Quinta das Abelhas, Permaculture in Central Portugal
The last few mornings have been so beautiful, with mist filling the valleys in front of the houses.
As the sun pokes through between the patches of cloud, it feels like spring.
A great time to listen to Tom Jones while cleaning up horse manure in their stables/paddock, and feeding the chickens.
Its probably my favourite time of day – alone in the company of nutty horses, loud music on my headphones, the caffeine rush in my head…
We’re very pleased to be featured in the launch issue of the UK’s National Geographic Traveller magazine, in an article by Alice Griffin on “Voluntourism”.
Responsible travel, or voluntourism, is becoming increasingly popular as people seek to give something back, submerse themselves in a different culture and, possibly, change their lives.
Read the article at:
http://www.alicegriffin.co.uk/Images/164_NGT_0111_161_volunt_SING_R1.pdf
Its a while ago now, that Matt and I went to the Pig to Pork Workshop.
I think its fair to say that most of us, if not all of us, who attended this workshop were apprehensive in the morning. A pig is a big creature, and having seen how they are often killed around here, we didn’t quite know what to expect.
Martin, who was running the course, was in fact brilliant. He started by talking us through the whole process, explaining the need to respect the pig, and to ensure that she would feel as little pain or distress as possible. This was a relief, as I am not sure I could be party to hanging a pig in a tree and letting it bleed to death, fully conscious and squealing!
He also went through all the tools that we would use, and clearly but simply told us what was ahead for the day.
The pig had been without food for 24 hours, so it was a simple matter to put down a bucket of food, wait for her to put her head in the bucket, then fire a bolt gun into her forehead. She dropped to the floor, effectively brain dead, although her heart would continue beating for some time.
Then she was moved to the ladder/tripod that was set up. Our first job was to cut the arteries going into her heart, pushing a long knife under her collar bone. Then she had to hang for a short while to bleed out.
Now she was dead. The next job was to burn off all the hair, which was surprisingly more unpleasant than cutting her arteries! This took some time, and we all had a go with the blow torch.
Then we had to scrape of the outer layer of skin – turning a black pig into a white one. This also involved a blow torch, lightly burning the skin so that it bubbled and could be scraped with a sharp knife.
Once she was cleaned of hair and skin, we watched as Martin cut around her anus, and up her front, to disembowel her, and remove all the internal organs, explaining what was what and what was not edible. After giving her a thorough washing, inside and out, we took the heart, liver, lungs and kidneys to cook for lunch – which was absolutely delicious, except for the lungs which were just a bit too much like eating rubber for me!
In the afternoon, the pig was moved indoors, cut in half and hung. The next day we were taught much about different cuts of meat, use of knives etc etc
It was a very useful and interesting workshop. I now know that I could slaughter a pig, and that one day I will want to keep them. Of course I would have to buy a bolt gun, to ensure a swift death.
Our olives in the hopper.
Going up the conveyor belt to be cleaned and washed.
Then on to wait their turn to be crushed into pulp.
Then here they are being stirred with 43 degree water, to extract the oil. One of these blocks contains our olives crushed into pate!
After about an hour the pulp is pumped into this huge press.
Then the resulting mix of oil and water goes through a centrifuge and out comes our amazing oil.
This then makes its way into a tank, as and when one is available.
And we get to pour this into our own containers.
Beautiful oil, wonderful colour, taste and we know that nothing has gone into it except olives grown on our farm, and handpicked by us.
Just had a fabulous week with Hannah Dawson, she’s been helping me with clicker training the horses, and we finally started to teach Frankie some manners 
See Hannah’s blog post about her trip to Portugal at:
http://hannahdawsonequine.wordpress.com/2010/11/23/clicker-training-and-equine-touch-in-portugal-2/
As a food and travel writer, I firmly believe if you’re going to blog or write about restaurants, you need to spend some time working in one to fully understand how the business works. It’s one thing to sit at your perfectly set table on the receiving end of (hopefully) delicious food and fine tuned service, but an entirely different thing to understand how many hands are involved in making that meal appear in the minutes after you say, “I’d like the steak, please – medium rare.”
After my first week at Quinta Das Abelhas, I feel that anyone who eats – period – should spend some time WWOOFing (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms), or at the very least, on a small, organic farm. I’ve volunteered in Seattle at Marra Farm, a four acre plot within the city limits that produces more than 16,000 pounds of food for the local community. But dropping by to play urban farmer for an afternoon is drastically different from living the day-to-day reality of what goes into making a self-sufficient farm function.
My duties at Quinta Das Abelhas have run the gamut from harvesting basketfuls of vegetables from the gardens and readying beds for the winter with fertilizer and seeds to making quince jelly with fresh picked fruit, helping to remove mud from a trench after a heavy rainfall to building a stone wall. After more than a decade of declaring defeat when working with yeast, Sophie even helped me bake my first successful loaf of bread. The list of what I’m learning about self-sufficiency is endless. The beauty of volunteering in this kind of environment is that there is always something to do, the work is rarely repetitive and it’s fun. I love, love, love being here.
