Permaculture Project Log

The road to the land is passable now. We split the cost of hiring an excavator to clear the landslide with our neighbor. It still needs a bit of work though.

We’ve made progress on the building materials front. We now have access to an unlimited supply of old tires. The only cost will be transport.

You can do some amazing stuff with tires. If you want to see some examples, do a search for the term “Earthship”. We’ll be using an adaptation of this construction technique that Mike Reynolds and his team developed for humid climates.

The locals we’ve talked to about this part of the project have been very interested. In fact, someone from the local government specifically requested that we take pictures of what we are doing. Old tires have become a real problem in the landfill. The piles have become unmanageable, and some have caught fire recently. So they are very keen to find ways of putting them to productive use.

We finally acquired the poly-ethylene pipe and fittings we need to route the water from the springs down the hill. The next time we have access to an excavator we will be terracing the hill and setting up the next series of ponds.

The ecosystems in the first ponds that we created are doing well. We have multiple species of fish, fresh water prawns and and water plants in here. The idea is to develop out self sustaining environments that produce large quantities of food without polluting the water. Basically it’s a permaculture approach to aquaculture. We’ll get into that in more detail in a later video.

Yesterday we worked on removing what’s left of the tree trunk and roots in the space that is slated to be the shared kitchen. Once that’s done we can finish the framing, close in the walls, and put in a floor. (We’ll deal with the giant boulder as time allows.)

There’s a lot to be done, so it’s a good thing we’ve got help.