Permaculturing in Portugal

As friends on Facebook have already found out, I managed to mistake my left thumb for a piece of pine while chopping firewood a couple of weeks ago. Quite a silly mistake really (and not one I should have made after about 20 years of wood-chopping experience) but these things happen when the brain is idling out of gear. Still don’t know yet how I managed to do it, but somehow I managed to split it longitudinally in two. Right through the nail, the bone, and out the other side.

Read the rest of this entry »

Discovered by Helen while digging up the middle terrace to prepare vegetable beds for planting. A Marbled Newt (Triturus marmoratus). These mainly terrestrial members of the Salamander family apparently navigate by the stars to find their way back to their breeding pools. Here it must be right at the southernmost extent of its range.

With the stove working daily for almost two months now, it was obvious the flue was becoming obstructed with creosote deposits. When it got to the stage of smoking the yurt out every time we opened the stove door to add more wood, it was time to do something about it.

I also wanted to make a slight modification to my earlier modifications. (The upside-down flue pipe has been working perfectly. No leakage of creosote or smoke.)

Read the rest of this entry »

It rained!

And the fireworks were awesome. Edinburgh Festival eat your heart out.

The Two Musketeers, Oonagh and Foxglove.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podar no Minguante, menos damasqueiros e morangueiros (prune on the waning moon, except for apricots and strawberries). So says February’s Agricultura/Jardinagem section in the Borda d’Água, the Portuguese almanac that most people hereabouts seem to follow. So we’ve been following suit, especially since our neighbours told us that they’d also been informed that the February waning moon was the time to prune olives.

Oonagh up the tree, Helen cutting the sawn branches into stove-sized lengths

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been busy building a compost bin and wood store, not least because material for composting has been piling up from both the composting toilet and kitchen, and our firewood has been both rotting and remaining damp underneath its tarpaulin.

Oonagh helped for a while, but was really more interested in rehearsing her outfit for carnaval. So Helen and I did most of the work. Both compost bin and log store are now functioning, but we still need to build the roof to keep the rain off.

Oonagh “helping” to build the compost bin

Read the rest of this entry »

With all the time lost in December and january to the torrential rains and getting our basic living accommodation in a habitable state, I’ve been keen to get on with pruning the large number of vines on the quinta. Last year we were only here for 2 weeks in January and I was only able to spur prune a handful of vines without really much of a clue as to what I was doing. I didn’t kill them though, so armed with that knowledge and a few techniques learned at a recent garden open-day in Barril de Alva, we’ve set about tackling the vines in earnest before the warming weather starts the sap rising.

With so many vines to do, it’s not really been possible to adhere to the bio-dynamic calendar, so we have just been proceeding on a daily basis for the last week. In any case, I’m not sure what days vine pruning should be done on. Most people say fruit days, but to my way of thinking, you’d want the vine’s energy concentrated in its roots if you’re going to be hacking large chunks off it above ground, so I’d be inclined to prune on a root day.

Double Guyot vine pruning

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Matt and Kirsten over at Quinta das Abelhas lending us their beautiful Dodge truck conversion when our prospective caravan fell through, we’ve been able to welcome our first WWOOFers to the quinta. Helen and Pepe joined us 5 days ago from a long stay at Quinta das Abelhas and have already made a huge difference to the amount of work we’ve been able to get done.

The Dodge

Read the rest of this entry »

Or is it?

It depends on what you mean by ’simple’. The trouble is that simple (leaving aside simple-minded for a minute) can mean both uncomplicated, and humble, lowly, basic. The two are not necessarily the same.

Read the rest of this entry »

At last, thanks to a load of firewood, I’ve been able to move over to the quinta. The yurt is drying out nicely, the accommodation organised for efficient and comfortable living, and the little Lange stove is performing superbly. It’s so good to be here!

Read the rest of this entry »