BTW: This mail can be forwarded to interested people
Dear friend,
it's chilly here on Monte Parreira, it was 6 degrees Celsius this morning and we had to heat it up a bit to keep it nice and warm in our hut. We recently moved from the van into the wooden house, the bedroom still needs a bit of furnishing, but we can already sleep well. Fortunately, there's no frost here at our altitude, unlike in the valleys, where they have already had night frost today.
Yesterday we had a visit from Chris and Virginia, who would have liked to spend the winter here, but without a car - we didn't know that beforehand, they were driven to us by a friend - it would be too difficult.
We live about 3 km from the tarmac road and the nearest supermarket (Intermarchee) is 15 km away, Lidl and Aldi 20 km. Even though Chris said that he is used to walking long distances, we advised him against it. There are also months coming up when it can rain quite a lot and for a longer period. Then it can be very demanding and challenging to spend the night here in a tent.
But we are also waiting for rain because our new large lake also needs to be filled, of course. At the moment, it is probably losing some of the little water that has already collected in the first rains, which worries me a little.
The shelter is now finished - apart from the sliding door - and we want to complete the final work on the doors in the next two weeks.
This means that the work on our house and the surrounding buildings is finished for now. Now we can start planning the next steps. We are continuously pursuing the idea of setting up a "Conscious Healing Camp", which means that we want to help people in physical and mental states of emergency to regain their strength. This will only be possible through a tourism project, for which we now need to seek help from companies that can advise us. We will also need small huts for this, for the construction of which we will have the capacity next year that was not (yet) available this year.
At the same time, we will be thinking about which plants and trees we want to grow on the site in the near future. We will also seek professional advice for this. After all, we want trees that are native to the area and can also act as fire protection.
In the meantime, we have planted more bamboo, which could later be used as building material. The first plants did not survive the summer due to a lack of water. There are two different species now, one of which can grow to a height of 5 metres and the other even 10 metres, and therefore have a correspondingly strong trunk. These are just starting to grow and are already producing the first shoots, which develop from the underground rhizome.
We are also investigating whether we could grow plants such as industrial hemp, aloe vera, sweet potatoes, ashwagandha, turmeric or ginger in the lower fields. On the other hand, we also want to plant fire-resistant plants and trees and are currently looking into whether we can get official advice on this.
Winter will therefore be a time of planning and preparation for new projects and I hope that we will be able to tell you more about them in the next newsletter.
Love and light, Sabine and Tom
Our house in its final construction stage
Final works with the heating and warmwater
Bamboo
The oven keeps us and the water warm
The upper platform after being cleaned by the ICNF (Instituto de Conservaçao da Natureza e das Florestas)
I wanted to send more pictures, but somehow the programme doesn't work. I had a lot of error messages when uploading. So you'll have to make do with the pictures above. I'll try to find out what the problem is and send the missing pictures next time.
