olives

We decided after having picked a couple of sacks of olives that we would leave them until we returned from UK. Leaving alot of olives on the trees and hoping that the weather wouldn't be too awful. When we returned from the UK, infact the night we returned it was the windiest we had experienced here, so windy that the pig sty was moved about 30 yards, probably with the pigs in it..

When we went to the farm the next day alot of olives were on the ground, it then rained for about 4 days, so we waited. We then started picking, Rick up the trees, me either picking up olives from the ground or cleaning the olives. We finally finished yesterday. After last years shennigans at the mill we decided to use another one, not traditional, but a sight more organised. We went with 295 kilos and came out with 57 litres. Way more than we expected. I guess leaving them on the trees for that couple of weeks longer really paid off. We'll do the same next year, the only problem is the longer you leave them the worse the weather.

I've got a lovely cock!!!

Turns out that I have cock! and I've called him Fancy Feathers



Not having sexed any of the hatchlings, I've been waiting to find out what sex they are, now I know, one is a cock and the other three are hens, brilliant. He is very handsome and proud and seems to be doing a fine job of keeping them all in order. The three hens are all huge and would probably be laying already if it wasn't so flipping cold. The surrogate mum (in the background, behind Fancy Feathers)



is still laying one egg every other day. Not sure where we'll go from here, need more space really and then we could start a breeding programme and rear chickens for eating as well as for eggs. We really need a proper in/outdoor pen for them all as at the moment they are not going outside, which I dislike alot. But it's the safest option and as the new ones won't let me handle them, it's impossible to let then wander off and not spend hours running up and down terraces trying to get them all back, hysterically funny and bloody annoying.

wrapping up for winter

I thought I would drag you all on a tour of the Quinta. You would think that there's not much to see or tell, but apparently there is, as I found out when I started to think about what sort of blog entry I would do this week and had a look around the farm.

Starting with the animals, as you can see the pigs are getting nice and big, they are on a sort of diet as apparently I have been over-feeding them!!



I have double-glazed their house at the top of the back wall, whilst it does let warm sunshine in it also lets driving rain in, so I decided to cover the hole up with plastic and I'll continue to pile straw in there, I never take any out, they are incredibly clean animals so they never soil their bed, this way they end up with a big deep bed which they can bury themselves in, lovely.



The chickens have also got themselves some double glazing, I found last year that the rain drives in through the door and obviously mixed with sawdust and poo etc. makes for a nasty clean-up job. So this way we are all better off and they continue to lay through the cold and wet weather. The chicks as you can see have grown up now and I still don't know what sex they are, so am just waiting for signs of laying or cockrelness??? any suggestions about how to tell would be gratefully received but I am not looking up their vents, thank you.





The citrus trees have been fleeced, I managed to kill them last year as I forgot to fleece them in time, luckily they forgave me and came back to life, this year I'm not leaving it until acuweather tells me, I've just done it early.



I have dug up and potted on some trees which will be planted around the quinta early next year



The raspberries continue to provide a small snack, it's their first year so I wasn't expecting much.

traditional red



and yellow ones



These are both late fruiting varieties, not sure what as they were given to me, I'm going to plant some earlier fruiting ones this season too, so we have them for more than one or two months.

I've left the tomatoes where they are, although we are not eating them the pigs like them, but only when ripe.



The peppers are still ripening



and when they are nearly ready I bring them home to finish off on the windowsill in the kitchen.



The carrots, parsnips and beetroot are fine and hopefully will continue to see us through the winter







as will the kale



The cabbages



and the greens



The salad and new zealand spinach may get fleeced or just eaten, either by us or the slugs...





Alot of meadow 2 has been sown with green manures

Rye grass



and buckwheat



I love that my cosmos self-seeded and came up again in the same year



and a random sunflower may make it, somehow I think not though.



These hollyhocks will flower next year



The grapes are all pruned,



the persimmons need harvesting



The river and spring gush forth, taking with it all the rotten quinces that we didn't quite manage to pick.



and finally the hoses have been coiled up into a nice neat heap, not to be used again until it's bloody scorchio and as dry as a witches tit!!

A moment of nostalgia

Some time ago a friend asked me if I would make her a Union Jack cushion cover, we'd been trawling around Portobello market in London and noticed that there were a lot of very "British" wares for sale in the home furnishings shops, you know Cath Kidson style stuff. So I agreed to make one. I wanted it to have a vintage feel, so chose fabrics that were muted in colour, also my sewing leaves a lot to be desired so the edges of most of my points are a bit crap, to say the least, but it works well.



Simultaneously, in a moment of nostalgia we thought we might as well have fish 'n' chips.



Later on we are going to cover ourselves in lard and go for a long swim, maybe back to England!

kill it, cook it, eat it

well it should be buy it, cook it, eat it, but kill it sounds more aliterate.
One of the things I love about the markets here is the food. Normally it's just chicken and chips, which is always good and never dodgy, today though it was buy it and cook it yourself, and pay someone else to give you chips and wine...excellent.







and then finish it off with a freshly fried fartura

the cat that got the rat got bit

Poor Lulu, she was just doing her job, killing mice and rats.



I noticed there was something wrong with her lower jaw and I checked her teeth to make sure she didn't have a problem there, but she was eating fine and seemed happy so I left her alone, then her jaw got worse, and even though she was till eating I checked the rest of her jaw out. She had a massive swelling under her chin.

