Permaculturing in Portugal

As well as work on the outside of the larger building, we’ve also stripped out the floor in the left half of the building in preparation for reflooring and started cleaning and preserving the chestnut timbers. We stripped the right side of the building last November and it still hasn’t got its new floor yet … ah well … the best laid plans of mice and (wo)men …

In doing so the building revealed more of its life story: something we hadn’t been aware of until letting all this extra light in.

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After a break of the best part of 3 months, we’ve been able to start work on building renovations again. The first priority is to complete the roof of the larger building. The roof over the main body of the building itself is done, but we need to extend it either end of the building to cover the external staircases, and to butt a lean-to roof up to it along the back of the building before it’s finally finished.

Extending the roof area right round the house in this way will, aside from providing covered walkways, give all round protection to the walls from most direct weather action: a major consideration with dry-stone walls, especially ones that are going to be clay-pointed.

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It sounds Germanic and it is. Hügelkultur, Heugelkultur, hugelkultur is growing things in Hügelbeets (“mound beds”) and they have a long tradition in Germany.

Raised beds then.

Yes, but they’re raised beds with a difference.

The base of the bed is a thick layer of wood in various stages of decomposition. Largest pieces go to the bottom, followed by smaller lengths, clippings, brush, bark, etc, then straw, hay, leaves, followed by the upturned sod or topsoil removed to create the bed. The idea is that the wood as it decomposes not only constitutes a source of organic material and fertility for the bed, mimicking what happens on the forest floor, but acts as a giant sponge, holding a large reservoir of winter rainfall and releasing it to plants as they grow through dry summers, reducing the need for irrigation. A deep enough layer of wood may be sufficient to hold enough water for the entire summer.

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Building work on the quinta has been progressing really well lately, despite us beginning to have to watch the weather forecast to plan what we do from day to day. Rain is forecast for next week, so today we removed one of the floors to clean and preserve the chestnut beams so we’ll have something we can get on with under cover next week.

No floor!

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As well as the log stores, the porch for the yurt has been slowly coming together between other jobs – like harvesting peppers (green bucket), giant squashes and pine cone firelighters (orange net bag) – and I’m quite a way further on with the construction since my last post about it.

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No. Not for the houses. STILL waiting on a delivery of more stone (over a month now) and the previous owner removing his stuff (over a year and a half now) before we can progress either of those …

The frustrations of waiting on a succession of Other People before I can get on with what I want to get on with were starting to get to me yesterday. Not only were there the ‘more schist’ and ‘less shit’ items above, I was also expecting a delivery from the local builders’ merchants, some parts of which were already a week overdue.

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Sometimes, when the number of Big Things needing done threatens to become overwhelming, it’s occasionally worthwhile to do a small thing, just for that sense of achievement, satisfaction and progress it can give. Well that’s my excuse at least.

Small thing in the foreground. Big Thing in the background

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Yesterday, while taking a trip up to Piódão, we happened across a couple of instances of fly-tipping. Not uncommon in Portugal. We’re quite into fly untipping, but the small diesel Opel Corsa we’d hired for this visit just wasn’t up for the idea of shoehorning 2 pallets into the back. At least, not without leaving one of the children behind, or incurring surcharges for reshaping the vehicle. A shame as these would have made a good 50% of a compost bin. But we did manage to collect some broken kitchen and bathroom tiles from a heap unceremoniously dumped in a bramble patch off the edge of a precipitous drop somewhere near Monte Frio.

Cleaning up the countryside as well as recycling! Double Brownie points! Though I think I’ve just lost one for being gratuitously smug about it.

Meanwhile, Aonghas and Oonagh have been experimenting with mosaics for our yet-to-be-built solar shower.