Photos of summertime

I just found out how to blog up photos from Picassa - wooh! So here's random selection from sometime last summer...

my favourite otter

Joao and son sorting out the steps 

Too darned hot up, time for chilling down at the riviera


Romanians rain-protector wall freshly built at the Alambique


Joao with his Toy Story toy



Earth to mud to piglets and eventually to wall plaster sometime later


Kira kind of learning to roll:)


And to ride waterfalls! (this taken after she made it down that littl'un:)

Week in the life of Casa Felix

January has been as busy as any other, though we still don't have planning permission so can't actually start work on the house. So we have spent way more time working the soil, which is mostly a gritty, sandy affair, high in acid and not very productive. So this is has become one of our tasks here, one of my obsessions even.

Arguably one of the most important things we have to do globally: figure out how to make soils productive without importing
fertiliser, using herbicides or pesticides
(all of which are made from fossil fuels) .
Here Kira's on our new raised beds, made in the chicken's former home, so we thought it must be fairly well fertilised. More on this design later.

This month Aljo visited. Former skateboarding conquestor, skate pad inventor, mountain bike builder and traveller. It's been a long time since last we connected, and in fact Alj represents the the first of my board-riding mates to visit.

Loads happened. First: moving dirt (see left). Their had to be a better way to move a few tonnes of this stuff from "up" to lower down the land where I want to build a new terrace for planting bamboo.

So we build a ramp to cross three terraces. With chipboard kindly flowed by Maria Fuentes (Galician sawmill).

OK this took a day or so of labour, but I swear it will save time later. Anyway it was quite surfable...

Here the chickens decided they had to give design advice, but just ended up getting in the way.

Next we decided to build a wall to stop catch the falling earth, creating the next terrace at the same time.









Then we went down to our river / watermills area to cut some chestnut and alder trees - for building projects later in the year. We are following local advice on felling trees at the "minguente" or the waning moon of January - when the sap is at rest, it means the wood will be better for all kinds of uses, be less vulnerable to bugs and diseases, will warp less, etc.

These chestnuts were first spotted by Hywel, who is big on coppicing. Cut them, he urged, and they'll grow back. In fact they had proabably emerged from the stump of an old chestut, cut about 15 years ago. I climbed up to tie a rope way up each tree, so Aljo could put tension on the rope, to help the tree fall the right way. The bark comes off easily, newly felled. Aljo's paw showing the girth of this one, only 10 years old. We'll probably use it as a post for a new outdoor kitchen outside the main house.

Then it rained. So we took refuge in this local river-cave.

Back up for air (to the terraces on the hill) we transplanted an olive:









Mulched trees to prevent weed growth (robbing nutrients from their second year of growth. Under the cardboard we chucked in some composted chicken and sawdust manure. Above it, we've now added forest leaves, straw and anything else we find lying around that's organic and soft (no more spiky things, like I foolishy laid around them last year).














Back at the camp, we revisited the slowest-to-build solar heating system in history. We need to build a frame around this panel now to enclose the 4m2 glazed double-doors we were given. More on this sytem later - when we get it finished...











Meanwhile, under strict instructions from Charlie and Lyra (the cats) the chickens are tractoring away on the lower terrace. See how much they have "ploughed" in just over a week. We move the cage every couple of days or so. Potatoes and peas following shortly behind in Feb.





Just as Aljo thought he could take a break, we whisked him away for weekend labours: clearing the local community youth club's tennis court. Yes: a tennis court! (OMG). And yes we can use it, and yes they definitely want people who are any good at the game to come and teach local kids how to play. In fact this local youth club is just kicking off again after a few years absence. I've been asked to be part of it in some way, so hopefully we'll have lots of opportunities to share ideas, games and projects with them, local kids and families soon.



Of course clearing this abandoned court /football pitch meant we had a source of oak and pine leaf litter, from year. Perfect for that tree mulch job:)















Finally we have all become servants to the cats, who need to be moved from house to land every day (we still live off site).
Here Charlie, clearly irritated by our delays growled "Are we leaving yet or What?"

How to make soil / Como fazer o solo?

How exactly do you get food to grow in depleted or poor quality soils? I've tried with little success in Scotland, Kenya, Liberia and now Portugal. What's the trick?

Now settled in one place for more than a few months, a village where people grow vast quantities of amazing-looking things in their gardens, I have seen a few seasons pass and have listened to their stories about what they do to make it all work. Also, we have Paulo on site much of the time: our very own walking permaculture encyclopedia, who's always keen to see the theories into practice.

Although permaculture design covers far more than the growing of vegies I can't help notice the huge differences between the two systems (local's gardens and permaculture growing). Here are a couple of major ones:

Normal gardeners dig their soil over each year, usually use this opportunity to add in some manure of other fertiliser. Heaps of work, happily avoided in permaculture's no-dig method: just cover the soil with loads of mulch (described below), avoid walking or compressing the soil and ecourage loads of soil life to develop: bacteria, fungi/mycellia, insects, worms, and millions of other mini-actors we barely understand but are responsible for making great soil if they have the right conditions. Digging the soil wrecks their world (and is way too much work too).

Weeding: another reason I always avoided gardening - loads of boring work. Instead, put down sheet mulch (shown below) and the weeds are denied light and can't live. Replace them with plants you want. Easy. OK, supposed to be. I'm sure there is more to it, but it has worked for us so far.

Couple of test sites here.

This is a South facing terrace that bakes in summer. Trying to build up soil there to plant berry bushes and small trees and kiwis to shade the whole area.
Neighbour's dog, Pinnochio (our dog's best friend by far) tramping all over it already the swine. We had just pruned a large bit of the mimosa (acacia) tree planted last year, for nitrogen mulch...



This is the next terrace up, the "chicken terrace". Here we want to build up an edge, to keep water on the terrace a bit longer, but also build up soil quality to grow things in. So we started with cardboard, then some nice looking soil with old manure on top, then forest leafy stuff, then newspaper, well soaked. then straw. We found 35 tiny strawberry plants in the shop and punched holes through the damp mulch bed and popped them in. Oh, we installed some micro irrigation pipe below the cardboard too, to avoid the drudgery of summer manual watering...
















Teuru, admiring our handiwork. Next stop: strawberry heaven.



And here is the first garden patch we started this Spring (09). We chunked it full of tomatoes and squash and green peppers. As they started withering into winter, we planted in some lettuces, cauliflower, brocoli, onions and any other winter thing we could find. Where we found weeds we covered them with more cardboard and straw. It seems to go OK, and the soil is imroving a lot, but slugs have chowed through a good share of those new leaves. So next up is how to deal with slugs. Any ideas anyone?

Star of this show: Teuru all the way over from Cook Islands





Paulo in his element with new trainees (James from Tasmania and Teuru)

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!