Quinta das Abelhas, Permaculture in Central Portugal
My compost heap is absolutely heaving with life. First I almost cut 2 frogs or toads in half with my spade, then I disturbed a mouse that our big ginger tomcat wolfed down, and then this beautiful slow worm stuck his head out of where I was digging.
Wriggly, wriggly slow worm!
So we put her back into the heap, but in the ‘new’ end, that is being added to now – nice and safe. Hopefully sheand those frogs will eat lots of slugs for us.
As it says, very simple.
Fry some onions til transparent in olive oil, add some soya sauce. Better quality soya sauces are preferable, such as Shoyo or Tamari.
Add your young broad beans – they are best at the start of the broad bean season.
Optionally add some other greens – I had a small red cabbage hanging around, picked from the garden a couple of days ago.
And perhaps a bit of garlic, or herbs – I chopped insome fresh coriander today. Broad beans and coriander are available in the garden at the same time of year, so that combination makes sense.
Cook the whole lot on a low heat, stirring continually until it has all softened a bit – not to a mush, stir fries are better if the vegetables are still a little crunchy.
What’s in that tiny box?
Oooh, aren’t they cute?
A visit to market, and we come home with 5 new ducklings – but luckily not the new puppy that Sophie and Beth were looking at.
And they’re out, into the corner first.
Then, back towards the doorway.
Here they come, out into the sunshine and a first look at their new home.
And they’re off.
Is that step too big?
No, they’ve met up with the other ducklings.
The swarm of 9 ducklings follows mother goose.
The first tomato seedlings have germinated, and are doing nicely. This is the time when wet weather would bring out the snails and slugs and wipe out all the baby tomatoes. Although we could really do with some rain right now, the dryness is happily keeping all the seedling munching monsters at bay.
These two trays are mainly old favourites such as Orange Banana tomatoes, that we’ve saved our own seed for, and the last few bought seeds in a few random packs from previous years. When I planted them, the weather was still a bit colder than now, so I planted ones that didnt matter too much. Since these 154 seeds went in, I have also planted 3 more trays – another 120, bigger compartments – of a wide range including Caro Rich that has more vitamin A than normal tomatoes, Cherokee Purple, huge purple fruit, and white cherry tomatoes which form 2 foot long trusses of fruit. Should be an interesting harvest this summer, plus we should have enough plants to give to a few friends who are just starting out here, or to swap with others.
I think we have close to 50 types of tomato seeds now, mainly heritage varieties, and we bought a few Coraçao do Bio plants, traditional portuguese type with big pinky fruit, at sunday market in tabua.
We’ve been seriously thinking about buying a proper glass greenhouse, although I’m still looking for plastic bendy pipe (if anyone has some spare lying around) to knock up a polytunnel. Whatever, we will hopefully be able to grow tomatoes and peppers through this coming winter, and get our seeds started off really early next year.
My two tea plants (Camelia Sinensis) have started growing again, after a winter of not. Great, I wonder how long it will be before we can start harvesting growing tips to make our own cuppas.
BACK GARDEN SEED SAVING
The best UK book on seed saving by top gardening writer Sue Stickland. She gives easy to follow crop-by-crop guidelines to help you save seed for yourself and varieties to look out for.
Almost all of the monkey puzzle (Araucaria araucana) nuts that I put in a seed tray last autumn have rooted. Putting them into a tray immediately upon receipt works much better than waiting for the spring, even though they sat through some frosts.
The acorns that were planted in the same tray have done really well too, and we transplanted them into bigger pots yesterday to grow on before we plant them out. We think these are american red oak, which have less tannins than other varieties, and are fast growing.
The monkey puzzles that I grew last year have almost all been given away to friends, and this is our last one. It is putting on a growth spurt now, and seems to be growing faster than I expected. We need to think carefully aboput where to plant it out, perhaps this coming autumn, as it won’t like hot dry soil, so we’ll need to ensure it has plenty of organic matter around its roots and gets watered regularly.
And here’s a picture of 3 self-seeded olive trees, that I found in my garden over the winter. There are more now, all under the same tree, so I wonder if we just have a fertile tree, while all the others (about 150) are sterile?
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Yesterday, after 3 days of acclimatisation (being out from under the plastic), the baby sweetcorn plants got transplanted into the ned in the garden where they will grow. The seed tray is now full of unusual tree seeds, ones that needed cold stratifying for 4 weeks – such as sequoia and redwood. Big trees! I do hope they germinate and grow well here.
