Sandbox
New vege garden beds[edit] | ||
| Posted by Nad on 28 May 2014 at 19:32 | ||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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Over the last week or so we've been making some new garden beds for planting vegetables. We've put them in the area that Barry cleared for his and Eduardo's tents a couple of weeks ago. We cleared the rest of the area and divided the cleared material into two groups, the brown ferns and the grass and other greenery. We then organised the ferns into long lines with space between them to walk, and then put the grass on top and flattened it.
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Bananas & Barefeet[edit] | ||
| Posted by Nad on 24 May 2014 at 21:55 | ||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| We've decided that we'll try and go somewhere every week so that we get more and more used to cycling and walking. This week we went to Canela again, we didn't really have any urgent supplies to get, but got a few things anyway. One thing we noticed while walking down a street we don't usually go down that was very interesting was some very large healthy banana trees. This is very inspiring because the climate in Canela is almost exactly the same as our land, it gets snow when we get snow, and frost when we get frost. We heard that the main problem with growing bananas in this kind of region is that their trunks are very sensitive to the cold, so we've been surrounding our small ones with piles of grass clippings. But what we noticed with these big ones in Canela was that they had Hydrangeas growing all around their trunks! Hydrangeas grow really well here so we're going to plant them around our bananas too :-)
After we got off the bus at Vaca Velha to begin the 8km walk back to the land, we again decided to try doing it in bare feet - last week we were interrupted by our 4x4 adventure after only a couple of kilometres. The trail is roughly three segments about a third of the distance each. The first is normal dirt road with some loose-metal and some muddy bits which we were quite confident about doing barefoot. The middle section is forest, half native and half pine, and the last section is mainly fields. We didn't think we'd be able to handle the native forest bit because there are many Grinfa (fallen Araucaria leaves) which are very hard and prickly. We decided to keep going and just put our boots on if and when it got too difficult, but surprisingly we got all the way through the forest without any problem! walking barefoot is really an exercise in awareness, you put your feet down flat so you can shift weight easily if you feel something sharp somewhere, and you always observe the ground and pick a safe point to put your foot down. Applying this process got us through the forest surprisingly quickly. Again as we were nearing the last section of the trail we were thinking that we wouldn't be able to handle it because the long grass is too dangerous in bare feet, but the same thing happened - the problems were all in our minds, and in reality the cow path we follow was all short grass, and there was always a place to step where the ground was visible! in the end we got all the way back home without any problem :-)
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Fruit trees, cycling and bare feet[edit] | ||||||
| Posted by Nad on 21 May 2014 at 16:08 | ||||||
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This post has the following tags: Our second year on the land
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| When we went to Canela in the weekend, there were a whole lot of young native fruit trees being given away in the town square. Some companies give away native trees as an environmental action to reduce their tax burden, and increase the value of their goodwill. We decided to grab a few (well eight actually) since we had just a few days earlier, with the help of Barry, prepared a space along the northern fence line on the side of the hill especially for fruit trees!
Unfortunately there was no way we could take them back home with us, because after getting off the bus at Vaca Velha we had two hours to walk with heavy bags of groceries - we didn't know that we'd be getting a ride in the back of a 4x4 all the way to our door! So we left the plants on some wet ground at the side of the road at Vaca Velha and cycled back the next day to get them. We cycled along the Vaca Velha trail because Eduardo told us it was perfect for mountain biking, but unfortunately Beth found it quite stressful, as she's not used to biking on steep trails full of mud and rocks, and her bike has the wrong handlebars for that and also has broken suspension! On the way back with the plants we went the long route via Lava Pes which is about 23km, but on normal dirt road in good condition. Beth can handle the long rides on good roads better than I can as she's better at conserving her energy. But after the first half I had learned how to build up and maintain momentum on the flat and downhill parts without using much energy, and then using this momentum to save most of the uphill work, so I found the last half a lot easier than the first half. It took us about two hours to do the 8km Vaca Velha trail and about three to return on the 23km route via Lava pes, so there's a lot of room for improvement there yet :-/ Then today we got the plants in the ground, I made the holes and Beth put them in. She worked in bare feet since we're now inspired to go without shoes a lot more after seeing Eduardo tramping through the muddy forest with no problem! So far I've only been going to our beach, and walking the first part of the Vaca Velha trail in bare feet, but next time we go to Canela I'm going to try and do the whole 8km of the Vaca Velha trail without shoes :-)
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