Doesn’t this emptied out greenhouse look like a whale skeleton?

You’ve not heard a lot from us in the last while because we’ve been really busy this month.  July has turned out to be a hot month of big projects.  Our two major undertakings have been having a group of workers from the local agricultural cooperative come up to build new fences, stalls, coverings, gates, and ditches as others of us emptied out and dismantled a roughly 15′ X 90′ greenhouse completely full of 10 years of stuff.  The temperatures have more or less averaged in the mid 80’s, with a few days reaching the upper 90’s.  While we’d conditioned ourselves for this in the last months, and the guys that came up to help us from the cooperative do this kind of work every day, it’s still been pretty intense for us all.

This new fence line, with a large ditch dug above it, will hopefully be less vulnerable to falling rocks which have typically created an annual maintenance headache.

Now that it’s wrapping up it definitely feels good to see all that we’ve done.  We’ve become good friends with the recycling/trash collection guy down in the village who’s shared his philosophy of giving unwanted items a “second life” as we both drop off and scrounge through his piles.  Monika, who has been with us for the last 4 months, has just left with a sense of big accomplishment.  Walker and I have spent some time in the evenings repurposing things that we’ve found in the greenhouse to create a shopping cart trailer he hopes to bike to Turkey.  It’s been fun to build on my experience from having made a shopping cart/bike vehicle to sell tacos during college, and I hope this one’s sturdier to get him all the way there.

This is the pile of materials from the greenhouse which we used to start the bike cart. It should be finished soon and I’ll post the result.

This week is typically the hottest of the summer, and after all the excitement I’m feeling a bit sick and in need of some R&R.   We’re starting to look towards our last month here and what projects we can accomplish before heading home.