Some meals from the kitchen

We have tried a few new tastes and cooking techniques and thought to paste a few photo's to tempt your taste buds.

Have been baking quite a bit of bread on the fire (in a pot)

Tends to work quite well as long as you have the time to watch the fire and maintain a constant, medium heat. Am pretty sure you can use any bread recipe. The trick is to cook over coals and not flames., so you have to keep manuevering coals and logs around. It also definitely helps to keep adding coals to the lid of the pot. This helps turn the pot into an oven more effectively.
Here are a few photo's of a typical evening baking bread outside.

The kids do actually wear clothes some of the time.
We normally let them do a couple of marshmellows and act like pyromaniacs.

We tend to do a wholewheat loaf, with a bit of syrup thrown in as well.
We did a great cheese loaf the other day as well.

We had crayfish the other night, which was really good. We can defitely dive these out ourselves and made sure we brought a licence along with us to do so. They are different from the West Coast rock lobsters we are used to in Cape Town. You also have to observe a season.

We tend to boil briefly until pink.
Then cut open along all of the underpart (head to tail)
You then use a bit of brute strength to break them in half.
Remove anything that looks like it will taste bad and trickle some melted butter, garlic, lemon and black pepper over everything.
If you haev coals going then you can add cheese and melt this over the tails.
Make sure to get all the meat in the legs.

We normally get half a dozen oysters when we go down to the beach at low tide.
These are definitely free range.
.
I am the only on in the family that eats them, so it is normally just me, my black pepper, tabasco and fresh lemon.

Tastes even better when you have got them yourself from the rocks.
A good tin mug of dry white wine also helps he cause.

I had never eaten Sea Urchins before so had to try these.
I picked a couple of each kind that I found.
Remembering what I had read once, I turned upside down and using a sharp knife gave it a full labotomy.

Removing the top of the skull, you could quite clearly see the yellow/orange "caviar"
I simply scooped this out into a bowl (you don't get a lot)

I tried some on its own, some with a drop of lemon, and lastly some on crackers.
It was pleasant to eat. Tasted like a combination of an oyster and a mussle with a hint of nut.
The texture was like caviar, but soft enough to turn to paste against the top of your pallet with gentle pressure from your tongue.
I did feel a bit bad on three counts.
1. The looked so pretty in the rock pool.

2. Their arms definitely move around on the table while you are swallowing them with a cracker.
3. They definitely were not substantial, so it felt a bit unjustified killing four of them, and still having a full dinner afterwards

Cleaning the carpets

Don't you just hate it when that happens.
You know.
It's Saturday morning and you really need 15 litres of fresh, wet, warm cow poop, and you cant find any anywhere.
Man, I hate it when that happens.

We normally have so much fresh cow poop you have to skirt around it.
Well. Saturday I had to walk for 35 minutes to get enough to do the floors.

We needed to re-dung our floors as the dust was getting pretty bad in the house.
We had been putting it off for quite a while (oddly, it wasn't difficult letting "rub fresh cow shit into your floor by hand" slip to the back of the chore list)

Our neighbour, Nonezile (non-neh-zee-leh)kindly showed us the ropes as we broke into virgin territory.

Once we had collected about 15 litres of cowshite (wet, very fresh, no crust)
All we needed was water to add.



I kept waiting for the secret ingredient.
There was none.

Basically you dump a bucket of fresh cow and bull dump into the middle of your floor.
Add a whole lot of water.
Get your hands dirty turning it into sludge. (I believe sewage farms use the term "slurry")
Then you get down on your knees and smear away.



The technique (in case you want to try this at home kids, don't ask permission first)is really about keeping it wet and slurry like, and using the edge of your little finger and the edge of your palm as a squeegee.



Remember when you were a kid and you went for aswim in the pool in the dark alone.
Of course there wasn't a shark in the pool.
But.
In that one James Bond movie they press a button and the pool has a secret door that lets in a shark.
So you laugh at yourself, but your heart speeds up a dash, and you get out quickly, and tell yourself it is simply because you don't want to miss Magnum PI.

