It’s already been two months since we made the reservation for the house. The first weeks of waiting felt like forever, but by the time I’m writing this time flew by. So it’s time for an update, because we’re finally signing on the 14th of May!
So what’s been happening in our life the last month and a half? We started a worm farm two weeks ago. We want to experiment a bit, because in the future we want to use this method (but different) for the toilet. This way we can flush our toilet, while all the ‘crap’ that leaves our body is food for the worms and turned into compost. But this is a story for another time. We watched a lot of youtube and copied the idea to start our own compost bin with the red wiggler worms. The idea is that they eat our food scraps, not everything but most vegetables and fruits (except citrus because of the low pH) and bread. Their poop and pee will be collected in the bin and we can hopefully use it in a few months for our crops. We’re growing tomatoes, beans, peppers and zucchini on our terrace so we might be in time to grow super veggies 🙂 We got a big scare after the first night in their new home. They crawled up in the bin around the handels, but apparently this can happen the first days as they’re still getting used to their new environment. We got the worms in a bag through the mail out of France, so they had some hard days behind them. As of now they’re doing good, eating lots! They eat half their body weight in a day, so in our case that’s 125 grams of scraps a day.
Furthermore we’re learning about permaculture. We got the exclusive bible, they say, for permaculture written by Bill Mollison. It was hard to find this book, as Australia is the only place where the book still gets printed. Unfortunately not very sustainable to ship the books from Australia, but we already got lots of sustainable ideas from it to off-set that cost. For example, the design of the land so that the rainfall is collected and has time to slowly sink in the ground as it’s an arid area. We also need to introduce new life to the soil to make it more fertile so we can grow more and a variety of different plants and trees. So first we need to send some of our soil to a company who measures the acidity level and soil fertility in the ground (and more things that I still don’t fully understand haha). So we know what plants and insects to introduce first.
Thomas already made a design for our compost toilet house. Our goal is to make this the weekend of the 14th, so we don’t need to dig holes. It’ll be very simple as we want a flushing toilet in the bathroom in the future. We’re also planning to work on our fence right away. So Luna can walk freely without us worrying that she’ll eat the neighbours’ chickens. And to make sure they’re not too angry if it ever happens, our plan is to impress them with some apple pie.
And as of this week all the finances are taken care off, so we only have to prepare ourselves and buy some stuff to go camping on the land the weekend we sign. As there is no running water or electricity, it’ll be a nice camping trip 🙂
