Back in Scotland, our chickens there had a permanent pen we inherited with the property, but most of the time we let them out to range free around the garden. The Portuguese, on the other hand, almost universally keep them penned into permanent compounds with thick wire and often solid concrete bases. This seemed a bit brutal to me. Left to their own devices, chickens spend a lot of their day scratching up the soil in search of larvae and worms, or sculpting out dust baths. They can’t do that on concrete. Coupled with the frequent presence of guard dogs chained nearby, their imprisonment seemed to epitomise the more utilitarian attitude that prevails in respect of domesticated animals here.

But the proximity of the guard dogs is no accident. Chickens are a favourite on the dinner menu for rather too many of the wild and semi-wild animals that hang around the periphery of human habitation here, and there are a lot more of them here than there are in Scotland. Not just foxes and the odd free-ranging dog, but mongoose, pine martens, genets, wild cats, hawks, eagles, rats, snakes … If I wanted to keep chickens, with the emphasis on keep, then they would need predator-proof accommodation.

So a robust and permanent coop was required, even if I free-ranged or tractored them during the day when our presence on the land would deter all but the most ravenous of predators. At the beginning of last May I decided the bottom terrace would be a good location for permanent housing for them. I picked a north-facing spot which gets the least amount of direct sun in summer and started work on the base of a coop, putting in a level platform and the beginnings of a supporting framework. Then, what with the building and the garden and everything else, it got put to one side and mostly forgotten about until New Year when once again I started to think about chickens.

A week ago some friends went to visit a local chicken breeder and I tagged along. There were chickens ready, a month or so off point-of-lay. The perfect number for all of us to have the number of chickens we wanted. So that was it. I had to finish the coop.

The platform for the chicken shed, completed last May

The first side wall takes shape. The walls are double-skinned with a layer of insulation between to keep out 2 more chicken killers: winter pneumonia and summer heat. The wooden planking is offcuts and rejects from the reroofing and reflooring of the buildings, or pieces that have previously been used for shuttering and other construction

The second side wall waiting for cladding. Yes, the insulation is the very unnatural, unsustainable and unecological blue polystyrene sheeting, but it was left over from the battery house construction and was the perfect thickness for the job. We are aiming to send NO waste from our building projects to landfill

Nesting boxes. 2 of them

The nesting boxes, external view. They’re accessible from the outside of the coop where they’ll also be under cover, keeping temperatures inside cooler in summer and the nests (and the egg-collector) dry when egg-collecting during downpours

Side walls and back wall complete, roosting perch in place

Roof on. On the inside of the coop section of the roof is some left-over 50mm cork insulation, on the outside foil-backed bubble wrap serving as both extra insulation and waterproof membrane

Foundation layer of cana (Arundo donax) thatch on the roof, start of the door frame in position

Door with access hatch complete

Ramp to access hatch and cana thatch complete. The covered verandah has hooks for hanging grain and water dispensers at chicken head-height. It keeps things a lot cleaner than having them at chicken foot-height …

The top layer of cana thatch is held down by 2 cana poles lashed together and tied down under the roof eaves

Close-up of lashing

Thatchwork complete

Close-up of access hatch and ramp

Finished!

The chickens are due to arrive on Thursday. So I have 3 days in which to fence off a compound for them for use when they’re not being free-ranged or tractored. Yes … in the end I decided on a combination of all 3. At least until we’ve discovered what works best for us and the chickens.

Alan Ereira’s documentary film about the Kogi people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia and the message to the world from their Mamas, or spiritual leaders, was produced in 1992. Twenty years ago.

When the Kogi talk about the heart of the world dying, what’s frightened them is the death of this area, the Páramo, because when this dies everything below it that depends on it will have to die. That’s what they mean when they said that they know that unless we do something, the world is coming to an end.

“It is the mountains which make the waters, the rivers and the clouds. If their trees are felled they will not produce any more water.”

The Sierra is a model of the world. Global warming does not stop here. We are changing the air and the sky and the balance of life.

“They have taken the clouds from the Páramo. They have sold the clouds. We know what is happening and we’re all in agreement. The world does not have to end. If we act well the world can go on.”

Has anything improved since this film? Unfortunately, no. The opposite.

Further message from the Kogi in 2009
Similar message from the Yanomamai peoples in 2009

Today I transplanted two young fig trees to positions either side of the ponds. They should thrive there and grow really fast with year-round moisture in the soil, eventually shading the ponds through the heat of the summer and giving us a plentiful supply of fruit. There were no fig trees on the quinta when we came here, so this was something to be remedied at an early stage in the planting schedule.

