain showers), and the walls lack a few more lines of bricks and bottles, plus plaster and paint, but you can get an idea of how it is progressing.
It is citrus season here, and we have oodles of mandarinas, oranges, sour oranges, and grapefruit to get creative with. A grapefruit mate anyone?Or perhaps some delicious mandarina marmelade??This full moon, we transplanted palm trees (Pindò) from our jungle to the entryway...Suki is still milking and so are we. She´s a lovely calf, ain´t she?The yoga platform floor is finished! We sealed it with linseed oil and wax, and now it is ready for some good-lovin yoga and meditation.

And some acrobatics and capoeria too...

This little fella, a tatu, or armadillo, lives next to the yoga platform and can be heard schuffling about in the early evenings. He showed me where his house-hole is, but I had to promise not to tell the neighbors (who might just eat him!) All the lovely showers hav brought forth gifts from the earth-- crystals and geodes and other rocky spectacles are showing up in our walking paths.

Mud Love, Recycled Walls, and Grandiose Carrots

The winter rain showers have brought back the lovely clover, a very important ground cover and a gorgeous creeper on the red earth. The clover is joining our field of oats, spelt, and rye grass.

The rains and cool weather have been bringing forth great riches from the garden... like these fabulous carrots. The lettuce, garlic, arugula, beets, and other delights are coming along delicious- and nutritious-ly. Mmmmm...

We have been busy as usual with our constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions. We took apart our Yoga Platform floor and used the planks to gussy-up our kitchen. We put in one wall (yes, just one) on the south side near the stove to keep out the cold winter winds and driving rains. We added lots of shelves and hooks and even a window (can't be too closed in, you know.) We just finshed our dish-drying rack and have a few other little shelves to build with the leftover wood. The kitchen is really grand now, and oh-so useful for cooking for our always changing community.

Here's a shot of the kitchen (and those beautiful carrots) being put to use. Lunch is our favorite meal... and the biggest!

So the Yoga Platform floor is being replaced by tongue-and-groove hardwood planks, which will make asana practice and meditation much more enjoyable. Plus, the wood is lindisima! Marcelo has been working very hard, and singing all the while, with his radio and eclectic music mix moving to the hammer's beat.

The other big project at the moment is our bathroom and shower house. We have had the stone base done for a while, and have finally started working on the Adobe brick part. Our bricks are gorgeous and stacking into an absolutely wonderful wall, if I do say so myself. Next part is the bottle-and-cobbing. Photos soon to come...

With all this rain between the sunshine, our rivers filled up and the waterfall is back in full force. Here she is... Mama Roja Falls, as magical and inspirational as ever.

Beans, Aloe, and A Salamander

Holy beans! We planted a handful of these gorgeous red beans (seeds given to us by a local farmer at last year's seed exchange fair here in Misiones) and waited and waited and waited. The vines grew green and lush and strong... but no flowers, no beans, no nothing for months. Then, lo and behold, after a long hot, dry season, the beans beaned! And boy did they bean! We have been harvesting and eating and saving up for next season's planting and the upcoming seed exchange fair.

The winter garden is coming along lovey too-- carrots, beets, arugula, lettuce, peas, and other such delights. The double-dug bio-intensive beds (plus all that soil love we gave) are really working well.

We also have been planting oats and spelt in our big field that was formerly overgrown with pesky elephant grass (not so pesky to Paloma, of course, but we have plenty more for her elsewhere). The plans are to keep working out the elephant grass in this field, replacing it with food crops and grains.
Now we have an Aloe Vera garden too, thanks to someone tossing tons of aloe plants out into the road in town, which we happily scooped up and took home. The start of a medicine plant bed?

Other pictures of the quincho (community kitchen):
The leftover floor boards from our cabin became little tables for our cross-legged dining experience-- inspiration from or friends inThailand.
And of course there are lots of delicious things coming out of our kitchen, like crepes and empanadas, all homemeade of course!
Update on the animals: Lulu and Amanita are happy and in love with Rambo, who is perking up after his summer depression, and even wags his stub of a tail in the early morning. Paloma is still giving us plenty of milk, and Suki the calf is big and strong and showing little nubby horns. The chickens, well they give us an egg or two every so often (even though we gave them that luxury coop not too long ago-- stingy little critters.)
Just for the curious: this is how we are keeping ourselves warm in our cabin this winter. Here, this stove is called a salamander, which blends perfectly into our rustic little house.

And this is Kim's new favorite item... an old pedal sewing machine that works like a charm to make curtains (out of recycled fabric.)

Flor de Mayo... the beautiful blooming May flower was given to us by a lovely little old lady with an inspiring garden and orchard, in which she produces all of her own food and then some on a 1 hectare plot of land. And she even has room for flowers!

(This blog entry was written with assistance from Gigi, an 8 year old American card shark passing through Misiones with her family.)

The Kitchen!, Some Musical Delights, and A Chicken House

Finally! We have created a glorious expanded kitchen space, complete with a non-dirt floor (cement), some cabinets and sinks, drainpipes, patio roof, and plenty of sitting space for watching the rainstorms and animals! This has been a long time coming, and we are so happy to have it up and comfortably in use.
(The photos are not so good, as our camera has decided to add a solarized flare to the images, and we can´t find anyone in town to help us fix it. So for now, you have to squint a little...)
This is with the roof extension just as we were working on the patio floor. Trying to keep the dogs, chickens, and cat off the newly smoothed surface was next to impossible! We had to trade off doing Floor Guard Duty, and even that didn´t work out completely. So, we have some paw marks and scrathes for a little added personality. Here´s Lulu lounging dangerously close to the fresh kitchen floor.

And us lounging in the sun on our new patio floor. Ahhhh...
The floor turned out to be in 3 levels --kitchen up high, patio in the middle, and storage/seed saving space lowest. We built a small brick retaining wall (materials from a neighbor brick-maker), then filled in the space with the dirt from our well hole, packed it down, and topped it off with a thin bit of cement and added iron oxide paint-- red, of course! Have I mentioned how glorious it is?? After 10 months of dirty powdery muddy slopey slanty sloppy frustrating un-fabulous floor, we will never take this luxury for granted!

Let´s see, the kitchen has been our main focus for a while now, but in our "free time" we managed to get up a chicken coop too (a little late for the kitchen floor). We had to round up all the chickens and roosters from the jungle trees and entice them with corn into their delux coop. The volunteers built a really cool simulated jungle branch entanglement for their perching delight, and they seem to really be at home now... even giving us an egg or two now and again.

While we worked on the floor, we had to move out our Big Bertha cook stove, but that didn´t stop our dulce de leche making (from Paloma´s milk). Here´s a delcious vat on its way.

The Yoga Shala has also been receiving extra love. We have added some exterior details and will keep working bit by bit to fancy it up too.

Also, we have been expanding our learning sphere into the musical realm. We have some great musician folks who are patient enough to teach us to play some songs on the instruments of our choice. Kim is learning the Quena (a traditional flute from northern Argentina) and Marcelo is reuniting with the guitar, plus we invite percussion, voices, and anything else others want to add to our musical menagerie.



And the long drought seems to be over-- our spring is full again, the plants are greening up, and our garden is ready to hold more veggies. The recent wonderful rainstorms make us all rejoice!