Quinta das Abelhas

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Eco-Living Central Portugal has a new focus! We (Quinta das Abelhas) set up the eco-living project with the intention of offering courses, workshops and practical experience of sustainable living on a large riverside quinta we planned to buy. Unfortunately the purchase of this new quinta fell through and we no longer feel we have sufficient space, time and energy to devote to the project. Thus we have, after much consideration, decided that the best use of this website and the funds we have already been kindly donated is to promote and support other sustainable projects in the local area (Central Portugal).

The project’s aims remain the same, and we will now be adding to the funding by sharing the profits from our business Pure Portugal Ltd to help meet those aims:
To support and promote local ecological and sustainable projects, courses and events;
To encourage visitors to gain practical experience of eco-living;
To inspire, empower, & enable people to reduce their ecological footprint;
To bring together communities and individuals working for sustainability, self-sufficiency, and low-impact living;
To collaborate on various projects and share ideas and experiences;
To network with national and international projects on sustainability.

www.ecolivingportugal.org 

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Whereas ‘Andy’s Garden’ is far more haphazard, with few straight lines, and flowers all over the place:

There are loads of tiny tomato, pepper and flower seedlings in the spaces here:

This new trellis is for metre-long beans, cucumbers and tomatoes:

And we’ve put in some support for the Trail of Tears beans. We invested in some thin wooden posts, which will stay in place each year - but we’ll change the crop growing up it.

Anyone that knows us, would expect our gardens to be the reverse. Sophie is far more ‘flowery’ than I am, and I am normally the control freak!

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We’ve extended the beds in our gardens a fair bit in the last few months, and they are now starting to be full of young plants. If we see any sunshine this year, we should have food abundance on the quinta - we are already freezing strawberries.

‘Sophie’s Garden’ has long straight beds:

Apart from a couple of simple circular brick sided beds:

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It has been quite an interesting week here at Quinta das Abelhas. There has been making garden beds, two attempts at making strawberry jam (which finally worked the second time), but most interesting of all would have to be the fact that a little baby boy was added to the family last sunday. Alice had the boy at home here on the farm after 17 or so long hours of labor. He is the cutest little thing, but still sleeps quite a bit. So I think that it is going to be difficult beating that for a while as far as big events. But there is always something interesting going on either way…Merina

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