It’s been the plan from day one to keep chickens, though it’s taken rather more days than that to get around to it. Keeping chickens is one thing. Exactly how to keep them is another. Free range? Tractor? Permanent pen? All have their fans among the chicken-keeping world and all for persuasive reasons. I thought I had it sorted in my head many times, but then I’d come across an advocate of another method or someone’s bad experience with the method I’d decided on and it would send me off back to the drawing board again.
Since the beginning of October, we – or, more precisely, Duncan with the occasional help of Wayne – have been working hard in the woods above the terraces. These steep slopes of predominantly Maritime pine (Pinus pinaster) have been neglected for a number of years and were overcrowded with self-seeded saplings, wind-blown fallen trees and sparse but flammable understory of Carqueja (Genista tridentata), tree heath (Erica arborea) and bracken (Pteridium aquilinum).
Permaculture, yes, but this is only the beginning. The first baby steps. To truly work with nature, not against it, we need to listen to our elder brothers …
Activities like this – saving seed to plant next year with enough over to share with friends and neighbours – could soon be literally illegal. Technically, in Portugal it already is. Sitting here stripping seed from the dried seed heads of various plants that have been hanging up drying in paper bags recycled from the padaria, I’ve found myself thinking about this often.
As mentioned at the end of the recent post on the ponds, I wanted to make the top pond larger and deeper to provide more variety in aquatic environment and a larger area of water around and in which to grow. It’s now twice the size it was, with an area twice the depth.
I have been thinking for a while now about ways to retain water for longer in its passage through the quinta. Not just for irrigation purposes, but to increase the range of environments we have for growing and to support a greater diversity of wildlife. The extent to which we can emulate strategies like Sepp Holzer’s at the Krameterhof and Tamera is constrained by the vastly smaller amount of land we have to work with, not to mention the topography and difficulty of access, but even on a much smaller scale, the principles ought to be similar.
This is the view from the top of the track down to the larger building on the quinta. In many ways it encapsulates the nature of the “Green Heart of Portugal” – forested mountain ranges cut deep by meandering river valleys, peppered with tiny white villages perched on mountain ridges, surrounded by land terraced and richly cultivated with olives, vines, fruit trees, vegetables … Idyllic.
But it encapsulates something else about the Green Heart of Portugal too – an ecological disaster-in-the-making presently taking hold in Portugal’s forests. The tree on the left is dying.
A month ago we were all nodding our heads sagely and predicting an early autumn as night-time temperatures headed down towards woodstove range and rainclouds gathered. Suddenly the valley was full of the sound of chainsaws and axes as everyone scrambled to get their firewood ready for winter, blocking and chopping the lengths of timber cut earlier in the year and left to dry. We haven’t lit the woodstove yet, but I dug out the winter quilt.
That was a month ago. After a very brief rainy interlude, it was back to summer again. On recent evenings it’s still been 20°C at 10pm with the yurt roof open to clear skies and the garden is showing few signs yet of slowing down for winter. If anything, we have more peppers and tomatoes coming on now than we did in August and September.
The yurt terrace vegetable garden at the beginning of October
Our lack of seed-raising facilities at the moment, coupled with a desire to learn how the Portuguese organise their planting calendar, has this year taken me to the weekly markets on a regular basis to see what seedlings they’re selling. It’s a safe bet there’ll be lettuce and cabbages. They’ve been a steady fixture from January right through to September. But it’s the other stuff that’s intrigued me. Sometimes you have to look quite carefully for it. At other times every stall is full of it, but for a couple of weeks and no more.
