Hellobee

It was announced today that the quarantine on our island will be lifted on May 16th because we live in what has been deemed to be a low risk area. The quarantine will remain in place for high risk places like the country capital. We don’t know exactly what this means as the specific parameters haven’t been released yet. The island we live on has only conducted about 80 tests for a population of over 1 million thus far, and we have no lab here so swabs must be sent by plane to the country capital, causing a long delay in getting results. I actually didn’t expect the quarantine here to be lifted because the Philippines hasn’t flattened the curve yet. We haven’t had enough testing (~160k tests for a population of 110 million) and if anything our curve has increased, or plateaued in the best case scenario.

We currently have 11,350 positive cases — more than Korea — which was the first country to experience a major outbreak outside of Wuhan, and we have a far higher death rate too. Korea successfully flattened the curve, only to have a new cluster this week when a covid positive man visited 5 clubs/bars over a holiday weekend and came into contact with 2000+ people. Wuhan also experienced a new cluster this week after a month of no new cases. Countries that have been successful in battling covid are now experiencing their second waves, which reminds us that we’re going to be battling this for a long time. And all news coming out of the US is depressing as hell.

Since the quarantine started, the kids have been helping out with our chickens, bees, gardens, compost bins and much more. They are naturally curious and have lots of questions, so we’ve been using farming to study nature, biology, chemistry… even the scientific method. We’re always working on some new project, whether its creating coco peat from coconuts to use as compost, picking flowers to make perfume, making our own sea salt… the kids have stayed busy during lockdown thanks to the abundant nature around us. Plus farm chores are such a sensory experience.

We are taking this time to rethink our lives because there won’t be a tourism industry in 2020, so we have to come up with a new business. On the one hand it’s been nice to take a break from the daily grind and have so much family time. On the other hand, there is a lot of anxiety about finances and future uncertainty. But we are all healthy and have a roof over our heads and food to eat, so we are among the very lucky here.

Charlie taking off some banana trunk 

banana trunks to provide shade for the watermelon seedlings Charlie and Olive planted from a watermelon they ate. The collected the compost from our compost bin, added coco peat, and planted the seeds all by themselves. They were so happy when the seeds sprouted just a couple days later!

Here are the watermelon plants now, 3 weeks after they first sprouted.

Charlie drew this after learning all about watermelon seedlings

The kids helping make noodles from scratch

baking bread

sprouted our mung beans

we made sea salt from sea water

extracting coco peat from coconut shells to use as compost and a planting medium

picking calamansi (similar to lime) while wearing a face mask

we made hanging cabbage balls to entertain the chickens. they loved it!

Olive carrying a big sack of rice straw to make nests for our chickens

an old tire repurposed as a chicken nest 

we made a bee bath so wild bees can drink water.

teamwork!

it’s the dry season now so the bees are busy collecting pollen and making honey!

adding worms to our compost bins

it’s mango season which means they are super cheap (70 cents for 2 pounds), so we are drying them and freezing them

we picked wonderfully fragrant ylang ylang flowers and made perfume out of them