The wood shed

Mary is studying architecture in England and likes to draw. And have ideas about building things. One day while trying to avoid any new projects she suggested a new wood store, an extension to the garage - to store the bits of wood we had cut from Donald's place a few weeks earlier. (Here's her dreaming up wood store designs stage left).

I like ideas like these and am suseptible to distractions of this nature at any time. Anyway, we do need somewhere to store wood, bikes and wetsuits when they are drying - out of the rain and out of the sun.

We started clearing the area - which took hours: more mega-brambles, tree roots, rocks. Why does moving rubble have to occupy so much of my life?

Then we realised that it was going to take weeks of labour to bring the level of the ground down a little, to be even, and so that you wouldn't whack your head every time you reached in to the shed on the lower end.

So we capitulated and called in the digger. We needed him anyway to dig a trench between garage and house (so water and power could be laid to garage. Mainly so we could wash our wetsuits at garage, before we dry them, but there are of course lots of other worthy reasons).

While we had him on site, we decided he might as well clear a huge pile of rocks and earth from the bottom of the quarry/climbing wall. Little did we know this would mean trucks upon trucks of rubble being moved out, and hours of costly gear on site. This wood store lark was becoming a monster! In the monster's defense, however, I would add that we have now reduced the huge pile of sticks and stones which once occupied the whole area to the right of the garage (see Nikita standing on this pile about a year ago, when we first started clearing the land)

Moreover, just about where Nikita is standing in that picture, we intend to build a dojo, tea room, training and stretching zone from bamboo and oak. One day.

Tired of waiting for the digger crew, Mary had long since returned to England to get back to school. But before she left we built up the structure on the garage to rest the new roof on. So it's half way there.

So Mary, now you can see we've got the level down and the site is ready. Come back - we'll build a wood/wetsuit store!

Moving mountains

Before we build our house we have to take the ruin that's already there to pieces. People have been telling me for years that it's more work -and more expensive - to renovate rather than build a new place. I could never quite believe them, kept thinking it would be different here because we would be doing much of the work, and all that. We are learning slowly but surely that "they" were probably right.

This is one story about just one element of de-construction we have had to do recently so that we can even think about building our house. This is one part of the main building, where we are going to build a new (first) floor, on the existing walls. You can see in the pictures above a part of the old building, and where João, the stonemason and builder is standing on a bit of bedrock that would sit above the level of the new floor. If we left this rock the way it was any rain or water would pour down and into the "new" wall - Not good. Also, we want this to be the rear entrance way to this part of the house, the kids rooms.

So João brings out his big guns: The Compressor + Marcio. Marcio is one of the few people around who is willing and able to spend days on end drilling through rock with an enormous drill that would rattle a normal mans bones to jelly within an hour. He started in the rain, which lasted a day or two, then carried on, hole after hole, hour after hour - with no earmuffs, goggles, gloves or dust-mask - and this work produces terrible granite dust, as fine as dust can be, probably leathal if inhaled in the wrong way. Marcio initially shunned my offer of all these protective bits of kit: what's the point using them now - after all these years, he shrugged. But he liked the ear muffs!


The drilling went of for 3 or 4 days. I can't remember now, it seemed interminable and the noise could be heard clearly miles across the valley. God knows why the whole village didn't come across to complain...

Next up was João with his magic "produto" a modern alternative to dynamite: something to put in the holes freshly dug to almost a meter depth by A-Team candidate Mighty Marcio. Anyway, this product is fiercly expensive (this bit pains me a lot, of course) but is quite impressive. You pour it in liquid, it expands within a few hours and whatever chamber its in splits. In Scotland I've heard they used water and wait for winter for the ice to do the same job. (Hey, cheaper too!).

Next day, the rock was giving up its grip, and had split like a melon. Lots at a time. More drilling, more produto, the process was well under way...


Safffy (our newly adopted family member) and Narissa, another short term adoptee from Australia survey the field of cracks...


