Permaculturing in Portugal

This week the roof is really starting to look like a roof from the outside as well as the inside. Monday we laid the insulation (50mm cork) on top of the boards of maritime pine, followed by the waterproof breathable membrane. No sooner had that gone down than the weather decided to test it out. We haven’t had a drop of rain since we took the roof off back at the beginning of July (well, apart from a 15-minute shower of dirt) and it waited until the very moment we got the waterproofing on. Considerate weather! Damn! When you’ve lived in Scotland for more than half your life, that’s a real novelty.

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The thing with dry stone schist buildings is that they’re dry stone. A good wind will whistle straight in through the walls, and the heat from a stove will whistle straight out. And there’s a fair variety of wildlife that comes and goes and sets up home in the gaps between the stones.

We have no particular objection to sharing the building with the local wildlife, but aren’t so keen on the winter winds and losing all our heat.

With the roof now planked and the wall heads being built up and capped ready for laying the insulation, we’re starting work on pointing the stonework in the interior of the building. It’s a messy job, so one preferably done before we get around to replacing the floors.

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This quinta has an amazing abundance of fruit. When we first saw the property back in November, the trees were mostly bare and it was hard to identify precisely what was here apart from olives, vines (both grape and kiwi), and the evergreen loquats with their distinctive foliage. January wasn’t much better, though by then it was possible to see what citrus fruits we had growing, and the persimmons (Sharon fruit) were ripe. Now with everything bursting into life, it’s becoming a lot easier to figure out everything else.

I intended to spend a good half day mapping out the terraces and noting what was growing where, taking photos of the trees so I could identify what they were later if I couldn’t at the time. But as is the way of these things, the camera batteries died on me after only a few trees’ worth and I hadn’t brought spares this time.

Here are some that I did capture though.

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Aonghas looking down the road towards Piódão, uma das mais bonitas Aldeias Históricas Portuguesas (one of the more beautiful Historical Villages of Portugal) which is roughly 10km as the açor flies from our quinta, though more like 30km if you have to rely on wheels and at least some tarmac to drive them on.

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This post is the first from Quinta do Vale itself, courtesy of TMN banda larga pré-paga (PAYG 3G mobile broadband) which I’ve brought up here to test. It’s lightning fast. Yeay hey!! Almost as good as our wired service in Scotland. Things are looking better and better.

The terraces were cleaned yesterday. We have terraces we didn’t even know were there! The place looks twice the size and wonderful, even if covered in frost and in shade.

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The older I’ve got and the more I’ve observed of nature and how humans play their part in it, the more disgusted I’ve become with so much blind stupidity and greed, and the arrogance, hubris and species chauvanism that supports it. But disgust has little to offer (apart from being an incentive to change), and to stay in that state is to continue to be part of the problem, not the solution.

For at least the last two years, this vision of us designing and building our own autonomous house and growing our own food has felt so electric, so imminent, it’s been like living with a massive thundercloud hovering in the air above us, only waiting for a lightning bolt to bring it all down to earth. I looked around for possibilities locally in Scotland, then widened my search to the rest of the UK, then France, Spain, Bulgaria, Dominica, Oregon, British Columbia, New Zealand … but for one reason or another, none of these places seemed either ‘right’ or possible. Portugal didn’t even appear on the radar. Yet the feeling that sooner or later we were going to get zapped just got stronger and stronger.

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