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More veges than you can shake a stick at!

Posted by Nad on 24 December 2018 at 23:11

Well we certainly can't complain about our Christmas yield! Things are really starting to take off now, which is a huge relief because we've really been struggling to get anywhere with planting for years now. This has been especially devastating for Beth as she's really put everything she had into the planting side of things, and has been on the verge of giving up many times. She's really happy with the results now and we're both super motivated to carry on :-)

Here we have a lot of corgettes, potatos, beetroot, garlic, broccoli, parsnip and onions. Since I've been away for a whole month I've been able to notice how much bigger things have got too; the blueberry and feijoas are at least another half as big, and the Chuchu and pumpkins are probably ten times the size! All the fruit trees look a lot bigger too, and we have a whole lot of kiwifruit on the way for the first time!

Merry Christmas everyone! The next post will probably be the first for our seventh year on the land :-)

Beth's plumbing projects

Posted by Nad on 24 December 2018 at 20:51

While I spent the last month in New Zealand, Beth's had to get familiar with a lot of tools that she'd never normally use such as G-clamps and silicone. A few days after I left, one of the new water pipe joints that Antonio made burst and she had to learn to connect it back together more firmly using metal hose clamps. This involves heating up the pipe first using a cheap gas torch we bought for R$30 which can only be described as a flame thrower! Not only did she fix the broken join, she also added a tap so that we can now disconnect the water to the island without having to go all the way to the guest house where the water enters the property :-)

After having mastered the flame thrower she had gained a lot of confidence, and so then went on to make another connection to get water into the house and added a kitchen tap!

And then still not content, she added a down-pipe from the gutter into the water tank which involved quite a bit of Gambiarra since the gutter is just a PVC pipe cut down the middle, and she didn't have all the right pieces at hand either.

After doing these three jobs and two gambiarras, she has now earned the right to publicly display her plumber's crack to indicate that her work is of a professional quality.

Note that whale tails are also generally accepted as indicating high quality workmanship in the case of female plumbers, but you should probably steer clear of male plumbers using this methodology.

Posted by Nad on 12 October 2018 at 01:14
Dangerous wasp adventure
This post has the following tags : Our sixth year on the land
I've finally started the job of closing off all the gaps around the roof of the guest house so that birds won't make their nests in there any more. I've got both sides closed off nicely, but when I tried to climb the ladder on the south end, the wasps suddenly swarmed out and attacked me, I fell off the ladder and they started stinging me! It was pretty scary, so I ran away, but they came after me and they're really fast, I could barely keep ahead of them! They finally stopped following me after I got across the river about a hundred metres from the house. Fortunately I'd only been stung three times on the back of my neck. But that was a couple of weeks ago now, which is enough time for me to have forgotten how traumatising it was! So today I went back to try again - but this time I was prepared! I made a gambiarra bee-keeper's suit using a sombrero and a mosquito net :-) When I got up the ladder, hundreds of them swarmed out and attacked me, but I didn't get stung at all and was able to nail all the pieces into place successfully, unfortunately Beth wasn't able to get a good photo of them attacking me from inside the house.

Things finally starting to grow!

Posted by Nad on 12 October 2018 at 00:54

Well it's been a few months since Antonio left - and since my last post! The huge amounts of manure and the regular supply of water have definitely made a big difference, we're really seeing some things starting to grow well now. Here's the beds shown in the last post, there's three generations of carrots, broccoli, beetroot, parsnip and strawberries. Everything's doing pretty well there except that Borroro came and ate all the broccoli, and the strawberries have been the target of leaf-cutter ant attacks. The carrots have good mass and taste good, but are very malformed even though the beds are raised and the soil soft, so we have to figure out what's wrong there. We've started putting orange peel down to attract the ants away from the strawberries which seems to be working so far, and we'll need to put more wires in the fence to prevent the dear and rabbits from getting in.

All the beds parallel to the north fence are doing very well too, you can see the full history of all those beds in vege patch, there's turnip in bed C, garlic in D and E, onions in F and parsnip in G.