By creating space in one corner, we produced a vast amout of material to move around. Rock. THis is most of what I do here: moving rubble. Oh, and dig holes, then move the earth. This time we had Team Rock, joined by Machado the Human Barrel, to level about 20 tonnes of this nicely sized granite blocks down into the Adega room. As if by magic, by 1030 the next morning, most of it had already been moved onto a nearby terrace.

Nikita popped round on his Thursday afternoon he gets off school, and helped João with his water level (nivel de água) - the old Roman way of using water's propensity to always find level, making sure things were on an even plain. In this case, they're measuring approximate spaces where the floor beams will site, within the bedrock. From here we'll measure upwards to include the depth of floor beam + rafters + floor boards (inc. some insulation along the way) to define our final floor level, after which we'll decide exactly where to finish the newly carved stoney path...

Our 350.org action

So, 24th October has finally been and gone - the big day for what they are calling the "biggest climate action ever" for 350.org. Together with José and Bugui, and other friends from both sides of the Minho we helped out with a small event at the old bridge between the Portuguese and Galician towns of Valença and Tui, though we failed to attract the hoardes to fill the bridge with balloons mexican waves of people holding up enormous signs about climate change and all that.

Great to be part of such a global action nonetheless: pictures of the thousands of events that took place that day are here, and were beamed to folks somewhere in New York city, we are told. Not exactly sure where our pics are. Must be a glitch in the system...

You may be asking why is everyone on about 350? Bit of an obscure number possibly? Why not say something like "fight climate change" and so on. Maybe, but it makes sense when you read a bit about it. So here is a link about the climate scientist, James Hansen, who first raised the alarm bells, and the science behind 350.

And a short film (take ten minutes out for this one) that explains what climate change is all about without any numbers, graphs or technical stuff. If you don't do anything else, watch this...

The Pizza Oven

Shawn is a one man bread oven making band. He once saw an old oven in the South of Portugal, was so inspired he figured out how to do it. And started building them for friends and local communities in Germany. Since then, he travels around Europe when his work permits showing people how it all works. We are his most recent beneficiaries, a rare honour!

So we started with the granite base AJ helped us build a while back. If you don't have a waist high base about this height, you'll have to gather a bunch of rock and rubble or earth or whatever to bring the base up, or else you'll be bending down to get anything in and out of the thing.

Photos: Shawn laying oven's base. About 80cm diameter. The stone in the centre is used to anchor a piece of string with a straight stick at the end. You use this to make sure each new layer of bricks, and each individual brick, is in the right place: the string makes sure each brick is the same distance from the middle. This creates a perfect dome shape.


The walls start to curve in... Nikita gets involved. It's actually fairly easy. Shawn showed us how to put little bits of stone of broken tile or whatever on one side of each brick to keep the curve going.










getting the key stones in the right place...


All set. Time to plaster it all with a nice little cob mix and enter Sophia, Heather and Kira to get the first coat on

Shawn gets up early when nobody's looking and pops a door in, then a few hours later and a couple of cob coats later and the fires in.

Then we realise that we should try and capture the heat to warm up some water. Enter Paulo and Huci and the copper pipe. Probably not long enough, but let's see how much water it heats, then we can adjust for future models. The pipe runs down a chimney to a hob beside the oven: somewhere to cook with pans - with some stylish mosaicing by Monica there.



Time to fire it up. Hector and Nikita on cooking duty. With the oven pre-heated a bit pizzas bake in minutes, potatoes do in half an hour. Roast veg in 20. Bread goes in later. The taste - oh - the taste!

We decide it's time for a chimney. Enter Logan and Nikita with another cob mix. We made chimney shaped bricks and stacked them up.


Everyone should have one

Gathering wood to build our house

Donald at home, with his horse, self-built round house and in his woodland


We need chunky beams to build our roof, and others to hold up our floors. Joists I think they call them. Anyway, we need loads and we don't want to use concrete beams, covered in a concrete floor, which mystifies all our local builder friends: it's what everyone does. Why not, it's resistant, cheap, etc.

