Quinta das Abelhas

I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks “what are these plants?”, looking through my records, scratching my head. There were a few possibilities. It just says ‘big pot at back’, and there were several big pots at the back! Today I made a list of the few possibilities, and did some searches for pictures on the net, eventually coming up with Tea plants. That’s right, Camelia Sinensis, the plant that is grown to make tea. Apparently our conditions are almost perfect for it, acid soil, hot summer and not too cold in the winter, but they would prefer to be higher up. Fantastic, in three years we’ll be able to make our own pots of tea!

I also harvested our oats today. I am not sure how to go about getting the oats off the stalks. Worse scenario is that I will have to pick every one off, but for now I am allowing them to dry out properly.

So, there we have it. Oats for my muesli, and tea, a proper breakfast of champions, and here’s the perfect place to eat it, where i can start my mornings thinking about the jobs needing to be done in my garden:

Unfortunately the coffee beans haven’t germinated, perhaps they will, and I will be able to have homegrown coffee with my muesli.

2 Comments »

7 people (an assortment of family, friends and wwoofers) from Termas da Azenha came to lunch yesterday.  We’ve been in contact for some time via email and it was great to finally meet them to share food and ideas.  I hope we’ll have more contact with them in the future and be able to work more closely, especially through www.ecolivingportugal.org

After lunch “Team Azenha” went off to explore the local river (Rio Mondego) and then we all went together to a Donkey Derby organised to raise funds for the Aniplus Rescue Centre.

No Comments »

andy looking like a tourist after finding his first “geocache”!

No Comments »

http://ethicsgirl.wordpress.com

No Comments »

Summer is here. Cassey and the kittens are taking a break in the shade of an olive tree:

These heirloom climbing beans are doing very well, but no beans to eat yet:

The bed is very simply some bricks, in a circle, filled with horse manure. Obviously the bean plants love the manure.

The Goji berry plant, which was just a stick in a pot, has been growing fast too. We are watering roughly every two days now, and, even with the manure, the beds dry out. Luckily our well has an underground stream flowing into it, so we have plenty of water (but we still need to be careful with it). There are no berries on the plant, also known as wolfberry, but it seems that flowers should start forming soon, and we’ll get berries through the autumn. Some info here.

I think we need to build some kind of frame around it to keep the berries off of the floor.

We have our first augergine (eggplant) flower of the year. I love aubergines chopped small, cooked with beans, olive oil and soya sauce. We’ll be eating them in a few weeks if this heat keeps up.

No Comments »