Hm, sweetcorn has to be one of the luxuries of growing your own food. I can already picture myself gnawing the kernels off a cob, on a summer evening, butter running down my chin! Fantastic.
I better get another batch germinated – you can never have too much sweetcorn.
In almost every dinner now – they are still mainly very small tender baby broad beans. We can pick a basket of them every day and it doesn’t make a dent on what we have growing.
Stir fries, salads, stews, I put them in wherever I might use dry beans (or the cheaply bought jars of beans rather) at other times. Soon they will be too big to eat like that. Then I’ll let them finish growing, dry out and have a go at milling them to make broad bean flour – to sneak into breads, cakes and dinners. Or perhaps we’ll be feeding them to the chickens! We’ll see.
A comment to my recent post, saying that the borage seems to have grown back from the roots, made me wonder whether it could really have overwintered.
So, this morning, I have dug up one of the plants. There are (were) two plants in my garden (and plenty in Sophie’s) that are in exactly the same place as last year, and quite a few smaller plants around them.
The root is big and woody – and we are in agreement here, that it probably has survived the winter and then grown back. It seems that it just doesnt get cold enough to kill the roots, although all the tops get cut back very early in the autumn. We could still be wrong, but the size of the plants and roots suggests otherwise – particularly as there are so many obviously self-seeded baby plants around the mothers, that are in the same place as last year.
Perhaps others have had experience of this? I know that some ‘annuals’ aren’t really annuals at all, but non-hardy perennials that are grown as annuals in colder climates.
PLANT PROPAGATION
Author – C. Brickell
Authorative book on plant propagation.
Somehow I managed to buy a piece of corrugated plastic sheeting, to try to fix a caravan window. Obviously its no use for that, but I have utilised it to cover one of our potting benches. It’s perfect, will maybe last forever, unlike the scrappy bits of plastic over the other two seed tray areas.
We’ve got a lot of seeds germinating already, and I am thinking that I’ll look out for another couple pieces of this corrugated plastic, because it is so good for this job. Unlike the fiddliness of the other plastic, it will just easily fold back dring the day:
and then as evening draws in, I simply fold it back over the seeds, keeping the cold off of the new seedlings. Brilliant.
I’ve been using scraps of big plastic bags and such for this forever, draped over bent mimosa twigs. It works, but this is easier.
This autumn I also want to make a poly tunnel, but I would prefer not to use mimosa, to avoid tearing the solar resistent plastic. I am hoping that I will come across some old lengths of water pipe, that I can bend over to support the plastic – I don’t want to buy new, when I know that everyone has a metre or two lying around. Re-using others’ rubbish is all part of the techno-peasant philosophy.
Also on the terrace where the potting benches live, is a healthy patch of peppermint , that was just one root cutting last year. It is growing very well, in the shade of an olive tree and under the drain pipe from the shower. I’ve been putting a jug of mint tea in the fridge – so refreshing, and a great tonic.
Aloe Vera really doesn’t like the winter, turning into a slimey mess well before real frosts came. But now, almost all the plants I put in the garden last year are showing new life. I am really pleased, because I thought we’d have to keep growing them in pots and bring in for the winter. Perhaps if we mulch them with plenty of straw before temperatures drop this autumn, they will do better through the winter. We have a few perennials like this that would grow into quite large plants if they didn’t get cut right back in the winter.
The salsify that I left in the ground over the winter, to allow it to seed, is starting to flower. So we should have copious amounts of seed soon. We haven’t eaten much of this or scorzonera, the similar but black skinned plant. I’ll have a go at growing a decent quantity this year.
I took a bit of a risk last weekend by buying greenhouse raised pepper plants from market, and planting them out in the garden. Some friends and neighbours have been telling me about the frosts they have been having early morning this week. We, being south facing, seem to have avoided frost, although I did notice this morning that some vines on our lower border have been cut right back by recent cold. I definitely felt chilly the last few ornings when I got up.
The peppers though are doing well. It looks like one or two have been hurt by cold, but most of them have taken well, and look like this one.
I’ve got quite a few self-seeded sunflowers coming up, the biggest one is in the following photo. I have also started a tray full of giant sunflower seeds, which I have now also dotted around the garden. And I am thinking about planting out a larger area of sunflowers, as the chicks can eat them and they are pretty well drought tolerant. Perhaps when the rye is harvested we’ll plant soya, maize and sunflowers, with squash in between – a slight modification of the south american indigenous 3 seeds ideas, beans, corn and squash.
