A few of us in Benfeita have got together to form a wholefood coop. Anyone within what you regard as a reasonable distance of Benfeita (where the orders will be delivered) is welcome to join.

The coop is an informal group, has no legal standing, is non-profit, and is run by members on a purely voluntary basis for our mutual benefit. There’s no joining fee or anything like that. The only rule is that no member seeks to profit from others voluntary effort, so no setting up business selling products bought through the coop.

We have just placed our first order with Essential Trading Coop in Bristol, UK, and figure on ordering roughly every 3 months to guarantee free delivery, which we get if we order over a certain amount. Deliveries can become more frequent if enough people join to qualify more frequent orders for free delivery.

While ordering primarily from Essential just now, we are concerned about food miles and about encouraging the growth of organic food in Portugal, so our long term aim is to be able to source local suppliers who can provide a comparable range of organic produce at similar prices. It’s also a potential outlet for any coop members supplying organic produce.

We have set up an online forum for order sharing – not just for the big Essential order, but for any smaller orders people are making as individuals from local suppliers as well – coop admin, member advertising and all manner of other communication. There’s a lot of potential savings to be made buying as a group beyond wholefoods. Take a look at the forum for examples. If you’re in this area and want to join, details are on the forum. It’s all in the early stages right now and will become what members make it, so if you have some good ideas, get involved!

Part 1

(Click on links for remaining 2 parts)

Part 2

Part 3

I’ve looked at several options for our cooking and winter space heating, but all have ultimately been filtered through a single criterion: efficiency. Most conventional woodburning stoves are not very efficient. A compromise has to be reached between combustion efficiency and comfort since so much of the heat generated is immediately radiated from the appliance. Efficient combustion = a room too hot for comfort. Conversely, a comfortable ambient temperature = inefficient combustion. That inefficiency has a number of downstream consequences; a large annual firewood requirement, creosote and tar build-up from incomplete combustion, increased frequency of cleaning, fire risk, etc.

A big AGA-type cast iron woodburning range with a back boiler is a wonderful thing to be sure (I grew up with one), but it’s a bit like one of those all-in-one printer/copier/fax machines: does all of those jobs, but none of them particularly brilliantly. It takes several hours to bring up to running temperature. Heat your water for a bath and you can’t bake at the same time (forget about running radiators – they really don’t work too well). Cook too many things on the top of the stove and the roast potatoes go soggy. If you’ve got good dry hardwood, it is possible to stoke the fire well enough to do all 3 but you’re down to your underwear and sweating into the frying pan. And in summer, a cooker like this is far too hot to use in comfort, so some alternative is needed.

Having gotten on a roll with the KISS principle in the renovation of the building, I started questioning the convenience of the single heat source and wondering whether it had eclipsed a more balanced assessment of the total energy input involved. Firewood takes a lot of effort to fell and chop (or alternatively a lot of money to pay someone else to do the felling and chopping). If we could halve our annual firewood requirement by lighting a fire only when required, maximising its efficiency both in terms of heat production and delivery for the purpose required and by storing surplus heat for later release, it ought to far outweigh the inconvenience of having to light and tend more than one fire.

Just as importantly, burning efficiently means minimal build-up of toxic deposits and virtually no greenhouse gas emissions.

So I have a cunning plan. We are going to remove a section of the upstairs wall between the two rooms and rebuild it as the core of a masonry heater, fed by a firebox in the living room. The use of the wall itself to store heat from the stove means that we need only burn one stove-load of firewood at maximum efficiency every 12 hours to keep a constant comfortable heat in the two upstairs rooms.

Below it, in the kitchen, a rocket stove will serve as our cookstove. With much greater efficiency in delivery, a rocket stove takes far less time to bring to running temperature than a cast-iron range and does not store heat so can be used year round for cooking. It has the additional advantage that it runs on much smaller pieces of wood, so harvesting the wood to run it can be less labour-intensive (it can even be done easily enough by hand rather than using a chainsaw). Last, but far from least, a rocket stove can be built for a (very) small fraction of the price of a cast iron range cooker.

