Tierra Dulce – Day 5 : garbage and seeds

The early bird catches the worm, as they say, and today we were the early birds (which was easy as we went to bed early yesterday). After some delicious arepas (we really need to buy corn flour back at home) and hot chocolate (now we know the recipe!), we started this morning’s task: recycling.

Daniel and Christina think (and we’re 100% with them) that all the trash that we leave lying around will be a problem for the next generations. Add to that the fact that there is no regular garbage collection here, and you understand why they never throw anything away. All food garbage is either composted or eaten by the piglets, and the rest of the garbage is piled up in the toolshed. As everything here is sold in a plastic bag, it’s the only way to really be zero waste.

But of course, once the garbage starts to pile up too high, they sort them depending on their future use. The plastic bags for milk (yes, here milk is almost always sold in plastic bags!) will be used to sow future plantations. Most of the other garbage is pushed into plastic bottles to reduce the global garbage volume (you’d be amazed at how much stuff you can fit in a soda bottle!). These bottles will eventually be used in as construction bricks for their future home. Same goes for the glass bottles.

After a morning’s work (for 3 people), we had managed to fit about 140L of garbage in a couple of bottles. So, we kind of felt we earned the great almuerzo we all cooked together. Daniel and Christina keep saying the cooking they do is quick and simple, but cooking does take a couple hours every day and everything we’ve eaten so far was delicious. After lunch we promised to cook some crêpes for dinner (we’re French after all 😉), so we made some dough.

This afternoon we sowed some beans and other seeds around the hen enclosure. In the late afternoon one of the mares managed to escape and not only did she trample a couple plantations, she went crazy and went through the hen enclosure, bringing part of the enclosure down with her!

Once we managed to calm her down, as well as the two other horses which had used the distraction to also escape, we did a quick repair to the enclosure. Then we chased a dozen chickens that had taken advantage of the hole in the enclosure to search for better worms nearby (and eat some of the recently sowed seeds).

As we sowed a lot of seeds in a huge quantity of horse shit, we think there will still be a lot of plants growing around the enclosure. But it did take a lot of time and energy to catch all these animals before dark!

And tonight, as promised, is crêpe night. I’m writing these lines in the kitchen, where the crêpes are currently being flipped over in a pan without handle (we didn’t foresee that no pan would have handles when we promised to do crêpes!). For now we’re managing with a tablecloth (yes, we’ll post a picture if a crêpe ends up on the floor :p).

That’s all for today. More adventures in the next episode!

P.S: sorry, you won’t get the photo, all the crêpes were delicious (well, we’re not really sorry about that 😉).