A spell of beautifully calm weather allowed Jasmine and Marco to head out to the Calf Islands with Nick. The seals were in fine form.
When a helper turns up with all his own work gear you know you have struck gold and Marco proved no exception. Unfortunately, (as he openly acknowledges) architecture is not his forte. Having chopped and stacked this entire wood house a gentle nudge sent it tumbling. Come back Verena!
Christian's axe handle is now operational and no, you can't use it!! It is a dream to use, absolutely no vibration at all, and only two people in the whole world will ever get their hands on it (and even Christian will have to ask very nicely!).
Sorry about that, but as the ever increasing list of breakages continues to grow so my tolerance starts to dwindle... Now to make another sledge hammer handle - thanks Marco. On the 21st of March about 10 o'clock just after having a nice breakfast in front of the sea...Suddenly it felt like if it was 6p.m. !
Time to use the telescope to watch the solar eclipse. It was so nice to see the moon slowly moving in front of the sun !
Unfortunately the axehandle broke during the last bit of chopping for the Holz Hausen. Luckily, Nick had a large leftover log of finest ash to be processed into a new handle. Today we did some splitting to get a right sized piece of wood. If there is some bad weather during the next days we will give it a basic shape and then step by step plane it into a nice handy handle. Zum Bearbeiten hier klicken.
Since there has been a lot of wooding going on over the last few weeks, we obtained a massive pile of logwood. For easy (and aesthetic) storing, Nick chose to build a second Holz Hausen close to the duckpen. A Holz Hausen is a traditional Austrian way of storing wood in a circle pile with thatched roof. The name derives from its shape, looking like a little wooden hut (Holz Hausen = wood house). It's quite easy to build, a nice way to store odd pieces of wood (you can simply put them inside the circle) and also really beautiful. Using some reed from the ponds close to the beach, the roof was thatched in one afternoon session. The wood will be ready for burning in about one year and keep the next generation of WOOFers warm.
This week Nick decided that the time was right to crack out the donkeys. In West Cork it is common practice to use seaweed as a fertiliser come mulch come compost. Over the past couple of weeks we have been digging the vegetable beds so that they are ready to be loaded with seaweed. The seaweed will rot down over the winter and nourish the soil so that it will produce masses of tasty vegetables next summer. Seaweed is regularly ripped up from the seabed during the wild storms that frequent the Atlantic coastline. Loads of it gets washed up on beaches where keen gardeners are then free to come and load their cars, tractors or (as in our case) donkeys with the stuff. The Rossbrin property runs adjacent to the shoreline and quite a few of its fields back right onto the beach. There are no roads so these beaches can only be accessed through the property. Not only is this an amazing luxury, but it means that Rossbrin enjoys most of the seaweed pickings exclusively. It is a 1km trek through the fields and up into the vegetable gardens, and this is an awful long way to lug multiple loads of seaweed. So - in true permaculture style - to combat the problem, Nick (the owner of Rossbrin) decided to acquire two donkeys solely for the purpose of baring seaweed from the beach up to the vegetable beds. A little crazy? Perhaps. Fun? Definitely! Written by Yasmine: Rossbrin WWOOFer
For more information see my blog too! http://averywholesomeadventure.weebly.com/the-wholesome-adventure.html |