A Day In The Life Of Developing...

Before I get to our daily nitty gritty,  let me bestow upon you some images of our day and a half of R&R on Mangengey island - now known as Camp NgeyNgey. This next venture of Tao Philippines is looking oh-so-very promising, as they have found yet another little piece of paradise to infuse with their unique Tao-vibe and innovative-native style. No pictures of our early morning speed boat rides to and from this haven, as we were holding on for dear life and begging the giant waves not to swallow us.

Sunset.

Tukas.

Morning chill time.

Can't get over the color of that water.

After thar breath of fresh air and intake of a whole lot of sea water (did I mention that crossing the Linapacan straight was quite rough), it was straight back to work as we dove into what had become our daily routine...

Waking up on the Tao farm is always a pleasure. There's the coffee with friends, the chitchat about what the day has in store... and puppies.

Look at that face. Wouldn't you wanna wake up to this little guy every morning?

Our car is parked in the nearby village Dipnay, so we take a 20min stroll along a path, a road and a beach every morning to get there.

One of the many views on our way to work.

Things at the Roots Farm have been developing at a speed we did not expect. With a team of a few workers, the land is slowly being moulded into something more inhabitable day by day.
Getting up to our building site used to take us along a winding path behind the greenhouse. Now we have stairs.

Any suggestions on how to make these less crumbly and more permanent?

Our only water source in dry season was a hand-dug well, from which we pulled up buckets to wash up, water the plants, drink (well, the workers and caretakers)... We now have two jet pumps installed, to which we can one day connect an electric pump and distribute water onto the property. They were drilled manually and they had a helluva time getting through our rocky ground. Sadly, after only a few hot and dry days, one already stopped pumping up water - that shows us how quick it can go.

Water is life and water will make or break our project here. On slash and burn land, water is scarce, because no trees are left to hold it in the ground. It will be up to us to reforest as much as we can and hopefully restore the streams and waterways. Until then, we need to dig deeper and do all we can to conserve the little we have. 

Manual drilling.

Water is life.

After realizing how much supplies and tools we were starting to accummulate through needs and wants and presuppositions, we decided to have a simple storage house built. Farm supplies atbp (at iba pa - Tagalog for "and other things") need a home too.

The shed beneath the papaya trees.

And of course, the rise of our house is definitely one of the most exciting and mesmerizing things to watch. The site changes on a daily basis, our future home becoming more and more discernable between the diminishing scaffolding and piles of woodchips. And, as bursts of inspiration crept up on us and our architect, the project has expanded slightly to include... well, an expansion.

Roofing.

Flooring.

Expanding.

More flooring.

With our expansions and additions and ideas, we find ourselves needing more materials on a daily to every-second-daily basis. Thank heavens for the Beast! Our trusty set of wheels has been put to the test with a variety of loads - cement, plywood, bamboo in all shapes and sizes, nipa (a kind of woven palm used for roofing), sawali (woven flattened bamboo for walls and floors) and people of course. 

Sawali. Those rolls are heavy!

Patong - Bamboo that strengthens with time, perfect for flooring.

Lest we forget the heart of the project - the farm. As it is the beginning of dry season, the actual tilling of soil and planting of plants would be quite difficult. The ground is hard and dry and without our water system set up completely, trying to keep even more plants alive than we already have would require a lot of work. 

So instead we are planning and slowly working out own way into thinking like farmers - looking at conditions, thinking of what we want to produce, laying out the land and designating areas for future use. Taking care of the plants we already have - a makeshift nursery of random plants and seeds my mom has schlepped here in the last year and which our caretakers have nurtured and helped grow. Learning about what we need to learn more about. And doing what we can at the moment.

The perks of building a wooden house - Woodchips.
Perfect not only for composting, but for our future compost toilets!

Extending EM - Effective Microorganisms which we use for...everything!
 Fertilizing, composting, laundry

Not their cup of tea - Organic insectiside made of crushed chili, wood vinegar and water.
Ferment for 7 days and it's bye bye bugs!

