Quinta das Abelhas

Also see FREE TREES from Pure Portugal.

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We are awash with beans. Small bushes, big bushes, climbing beans, trail of tears, lazy housewife, metre long beans, yellow ones, purple ones, green ones, spotted ones. Almost every meal has a load of sliced green beans (or purple or yellow) in it, and quite a lot are going into the freezer for the winter.

Next month I will stop picking them, and let them grow to full size & dry out. Then we’ll store them for winter, and stop buying those jars of precooked beans (so convenient, and we get the jars for storing stuff). It will certainly be reassuring to have lots of dried beans stored away, which when mixed with some grain, rice or seeds makes a full protein source.

Heres a photo I took that conveys the ‘jungle’ that is my garden. I love it, and wouldn’t be as happy in a garden full of straight beds, orderly crops etc. Watering, weeding and harvesting involves clambering through the undergrowth, barefoot. The closest thing to a hunter gathering lifestyle?

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Aren’t pumpkins, squashes and courgettes amazing. They come in so many different shapes and sizes.
Here are a few that we are growing this year.
Patty-pans:

An ugly looking thing.

Neck squash.

Guatamalan Blue pumpkins.

Some kind of rocket squash.

Heirloom pumpkin.

And a stripey one.

And of course, we have tons of butternut squashes growing, and some other varieties of pumpkins and squashes that I didnt take photos of. Plus quite a few different heirloom courgettes (and a few normal black courgettes, planted late because i didnt think we had many courgettes!)

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This is a truly beautiful walk, through an area completely full of citrus trees. Surprising that such a large area is warm enough in the winter for oranges, this far north and that high up.

Most of the orange groves are in a state of disrepair and abandonment, which is a shame. According to a sign on the route, the orange groves have been there since the 1700s.

We passed several fontes, filling our water bottles at each.

And passed through some pretty run down villages, surrounded with old orange trees. There were oranges everywhere.

Before entering an area of orange trees and river. We continued so far, but it was getting late and we decided to return another day, earlier and with a packed lunch to walk the entire route, of 7kms.

The route is very well signposted, with yellow and green lines painted on rocks and walls to show the way.

This sign gave us a short detour to the river, and coincidentally another geocache that we didn’t manage to find. Just a bit further, where we decided to turn around, there was an area that stank of wild boar. I mean really stank, there must be plenty of boar in that grove!

The Rota dos Laranjais is definitely worth walking, if you are in the area.

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We took our visitors up to the Parque do Coração de Maria, near Casteloes, near Tondela, and did a bit of the Rota dos Laranjais. The church and park is very beautiful.

The views from up there are breath taking:

And these must be the bluest hydrangeas I have ever seen! The soil there must be either very acidic or contain a lot of aluminium.

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