The quinta has slate-built concrete-lined tanks on each main terrace, designed to collect water from the stream and its springs, which is then released through sluices into irrigation channels along the back of each terrace to flood-irrigate crops grown on the terrace. Slate-lined channels underground beneath the terraces take the water from terrace to terrace. At the moment, the tanks are full of years of accumulated sludge, the irrigation channels are overgrown and the transport channels don’t function in quite the way they were designed to.

But even were we to restore this system to its original working order, it’s a predominantly anthropocentric system: designed for a specific agricultural purpose and not particularly user-friendly for wildlife. The tank sides, for instance, are far too precipitous for frogs to get in and out, and the very containment of the water limits its use to a particular form of irrigation of a particular form of cultivation. It doesn’t work for raised beds, though it would irrigate fruit trees well.

One idea has been to create a series of ponds for the water to flow through from terrace to terrace rather than using the underground channels. Constructing unlined ponds using Sepp Holzer’s techniques will also allow the development of wetlands in which to grow plants that thrive in this environment and encourage more amphibious wildlife which will hopefully enjoy feasting on our plentiful supply of slugs and snails.

First I wanted to experiment on a small scale with the construction technique.

Underneath the bottom terrace is a pouço – a slate-lined underground dome with a collection tank below it, designed to collect water filtering through the ground above it. In order to keep the ground wet enough to supply my neighbours’ drinking water requirements, this area had become a stagnating marsh, breeding mosquitoes and bad smells, not to mention prodigious amounts of vegetation which considerably slowed the rate of water filtration. Turning this area into a shallow pond fed with plentiful clean water seemed a good project both to deal with my neighbours’ water supply issues and to begin my pond-building experiments.

I began digging with Simeon‘s help back in August. Together we created the first of two ponds, with the outfall of the first to feed the second.

Upper pond dug and filling with water. Some of the fine sludge from the bottom terrace tank was put into this pond and, along with the clay-rich soil, was mixed and trod in imitation of pigs creating a wallow so that a natural seal is formed as progressively finer particles settle out and line the pond.

The digging of the second, lower pond. This pond is directly over the neighbours’ pouço and is necessarily very shallow.

The ponds after a month. Water levels maintain themselves very well with only an occasional adjustment required to compensate for sudden changes in flows upstream. The water is kept moving to prevent stagnation and the pond feeding the pouço is full of sweet clear water. I would like to make the top pond larger and deeper though, and plan to do this sometime before Spring. Frogs have already been spotted swimming.

Duckweed (Lemna spp) starting to grow.

The pond digger

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.

Pinewood nematode, pine wilt nematode, pine wilt, pine wilt disease … all names given to the disease affecting rapidly growing numbers of the Maritime pines (Pinus pinaster) which form the vast bulk of Portugal’s forests. It’s caused by the nematode Bursaphelenchus xylophilus, a tiny worm that infests the sap wood of various species of pine, and is vectored through various wood-boring insects, depending on where it’s present. Native to North America Japan and Asia (see comments below), it has spread to the USA, Australia and Portugal, presumably via imported timber.

Not only does the nematode kill the trees it infects, it also renders the timber unusable. If left standing for more than a few months, the wood of the now-dead tree undergoes a change in structure and turns into a strange spongy substance that, aside from being useless for building, clogs the chainsaw blades that try to fell it and barely even burns, generating almost no heat.

When I first came here just 3 years ago, there was scarcely any evidence of it. People were talking about it appearing around Arganil, 20km away, but there was no obvious evidence of it in this valley. Now, this is the view across the valley.

The photo at the beginning of this post was taken last year, when we removed 3 trees with the disease on the quinta. This year we are going to have to take out more – I’ve counted around 10 and that’s before a thorough exploration of our bit of pine forest. Next year there will probably be more still …

So we’re bringing forward our plans for the woods and stepping things up a gear. The aim is to try and spot the infected trees at the first sign of infection and fell them before the wood becomes useless for firewood, burning them as soon as they’re dry, and stockpiling healthier trees for future years’ firewood, making clearings where we can start to plant more hardwoods. In doing so, we hope to steal a march on the disease. Lowering density and increasing diversity may offer some protection to remaining healthy trees, but even if it doesn’t, by the time the disease decimates the surrounding forest, we will hopefully have a well-established start to a new, more diverse and healthy forest.