Well, halfway through mixing everything with your hands, you have the following unavoidable thought process.
"I know I collected all the poop myself"
"It was all definitely cow poop"
"I definitely didn't get any human poop by accident"
"80 percent of the village poops in the bush and grass"
"I wonder what time Magnum PI starts out here"
"I wonder what higgins will be p to this week"

For about 30 minutes it smells like a cow shat in your lounge.
Then it smells sweet and rich and reminds you of horses and summer and clover.
Honest

And it is soft well insulated.

And free.

And it only took us about 20 minutes. And that my friends is quicker than a vacume.

Goose, Freckles and Snuffles

Our chicken experience was going to be as follows:

On Tuesday (2 days) we receive chicken wire, poles, wood, roofing.
I have chosen a really good spot a chicken run, including a nice coop, allowing easy access to collect eggs.
I would put the word out that I wanted 4 hens and a rooster.
I would then select premium stock.
We would keep them confined to the run for about a week, and then let them out sometime around 11am each morning once they have laid their eggs.
They would range free all day, digging and scratching around to their hearts content, sometimes followed by a few baby chicks.
At night they would come in to roost.

Our actual chicken experience was ----------------------------------------------------------7612777777777777777777723333333333333333333333333333333333aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

(Sorry, the above was the kitten walking across my keyboard - no kidding)

Anyway, back to our actual experience as follows:

The kids and I arrive back from seeing Sonja off (she is off to JHB for three days)to find a white fertilizer sack with three semi live chickens inside. They have their feet tied and are bundled on top of one another.

.

The top one looks alive. I am not sure about the bottom two.



Our neighbour has walked half the day to get them for us, So I can hardly say no can I? I pay her the R50 she tells me is the price per hen(This is about 40% more than a frozen broiler form the supermarket)

I have no fencing, no poles, no chicken food, no plan.
I have three gasping, dying chickens, and three freaking out kids.

I stay calm and have a cup of coffee.

I decide that I obviously need to get them into a holding cell for three days until I can get a coop built.

My ideas of a picture perfect coop go out the window.
I get the canopy off my bakkie (pick-up)
Bang together a few bits of scrap wood and rusted wire I find thrown away.
And put together the ugliest chicken run in the world.
I want to scream out to everyone that it is only temporarily



We get all three out of the bag and into their temp home.
We get them plenty of water and I manage to bum a bag of chicken feed from David, down at the lodge.

I get my first decent look at them, and honestly. They all fell out the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.
They are so shocking, they are kind of creepy.



Of course, the kids adore them.

All three are instantly named.
Skye chooses one and names it Freckles
Mila goes with the big, John Cleese looking one and calls it Goose
Caleb names the dark one Snuffles (which is vaguely funny, as in Snuffed, died, killed)

I have to promise solemnly that I cannot kill any of their birds without asking first.
Mila and Skye inform me that I will never kill either Freckles or Goose.
Caleb is pretty open to the practicalities of farming.
You can kill mine, he informs me.
Good chap.

But to tell the truth, they are so freaky and weird looking.
I could never eat any of them.

Mila is busy negotiating that "babies" fall under the same protection.
Not to worry, I am not spreading these genes any further.

Next trip to town I am buying 6 Rhode Island Reds, and a grand rooster.

Building a composting Toilet Part Two - The Structure

Once we had the hole dug and just the top of the blue drum sticking out of the ground, it was simply a question of putting up four poles, and a floor frame.



Then putting on the floor (with hole cut in it to fit the top of the drum snugly.



Place our pre-made lovable loo around the top of the drum (site tested by Mila. Then we added on a roof frame,wall frames, a door, and wrapped two layers of shadecloth around the whole thing. We still need to put the roof on, and our plan was to (painstakingly) cover the outside of the walls with groovy looking bamboo strips. But for now it is shadecloth, which, although not waterproof, is very light and airy.



