As I mentioned in my last entry , I finished my tiny house mostly because I set myself a deadline. Aside from the final result, this really shows how good I work with a deadline and a little pressure ;-). And it wasn’t just a random deadline.. It was the date of my (tiny) house warming party!
Over the years I spent some time with project lifecycles and especially systems like the one in Dragon Dreaming and the natural cycles of the medicine wheel resonated with me. Within Dragon Dreaming, there are four recurring phases in the cycle:read more
I’ve been asking myself: When does a house become a home? – Well, I found the answer in an old folk song (probably from the Natives of North America, but I never verified it):
I’ve been travelling a day,
I’ve been travelling a year,
I’ve been travelling a lifetime,
to find my way home.
Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is
Home, is where my heart is,
My heart is my home.
My heart IS my home, but since I put so much of my heart into my little house, it is now also part of my home. My home also includes people I call family and dear friends, so I’ll probably never be truly homeless, but since I moved in, I do feel like I’ve come home. Being in my tiny house feels like a warm hug by a loved one. Not perfect by outside standards, but perfect in my eyes, including all its imperfections.
I do like the motto of the Stark family in the Game of Thrones books, and I do like winter, but the season have been in transformation for some time now. This year, winter seems to be especially undecided. At christmas it had +15°C, only a few days later it was below 0 and looked like this:
Only a week after that, it was sunny and warm again.
I read a while back in a book called “The Vanishing Face of Gaia” (by James Lovelock) that the climate change will result in extremes. I guess that means that not only are spring and fall cut short, but also during the seasons the temperature changes rapidly and unpredictably in any direction. No adaptation periods. I can only guess, but this can’t be good for neither plants, animals or any other living creature. Well, we’ll see what’s to come when it’s here… What did you notice about the weather and climate in your area?
My last blog post about the potential transformational power of traveling was mostly inspired by two trips I took recently. Very different, and yet very similar at the same time.
One included a visit to a couple living in a tiny house in the middle of nowhere, completely off the grid. No electricity, no gas, no running water. Watching them interact with each other and their surroundings. And getting a small taste of how it could feel to have a life where everything you do is in direct response to ones needs for living and surviving.
The other trip was to a big city: Paris. There I had a somehow fateful encounter with a person sharing my passion to really get to know and understand the places you visit. His expression of that passion is through offering specially prepared walking tours around certain parts of Paris, not just showing the sights, but really introducing the visitor to the city, its history, its people. Giving a taste of how it might feel to live there.
These recent experiences inspired my new quest to find the essence of communities – big and small – all around the world, which I will write about in a newly created separate blog: essence of community.
I recently listened to a song by Milow that is called "Against the tide" and had an interesting revelation. To swim against the tide as used in the english language means "to do something that is in opposition to the general movement of things" or "to not follow what everyone else is doing". But the way I see it now - viewing the tide as a river - there are not two but at least three different ways of doing something or living your life in general.
I already started three vegetable beds last year, and extended my garden to house another four. I was planning on planting tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, peas, beans, carrots and a mixture of herbs. At the beginning of the year, my enthusiasm and motivation was great, but it diminished over time… mostly due to a very well known garden-pet: the slug!
Since the garden is in a rather musty and wet area there were huge amounts of slugs! They left my tiny and fragile tomato plants mostly alone – I guess that is due to the fact that they have a special odor, but everything else was gorged down in almost lightning speed (especially for a slug). My equally tiny and fragile cucumber and zucchini and pepper plants seem to be the most delicious thing the slugs had seen.
My frustration with these creatures grew by the minute. I was researching all kinds of ways to get rid of them either without killing them or at least without being too cruel about it. Nothing seemed to work – except just picking them off one by one… And that isn’t less cruel if you kill them afterwards and also far too much work to do on a regular basis. Also it didn’t keep my fragile non-tomato-plants alive anyways.
I read about creating all kinds of rough surfaces that they supposedly do not want to cross, and odorous plants that they do not like… they didn’t care at all about the surface, they only disliked lavender and rosemary, but loved loved loved thyme (the day after planting, I found about 15 or more slugs on the one plant), and even though they surely disliked the lavender and rosemary, that didn’t keep them from eating the delicious plants right next to them. I would have liked to go the permaculture-way and get a runner duck, but what would I have done with it as soon as the slugs were gone??
But after spending a lot of time, thoughts and observations, the tide somehow turned. I became more and more fascinated by these creatures! There were so many different kinds in my garden that were all slightly different in appearance and behaviour. There was the rather normal dark brown spanish slug (Arion vulgaris), but also differently coloured ones that were lighter and had yellowish stripes.
And the most fascinating one: the tiger slug (Limax maximus). Almost right away, I noticed something different about this slug. It wasn’t as inactive and slow as the others, but almost like a sprinter-slug. Only later I first heard and then read that they are the predators among their kind, because they not only eat plants, but also the eggs of other slugs, and sometimes even other slugs themselves!
A few weeks ago, when I first thought of writing an ode to my new pets, there were still quite a few of them around, but now, as I wanted to take some pictures, I almost couldn’t find any! It seems that they only like it here until June or so, because now it’s too dry for them and they apparently moved on to moistier pastures… – until next year
Is their name a coincidence? I can’t tell for the history of the word, but it is definitely true for my new strawberry-patch! A very dear friend contacted me and asked if I wanted 30 or so different kinds of strawberry plants. And who says no to such an offer? – not me!
So with the help of another dear friend, I prepared two beds, both 5×2 meters, then we layed out the black “mulching and anti-root” sheet and fixated it on the edges with soil. Usually, strawberries create offshoots around the mother-plant, where new independent plants will develop, which is usually a good thing. The sheet however keeps them from forming roots in the soil. This is necessary in my case, because I don’t want the different kinds of strawberries to mix.read more
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