The vege patch by the house is going super well too with big broccoli and huge kale (even though it was supposed to be cauliflower), mustard, watercress, rocket and other stuff that we're not sure about the English names for. Also some herbs; parsley, oregano and spring onion.

Going it alone again

Posted by Nad on 20 June 2018 at 02:23

It was Antonio's last day on Friday which was exactly a month of work - he was originally going to stay for three months, but the cold was too much for him and he cut the time down promising to return again later in the year. We set off around midday on Saturday, but only got about 100m out of the gate and the engine suddenly died and wouldn't start again. The starter would rev fine, but the glowplugs dash-light wouldn't come on, so I checked the relay for them which worked fine, and then their 80A fuse which was also working but had no current going to it at which point I was out of ideas. Our neighbour Juca came to take a look at it on Sunday and tried to tow us to a flatter area further up where we could try starting it from being towed with a bit of speed, but it was too muddy for his truck which only had two-wheel dirve. The plan was to see if we could find a tow truck to come out, but a couple of hours later Juca rang and said that on the way back his truck had broken down as well! So his son was coming out on Monday with a mechanic friend and they'd take a look at both our cars.

Our other neighbour Remi was heading to Canela early Monday morning, so Antonio got a lift with him in case the mechanics failed to get our car working. He then got a bus from Canela to Porto Alegre, and he's now on the bus back to Brasília which is a 36 hour trip (he doesn't like flying)!

He has done an unbelievable amount of work on the land in the short time he was here. All the fences around the whole land are replaced or upgraded and many new fences have been erected within the land as a secondary measure against cow-entry around the important growing areas we've planned. He's then made holes filled with manure and lime and garden beds through all these areas, as well as laying a huge network of probably a kilometre of pipes (many of them buried) all around the land so we can irrigate the new planting areas. One of the most important lessons we've learned is that we've been doing things on too much of a small scale, for example one of our typical mulch beds would use maybe three wheel barrows of manure and another three of mulch, but his ones use about 15 wheelbarrows of manure and 7 of mulch. We've been seriously under-watering everything too as we assumed the environment was wet enough that it didn't need much, hence all the irrigation pipes.

Juca, his son, wife and two kids and the mechanic friend all arrived late Monday afternoon and got straight to work looking for the problem with our car. After half an hour or so, they managed to isolate the problem down to one particular part which they said they had no idea what its function was exactly (it must be important though because the engine dies instantly if its not working!), but they managed to do a temporary fix (pulling one of the hoses out of the part seemed to make stuff work somehow) and get it running well enough that we could get to a mechanic in the city to take a proper look at it. We decided to head to Caxias right then while it was running, rather than risk it not starting the next morning in the cold.

We took it to an auto-electrician since the mechanic said the problem was electrical and we showed them the part in question. The guy established that some wires had broken lose on the part which he also didn't know the purpose of, and figured out where they all connected and then everything worked fine again - including the glowplugs and their timer, dash-light and relay! We're at our favourite hotel in Caxias now, and will be staying for a few days for a bit of a rest :-)

Update: I found on the Toyota wiki that our engine is the 1KZ-TE engine (a 3L SOHC diesel) and I was then able to download a workshop manual for the motor and discover that the part nobody knew the purpose of, that had the wires break off and needed the hose temporarily unplugged from to get us to the city, is the turbo pressure sensor which is connected to the intake manifold. The engine control unit (ECU) detects the intake manifold pressure as a voltage from the sensor, and uses this for correction of injection volume control and injection timing control.

Punnets of pain!

Posted by Nad on 08 June 2018 at 22:27

A few weeks ago I found this insane company called Viciado em Pimentas who grow some of the hottest chilli peppers in the world! The guy who founded the company, Fábio Tuma, spent a year developing their own special hybrid chilli plant called VICNIC-1313 based on the Carolina Reaper and the Trinidad Scorpian Moruga - it's hotter than the Bhut Jolokia, but he couldn't beat the pure Carolina Reaper!