We have a double seater. One for solids (down the hatch) and one for wee which goes into a bucket that needs emptying every few days (wee only - I don't have that strong a constitution that I am going to be emptying crap buckets without barfing)
Here Mila tries out the pee pot.



Followed by the real Macoy.

The idea is that once you have done what you need to (and finished off the chapter you were on), You simply wipe. There is no adding of soil or compost or wood chips. The platform off the ground means things should dry out on their own. Once a week I collect some cow dung, mix with with a bit of wood ash from our fireplace, and sprinkle it over all that lives below.

The pee bucket is currently emptied by hand, but we will fit a pipe as soon as we have a vegetable garden fenced, and will drain this into a banana garden, along with some grey water.

Some New Birds Spotted

We have been so busy getting things built and working on various projects that I definitley haven't had time to do any bid watching.
However, I took my binoculars out with me yesterday when I went on a field visit and spotted half a dozen new birds that I hadn't got on my Bulungula list.

European Swallow
Lesser Striped Swallow
Brown Throated Martin
Red Shouldered Widow
Red Collared Widow
Lanner Falcon
Greater Double Collared Sun Bird

I really need to get into the forsts and take some time to have a proper look.
The new field we are going to begin working on next week is right on the border of a really thick forest.
When you stand on the edge you can hear these really exotic bird calls that sound very African and inviting.

I am sure I can expand my list three-fold if I took the extra time.
I might try and bribe a couple of ornithology students to come and spend a week here in tents and do a comprehensive census.

To view the entire master list you need to click on the Bird Watching catagory description.

Have also seen some awesome birds that are already on the list.
Had an awesome view of an African Fish Eagle flying from the forest out over the lagoon.
Also lots of kingfishers. See three or four varieties any time you walk up along the river. The Pied Kingfisher, and the Giant Kingfisher, both also fish in the rock pools at low tide a lot, for saltwater fish.
Also unusual for somebody from Cape Town are the Crowned Hornbill, the RedBilled Woodhoopoe and the Green Pigoen, which has these amazing red, orange and pink, beak and legs, and and emerald green feathers.

All quite beautiful.

Attention: Mr. Bill Bryson, Writing Bloke.

Attention: Mr. Bill Bryson
Living on the Big Island

Dear Sir.

I was heading down to our new loo recently with my well worn copy of A Short History of Everything under my arm. Let me hasten to assure you that the book was for reading and no other purpose. (Please do not feel insulted, I do some of my best reading on the loo)

I am into my fourth read of the book.
I managed to understand at least 80% of what you were explaining in my first read. And then promptly forgot about three quarters of what I had read. I find that the 20% that I can recall doesn’t quite get me though a discussion at a dinner party. (by the way, I am amazed by how few people actually know what percentage of their pillows are made up by dead skin and mites while eating their soup)
I have thus promised myself that I would read your book at least twice this year. Slowly, and with furrowed brow. This should get me up to about a 50% recall, and that sir, should see me through until dessert is served.

Anyway, back to my visit to the loo and my dilemma.
The problem that I experienced had to do with my wife.

On my second visit, to what has turned out to be a very pretty outhouse indeed, I noticed that my book was missing. Needless to say this upset my routine awfully, and something I was really looking forward to, turned out to be a very ordinary experience indeed.
Afterwards, having made a more thorough search, I found the book, pushed down between the box and the wall.
I suspect this was no accident as there is a member of my family who frowns at and looks down upon my reading habits.

