We’ve only been picking what we need to eat every day, so today as we have Emma here helping we’re having a harvesting and preserving day. Here’s what we picked: So we’ve got a lot of ratatouille to make and tomatoes to bottle today. Matt also harvested 3 frames from the beehives, giving us over [...]
Posts under ‘Bees, Animals & Wildlife’
Mystery Guest
Anyone know what this beautiful beastie is (click on photo to enlarge) ?
Bees Love Borage
I can spend hours watching bees and other insects collecting nectar and pollen from flowers. The self-seeded borage in our gardens is covered in honey bees, so I tried to capture some photos of them. Obviously I took lots of photos to obtain these few interesting ones!
Two Weeks Later
The chicks are growing, and now have feathers. Animal food has been a problem for us. We used to buy ‘natural’ chicken food, until we realised that it was largely genetically modified corn (milho) and soya. So, now we have been buying individual sacks of rye (centeio), barley (cevada), wheat (trigo), wheat germ, sunflower seeds, [...]
Bees Gathering Pollen
This morning I took some photos of bees, busily collecting pollen from some poppy flowers in my garden. Now that we have 4 inhabited hives, bee activity in the gardens is noticeably more than in previous years. The poppies flowering in the edges of my garden are incredibly busy with both honey bees and native [...]
Black Kites
We sometimes see Black Kites now soaring in the sky above the quinta. Apparently they winter in Africa and are only seen in the UK when they are passing through. They summer here though, lucky us as they are majestic! Black Kites will take small live prey as well as fish, household refuse and carrion. [...]
Horse Manure Compost
Good things about Horse Manure Maurice and Daan certainly do their job here on the quinta by providing us with their manure. Animal dung has been used for centuries as a fertiliser, as it improves the soil structure so that it holds more nutrients and water, and becomes more fertile. It encourages soil microbial activity [...]
Kitten Update
The kittens are now 5 weeks old so can go to new homes in the next few weeks. It’s not so easy to find homes for cats here in Portugal so if you can possibly offer one please let us know!
Horse Riding
Sophie and I have just got back from our weekly horse riding lesson at Quinta da Pombal in Beijos (half an hour away from here). It is a ‘proper’ Portuguese stables with stallions and mares and they do Portuguese Dressage there. We have about an hour with a teacher for a very reasonable price and [...]
