Soltice, Soot and Santa

Well....our final blog post for 2008. Looking back through the year I can see just how much we have actually achieved, which is an eye-opener for the days when we feel that we are making little progress. Another great reason for keeping this blog in the first place.

The Barn.....Fixing the Holes

We had a month of rain and discovered to our horror that rain was coming into the barn on the south side above the stairs. As the damp spread we located the gap in the rendering where the beam over the stairs had been put in. Our great friend Antonio, did a great job of closing it up and refused to be paid. We also disovered a huge hole at the apex of the roof on the North side which our previous builders hadn´t closed when they did the roof. So Fraser climbed up once the rains stopped and the tiles had dried out, to remove the shuttering boards and fill it in. Not best pleased!!!

In the meantime one of the guys who was doing our tiling and painting had to have an afternoon off to go and kill his pig.....as ya do! Anyway the next day we were invited into the barn for lunch and discovered that they had grilled some of the free-range pork meat for us in the fire!! A great idea and the meat was amazing. I am almost converted to the idea of rearing my own pig now, but Fraser is rather dubious about the whole issue.

So here a a few pictures of the barn so you can see the finished product.

Getting ready for solstice and preparing for our winter fires we decided that the time had come to sweep the chimney. We are still finding the traces of the resulting fine layer of soot dust all over the kitchen, despite our careful efforts to contain the soot during the sweep. Fraser had fun playing the role of sweep though and it was good to know it was done.So then we were getting ready for Christmas and trying not to panic over the increasing power of the euro which has cut so much of our savings and made life that little bit more "interesting" in the Chinese sense of the word. I was delighted to find that, yes, I had really grown parsnips!!!!!!!! Not available here. Many of them are amusingly shaped but they still tasted good on Christmas day. As Christmas approached we were putting in final touches and managed to use the party room for our Boxing Day Open House. We emptied the house of furniture and decorations and had a lovely day with friends.

So it only remains for us to wish you all a great new year and hope you will continue to read the blog and come and see us so that you can be featured on it!!!!

The End is Nigh.....

No that´s not the end of the world, but the big news this month is that the barn is nearly finished inside.

Having decided to try to complete the work ourselves because we had run out of funds, our materials provider Antonio, offered us a deal. He would complete the internal rendering, paint inside and tile the ground floor in exchange for ...............Rosie!I will be very sad to see her go but needs must.. and having recently traded the truck for the buswe really now don´t have need of a second car. Sniff...sniff. Antonio´s youngest son will be receiving Rosie for his 18th birthday in January.The upside though is that we have completed much more than we anticipated so should be settling everything into the studio rooms and party room in December.

Fraser has already started to transfer his stuff upstairs.It just remains for me to complete the tiling in the bathroom and on the fireplace and for Fraser to build the partition wall at the back of the bathroom under the stairs.

We have managed to complete all of the pointing round the stones outside and now I can focus on building up the other side of the rockery at the front. We are going to organise the shifting of all of the detritus in the quad, move the granite blocks to store along the roadside and level the area ready for creating the patio garden. Hopefully the levelling will provide me with more topsoil for the rockery. We will have to wait a while for my pension to kick in next year and spring to forage in the forest for cuttings to get that on the go.

In the meantime the land will be needing attention and we are still waiting for more rain to soften up the ground to make it easier to double dig. I am extending my veges to include a patch down in the field along the ditch leading from the pond, where I am going to try to grow pumpkins, squash and melons again. Hopefully, being wetter there I will have a bit more success next year. We also are going to sow the clover...still not done but after the rain it will be a good time to do this.

The critter factor this month .....Our next door neighbour unearthed a local tree frog while she was weeding.And we have discovered that Portugal has false Black Widow spiders...which still pack a venomous bite but are not as lethal as their antipodean cousins. This one lives at our neighbour´s place on a fencepost...We have had to put a net frill string web across the pond since we have had a couple of visits from the local heron, who strikes a wonderful pose on the terraces across from the kitchen window. Unfortunately no picture of him as yet.

November is olive harvest time and some of our neighbours came to pick ours over four days, since we have had no time to even think about doing this and we didn´t want them to be wasted.They got over a hundred kilos in the end which they will add to their own to have processed into olive oil. The quality is usually pretty low, but we will get a couple of litres anyway to see what it is like. I did collect a bucket of what I hoped were bug free olives to preserve for the table. One lot fermented and were full of little maggots and the other small lot are now in brine and herbs after 10 days of changing water and are bugless!

It now only remains for us to prune the trees which is a huge amount of work since they haven´t been done for years. We have done four so far and the amount of trimmings created a wonderful bonfire. We now need to get onto trimming a couple each week, (since we have 25 trees) and dragging the branches down to the field for burning. Should be done by February! No worries.

Highlight of the month was a visit from friends Jenny, Steve and Skaigh (the dog)who came to us for a well deserved break after solving their lightning strike problems. We took time off for a day of retail therapy in Viseu and for a trip up to the Estrellas Mountains to the highest spot 2,000metres The little blip that looks like a small tower is actually two people standing at the edge of the fall away... the rest is cloudbank ...where we found snow!! Skaigh made friends with an Estrella Dog puppy at our stop at the dam below Torre and we were sorely tempted to buy one of the puppies on sale, although we are not quite ready for a dog yet. On our way back we went through a wonderful valley near a place called Manteigas (butters!) and had breathtaking views of autumnal deciduous forest.

and a glacial valley.

It was a great trip!

As it was the time of the festival of São Martinho, when traditionally the locals roast chestnuts and drink the first fermentation of their wine, we decided to have our own chestnuts, done brilliantly by Steve on the barbecue.

