In the Stone Room

Sometimes wonder what's the point of having a completely independent say-what-I-want site, then never actually use it but to post a few family snaps. Pathetic. So much going on, so many issues, ideas, great thoughts (or fools' illusions), crises local and global to discuss, to share, to link to. And what happens? Nothing.

Is this blog a diary of a few events that I have encountered - or a platform to issue forth my take on the world around us? Clearly the former so far, but I am tempted to paddle into those more hefty questions that surround us every day: new economic paradigms, imminent peak oil, climate chaos (and denial campaigning), bothched agriculture policies, misguided humanitarian aid and recovery programmes, the general head-in-the-sand mindset of our generation, the lack of fresh cream in town, the irrelevance of our kids´ school curricula and the lack of alternatives save us quitting everything we do so we can teach them from home and generally withdraw from the local community. Long breath. These and many more. (That was nice, making a huge long list, with total disregard to grammar, syntax and flow, just because I can). If you're still reading you are part of a tiny droplet of humanity that is, and for this, I salute you.

So I sucumb: The happenings of our life. Here's some stuff from November last year. Which reminds me of another thing (last distraction for this post, honest) :Why be compelled to sticking to the chronological order of things. This happened today, or this month. To hell with that! Loads of stuff happened to us like 8 years ago, or 3. Or last year. When I have an inspiration I'm going to get it out, like it or not.

So where were we? November, a few months back. Hywel visted from England to lend some wisdom on dry stane walling, working with lime and straw building. (Here seen playing with wood too, maybe just because he's not allowed to at home, or too busy on lime courses, but here with our elven friend (Paulo) building a wee woodshed on upper camp.







We went a bit mental with the front gate and, at João's insistence took it to pieces (with his new stone-block-moving toy), expanded the entire entrance way so we drive in and be nice lazy modern shoppers. Principally however I suspect was so João could drive in easier with his truck loads of rock or whatever and not carry it from the road. In any case, we took down the wall, shifted untold tonnes of earth into Vitor's tractor (to top of land, a future workload of Eygptian proportions) then rebuilt the wall under Hywel's all-knowing eye, all dry stane and solid.



Hywel and Paulo were keen to show off their lime skills. Little wonder, it's amazing stuff, which I'll blether about in another post. Our task at hand: pointing. Test the "cal viva" or active, living lime (what do you guys call it again?) which costs a paltry 6 euros for a 40 kg bag. We mixed it with sand: 5.5 sand to 1 of lime. And water. Let it fizzle and pop awhile and boom: we had our first pointing mix. Kira, seeing something new happening (finally!) insists on being in on the scene, grabs a pointing trowel, shoves us out of the way and takes centre stage in front of our new tutor.

The key, Hywel explains, is to maintain moisture for a couple of weeks after application. Not too hard in late autumn, though summertime we'll need a hesion sheet and regular spraying. João - local stonemason, cement disciple - monitored progress closely. He complained (of course) but mostly about our haphazard depths of pointing. He liked the material. I think. Time will tell. Anyway, we like it, so there.

Nikita picked it all up really quickly, as per usual (annoyingly quickly I have to add).













What else? Lots of stone washing. This is a whole new excuse to dress up as a Jedi and wield a purring staff, threatening to soak the enemy to death with a micro touch on the 180 bar trigger; Ungh - melted Jabba, you will make.

Our task: clean earth, lime and cement debris off the walls that have been buried below a concrete render for the past 50 years or so. First, chip the bloody cement off the damn wall (this is a nightmare not really worth telling).

Anyway, fun had by all till it gets really boring. Then you just keep going. Good machine though.








Downstairs sala (more like a dungeon) came up lovely. Actually all we had to do was to wash off centuries of pig shit and cow-hide, then a few more recent decades of more civilised workshop use (by former owner Senhor Felix Rodrigues and his watch-fixing obsession people keep telling me about). Directly upstairs, the main rooms, also stripped of internal plaster, ready for a good wash. Ceiling gone, almost ready for the roof to come off, new one on, and all that house building stuff that seems to be an impossible mirage (delays caused by local planning office taking forever to give permissions, and national roads authorities blah blah).

To end this stony post, some more glimpses of the new-old walls...



















Enough of Kira posing. Here's two other fanatics - mushroom fans. Fungi Freaks. Nuts...





















Have to admit these parasols tasted pretty good when cooked right. Though you'd need a couple of kilos to satisfy this pair first.

Week in the life of Casa Felix

January has been as busy as any other, though we still don't have planning permission so can't actually start work on the house. So we have spent way more time working the soil, which is mostly a gritty, sandy affair, high in acid and not very productive. So this is has become one of our tasks here, one of my obsessions even.

