Permaculturing in Portugal

As part of the renovations of the smaller building on the quinta, we intended to create an outdoor kitchen under the new roof extension with all cooking to be done using energy sources on the quinta – ie. with wood-burning or solar. First on the list – mainly because I’ve been itching to build one – was a cob bread/pizza oven.

I followed the guidelines and proportions recommended by Kiko Denzer in his “Build Your Own Earth Oven”, the seminal reference book on the subject.

First, we built a schist stone retaining wall for a kitchen counter, backfilling with rubble and stamping it well down, leaving enough depth for a substantial insulation layer beneath the oven.

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I’ve been keeping deliberately quiet about the work we’ve been doing over the last month or so as it was a surprise for daughter number 2 who’s been in the UK for college interviews (and yes, she was accepted). Now she’s back in Portugal and has been duly surprised, I can at last post about our progress.

This time last year, we built a roof on the back of the main building as part of a strategy to keep the building dry. The dry-stone schist buildings on the quinta, as with most buildings of this kind in this area, are built straight onto bedrock with the ground-floor rooms cut out of the rock itself. As a result, preventing or otherwise dealing with rainwater runoff following the bedrock into the buildings is necessary before these buildings can become habitable.

This year, it was time to give the second building on the quinta a similar treatment.

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At the end of last June, we set out to replace the log store on the yurt terrace which had started to lean precariously. At the time, it was serving as a temporary home for our composting toilet, so to relocate the toilet, we ended up building the cob bathroom. Now, with the bathroom walls slowly drying and soon ready for their coats of plaster, it was finally time to rebuild that log store.

Two years ago: the original compost bin and log store, newly roofed

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It seems rocket stoves are as much part of the natural building vernacular as glass bottles in cob walls: de rigeur for any self-respecting stomper-of-mud, stacker-of-straw and fashioner-of-eccentric-curves. Being innately somewhat contrary and suspicious of fads and fashions, even ones I’m participating in, this fact alone would usually send me running in the opposite direction. But reading about rocket stoves, I was attracted by their low tech simplicity, their apparent ease of construction, how they lend themselves to self-build projects, how they can be made from junk and be fueled with the small branches and sticks that are no more than kindling for more conventional wood-burning stoves, and how efficient a burn they can achieve. So they were penciled in firmly for the buildings here – for cooking and heating water – pretty much from the start.

But theory is one thing: practice another. With a big push on the main building planned for this year, it was time to start experimenting – constructing different configurations of firebricks and clay and stuff and firing it all up to see what works and what doesn’t.

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These short and misty-morninged days around the winter solstice and turn of the year seem made for the purpose of reflecting, stock-taking, planning for the next year …

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The one thing with a back-to-front build like this, building the walls last, is that it’s a long time before the building starts to feel like a real building. It’s been worth the wait though. A month ago, we finally started to build the cob walls.

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It seems crazy that 2 months have gone by since I last posted about the cob bathroom we’re building here. Facebook followers will know where we are with it, but the blog is long overdue an update.

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No vindima in Portugal is complete without the last part of the process of wine production. Once the wine has been separated from the skins and pips and put to ferment in casks or bottles, the remaining must is distilled to produce aguardente.

It was never my intention to get into distilling – I rarely drink spirits – but while discussing matters spiritual with two of the area’s greatest exponents in the village above us, it emerged there was a surplus alambique in the village which the scrap man had his eyes on. With what seemed ridiculous haste, I found myself a short while later the owner of a venerable 80-litre copper alembic or pot still, scratching my head over what I was going to do with it, but somehow certain it was a Good Idea to have rescued it from certain meltdown. If nothing else, I was thinking biofuels …

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Grape harvest! And our first real harvest.

When we came here, the vines had been left unpruned for some time and we had to cut them right back to a manageable size, taking away most of the previous year’s new wood (ie. the next year’s fruiting wood) because it was all too far from the main stem. This meant a very meagre harvest in our first year. Last year, the late rains in May did for pretty much the entire valley. The combination of heat and rain are perfect conditions for fungal diseases to flourish and the young fruit rotted as it formed, regardless of whether it had been doused with chemicals or just left, as we did. But being busy with building, it wasn’t so much of a disaster and we still had grape juice left from the previous year.

This year we’ve had a decent amount. There are still many vines in desperate need of some TLC to bring them back into best fruiting condition, but it’s going to have to wait until we’ve completed most of the building and can concentrate on growing full time.

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We’ve been moving on with the cob bathroom. See the previous post in this series for the first part of the build.

Having successfully established the principle of putting the roof on first in case it rains (maybe I never got over Enid Blyton’s Big-Ears scoffing at Noddy’s impeccable logic?) we’ve carried on with fittings, electrics and plumbing so all can be thoroughly checked and tested before being built into the walls.

Back wall

First, there was the back wall to complete. This is how the original wall ended. Whether it was roughly built this way or at some stage was partially destroyed by the growing oak tree is difficult to determine, but at any rate it had to be closed off before the cob walls were built.

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