I carefully watched my wife’s next visit.
She also carried a book in with her. Careful detective work on my part proved that the book was a Xhosa Speaking course, that we are both meant to be studying.
Yes, in short. Homework.
Now homework is obviously important in anybodies book. But I would as soon take homework to the loo as I would take it to some other pleasant and peaceful event, like a trip to the cinema. It makes no sense.
I am also prepared to admit that there may be an argument for me to learn Xhosa, although one could also discuss the merits of 99,36 percent of the village learning my mother tongue.
Also, my approach to the matter is to combine religion and language, and here I feel that I may be onto something new. I believe that purposely, and purposefully, not making a conscious effort to learn, will free my unconscious mind, which National Geographic tells me is all powerful.
I suspect that this approach, combined with a religious epiphany, will allow me to suddenly begin to understand a foreign indigenous language.
Instantly, and out of the blue.
Anyway. This is my plan. And it is my business.
And my choice of reading matter is also my own business.

However, in the interests of meeting my wife half way, to the crux. Please could you and your publishers consider including an abridged English-Xhosa dictionary at the back of your next print run.
I cannot imagine I am the only one in this predicament.
Who knows, it might even boost sales.

In the meantime, I have removed pages 83 to 127 from our Oxford English-Xhosa dictionary (Flower/intyatyambo to Monday/uMvulo) and pasted them in the back of your book.
This is obviously not ideal, as amongst general aesthetic and practical issues, I lost quite a few words when I trimmed the dictionary pages to be the same size as your paperback.

Even though I am sure my wife will be happy to see that I am making a move in the right direction I feel the only real answer will be getting a move on with the new print run.
Lets shake a leg.

Yours in appreciative reading.

Hamba Gashle

Charles Starling




PS - my son found the journey down, and the general working below, more interesting than the book. So perhaps a couple of pages of drawings to be coloured in, might also be worth considering.

Creating a Composting Toilet: Step 1 - getting the hole right

This is not meant to be rivetting reading, but I promised myself that I would record our loo building and shower building, as it wasn't easy for us to get information when we were looking for it.

So unless you are under pressure to build your own long drop, dunny, out-house, crapper, privy or toilet. You might like to skip along and wait for the next poetic blog about how Skye helped rescue a baby dolphin that had beached itself. Or not.

There are five things you are aiming for, when building a loo:
1. Being Environmentally Friendly
2. Being comfortable
3. Having some privacy
4. No smell
5. No Flies

We came up with a simple model of our own, combining (borrowing and stealing ideas)a little from everything we had read and heard.

To achieve the first three points are easy.
It is the last two, the smell and the flies, that are tricky.

To remove flies and smell, you need to focus on the following:
1. Keeping things as dry as possible (wet poo smells bad, very bad. Dry poo hardly smells at all)
2. Creating a living loo (No chemicals. You want your solids to decompose and get eaten and processed and turned into compost. You want a lot of earthworms and creepy crawlies and microbiological activity. They are your friends. They should make your loo smell alluring, like the sweet woody smell of a forest after the rain)

Our design was simply about digging a hole,as deep as we could without being buried alive
I suspect the kids wouldn't have minded the extra excitement of the old man being buried though.
Sonja, lovelingly gave me the following advice: If it caves in on you keep one hand in front of your face and stick the other up in the air. As I was alone when digging, I presume this was to make finding my body easier.
I can see the thought process - "well, he is under already, and it would save a whole lot of work. Lets just get his hand back under and close it up.

Anyway, back to digging. Once we had got as deep as we could it was then about creating a chamber, or cave at the bottom of the hole, where we would encourage bacterial and microbiological life to flourish.
Into this we would drop our used goods.
To stop the whole thing from caving in, we would create a vertical tunnel up from the chamber to the loo seat, by cutting out their tops and bottoms, and then joining a couple of oil drums to form a tube.

Once everything was filld in, the top drum would stick out the ground slightly, and into the lid of this we would fit a 20 litre plastic bucket (again with no bottom). Around this we would fit a wooden box, with a loo seat. Easy.

