Updates from around the Farm

Hello and happy Sunday! Its been quite an adventure this week, and we continue to move forward not only in time but also physically progressing on our projects.

Here is my lovely wife @ecoinstante looking out her kitchen window. The building team has made good progress but this week I also had to meet with an electrician and a metal bender to make the doors/windows. In the above image you can see that the kitchen is open, this space is next to the camp ground and could be rented out by groups, they can even sleep in the living quarters upstairs. For now, we are sleeping there.

The cement plaster application process is not something I had seen close hand before, but was fun to watch. With a flick of the wrist, about 1000 times, the whole wall gets covered and then smoothed down and touched up.

This plaster gives a longer life and easier maintenence to these block walls, plus its a lot prettier!

In the meantime, I've been working on a few other projects besides smashing rocks in the road. I am hurrying up to implement a new cropping system before Christmas rolls around as well.

We have an area that has started natural ecological restoration, and we have taken some days to go through and chop out the underbrush. Then we took another two days to limb and prune the trees left behind. This space, already populated with many native species of trees, including lots of guava trees, will be perfect for my new agroforestry system. I want to talk more about this, but for now its enough to say that I estimate that when this system gets underway in about 5 years, we will be at least 3x as profitable per acre as growing coffee, and likely more due to not needing expensive fertilizers or poisons.

And here is where we hit the first adventure of the week. This young lad I work with enjoys climbing the trees. He seemed to be doing fine, I even took the above picture of him high up in a guava tree.

A little later in the day he was up in another guava, chopping tangled vines while his partner pulled at them from the ground. I set down the chain saw and came over just in time to see something out of looney tunes. As one guy pulled, the other made the final chop and....

PHWANG!

He's fine. It's fine. Everything is fine. He tumbled to the ground and took a trunk to the chest on the way down, kept rolling and found himself stuck.in a pile of brush. He got the wind knocked out of him, and we helped him out and slowly walked him down to the car to take him to the hospital.

I drove him there and even sang him a song about how he was going to live for many more years, he remembers it fondly even if neither of us can remember the lyrics or melody anymore.

After some imaging and consult, they gave him some anti-inflammatory medication and told him to rest.

I'll keep you all up to date on his progress.

And of course I haven't forgotten about the poop!

Hopefully we will get the tanks to install septic this week, I will be taking pictures all the way, this is one topic I have always been nervous about.

Freedom and Friendship!