My hopes are that it can also turn out to be a successful example of an alternative approach to the disease. Rather than clear-felling and replanting with eucalypts (now against the law, but flouted with virtual impunity see comments below) which will cause even more environmental damage and increase fire risk, I hope to show that it’s possible to regenerate a largely indigenous but also productive, valuable, non-flammable forest from which high-value timber such as chestnut can be harvested regularly through coppicing and provide a good return in less time than it would have taken to bring pine forest to maturity and harvest. Although we won’t be harvesting our trees in this way, for local people it’s part of their livelihood and how they look on their forest. If they’re to turn away from present practices, then there needs to be a reason and viable incentive to do so.

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

Ripening tomatoes amongst the asparagus

Piri-piri chillies

Black chillies

Ripening peppers

Aubergine

Curry plant and piri-piri chillies

Lemongrass

Courgettes now into their fifth month of production

Recent sowings of lettuce

Cauliflower

Physalis

Marigolds

Pineapple sage in flower

Flower and leaf of Devil’s weed, Datura stramonium, growing wild in the vegetable garden

The seed head of Datura stramonium

I’ve been allowing some ‘weeds’ to have a place in the garden, among them the Devil’s weed above. It’s an excellent shade plant, growing tall and spreading wide. It’s also very striking: a bifurcating style of growth with delicate white trumpets of flowers maturing into urchin-like seed heads appearing in the forks, though I’ve been careful to harvest each seed head just before it opens – we wouldn’t want it everywhere … Sepp Holzer talks about there being a place in the garden for the poisonous plants, that they can contribute strength and vigour and improve the health of the soil, and that feels right to me (it’s somewhere in Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture and when I can find it I’ll add the reference).

And lest everything in the garden appear altogether too rosy, there have been some late hatchings amongst the butterfly (both Small and Large Cabbage White) and snail populations. It still amazes me how a single plant, like the young cauliflower below, can be reduced to lacework overnight.

Today we had a visit from a swallowtail. Not the Scarce Swallowtail (Iphiclides podalirius) I’ve seen here many times before, but THE swallowtail (Papilio machaon), the largest resident butterfly in the UK, found there only in a few areas of the Norfolk Broads, and consequently not one I’d encountered in a childhood fascinated with butterflies. The fact that it’s widespread throughout Continental Europe made not the slightest dent in the excitement I felt finally seeing this butterfly up close.

One of the most rewarding aspects of starting to explore polyculture and companion planting in the new raised beds have been the effects of growing flowers – both ones we’ve planted and ones that grew themselves – amongst the vegetables. It’s not just the visual impact of so much colour in the garden. All summer long, the garden has been full of butterflies and bees.

Butterflies here are numerous both in number and variety, but now, instead of rushing to capture them on camera as they pass, the yurt is surrounded by a cloud of them every sunny day. Those that were fleeting visitors or hard to photograph last year have been in such profusion that it almost didn’t even occur to me to bother.

The Silver-washed fritillary (Argynnis paphia) for instance. It shows a marked preference for the Tagetes species of marigolds and has been a constant presence for the last 6 weeks at least.

The sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) and purple coneflowers (both Echinacea purpurea and E. angustifolia) have been attracting many bees.

We have also been able to use some of the flowers medicinally. A herbal eye wash made using the flowers of the pot marigold (Calendula officinalis) and chamomile (Chamomilla recutita) proved very effective for ‘pink-eye’ or summer conjunctivitis.

Here is the recipe:

Herbal Eye Wash *

One fresh flower head of Calendula officinalis
Several fresh flower heads and a few leaves of Chamomilla recutita
One small teaspoon dried leaves of Camellia sinensis (ie. tea! – a tea bag will do nicely)
A few drops (6-8) of apple cider vinegar
Around 250ml boiling water

Put the flowers and tea into a small bowl and pour about 250ml of boiling water onto them. Cover, and allow to cool naturally. Add the apple cider vinegar. Strain, bottle and keep refrigerated if possible. It will last a couple of days unrefrigerated.

To use, soak a cotton wool pad and use both to clean crusts and discharge from eye(s) on waking or to bathe eye(s) through the day. Use a separate pad for each eye.

* DISCLAIMER
Thanks to the current insanity revolving around attempts by the pharmaceutical industry and other ‘authorities’ to appropriate all matters concerning your health, it’s become necessary to insult your intelligence by explicitly drawing your attention to the obvious fact that any views or advice in this website are, unless stated otherwise, the opinions and experience of the author alone and should not be taken as a substitute for ‘professional’ medical advice or treatment. If you choose to take anything from here that might be construed as advice or treatment recommendations, you do so entirely under your own recognisance and responsibility.