However we decided to forego the young fermented wine (vile and will give you a mother of a headache) and made hot spiced wine instead! (Better taste, same headache!)

And finally conCATulations are due to Fraser´s niece Saffi and her Maine Coon cat Sarnia Cherie who won the UK Grand Premier Certificate, then Best of Breed followed by Best of Variety Semi-Longhair Neuter, beating lots of other cats along the way at the NEC in Birmingham. She then competed against the six other Best of Variety Neuter winners - Persian, British, Foreign, Burmese, Oriental and Siamese and won the title of Supreme Neuter. Then Cherie beat the Burmese Adult and Norwegian Forest Kitten to gain the most coveted GCCF title - Supreme Exhibit 2008 while being filmed for a television programe...with Joanna Lumley. Absolutely Purrrfect!

Equinox!!!

The day after the winter equinox on the 21st October we had gales for two days right on cue! The sunsets were pretty stunning too. Illustrating that Portugal is not just sun and relaxation all year round.
Luckily the gales were not too damaging and we didn´t have it half as bad as in the southern Algarve where the floods and winds were vicious. Friends of ours, Steve and Jenny (the villa we stayed at in August with the boys - see August post) had their chimney struck by lightning earlier this month which did huge amounts of damage, blew out the woodburner glass door and shot the electrics. The chimney disappeared and the rubble was everywhere including in the pool. Fortunately this happened in the early hours of the morning so they were safely tucked up in bed. They have spent this month fixing the damage and sadly did not manage to come and stay as planned.

Our woodland is changing its wardrobe to autumn shades, the olives are pretty full of fruits although some are unripe green and others ripened black which is unusual since this is traditionally the olive picking time.

The morning mists have started caused by the closeness of the lake and we even had frost the other night.We fell to talking with a local builder about what it was like here in the past before the river was dammed. He maintains that the olives never used to ripen so sporadically when the river ran free. Apparently in summer you could cross the river on stepping stones it was so shallow and the whole riverside sandy beach was much longer and was full of people at the weekends from both sides! It was well known and the boats used to come up from Figueira da Foz in winter when the river was full and there was a little ferry to the other side and Azeré, the village on the other bank. The two villages had a lot of ties but the dam killed that, separating family members. It was suddenly a days walk or cart ride over the newly built bridge and back to Azere and as no one here in the village had a car in the 70's they rarely saw their families more than once or twice a year.

Fraser has been wondering recently why he hasn´t seen the usual shoals of little sunfish close to the banks anymore but according to a few local fishermen, some idiot of a bureaucrat decided it would be a really good idea to release pike into the river a couple of years ago. Being a reservoir there are no weed beds to provide cover for dinky fish. Probably more worrying is the slimy flourescent green algae that has been coating this stretch of the river all summer. It's like green cottage cheese and where it dries out it turns a bright turquoise blue. I wonder if it's because fish, like shad or something used to eat it before they were eaten?

Going back to the Olives, we have decided to harvest a couple of trees ourselves and process them for eating which is a helluva long process. After bruising the fruit you have to emerse them in water for two weeks, but change the water every day. Then you can preserve them in brine or oil. So we are going to have a go! The rest we have offered to the neighbours who will probably harvest them and take them all to the local Adega to have processed into olive oil. We will then get a few litres of oil from them as payment. We really do need to prune the trees back hard this year, because they haven´t been done for years but there are so many and there is so much wood to prune that the task is pretty daunting. However we will try.

Fraser helped me make a compost bin using up an old door from the barn, two pallets and some other old pieces of wood. Hopefully it will make some decent compost for the spring

We have planted out more saplings, a Sharon Fruit (persimmon), a Liquid Amber, 6 Gingko and 6 more Sweet Chestnuts. We have also decided to sew Clover on the two fields to help enrich the soil, please the bees and hopefully help cut down on the amount of grass cutting needed next year. I have dug over the garden beds but hope to extend the area for next year so after the current rains finish Fraser will help me do the first dig!

We spent a very autumnal day last weekend helping our neighbours Harry and Elaine to collect chestnuts from their new land.

We had a hot lunch thanks to Elaine, camper style and of course roasted chestnuts!Regarding the barn we have panelled sections of the work areas so we could insulate on the brickwork and cut down the costs of rendering! Rui, a local builder and decent sort of bloke, stopped by on Sunday to deliver the quote for rendering the second half of the inside of the barn - €2000. OUCH. This was mainly because it's dead fiddly, lots of nooks, crannies and corners. I think that this is where we learn rendering. So first we decided to do the bathroom ourselves, since that isn´t a place where you spend too much time and anyway I did the tiling so why not finish the job! Fraser says "Ain't doors fun to put in?" since he has just put in the door to the bathroom. And then we came to think that we might as well have a go at doing all the rendering so wish us luck! We're going to be tiling the floor ourselves too, 50 square metres of it.... We're looking for cheap tiles that aren't too hideous.

I have reconstructed the steps from the front of the main house to serve the the door of the barn to make them safer and friendlier to use, using stone wherever possible. It only remains now to put up a couple of railings. Friends have provided us with an old indoor stair rail, very popular in the 70's here which will do brilliantly for us. We just have to work out now how to fix it.

Our solar water heating panels are up and running. Need to adjust how we use hot water to cater for the supply but so far it has been great.

We bought a mysterious orchid cheaply last February without know what kind of bloom it would produce and it has turned out to be a stunner. Captured here with a regular visitor to our verandah.And going back to the theme of windy, I made Jerusalem Artichoke soup from our crop and have decided to re-name it windy soup. Boy we suffered for days!!!!