Where to begin? There are so many reasons why not: the environmental impact of the evil grey powder, horrible material to work with (wrecks your tools and your hands), doesn't perform well in terms of breathability: it's like wrapping your room in plastic so the vapours inside can't escape. Build your roof with it and you live in a plastic bag. Do we need any more reasons to choose wood?

Anyway, a wooden floor or roof beam can be exposed and look nice, maybe even curved a bit like the tree was. Maybe we can insert long bolts and swing from it. And so on.

So we meet Donald and Eleanor who live near Valença in their very own forest. Donald is a vet, and worked in his local community for 17 years or so. Now he looks after the ranch. Donald said we could take some oak trees from his place if we needed to build a roof.

So in August we decided it was time. August because we've heard so much about cutting trees at the right time considering the movement of sap in the tree. These are called the the "menguinte" and you are supposed to cut most trees only in the menguite de Agosto o Janeiro. It make sense: mid summer or mid-winter with be the stillest time for the sap.

The menguinte refers to the waning phase of the moon. As usual other things were happening and we got on to it a bit late, but we got started.

Within a week we had cut 17 of Donald and Eleanor's fine trees. It was quite hard to make the decision to end their eager lives, but Donald tells us that the roots remain full of energy and burst up through the stumps creating many new shoots. He cuts most of these, leaving say four, which grow quickly and in about 8 years are a good chunky size, useful for posts, fencing or firewood. Oak coppicing in other words.

Meanwhile, everywhere we looked we saw baby oak trees growing in every possible space. This is a truly native species and seems to grow at a tremendous speed. The biggest trees we cut were only 25 years old (counting the rings). In Scotland, a tree this size would sure take twice that long!

We arrived in teams. At first myself and Paulo. Then we picked up Shawn for the bread oven and he joined in. Heather and Sophia joined us the next day as we realised how much work clearing the branches and brash was taking. A few days later we increased the pace bringing out our heavy artillery: Machado (local everything worker), Nikita, Logan and Cyreeta and Mary.

After this onslaught we had whole trees strew across the land. Firewood and brash piles rose in newly illuminates glades. Our desired length for most joists was 6m.
This meant leaving extremely heavy chunks of tree lying around in mostly hard to access bit of woodland. How were we going to move it all?


Machado said we needed a "tractor do monte" (a mountain tractor). We called Pedro and he brought his quite amazing hill moving machine.

Fitted with two massive winches, he puts this scary looking tractor in a strategic position, pulls out chains and ties them around the base of trunks. Then stands back and lets the machine do the work: on remote control! Yes, as if by magic half a dozen of these enormous trees move obediently towards this vision of future mooon-scaping. Mary, Donald, Eleanor and I stood like fascinated villagers who had seen a car for the first time. We got lifts in the wagon and played God with the remote. Within a few hours we'd shifted around 20 tonnes of oak to the road side.


Next day, Pedro brings his techno-truck. Awed by the tractor, we were blown by "The Claw". This is a mechanical arm controlled from a precarious looking cockpit above the back of the truck. It moved with the speed and accuracy of your arm. It had the delicacy too: it could pick up small branches and gently relocate them. Or grab whole car-size lumps of earth that were in the wrong place and lob them, like a gormless cricketer, into the beyond.

Once again, we googled open-mouthed. I wondered how I can have missed all this technology development. I suppose I don't work around modern technology in forestry. My only experience with moving wood was in Romania, where we did it all by horse and cart. Seemed to work pretty well too, and would have done here. But moving all the wood the 20 odd miles to the sawmill would have taken forever by cart. Anyway, this is the space age, and we borrowed kit from the Mars programme and enjoyed the show.

Senhor Jorge, at the sawmill was a bit dismissive, saying most of was "lenha" (firewood). He is used to working with massive trees as wide as his own barrel-like girth. He says the heart wood is the only usuable bit, the white outer wood is vulnerable to rotting, bugs and so on. Wish someone had told us this before. We had been hoping he could cut one edge of it for us, leaving the rest in the round (as floor joists would rest of these beams). I'm still sure he can get a few rafters or joists out if it all, if not major beams. And there's plenty of posts for building sheds and the like (chicken coups come to mind).

