COW MANURE AND OTHER THERAPIES

Shiva looking hungry and Grasshopper looking scared

(sadly I did not take this photo, Carina did)

Mostly writers complain about writers block, I think that means you need to go stick your toes into some cow manure, you are just bored. My current problem is that I do not have enough time to write.

We, that is now Shine and Sam and the kids and our volunteers and me and David, we all went on a cow manure maneuver, a whole team effort.  We went into a big piece of field where the cows where recently grazing. We made big piles of dung and chatter and played and loaded it onto the truck and took the dung home. Thanks to the cows we now have a huge amount of compost happening for our garden. The soil here is very much clay, so the cow dung is a life saver for the plants.

I have never ever been as cold as this morning, apparently it was -6, my fingers where so frozen and I dropped everything I tried to pick up, very frustrating and then I slipped on ice. Not a good start to the day! We got up earlier than normal because we had to go to town early, normally I wait until the sun has had a bit of a chance to warm things up, about 7H30ish. The problem is that there is no heating in the caravan and it becomes like a walk-in fridge. 

We have two visitors here at the moment, there is Shiva and then there is Carina, Shiva studies at Durban University and she is only here for a short visit and then Carina is from Sweden and she is also a student. Volunteering, learning and teaching.

Pink! Very pink! Shiva and Carina at a Traditional Wedding in Impendle

David and I fixed the circle for the horses (David did most of the hard work, I did most of the talking), the circle is now closed, but this morning the horses are gone, all 11 of them. They came back later, somebody left a gate open somewhere and they went wondering into a neighbor’s garden and obviously got chased away from there and came galloping back all happy and not so hungry. I really know very little about horse training but I have been visiting them just about every morning, they seem to have a routine, they disappear over the mountain at night and in the morning they come back this side (where the sun is rising) and a little later on they stroll or gallop down to drink some water and then move on to where the grass is greener and where the circle (we fixed) is. They normally run the distance between the water and the green grass. I have no idea why they do that but it is amazing to watch and you can hear them, so you know when to look.

I am kind of up to my eyeball in proposal writing and unanswered emails, so I am going to have to play some catch up this weekend and I have to seriously start doing some marketing for the Eco tourism side of things, that is my total aim for this coming week, I honestly haven’t even touched on that and it is on the high priority list, but so is the proposal.  I kind of find it difficult to focus and concentrate with a lot of movement and noise around me, I am just not use to it. The fact remains we are all more productive if we are in a less busy space, or maybe that is just mad me again?

I also manage to put together a basic website for Rainbow homestead, www.rainbowcommons.co.nr

Carina and Shiva have been doing a bit of a gardening blitz and the beds look fresh and ready with a brand new blanket of mulch and I am trying to grow micro greens in the middle of winter, let us see how that develops. That reminds me, I must still make two trays for Wheat grass….

 Carina getting a nice winter tan.

We kind of live in a bubble of our own, we do not have TV and no radio, so we see something on face book or somewhere else on the internet and you never quite know how much of it is true and you cannot believe what the media tells you either, so we are not missing anything and we are no worse off. 

I guess some people would call this living under a rock, but I see it as living on top of a rock, which it is, it is on a mountain. I am quite sure if the half of America is destroyed by an earth quake or something that drastic happens we will somehow hear about it, but even if I do know, there is nothing I can do about it and I do not want to feed the fear either, so I am trying not to focus on it (feeding it). We are suppose to go into town at least once a week, but that does not seem to be happening.