Our round up of what we’ve been working on at Casalinho, our developing permaculture project in central Portugal.
With our first volunteers of 2015 now fully on board, we’ve been hard at work planting the new trees which I talked about last week. Now the mulberries and walnuts are in we are working on the oaks.
Unfortunately illness and bad weather slowed our progress a little, but we’re nearing the end of this project now and looking forward to the next.
Left to right, top to bottom:
1) When our new volunteers arrived we were drowning in cheese! One of our goats had lost her kid leaving her with lots of milk earlier than expected and we’d had less human mouths to feed than normal so I was struggling to use the 3 litres a day I was taking. But within the space of a week it dropped to just over one as Horny is now very close to kidding.
2) The cheese was an excellent accompaniment to the delicious bread Jeroen was baking.
3) Stephan digging holes for young oak trees.
4) My beautiful Wilbur, who has disappeared this week. Much missed.
5) This strange frost pattern on the lower field needed to be recorded! It’s been created where there are differing amounts of water in the soil. Or perhaps it was a spacecraft.
6) One of the tastiest foraged green stuffs around just now, Wall Pennywort or Navelwort (Umbilicus rupestris). Nibbling it gives me something to do when I’m supervising goat walks.
7) Young medronha tree showing it’s wonderful colours in the winter sun. This is one of the trees planted following our Threadpen campaign Christmas 2013.
8) Maybe we have to chisel them out of the ground, but they’re the best tasting leeks ever!
9) Wind damage. This young fruit tree in the orchard area had been loosened by over enthusiastic weeding around it’s roots and the damage hidden by mulch. You can’t hide from the wind though, which blew it straight over.
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