Imagine for a minute you are a piece of crap. For some of us this is easier than others. Upon attaining your freedon you would free fall (without touching sides please)through the 20litre bucket, down through the top drum, down through the bottom drum, and gently land on mesh platform about 30 cm from the bottom of the hole, where you would get dried and eaten quickly, and turned into compost. And shat on. Eventaully you would trickle down through or over the platform to the bottom of the chamber, which would itself be lined with a mattress of grass and living microbiological organisms and earthworms and you would be converted into rich soil.

The whole structure is buried, and the only part not covered by earth is the top quarter of the second drum sticking out of the ground.

We will fit a chimney (extraction) pipe into the top drum, (A PVC Guttering downpipe) that we would paint black. This should attract sunlight and then heat the air inside the pipe, which should then rise, carrying out any odours that there may be.

The only vaguely tricky parts were creating a "roof" for the cave that we could fill soil in on top of, and making a mesh screen at the bottom of the drums to catch things (yes, shit) and keep them about 30cm off the ground.

Here is how we did it:




Choose a site with a good view (this is for the comfort part)




Dig a hole about 1m wide and 2 meters long.\




Dig deeper.




Go about 2 meters deep (or until you hit water) Water is bad. It makes things smell. Dry is good.



We hit clay at about 2 meters. We waited overnight and went to look the next morning and we had a small amount of water collecting at the level of the clay. We filled earth in to take us back up above the level of the clay.



We now needed to create the chamber at the bottom of the hole. It needed to be about 30 cm high and needed to remain hollow once we had filled everyting in. After we filled in some earth to above the water level, we then built up some sides at the bottom of the hole to create a ledge to rest the top of the chamber roof on. We used old logs as they were free, environmentally friendly, and already had some microbiological and fungal growth.



On top of this ledge we created a "roof" using some old rusted window frames that we had found. This did the trick perfectly. We now had a sturdy roof support, about 30cm from the floor, strong enough to support the weight of the soil when it was refilled, and strong enough to hold up our tunnel of drums. But with at least 30 cm hollow space to encourage drying and composting. We lined the bottom of this with grass to form a dry mattress.



When all of this was in place we collected a bucket of cow dung that was semi-dry. We made sure to keep all the insects and microscopic growth with it, and then sprinkled this liberally over the grass on the floor.



We even collected and added a whole lot of mushrroms we had found. (We really want that bottom chamber to be alive and active)
I also secretly added a 10g bag of baking yeast.
All good projects need a secret ingredient.



The whole thing was now teeming with life, and there was plenty of room for everything to breathe and compost.



We then put the bottom (rusted steel)drum into place. Then it was a question of placing off cuts of corrugated roofing around the drum to form a roof over the chamber below. We simply overlapped these until we felt we could fill the sand back in the hole and it would not collapse inot the chamber. We then filled the hole with soil. Now we had a steel drum looking down into an empty chamber.
We inserted a platform at the base of the steel drum, with holes small enough to stop most solids, but that would let liquid through if required. We added a whole lot of dung and mushrooms to this as well. This means that most of your solid waste actaully stops about 30cm above ground level. Having air above and below will let things dry out more quickly.



Next we fitted the second drum into the first. We had opted to make this drum a PVC one, as the idea is that we can slip the whole top structure out and re-use it when th hole is full. (Not in my lifetime I hope)
So all we lose is the bottom drum, which is old and rusted and we got for free anyway.



Once the second drum was in and aligned, we filled in with soil all the way to ground level, then we fitted the white bucket, so that I could line up the structure and floor when I fitted it, and last of all we cut a hole for the outlet vent.

Then it was time to move onto the actual structure.

The geko eggs actually hatched

Great excitment from the kids as the eggs we had found and hoped were geko, actually hatched, and actually were, so we had tiny little geko's heading off in all directions. Hopefully they stay clear of the fly paper and don't join the casualties there.



We put a nice piece of driftwood with lots of little hiding holes on it, next to Skyes bed, and released the babies onto that. Of course, they bolted straight over it and dissapeared to groans of "I told you dad..." and "We should have used a jar like I said" etc, etc.