Another effective way of keeping the bugs at bay.
Planting a wall of "smelly flowers" (marigolds) around the greenhouse.

Our nursery of Noelle's random plant babies.

Birds and Bees. Trying our best to keep these fellows around and happy.

My biggest personal accomplishment this week was the planning and execution of our very first banana circle. This natural system straight from the Permaculture design book is made to absorb your graywater (from washing dishes, doing laundry etc), compost any compostable materials, provide food and look pretty damn good while doing so. It is nature at it's best, a symbiosis between the consumer (us) and the provider (nature). This simple circle of plants is the perfect display of how, after taking and taking what nature offers, if we only understand the natural systems and learn how to feed into them the right way, the chains of energy can be endless.

Here's my step by step. All in a (that's one single) days work.

A circle 2m in diameter with a ca. 60cm wide ring around it. Go 0,5-1m deep.
(The heart just happened during the digging. I think my tough guy worker is a secret romantic.)

Line the bottom with banana leaves (or wet paper or cardboard)
- it's to keep weeds from sprouting initially.
Start filling with larger compostable stuff - logs and branches for example.
It provides a good airated foundation.

Fill with more dry compostable stuff - in our case, loads of thin bamboo we chopped, leaves, weeds and whatever was lying around the property that would biodegrade.

Add some life. Fertilizer, manure, microorganisms.

Pile on more stuff. We likes these coconut husks - dry and bulky and lovely.
Pile up the center higher than your side mound, it will sink.

Start planting. A circle this size can handle up to seven banana plants.
We used plantains and mixed it up with some Red Lady papaya.

Interplant the top of the mound with vetiver and/or lemongrass.
It will hold against erosion, support the filtration of the water
and lemongrass will help keep the pests away.

FInally, mulch the top with whatever mulch you have. We used dried vetiver grass.

The final result can be quite messy at first (unless you are OCD like me).
But once it takes on a life of it's own - with the help of your dirty water and kitchen scraps
- it will be beautiful!

And last, but definitely not least, with every day that passes, our connection to the land and the people deepens. Many of the workers are from the area and are connected to our caretaker's family. One of them is the husband of our caretaker's youngest daughter, who comes along and helps out, bringing along her youngest daughter - a little cutie who has helpled break the ice between us all. It just shows that children don't see social divides, skin color or cultural differences - they're just happy about high fives!

"Up here!"

New best friends. 

Making friends ith the other inhabitants.

"Uhm, are you really trying to feed me grass here?"

Time flies when you're having fun... and when you're developing. There are just never enough hours in a day. We do our rounds, we talk to our workers, we go get materials, we dabble in farming, we sit and talk and plan...and the sun seems to tell us to wrap it up.  We wake up with the rising sun and do it all over again. The days are long, hot, sweaty and tiring. They have taken a toll on us. But this is the first phase of a first chapter of a whole new story and it's the rush and excitement of it all that keeps us going. Can't wait to show you some results of this hard work!

Until then, here are some images of our walk back home (on the days we make it home in daylight)...

Sunset from our hill. Time to wrap it up.

Dipnay bay. The perks of a long day - this sunset.

Walking home along a beach.

What does your walk home from work look like?

Spot the baby goats. 

Transportations, Inspirations and Foundations

I was going to call this post "Setting Up Camp", because that's what the last two weeks were planned as. But as anyone who has ever been to this country (or been in contact with anyone from this country) knows, plans are not only made to be changed, but destined to be. And so did ours... 

Our time in Puerto Princesa was divided into the must-dos and want-to-dos - something like a work-life-balance? We spent half the time catching our breath and catching up on "work" (such as phone calling and blogging) and the other half driving around from one corner of town to another, filling our trunk with goodies from various hardware stores.

Our choice of venues for our leisurely shopping spree.

Our Beast being christened with a heavy load.

