Uh, is it 2024 already?

What's going on?

It's been a while, sorry. We have had a lot of little things going on and it's not always top of mind to post. But here we are, time to ketchup.

The weather here has been pretty nice. I never thought I would get cold in 70 degree (google, fyi, we use Freedom Units here even if they don't make any sense) weather but it's happened. The nights have been really nice, and the drought seems to be lessening a little bit this dry season with some overnight rains and showers during the day. The plants have all been happy, which means more road mowing but we've got a pretty good system on that now. EGO Power, if you're reading this, we'd take a sponsorship anyday if you send us another battery or two. The brush cutter is amazing, just like all of their tools.

Brace yourselves, the build is coming

Our structural engineer finally had his comity application approved and now we have plans stamped by a licenesed engineer. That means we get to start on building. Our first building will be what we hope eventually becomes an AirBnB or rental of some kind. It's not what we thought we'd be doing, using concrete block wasn't our first choice, but it will fit our budget pretty well and it's an aproachable project for us. More on this later, but we are pretty excited to be ready to build and hopefully we can get a lot of the structure done before any hurricane's roll through. Then we'll clean up our camp and move into a home with real walls and a couch.

But first, since we've never done any masonry, let's build something smaller that can fail and not be a major set back.

Shed 2.0

It turns out we need more room. We have most of our stuff still in the shipping container. The USVI adopted 2021 building code which allows a sub-200 square foot building without permit and we've opted to build a future garden/farm shed out of concrete block in order to work through and learn how. Nothing big, 10x12' with a hip roof. More water collection because where it's going will be a great spot for future farming, it's out of the way. The best benefit, however, is that we can move a lot of the stuff tucked away in our container to this shed and finally be able to organize our container. This is important to make our build go smoother, because right now it's really hard to find all the right tools or access them.

Gardening

Courtney has been killing it with the garden. We've got quite a few things sprouting like eggplant, tomato, squash. We also started a tamarind tree and one of the many exciting plants growing is a beautiful Kapok tree (it's about 8 inches tall). These trees are super cool, and at one point the native inhabitants knew how to grow and shape them to be easily converted to canoes. Can you imagine sailing between islands in a tree trunk with none of the modern tools? It's wild, very impressive, and we're hoping to continue our efforts to re-forest our land with native species while adding forest gardens and sustainable farming practices.

It's been a year

We officially hit our one year mark living here. It's been a bit weird not being able to travel anywhere, and kind of sad, but we're still trying to figure out the dog situation. We're investigating some boarding options since it's unlikely anyone would want to house-sit our pups in the camper. Luna has a bad history with boarding and being abandoned but she'll have to deal with it a little bit until we're done building.

Diving

We're slowly getting more confident in our diving abilities but we don't do anything too adventerous yet. We found an elkhorn coral nursery in Cane Bay recently, but couldn't find any more information like how to volunteer to help. Still, pretty neat to see. Hoping to hear whales some day but with all the homestead tasks it's hard to dive enough. We bought some weights since some of the shops charge for those in addition to tank fees. I still get terrified but it's become more manageable.

Summary

It's been a struggle in some ways. Employment is still rough but we've got a pretty good camp and we're making progress toward home-grown food so that will cut our expenses a lot. The road is a continual project but we've cleared our way to the other lot which gave us our best view yet of where we may want to plant plantains, though we'll still have to cut a foot path. EGO did I mention you can sponsor us? The brush cutter makes that such an easy task. I have a few design ideas.

I hope the next 9 months are also kind to us.