Quinta das Abelhas, Permaculture in Central Portugal
For a sneak peak of our soon-to-be-launched Etsy shop, have a look at
http://www.etsy.com/people/technopeasants
For now, we’ve just got a listing for the Cat / Superhero Hats and are looking forward to doing a proper crafty photo shoot in the sunshine later this week!
I’ve been wanting to make a “Chicken Garden” outside their pen for years. Somewhere we can grow some of the things they like to eat, so it’s easy to just pick some leaves and throw them in for them. As far as I’ve ever got with this was planting a comfrey plant next to the gate. The rest of the space is still pretty overgrown with couch grass and brambles.
As I’ve taken over the job of looking after the chickens on a daily basis I’ve been more inspired and motivated to get on and create the Chicken Garden. Add the enthusiasm of happy helper Theresa and we finally made a start on it yesterday.
We dug out all the couch grass and brambles. We want to make raised beds alongside a new paved pathway (Lester – who now lives in the village but first helped build the chicken shed when he was here as a wwoof-er about 5yrs ago – just offered today to lay some leftover paving slabs to make the path for us).
I also dug out the foundations for extending the chicken shed “veranda” as the soil has become really badly eroded and I want to put a bigger ramp in so it’s easier to get a wheelbarrow into the pen. We also want to put a turf roof on the shed, and extend the roof over the veranda so the chickens have some extra shade in summer and cover from rain in winter.
Most of the area is now dug over and levelled! 
Today I put the olives for eating into jars. They’ve been in water for 2 weeks, with the water being changed every day.
I made up a brine of water with enough salt in it to float a medium-sized peeled potato, and gathered rosemary, bay, garlic and piri-piri from the garden to flavour the olives.
I spooned olives and flavourings into the jars in layers. I used 2 garlic cloves, 2 piri-piri, 1 bay leaf, and one small sprig of rosemary per jar. This is total guesswork, so I need to remember when we eat them to write down if these quantities worked or not.
Then I filled the jars with brine, put the lids on, labelled the jars, and put them in the adega. They’ll be ready for eating in 6 weeks, although I’ve done one jar covered with olive oil and put it in the sun to steep which we will try tonight. The olives have already lost a lot of their bitterness and I’m interested to try really fresh ones!
I’m loving that, apart from the salt, all the ingredients are from our land – even the water
Thanks to multi-talented Conny Kadia for her eating olives recipe.
I also hung up some piri-piri plants and some bay to dry in the kitchen.
Andy was out having a bonfire of olive prunings and managed to burn himself – eek! So he got Aloe Vera and a bandage for the burn, and home-made raisin bread with our own honey for lunch.
Meanwhile … Jonny’s been making a loveable loo:
So the olive harvest is finally over! We worked in sunshine and in torrential rain (“they don’t show this on the adverts” says Emma).
I mostly did the ‘support work’ of keeping up with the everyday tasks and feeding the workers, helping out for short bursts with the olive picking. Andy, Jonny (who’s now living in the cottage), Tommy and Emma (our friends and regular helpers) and Theresa (our German friend / woofer) did most of the picking.
We put the olives through our winnowing machine, which blows out all the leaves, before storing them in huge tubs of water until they are all picked and ready to go to the mill – it took 1 van, 1 jeep, and 1 car to transport the olives to the olive mill (lagar)and us to the café for coffee and cake while we waited our turn for olive pressing.
Finally it was our turn to get our olives pressed (I’m back home by this point, catching up on emails, housework, and making a pizza for celebratory olive harvest dinner).
We have over 900kg of olives which is more than twice as many as we need to get our own pressing, so the oil we get is only from our own organically managed trees.
After a few hours of waiting (the lagar has a bar!) the oil is ready. We have 121 litres!
Home for pizza and a blind olive oil tasting. We used our new oil, our oil from last year, Tommy and Emma’s oil from this year, a cheap supermarket brand (Lidl) and a premium brand (Gallo Extra Virgin). Tasters were me, Andy, Tommy, Jonny, Theresa and our neighbour Dave. Emma did a fine job of keeping a poker face while we were tasting and commenting, so as not to give away which oil was which. Our oil came out favourite with every taster, and Tommy and Emma’s was a close 2nd. All of us got the two supermarket oils the wrong way around, thinking the cheap one was the premium brand (so maybe if you are going to buy mass-produced oil then you might as well go for a cheaper one?!)
And finally … Jonny is convinced he met Robert de Niro’s dad at the olive mill:
If you’d like to taste some fabulous unrefined, unprocessed, unfiltered Portuguese olive oil (from the very same lagar) for yourself, then check out our friends’ website www.quintafelgar.co.uk where you can find a list of UK stockists, or order online.
We’ve just lit the stove. That’s officially the start of Autumn / Winter!
The stove is an Esse and we love it! For a basketful of wood a day (it’s super-efficient and designed to run on wood) it provides the energy for all our cooking, heats the whole house, and gives us lots of hot water
It looks good in the farmhouse kitchen too 
Harvested our first small crop of Szechuan Peppercorns today! The smell is wonderful
Beware, the plant is very spiky!
We bought our szechuan pepper bush from the Agroforestry Research Trust.
Good article all about them at http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/dec/13/szechuan-pepper-chinese-five-spice
We are in need of someone (ideally a couple / two friends) to look after the smallholding from 18 May until 01 June while we are away. You’ll need to be responsible and willing to feed cats and dog, feed chickens and let them in/out of their shed morning and evening, muck out the horse stables and paddock, and water the gardens.
Beautiful eco house with all amenities to stay in, and lots of organic veg to eat!