Our want-to-do was a trip to the Department of Agriculture to meet a friend of a friend who runs the organic farm there. What a place! Even though it isn't really the greenest season right now, the edible landscaping, herb gardens and beds of all kind of vegetables looked delectable. Mo especially was inspired by the trellis walkway covered in upo, a gourd.
Our conversations took us from soil conditioning to pesticides to educational programs at the DA and the many uses of wood vinegar. We left with many bottles of fermented stuff and smokey smelling liquids.

Mo's inspiration - a walkway covered in gourds.

Edible landscaping. In other words, a sexy vegetable garden.

With a couple of hundred kilos of supplies in our truck, we s.l.o.w.l.y made our way to El Nido and got there just in time to meet the group of workers that would be around for the next weeks and watch the sun go down.

Now, the main reason why this entry is no longer called "Setting Up Camp", is that although we spent the next days driving around from A to B, picking up our life in boxes that we had stored and sent, buying water and food in town and even getting two tanks of gas for our burners - up to today this well planned camp has not yet been set up. In the first days, our "reasons" (yes, we admitt now that they were excuses) was that we hadn't gotten all our stuff together yet and that we always seemed to finish our errands so late, that we decided not to want to set up camp in the dark (yeah, right).
Instead, we reinhabited our tuka in our home away from home, and were once again adopted by our Tao family. And after the first nights of saying "tomorrow we'll get camp set up...", we accepted that that was just going to happen some other day and that's fine too. And with a place such as this and people such as these here at Tao, who would blame us.

And then that morning came... that very early morning. We met with our architect and he handed over the final drawing - which we scribbled on immediately, of course. 

Early morning excitement. Happy homebuilders.

The spot we had chosen for our first little home was on top of a little elevation, to which a path had to be cleared through the vastly spread buho, skinny bamboo that sprouts and spreads on slash and burn land.  

A "hike" up our "hill".

"From here... to here?"

"I think if we face it that way, we'll have the morning sun in our eyes"

Before any construction is started, it is Filipino tradition to make an offering to the land to appease the spirits and ensure the work will be done right and safely. This requires blood to be spilled, quite literally. Though it did take us some time to find a live chicken, a good friend showed up just in time with a very relaxed white hen, happily dozing away in a plastic bag - I believe she had already accepted her fate and saw it as an honor.

Pa-dugo was done in all four corners of the building site and our workers had a good lunch afterwards. 

Offering.

Thank you, chicken.

And then the work began. With such speed that after only leaving for about an hour, the plot was staked out, the scaffolding had gone up and the holes for our posts were being hacked into the rocky ground.

Posts.

Staking it out.

Planing.

Construction site, island style.

Oh the joys of building. Coming in every morning to see yet another step completed, to find yet another little issue we hadn't accounted for, to request another adjustment and marvel at the skeleton of wood that will someday (soon!) be our house. We had never had to make decisions about sanding sealer or varnish before or wonder about the width of that one post and if it will withstand the gusty winds up there. Challenging and surprisingly fun!

Our Beast was also challenged, having to haul heavy wooden posts, mountains of rice hull and a giant load of cement and marine ply wood that threathened to lift us off the front tires. She did good.

Meanwhile, at the bottom of our hill, our little farm started sprouting with the help of our caretaker and his family, who do have green thumbs and are slowly getting into our organic ideas. 

Since it's too windy for seaweed farming, they used their net to plant string beans.

Beating the birds to the chili harvest.

Kalabasa. Pumpkin.

Our rice hull happily carbonizing.

And finally, on a sunny windstill day, we got to explore the reefs in front of Sibaltan. Corals galore. Schools of squid. And we saw something big breach the surface, something beautiful... our very first manta ray! 

Somewhere beneath this glass surface is our manta.

And so our days go by. Wake up, take our morning walk to Dipnay, San Fernando, where our Beast awaits the errands of the day and at the end of the day (usually via a dark and damp boat ride), return to our other kind of camp in our other kind of home. Our tents and hammocks will be hung and our camp kitchen set up soon enough - the construction is flying - and we are excited for that first night on Roots soil. Many other developments are being dug out, set up and planted... More on that next time!

Full moon rising.

Working hard (and horizontal) on what's next :)