Quinta das Abelhas, Permaculture in Central Portugal
We watched this last night and although I felt it concentrated too much on the meat industry (large-scale fruit and veg production is just as bad for the planet) it’s well worth watching. Recommend it to your friends. Here’s a the first part on youtube, and you can watch the rest there too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyagLY1Nem8
“You’ll never look at dinner the same way”
Further Reading:
We’re going to start building our bread oven this Saturday, 18th September!
Everyone Welcome 
This will not be run as a formal workshop but simply an opportunity for anyone who’s interested to come along and see how it’s done (and hopefully lend a hand!).
Lunch & drinks will be provided for which there is no charge, but please let us know if you will be coming so we have an idea of how many we need to cater for.
Depending on the final design, weather, number of people, etc, we expect the build to last 3-5 days. You are welcome to come for as much or as little as you like.
On Saturday we’ll start with building the foundation / base for the oven.
Saturday evening is the last night of our village festa, with live music and fireworks (and a pool tournament at our local bar) – so there’s lots of fun to be had this weekend!
If you want to bring a tent and camp here for the Bread Oven Build that is no problem. We have a kitchen caravan where you can prepare your own breakfast & evening meal, a solar shower, a compost toilet, and a swimming pool! 5 euros per night (small tent) / 10 euros per night (large tent). Some yurt accommodation may also be available. More info at: www.portugalyurt.co.uk
Does anyone have a slab of stone (granite, slate, …) at least 1m x 1m that we can have / buy for the base of the oven?
Love this poem:
And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.
They’re coming, they’re on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped with cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people’s gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.- Marge Piercy “Attack of the Squash People”
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 4 kilos of delicious raw honey!
With the blackcurrant bushes overflowing, we found ourselves thinking of delicious things to do with them. Having picked over 3 kilos in a few days (even if we did eat quite a few on the spot) it was obvious that we had to preserve them somehow. This turned into a blackcurrant feast with jam, Swedish-style blackcurrant cordial, bottled fruit and a yoghurt and blackcurrant cake – so good we had to make it again the next day.
We’re posting the recipes for all these things below, just in case anyone else is in the same situation…
Blackcurrant Jam
This jam is simple and delicious (we know because we already ate a whole jar!). Currants are a great fruit to make jam with because they’re high in pectin – especially when just under-ripe, though ours weren’t – so they set without adding any other fruits. This recipe is from the River Cottage Handbook of Preserves.
We used
1.5 kg of blackcurrants, without twigs or stalks (though the shrivelled bit left from the flower can stay)
2,250 kg of sugar
900 ml of water
Put the currants with the water in a pan and place over a low heat to bring to simmering point. Leave for 15-20 mins (the fruit should be soft but not totally disintegrated), then add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved. Then, bring to a full rolling boil and maintain it for 5 minutes while stirring.
Remove from the heat and continue stirring gently for a couple of minutes to cool. You’ll know if the jam is ready by testing for the setting point. When it is done decant into sterilised jars – from our currants we got (more or less) six:
Jam!
Bottled Blackcurrants
This is a great way to preserve the little delicious black balls themselves. This project was also a way to test out using the solar cooker and oven to sterilise jars, which was definitely the most work-intensive part! To sterilise jars we boiled water in the solar cooker (at about 88 degrees centigrade) and filled up the jars, which we then left in the solar oven for some twenty minutes.
Jam jars sterilising in the solar oven, with the screw tops in hot water
We needed:
1,750 kg blackcurrants
1,2 l water
450 g sugar
a few lemon verbena leaves from the garden
The actual bottling involved cleaning the blackcurrants and packing them into the jars, with a few verbena leaves layered in each. Then, we added the syrup we made from the sugar and water – it should be at 60 degrees. We closed the jars without tightening the lids much and put them in a deep pan with a tea towel at the bottom filled with warm (38 C) water up to the jar necks. The point of this step is to create a vacuum inside the jars by slowly heating the water to simmering point (88C again) and letting it boil for just a couple of minutes before removing the bottles and tightening the lids. After a day or so, they should be properly sealed and last for about a year… Fingers crossed.
Adding hot syrup to the jars
To be continued due to low solar power…
Hedvig & Sara
We were looking for a free holiday when we found out about Wwoofing. Sara and I live in East London, and being Portuguese Sara gets thoroughly sick of grey skies and rainy days by the end of a long English winter and starts to pine for her homeland. When we hit upon Wwoofing Portugal it seemed the perfect way to sate both her longing for 30 degree temperatures and ours for growing fresh vegetables, having had to give up my tomato and chili plants when moving house last year. I didn’t really know anything about growing organic food and permaculture, having largely ignored the movement considering vegetables in the UK to be expensive enough already, but we were attracted by the yurts, the bees, and the prospect of debating the collapse of civilisation.
The joy of arrival was only slightly tempered by our accomodation being moved from the then-uninhabitable yurt to a cosier (smaller!) caravan, and we soon realised that this was a symptom of life at the Quinta being more relaxed than we could possibly have hoped. It’s no picnic, we get up at hours I normally only see from the other end of the day to shovel horse-shit and do the heavier jobs that are unbearable once the mist clears and the temperature climbs, but when we have time free in the day I recall Sophie suggesting we take a picnic to the river, so sometimes it is.
There is certainly a lot of work that I would not describe as fun. Scrubbing yurts and weeding (especially in the heat of the day) is in no way my particular cup of herbal tea, but I was surprised to find that once done, and done well as part of a team, the satisfaction is considerably greater than that gained from, say, skiving off in the shade to ‘blog’, as I’m doing now and do a lot back home.
I wouldn’t say that wwoofing is for everyone, but the great thing about Quinta des Abelhas is the relaxed attitude to it: no-one has ever asked me if I’ve done my 6 hours of work on a particular day, and they haven’t needed to. With such a variety of tasks available to get on with in our own time, everyone seems very happy to spend a few hours making a mosaic, some time in the garden, a dip in the pool to cool off and then off to the kitchen to bake bread. There was no question that taking two days off in the first week to go wild in Porto at San Joao would be a problem, and likewise when Matt screeched to a halt in the 4×4 when I was on the way to watch the football, saying “Need a volounteer to put the yurt up, it’s gonna rain!”, it didn’t occur to me to point out that I’d already done 6 hours work that day. If my employer in London asked me to work an extra hour for free I’d be laughing all the way home. I even missed the Holland game yesterday to watch Andy’s Geoff Lawton film, “Creating a Food Forest”, which was a revelation. It’s great to realise that there’s a way to live off the land without stripping it bare and spraying it with pesticides. I would recommend coming here to wanting to learn about permaculture, as long as you don’t mind shovelling shit at 7am.