A separate (possibly also rocket) baking oven will be built on the exterior of the building. Both rocket stove and bread oven will vent into an external chimney above the oven which, in winter, can be diverted via dampers into the masonry matrix upstairs before returning to the chimney.

I’m also considering running pipework for winter domestic hot water through some part of the system at the same time.

So. Question. How interested would you be in attending a series of workshops based around the construction of this integrated cooking/heating complex? The way I’m thinking right now is that we will have separate workshops based around each component of the system – the masonry stove, the bread oven and the rocket stove – with the option to attend any or all. The response I get to this post will determine whether or not we do this.

The Dodge

Well mostly that’s down to Helen as Pepe isn’t too handy with a saw or a pair of secateurs, but she’s very good at being a guard dog. A very warm welcome to both!

Pepe

Stereo sawing: cutting the day’s firewood (the standard Portuguese block size is too big for our stove)

The book does still appear to be available direct from Bill Mollison’s Tagari Press for a more modest £18/€20 (£37/€42 including shipping to Europe), but this presents something of a dilemma. You can’t give something back to one of the guys who started it all without giving an equal amount in support of an insane use of finite resources to deliver a book half way round the world. What to do? At least there is now an alternative to lining the pockets of Amazon booksellers …

UPDATE: This has now been removed due to copyright infringement.

I’d already realised I hadn’t made a big enough wastage allowance in my calculations, so had ordered up a dozen more lengths of flooring in the morning to collect from the woodyard in Coja at 4pm. This was going to eat into my construction time too.

Imagine my surprise when a full yurt-raising team plus dog and children arrived! I felt terrible to disappoint them all, but utterly blown away when everyone just pitched in and helped work on the platform, and even clear terrace walls and strim some of the overgrown terraces, while the children and dog enjoyed the waterfall.

Then Sarah and Blossom joined us bearing cake and camera, so there are even pictures of the event.

I drill. Sophie hammers.

Teamwork. Amber (hands on hips) directing operations. (And before anyone asks, that’s a doll in the foreground …)

Andy already regretting his comment “If only you had a strimmer …”

Another piece of flooring to be laid.

Aonghas and I left at 4pm to fetch the extra wood in the hired Renault Clio we’ve been driving this trip. Of course it had to be the case that the lengths of flooring were just that wee bit too long for the car. The guys in the woodyard didn’t seem to foresee a problem and just tied the tailgate down, but the road to Benfeita is not a particularly smooth or straight one and it wasn’t too many jolts and corners before the whole lot started sliding gracefully out from underneath the tailgate, threatening to litter the road behind us. We came to a halt to reassess. There wasn’t much in the car but assorted children’s clothes (mostly damp), a couple of sturdy Intermarché eco-shopping bags and the baling twine the woodyard guys had used to tie down the tailgate, but with the shopping bags and baling twine we managed to create a container to stop the wood sliding out the back and arrived back home exultant (and even in time for a beer with everyone down at the café).

Although I’d already seen community (permaculture and otherwise) in action here in Portugal, it’s been something else again to be on the receiving end of it. The way everyone just comes together and helps out with a happy good humour and heaps of great advice just bowls me sideways again and again. So many thanks again to everyone — that’s to the Quinta das Abelhas crew, their neighbours Anita and Amber, and the travelling family Smudge; Scott, Alice, Isabella, not forgetting Milla the dog.

To come back later to fetch water and find two bottles of fizz lying cooling in the waterfall’s plunge pool is just the icing on an already deliciously rich cake. We’re saving them for when we can really put the yurt up, and hope we’ll have many of the same people around then to share them with.

More pictures on Andy & Sophie’s blog here.

Though he doesn’t mention the word ‘permaculture’, he’s achieved this by applying permaculture principles. This is a really inspiring talk.