Permaculturing in Portugal

Some friends who are seasoned yurt dwellers told me this last year and it’s been on my mind since: it’s not the rain that’s the main problem when it comes to living in yurts in this climate, it’s the sun. The sun rots the canvas covers, and under the full glare of the Portuguese summer sun, even a heavy 12oz canvas cover like this will only last 2-3 years. At over £500 a time to replace, it pays to take some measures to lengthen the life of the covers.

Not only that, but a yurt sitting in the full summer sun gets pretty hot inside. Too hot to be really comfortable, even with the roof open and the covers lifted around the base.

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Finished at last, complete with arty-farty bits of tree. Not quite so easy to dismantle as originally intended, but still a stand-alone structure that’s not fixed to the yurt, and which allows the covers to be removed every year. The sawmill offcuts morphed into rough timber boards – there weren’t enough offcuts left of a suitable thickness.

The simple side, the walnut strut

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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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Having cut the timber from our woodland and let it dry sufficiently to be unsticky enough to handle (just), I got started on constructing the porch framework over the last 2 days.

Laying out and levelling porch floor area.

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“To be is to do – Socrates
To do is to be – Sartre
Do Be Do Be Do – Sinatra”
Kurt Vonnegut

Somewhere in that quote above is all sorts of wisdom about Doing and Being, but the trouble is I’m so much in the Doing right now there’s no room in my head for reflections on the subject. So I’m sticking with Sinatra for the moment …

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Christmas Eve. Seems a good time to get the stove finally in and working. I’d forgotten just how good this little stove is, and it draws to perfection with 3 lengths of 110mm flue pipe. At this rate I should have the yurt warm and dry and fit to move into within a reasonable time. Always providing I can source the firewood …

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Finally today, after umpteen delays and some prevarication (well maybe that’s a bit harsh – I really needed a bit of down-time after everything that’s happened recently), I arrived back in Benfeita with a van-load of stuff and the intention of being here for at least the next 2 months before having to go anywhere else again. (Oonagh is staying with her father in Asturias and will be here in the New Year.)

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Saturday dawned dry. While Aonghas mopped the overnight rain off the yurt platform, Oonagh and I shifted all the yurt bits bar the door down from the casinha, where they’d been stored since April, to the middle terrace (fantastic teamwork! High 5 guys!), and welcomed our yurt-raising team – Andy and Sophie plus WWOOFer Helen from Quinta das Abelhas, and Pete and Cynthia from Quinta da Mizarela.

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I figured if I got an early enough start, timed it right to get the drill battery charged up at the café down in Benfeita (Luís having already generously offered use of the café’s electricity supply for charging all our stuff), and worked at it efficiently and quickly, I might just get the platform finished the day we had to leave for Scotland again. We weren’t getting the flight until 21:15 out of Porto, and Porto’s only 2 hours away, so …

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We’d been on at Andy & Sophie to come and see our quinta since the day we shook hands on the deal last November. Somehow they were either always too busy, or we were. But this time it looked like it finally might happen. I’d texted to say there was a possibility I might have the platform ready for the yurt the day they were coming, but I wasn’t putting 2 and 2 together when I got a text from Andy to say 9 of them were arriving with lunch. Expecting only a social occasion, I was even thinking to myself “Damn, well I’ll not get much work done on the platform today then …”

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.

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