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.
Back in Scotland when I lived in houses with big cast iron range cookers in the kitchen, I used to make yoghurt all the time. It was so easy just to sit it in a water bath on the back of the stove. Since then, I’ve not been very successful at finding a way of keeping the yoghurt at the right temperature for the required time, short of buying an electric yoghurt maker which I really didn’t/don’t want to do.
But now I have. It was obvious really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.
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.
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.
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
Shouldn’t someone be telling this bracken it’s October, not April? Bracken is a perennial fern, but the fronds generally emerge in the spring and die off in autumn. I’ve never seen this before.
Following on from the last post on the subject – and a bit overdue since they’ve been completed at least a couple of weeks now – we have finished the stairs on both sides of the building. This makes 3 sides of the building now protected from the weather by an extra overhang. All that remains now is to complete a lean-to roof along the back wall, dig a large drain into the bedrock behind it, and we should have a substantially watertight building … even without all the windows and doors.
I mentioned elsewhere what an enormous difference the presence of flowers in the vegetable garden this year has made to the number and varieties of butterflies we’ve seen. Considering that the number and variety here is, even without flowers, comparable to a profusion and diversity that’s not been present in the UK for a good 40 years, then perhaps you can begin to grasp what a wonder this year has been.
Follow us on the|
moon phase |