Arguably one of the most important things we have to do globally: figure out how to make soils productive without importing
fertiliser, using herbicides or pesticides
(all of which are made from fossil fuels) .
Here Kira's on our new raised beds, made in the chicken's former home, so we thought it must be fairly well fertilised. More on this design later.

This month Aljo visited. Former skateboarding conquestor, skate pad inventor, mountain bike builder and traveller. It's been a long time since last we connected, and in fact Alj represents the the first of my board-riding mates to visit.

Loads happened. First: moving dirt (see left). Their had to be a better way to move a few tonnes of this stuff from "up" to lower down the land where I want to build a new terrace for planting bamboo.

So we build a ramp to cross three terraces. With chipboard kindly flowed by Maria Fuentes (Galician sawmill).

OK this took a day or so of labour, but I swear it will save time later. Anyway it was quite surfable...

Here the chickens decided they had to give design advice, but just ended up getting in the way.

Next we decided to build a wall to stop catch the falling earth, creating the next terrace at the same time.









Then we went down to our river / watermills area to cut some chestnut and alder trees - for building projects later in the year. We are following local advice on felling trees at the "minguente" or the waning moon of January - when the sap is at rest, it means the wood will be better for all kinds of uses, be less vulnerable to bugs and diseases, will warp less, etc.

These chestnuts were first spotted by Hywel, who is big on coppicing. Cut them, he urged, and they'll grow back. In fact they had proabably emerged from the stump of an old chestut, cut about 15 years ago. I climbed up to tie a rope way up each tree, so Aljo could put tension on the rope, to help the tree fall the right way. The bark comes off easily, newly felled. Aljo's paw showing the girth of this one, only 10 years old. We'll probably use it as a post for a new outdoor kitchen outside the main house.

Then it rained. So we took refuge in this local river-cave.

Back up for air (to the terraces on the hill) we transplanted an olive:









Mulched trees to prevent weed growth (robbing nutrients from their second year of growth. Under the cardboard we chucked in some composted chicken and sawdust manure. Above it, we've now added forest leaves, straw and anything else we find lying around that's organic and soft (no more spiky things, like I foolishy laid around them last year).














Back at the camp, we revisited the slowest-to-build solar heating system in history. We need to build a frame around this panel now to enclose the 4m2 glazed double-doors we were given. More on this sytem later - when we get it finished...











Meanwhile, under strict instructions from Charlie and Lyra (the cats) the chickens are tractoring away on the lower terrace. See how much they have "ploughed" in just over a week. We move the cage every couple of days or so. Potatoes and peas following shortly behind in Feb.





Just as Aljo thought he could take a break, we whisked him away for weekend labours: clearing the local community youth club's tennis court. Yes: a tennis court! (OMG). And yes we can use it, and yes they definitely want people who are any good at the game to come and teach local kids how to play. In fact this local youth club is just kicking off again after a few years absence. I've been asked to be part of it in some way, so hopefully we'll have lots of opportunities to share ideas, games and projects with them, local kids and families soon.



Of course clearing this abandoned court /football pitch meant we had a source of oak and pine leaf litter, from year. Perfect for that tree mulch job:)















Finally we have all become servants to the cats, who need to be moved from house to land every day (we still live off site).
Here Charlie, clearly irritated by our delays growled "Are we leaving yet or What?"

Winter in Scotland

Scotland was covered in snow this winter for weeks - weeks! I can never remember this happening.













Anyway, it was nothing short of amazing. But to keep this short lest I never actually post these pictures up, and never get time to catch up with everything else that's going on, I'm going to get on and talk about our igloo.


It all started with some mediocre sledging attemtps, which then turned into massive snowball making sessions. We rolled these lumps together and made the first wall. Never having done anything like this before we just gave it a bash, making each layer lean progressively inwards...


Pretty soon we had a couple of walls heading towards each other. Shawn's pizza oven design helped to understand how a vaulted structure holds together.

Nikita (principle architect and builder) and myself before the roof closed in further.

By this time we'd put hours into this thing, not knowing if it was going to thaw anytime (we needn't have worried. It stayed sub zero and covered in snow on and on).

But as the temperature dropped to -5, then -10 the snow became unworkable. It needs a bit of stickiness to it to work as a binder...


Nice spot for a winter home






Basic entry way done, we had our first guest - John, fresh from living in the Highlands in caves and bothies, was happy to give it a test fire, with a couple of sleeping bags and decent underlays.


John insists he slept like a baby, despite the gaping entry way and meagre tartan door.