I decided to WWOOF with Quinta Das Abelhas because I try to eat locally and seasonally whenever possible and take great interest in knowing where food comes from. Portugal is a far distance from Seattle (5,836 miles each way to be exact – I have a lot of carbon footprint making up to do), it’s a place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time and got a really good feeling about Andy and Sophie from their website and blog. (I also saw a photo of a gigantic zucchini a friend’s father in Lisbon had grown and had a feeling that people around these parts knew a thing or two about farming.) My gut was spot on. I know a lot of people who’d pay large sums of money for this kind of experience and to achieve the peace I’ve experienced here.
For starters, the property is stunningly beautiful. So even when you’re shoveling manure, you can’t help but have repeated “ah ha” moments. I’m no skilled farm hand, but even so, you feel like you’re playing some small part in the success of a small, family run operation and that feels good. It takes a lot of hands, heart and sweat to make this place run. For all of your hard work, volunteers are rewarded with amazing meals made by Andy and some of the sweetest slumbers ever – I’ve made no secret about how much I love living in my comfy, cozy yurt. After volunteering with four other organizations over the past four months, working for kind people who truly care makes a huge difference. (That’s probably the number one thing I’m grateful for.) Living at Quinta Das Abelhas is a simpler way of life than I’m accustomed to, but it imparts such incredible feelings of calm and satisfaction, that I’m already scheming ways to adopt some of these aspects when I resume my usual urban routine.
My time at Quinta Das Abelhas has reiterated something I feel strongly about: More small farms means more locally produced food, which makes the planet happy. Would you rather be on a first name basis with the farmers who grow your food or do you prefer food that has wracked up thousands of airline miles to make it to your plate? A silly question, really. In a perfect world, less people would eat food produced in massive industrial farms and far off places and more would support the individual people who put so much care into making sure our food is safe, healthy and delicious. WWOOF and you’ll understand why.
We’ve been making quince jelly for the first time – I usually have a horror of any recipe that sounds the least bit complicated and anything mentioning a jelly bag instantly gets discarded. But after Wendy gave us a jar of her quince jelly and then Sarah posted a really simple recipe on her blog, I wanted to give it a go!
Charyn, our current wwoofer, picked and chopped and cooked the quinces. My mum, who’s visiting at the moment, helped to hang the jelly bag above a big bowl.
The fruit was left in the bag (improvised out of an old muslin curtain) to drip into the bowl overnight.
This morning Charyn boiled up the resulting liquid with sugar and lemon juice … for ages! It didn’t look like it was ever going to set. Oh no! We decided (after looking at Wendy’s slightly-more-complicated recipe – which is why it had been rejected in favour of Sarah’s) that we needed more sugar. I added – ahem, rather a lot – more sugar and yay! setting point was reached.
We now have 7 jars of the most beautifully coloured and wonderfully flavoured jelly. I shall be making it again!
It has been a madly busy week again. Many many thanks to Shawn, the bread oven king, for staying with us this past week, and persevering with the bread oven construction.
We had 4 tonnes of granite stone delivered and a metre of sand, and some sacks of cement. Last Saturday, Shawn and helpers started by building the dry stone granite base of the oven.
As the base reached the desired height, it was important to create a level base on which to build the actual oven. Before the cement was added, a fair bit of sand and gravel was filled into the centre. We had a block of slate hanging around, which was used to form a shelf/lip in front of where the door was to go.
Now the fire bricks could start to be put into place, cemented in with fire cement.
Once a rough circle was completed, Shawn starts building the walls. Some of the bricks had to be cut to form the circle.
Upright bricks make up the sides of the door, with an arch over, and the wall bricks continue at an angle to make the dome of the oven.
At this point it looked really unstable and bodged!
Voila! The insides of the oven are completed.
Next, we covered the top in fire cement, and pointed all the bricks properly.
So, after 3 (or 4?) days of work, a fire was set within, to help set the cement casing.
Pizzas were enjoyed later in the evening.
Then we got to play with mud! Mixing cob is an art form, with lots of stomping mud, sand and straw into the mix until it felt about right. Young Tru couldnt resist sitting in it.
When the mud fight was finished, the work of covering the oven in cob could begin. Using hands, a good layer of cob was added, and smoothed out to get the desired shape.
Several layer went on over several days, with the oven being used in the evening to cook dinner, and to help dry out the oven. Before the final coat, indentations were made in the top, so that it would really stick. Any cracks that appeared were smoothed out, filled up, or slipped over (slip – a watery clay mix).
The finished oven is beautiful and practical. It heats up very quickly, burning only twigs and prunings, offcuts and scrub, and stays hot for a long time, thanks to the thick heatsink of cob, stone, bricks and cement. The inside gets up to well over 200 degrees centigrade, while the outside is only warm to the touch (the cats love to sleep on the granite lip around the oven – a cosy spot now the nights are getting chilly).
We still need to make a door for it, fire bricks will work for now. We are very happy indeed with this new low energy cooking option added to the quinta.
“Frankie the Foal” arrived today. Daan is going to a new home where he’ll be loved and spoilt and excercised more than we have the time for, so we needed a companion for Maurice … here he is!
hmm ... not sure about this ramp
oh, seems ok actually, where's this then?
ooh, i'm quite excited about being here!
time out from the track, that's better, i feel much calmer now
ok, i'm ready to go again now!
who's this then?
hello!
hello!
they seem nice, but eating this grape vine is much more interesting
a bucket of food waiting for me! i think i like it here!