New chicks on the block

This post written by Sophia, when she was recovering from an impaled foot incident involving a 6 inch brass screw...

The continuing urge of self sustaining living has driven us to chickens. Other than being very tasty and productive little things for the non vegans amongst us, they are massively useful when applying permaculture principles. We now have fluffy chicken tractors for the land. The chickens will allow our sun burnt soil to become prosperous veggie patches, fertilized with organic chicken waste, whilst eating up our dinner scraps.

(Note from Editor: actually, thus far they have clawed up any living thing on the soil in the coup, rampaged through the veg gardens when let out to wander and produced nada on the egg front since day one. Still, in principle...)

Applying our best salvaging and scavenging techniques we built a moveable coup so all of the growing terraces can eventually benefit from our new feathered friends. Whilst on a trip to the James Bond river (more of that later) we harvested some wild growing bamboo to build the structure of our coup.

Luckily, this was ideal as it perfectly fit our two design criterions: lightness of the structure and height. This meant we could move it around easily and not look like an aged crone when you’re collecting the eggs (and for Heather, our newest volunteer, to play with the chickens). The bendability of the bamboo allowed for a beautiful arched structure. Although aesthetics aren’t everything by any means, it’s still great to have an organic flowing structure fitting the natural landscape, than a plastic monstrosity!

Getting the structure to stand firmly without braces (which we didn’t have enough resources for), required notches to be taken out of each piece of bamboo to create a tight fit and then excellent knotting skills, learnt from a friendly Italian visitor. (That'll be Ricardo)

The chicken laying house, to go inside the coup, was scavenged from the shell of the house. Old doors and shutters have been cobbled together to allow the chickens to provide us with omelettes once they come of age. But for now, they continue to look cute and be clucked over by Heather, our mother hen.

(Editor again: they are now SO much bigger, a bit more grumpy and less cute, but still chirping away. Oh, and we tripled their enclosure and stopped them rampaging across the gardens, which was a shame because they used to appear in the kitchen for chirps and shade).

Sophia, current author, having built herself in.

Back into the fray

Finally freed from shackles of a thesis deadline at the end of July we arrived back in Portugal by the first days of August. This time, with Ruth sharing the driving and Hector entertaining Nikita nd Kira in the back of Cora, our van, chockered to the brim with newly acquired stuff - including a couple of ebayed kayaks, dingies and other essential items for a building project.

Since then, August has been a whirl of activity and new arrivals, leaving almost no time to return to this screen to capture some lost moments. Before too much more happens I feel bound to commit something on "paper"

People sharing land and food with us this month so far:

Ruth and Hector (Scotland)
Leen and Meat (Belgium)
Sophia and Heather (England)
Miriem (Galicia / Espagne)
Ricardo, Germana, Michele, Gaia (Italy)
Machado (Portugal)
Paulo (England / Elven Kingdom)
Shawn (USA / Europa)
Huchi (Brazil / London)

August week one:
Ruth embarks on kitchen repairs and upgrades, like linking the sink up to a drainage pipe which we dug across the terrace and left dangling onto the next one. In other words, we just shifted the problem 10m away, so now we need to collect this grey water and build a mini irrigation line from it to the veg bed.





Nikita and Hector start on the solar hot water panel (we'd bought the silicon pipe when back in Scotland - about one third the cost of local copper). I'll post more about this when it's up and running, but basically it's a 4 square meter panel: a sandwich of silicon pipe tied on with wire between 4 sheets of metal, painted black on the exposed surface. We'll need a 12v pump (run of a small solar photovoltaic panel) to move the water between the panel and the hot water tank. It's based on a Solartwin system, invented in Scotland (yeh!) and proposed here by Simon Sharpe, who runs his own renewable energy company out here.

Week two
Sophia and Heather arrive and join the house clearing gang as we pull down any remaining walls, internal plaster and ceilings.








We discovered various new bamboo fields and decided it was time to raid them for our emerging village. Handy for light weight ceilings or roofs, but only over a limited span.









More soon