Archive for Green
Our Green, Green Garden
Posted by: | CommentsWelcome to our beautiful garden filled with lettuces, broccoli, tomatoes, herbs, strawberries, sunflowers, carrots and radishes. Our tomatoes are carefully covered with a plastic green house or they won’t survive the rainy season. Everything else does well outside. We have planted many of our plants from seeds and some from starters we have purchased. We are all very excited about the tomato crop coming in. Our fruit trees were planted last year so they had at least one rainy season to take root and now have their second. We have fruit on all of our baby trees!!
Our future plans include a worm composting program for our fertilizer and a small green house to begin starting all of our new plants. The children will be included in all of what we do. They will really learn where their food comes from by planting a seed, watching it grow, picking the veggie, cooking it and then composting what is left over.
Extremely Cool and Green Clotheslines
Posted by: | CommentsI never thought that I could ever be totally in love with clotheslinesline but it has happened. I was looking on the internet for an efficient clothes drying system. We have an industrial gas clothes dryer but during the dry season want to use our main source of energy, the sun, to dry our clothes. We have so many kids that just getting all the clothes washed, by hand, is tough but then hanging them to dry is even more back breaking. I found Cord-O- Clip on the internet, they even have a video of how it works. I thought this is just too good to be true. So I called the folks at the Clothesline Shop and they promised me the lines work really well. I ordered two 75 foot lines (we actually need about 5 in total) and in a couple of weeks (spending time in Guatemalan customs) we had our clothes lines.
We were lucky to have Greg from ProjectSomos install the clothes lines. Greg’s wife, Heather and I put on the clips and, of course, gave advice. I have to say this is such a cool product. It takes a little time to get accustomed to the process of hanging and taking off clothes but it is amazing. As soon as we had the lines up and the clips on the nannies were behind us with baskets of wet clothes. Greg gave an “in-service” on using our new system and within minutes the clothes were up and drying. This should be a great time saver for our nannies and so much more cost effective and kind to the planet than using a clothes dryer when we have so much sun.
Casa Amarilla
Posted by: | CommentsWednesday our very stark white children’s home got a new coat of yellow paint! A group of excellent volunteer painters from the States began painting in the morning and had half of house painted by the time they left in the late afternoon. I will post more next week with new photos of the entire home painted and an appropriate thank you to our volunteer group and everyone involved in getting our home painted.. I was just so excited for everyone to see our pretty yellow home (which was suppose to be yellow wheat but looks more like yellow lemon). With the rainy season fast approaching we needed to get the outside painted now or wait until next year.