So next warmer day Nikita and another crew of enlisted volunteers (shown right)














built a classic crawl through entry way... we then imported some raided straw from the local farm, carpet felt, a donated carpet (thanks Vicky!) built a few candle shelves and we were set up for the night. Cosy one we had too.











after which it became our external party house / meeting point. Wish we'd slept there EVERY night....














Team Traquair clearly taking over here:)


Parting shot, moring of departure.


all pics can go up on to picassa if there's any demand.

How to make soil / Como fazer o solo?

How exactly do you get food to grow in depleted or poor quality soils? I've tried with little success in Scotland, Kenya, Liberia and now Portugal. What's the trick?

Now settled in one place for more than a few months, a village where people grow vast quantities of amazing-looking things in their gardens, I have seen a few seasons pass and have listened to their stories about what they do to make it all work. Also, we have Paulo on site much of the time: our very own walking permaculture encyclopedia, who's always keen to see the theories into practice.

Although permaculture design covers far more than the growing of vegies I can't help notice the huge differences between the two systems (local's gardens and permaculture growing). Here are a couple of major ones:

Normal gardeners dig their soil over each year, usually use this opportunity to add in some manure of other fertiliser. Heaps of work, happily avoided in permaculture's no-dig method: just cover the soil with loads of mulch (described below), avoid walking or compressing the soil and ecourage loads of soil life to develop: bacteria, fungi/mycellia, insects, worms, and millions of other mini-actors we barely understand but are responsible for making great soil if they have the right conditions. Digging the soil wrecks their world (and is way too much work too).

Weeding: another reason I always avoided gardening - loads of boring work. Instead, put down sheet mulch (shown below) and the weeds are denied light and can't live. Replace them with plants you want. Easy. OK, supposed to be. I'm sure there is more to it, but it has worked for us so far.

Couple of test sites here.

This is a South facing terrace that bakes in summer. Trying to build up soil there to plant berry bushes and small trees and kiwis to shade the whole area.
Neighbour's dog, Pinnochio (our dog's best friend by far) tramping all over it already the swine. We had just pruned a large bit of the mimosa (acacia) tree planted last year, for nitrogen mulch...



This is the next terrace up, the "chicken terrace". Here we want to build up an edge, to keep water on the terrace a bit longer, but also build up soil quality to grow things in. So we started with cardboard, then some nice looking soil with old manure on top, then forest leafy stuff, then newspaper, well soaked. then straw. We found 35 tiny strawberry plants in the shop and punched holes through the damp mulch bed and popped them in. Oh, we installed some micro irrigation pipe below the cardboard too, to avoid the drudgery of summer manual watering...
















Teuru, admiring our handiwork. Next stop: strawberry heaven.



And here is the first garden patch we started this Spring (09). We chunked it full of tomatoes and squash and green peppers. As they started withering into winter, we planted in some lettuces, cauliflower, brocoli, onions and any other winter thing we could find. Where we found weeds we covered them with more cardboard and straw. It seems to go OK, and the soil is imroving a lot, but slugs have chowed through a good share of those new leaves. So next up is how to deal with slugs. Any ideas anyone?

Star of this show: Teuru all the way over from Cook Islands





Paulo in his element with new trainees (James from Tasmania and Teuru)

Copenhagen climate conf: best videos so far

They say it's the most important meeting in history, so much at stake, tens of thousands of people there, millions like me here and can't go. How do we keep up with what's going on?? BBC and all the usual media sources provide slim pickings, not much radio or video worth mentioning, or just interview the senior politicians or advisors (eg Nicholas Stern).

However, the Stupid Team (who made Age of Stupid) have the best show ever, covering each day, intereviewing heaps of key people and dealing with the rising tide of climate change sceptics. Why is it that more and more people are starting to believe the rubbish dished out by the climate deniers camp? Anyway, these videos say it all.

1. The Stupid Show



2. Desmond Tutu's speech to the crowd (that guy rocks)



3. President Nasheed of the Maldives (what a President to have?!)



4. Ambassador Lumbumba chair of the G77 group of nations (this one a bit longer and more serious, but his points are classic)

Thesis on watermills to generators

I just realised that I can share my thesis with anyone if they are interested. Here is a link to google docs for:

abstract, contents pages, etc.

the introduction

the conclusion

Let me know if these even work... And if you want to see any of the actual chapters - these are just opening and closing sections.

Photo: Senhor and Senhora Gonçalvez, by their functioning grain mill on the river Mouro. Interviewed for the thesis - which also gives a rough idea of how much electricity could be produced from their mill, while maintaining their flour milling service.