I took her to the vets and an hour later he had shaved her and lanced an abcess and drained about 10ml of stinky fluid from it. The only thing I can imagine that caused this is the rat, she's pretty hardy and has fights with cats all the time, but have never had a problem like this, it's only the second time in her life that I've had to take her to the vets outside of her yearly injections.....



bless

Alpaca poo tea

I have been trying to dress and feed all the trees which we have planted since we've been here. Some trees have not survived, mostly because I didn't water them enough, some I suspect from poor stock. They don't cost much here, so it's not a terrible shame. But always trying to manage things better and do things efficiently and cheaply I was offered some alpaca poo in exchange for some livestock.



Having recently given over the whole of meadow three to the pigs (moving the fences constantly was too labour intensive),



Rick fenced off each end and now they have the run of the whole meadow. I needed to sort out the trees that I planted there, I actually couldn't find two of the almonds as my sunflowers had taken over, I dug bowls around each one and dressed them with straw and covered that in alpaca poo......

Great

NOT

Pigs love alpaca poo



I had to pick up all the alpaca poo and come up with another plan. How to feed the trees. Bit of research later....alpaca poo tea, you'd probably need one hell of a digestive biscuit to stomach it though.

No budget build-access

This is a picture of where it all began, the farm, in the forest, in the mountains, in portugal.



I think its important to try and be as sensitive as possible to the environment in which we are a part, and that includes the way in which any of us build, from our approach in siting buildings, through our choice of materials, and to the method in which we construct.

In an effort to achieve this sensitivity I think its important to be thinking about what we are doing, constantly. To think about what we are doing and our relationship to all things.

As such, I would like the finished building and all the necessary ancillary work to blend seemlessly into the surrounding landscape. With that in mind I will endeavor to maintain as much of the existing landscape as possible. However, and its a big however, it was necessary to fell a number of the pines to put the driveway in. I know it must have appeared as a scar on the landscape, yet subsequent planting and natural reseeding of the area have taken place and have begun to soften it.



Further, in order to improve access to the site, and to protect it from damage due to blowdowns (which are not uncommon here) and fire hazard, as a preventative measure I have taken out a number of pine trees within the vicinity of the planned build.



And although right now, as I write this it may not look as sensitive as I would like, that is my end game, where I am headed toward.


In the beginning of this story, there was a series of farm buildings comprising several parts, perched on the side of the mountain, with terraces sloping off. Slopey terraces may be great for harvesting olives, when you want them to roll down the gathering nets, they are less great when it comes to access and building.



Our farm has an access road running though it, just above the house site, and an ancient caminho publico (that's public path/right of way, to you and me) running from that road, past the house, along the boundary of our land, and up through the forest on the dark side, to join up with another camino that runs from further down the road, through another section of our land, and from there eventually back to the village. This makes improving access to the farm or building site somewhat contentious, or frowned upon to say the least.

Access from elsewhere is just as fraught with problems. The steepness of terrain governs this region, and nothing much short of a civil engineering project can sort out our access issues. Or that's how it appears.



We could remove some more trees from the mountain side and excavate a wider pathway with at least one change of direction, wide enough to get a tractor down, but there isn't really the width of terrain to achieve that. It's very steep, but not very wide, and it would be marginal at best, and at worst it would undermine the road, which would be a massive headache.

Access back up to the building from elsewhere on the farm is equally entertaining, and would involve crossing more than one other farm to get here, negating the possibility of coming from a different direction.

So we have ourselves a bit of a situation, not uncommon here, where you have no access for plant, and crappy, at best, access for farm machinery. Even though from the roadside its not 20 mtrs to the back of the building, to the front obviously somewhat more, its awkward, steep, very steep in places, slippy when wet, or covered in pine duff, and further confined by a stone wall down the other side. Provided you are able bodied you can get up and down without too much effort, but try barrowing a load of ballast or sand down and it becomes its own stupendous game. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you can only level fill the barrow or it runs away with itself, or spills, because you have to hold it at such an elevated angle.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is that everything that goes to the farm or building has to be 'man hauled' as Shakelton would refer to it. It doesn't take long to understand why, in the past, people farming here used donkeys and mules and asses.

The no budget build-demolition

Then began the process of demolishing the buildings. All of the demolition had to be done by hand to salvage as much material to reuse as possible.



First the roof off the adjacent smaller building to the west was stripped off.



The front and part of one side of that building were robbed out to further facilitate the excavation. Following the completion of excavation, i could begin the demolition of the main building.

Then I put up the scaffold,





ripped the roof off,





and began taking the walls down.





Keep this in mind when reading.
When building for yourself, certain things are going to slide, often those things are to do with personal health and safety, in your efforts to try and achieve, you push your own limits way beyond what is reasonable.

Constantly, I am faced with the question, how am I going to move this thing which weighs hundreds of pounds, yes hundreds, from here to here, on my own? Only you can come up with an answer to that. Do you ask someone for assistance every 5 minutes, or do you try and figure a way of doing it on your own that limits the possibility of you getting hurt but hopefully achieves the aim? The choice is yours, if it's a choice. For a lot of builders that choice gets made for you, and you end up doing it on your own, and your back and your joints pay the price.



This 17' 8"x10" (thats 6mx200x250mm for those of you who work only in new money) chestnut purlin weighed a great deal. I lowered it down as I demolished one side of the building, robbing stone out around it as I went, then had to slide it out of it's housing the other side, lift it out, all however many hundreds of pounds (come and lift it if you don't believe me) and hump it across the building site, and out over the scaffold.





Compared to digging out, the demolition was easy. But it still took me over a month of hard labour. Erecting scaffold, dropping walls, dropping scaffold, etc etc etc. and piling stone,





until it was all down, and I had cleared away the site, in preparation for the next phase.





When i thought it was almost done, something else became apparent, that had, until the clean up, remained hidden.