I ordered a big selection of their products when I found their company on the net, but they're only just arrived due to the truck strike. You can see my selection below as well as a photo of Fábio and his punnets of pain!

As well as the standard insanely hot sauces, I also ordered a couple of mustards, a ketchup and a barbeque sauce each with an added chilli bite! They also threw in a special free present - some strawberry jellies sprinkled with coconut - and of course they too have a serious chilli aftershock :-)

Posted by Nad on 07 June 2018 at 19:40
A huge pile of shit!
This post has the following tags : Our sixth year on the land
We just paid a thousand bucks for nothing but a big pile of shit - literally - R$1200 for sixteen tons of chicken manure! Actually we gave the guy an extra couple hundred because we ordred it when we were in Canela and told him we'd head home first and let him know if the road was ok for a big truck. Well it seemed ok, but when we returned to meet him and guide him back the road had somehow got much more slippery - so slippery that even the Hilux was sliding all over the place in some parts! Still, he took it slow and got there in ok in the end, but there was no way he was going to do the last kilometre, so we're moving it the rest of the way a trailer load at a time.

Mum & Dad spending time at the land

Posted by Nad on 30 March 2018 at 22:24

The holiday hasn't quite gone to plan, first Dad and Beth and now me, have come down with various sicknesses and we've had to cut out all the hot places (which is pretty much everywhere!) and cut the duration down to just one month. We were unable to book anywhere comfortable to stay in Florianópolis due to it being right on Easter, and so we've spent the whole time staying at our land and at a hotel in Caxias!

We have two waterfalls that are a short walk from our land, and we went to the first one last week:

And the rest of the time has been spent reading or doing odd jobs such as chopping and collecting firewood for the winter and putting glass in the guest house windows - while being careful not to disturb the uninvited guests squatting above!

Mum & Dad's 2018 holiday in Brazil begins!

Posted by Nad on 11 March 2018 at 14:23

Mum & Dad arrived in Brazil the day before yesterday! I forgot to take the camera when we left the land and I've also been changing over to a new Purism laptop that they brought over from New Zealand with them, so the blog has started a couple of days late sorry!

They flew from Auckland to Santiago (Chile), spent a day there, and then flew another six hours across the continent to São Paulo, and then took another couple of hours on a connecting flight to Porto Alegre. Meanwhile, Beth and I drove from the land to Canela where we unpacked all our luggage into the apartment we've rented for the week, and then I caught the bus to Porto Alegre about three hours away to meet Mum & Dad at the airport. Their plane arrived right on time and we were on our way to a hotel about half an hour after I got to the airport. The next morning we had breakfast at about 9:30 and then got a taxi to the bus station to get a bus back to Canela. We all arrived in the apartment at about midday :-)

We've just been relaxing and going out to nice places for lunch and dinner, but one thing Mum and Dad did do here in Canela was visit the Caracol Falls and go on the gondola which gets some very nice views of the falls.

After that we went to lunch at a nice buffet called Paradouro Rural which is a few km out of Canela to the north, they have good traditional Gaucho food as well as a good vegetarian selection for Beth and I, some nice speciality beers and some free Cachaça ;-) They also have tables overlooking a really nice view of the valley, those eucalyptus in the background are around eighty meters tall! It's amazing that it's only 40km from our land, but yet there's tropical fruit there that's really thriving like papaya and banana.

Unfortunately, on what was to be our last day here in the apartment in Canela, it was pouring with rain all night with thunder as well. We thought this probably wouldn't be a very good situation to go to the land in, so we've extended our booking until Monday, and then we'll go straight to Caxias from there. We can do a day trip to the land if the weather picks up, and stay there for longer after Caxias. So meanwhile we've set our selves up for some rainy days in the apartment :-)

Posted by Nad on 06 March 2018 at 00:28
New house design for 2018
This post has the following tags : Our sixth year on the land
Oops! I should have posted this a month ago! The bad feng shui in our house has been driving Beth crazy¹²³⁴⁵ so after getting some emergency interior design advice from our friend Irena, we bought some new furniture in Canela and made some long overdue changes!