Hope they get on with the new kittens!

Kittens, toilets and school

We will have some blogging to do tonight to catch up on all of our news.

Sonja has started her pre-school. Today is day three and they have about 20 kids attending. Lots to hear here, with many funny and moving stories. She has some awesome pictures as well.
Caleb and Mila attend each morning from 8am to 12.30pm.
Takes them a half hour walk through the village to get to school.

Much more importantly, our toilet is looking beautiful and today I will try and get the roof on so that we can start using it tomorrow morning. Me first, please.
I might run a poll to see which blog is more interesting and fulfilling, Sonja educating and changing lives, or my opus on toilet building.
(with lots of photo's of me risking life and limb down a 2 meter hole in the ground.

We are also slowly developing a routine. We normally are all up by 6am (to beautiful views)Then an hour and a half of chores, dressing and cleaning. At 7.30 am Sonja, Mila and Caleb head off to the pre-school.
Skye and I then start computer work and her home schooling.
Sonja gets back at about 1pm with the kids and then I spend the afternoon doing outside work.

The kids are also dying to post photo's of their two new kittens.
We have one called Tigger, and Mila has called hers Cheetah.
They are reasonably sweet, as far as pets go.
(I am more a farm animal type of person, especially ones that you can milk, get fresh eggs from , or eat)

Stay tuned tomorrow for the school and toilet blog.
Don't feel bad choosing the toilet over the kids.


The donkeys now come inside our bedroom and have to be chased away.
Puma (poo!-Maah!) - means bugger off



We also figured out where all the dog food was going.



Skye looking at a dead fly under the microscope in her classroom on the hill. She has possibly got the best biology teacher in the Southern Hemisphere.



A quick preview of the views our loo will have.




Doing the dishes in the scullery.



Burning our rubbish, another chore.



Explaining to Skye, and having her examine just where the new "time-out" spot will be. None of my kids takes me literally anymore which is a bit annoying. I might have to do a trade in on ones that do.

A peep into what our cottage looks like inside

A very exhausting and fullfilling week-end.
We even got a chance to get up on the roof and repair as many holes as we could find.
We definitely have the worst looking roof in the village.
I suspect that the neighbours are slightly embarrassed by the extent that we are bringing down the neighbourhood aesthetic.
Am pretty upset Sonja didn't get a pic of me up on the roof. I was sure it looked pretty heroic, but for some reason she seemed busy when I called to have my photo taken.
Will now have to pose for it next week (probably with a knife between my teeth)

We have now finished all the furniture we were planning on building.
All that now remains is building an outside porch, putting in a long drop loo, building a solar (jerry can)shower, building a chicken coop, and establishing and fencing an organic vegetable garden.
We will tackle these slowly over the next two weeks.
I will start with the most easy and fun, say, the chicken coop.
Sonja will advocate for the most urgent and back breaking (the loo)
Dammit.

Below are a selection of the fruits of our labour (as opposed to the kids in the pics are the fruits of my loins)



Here I am working at building a water table and a "builders bum".




This has to be one of the most beautiful workshops you could wish for. If it had a level floor it would be an improvment. It is very difficult to get 90 degree corners under these conditions.




Mila agreeing that the new bunk bed is very comfortable.




Skye and Mila dunking biscuits in hot tea.




Caleb taking a break he definitely didn't earn.




A quick semi family picture taken by Skye. Her mother is taking all the mugs to the scullery. Which consists of an outside plastic tub, and a great view.




Mila having one of her spontaneous moments that she is prone to. Have been unable to beat the joy out our of the kids.




Our bedroom. Bit drab with the flash on. By candle light it is much more warm and cosy.




The kitchen area.




The girls beds




Caleb asleep on his new bed.




Our living area looking through into our bedroom.




Our living area looking through into the kids room.




The new bunk in our living area.