Permanent Portuculture

first orange

2012-01-14T10:03:00.001-08:00

this is our first orange from our three year old tree...lots more to come and lemons too

Greek style yogurt and orange curd

2012-01-07T01:09:00.000-08:00

I have spent some time making live yogurt in a variety of flasks without great success, it was always a bit runny and as it's the winter we are using the flasks to take soup to work.So for Christmas I bought myself a present for my husband to give me. A yogurt maker. It was cheap and only uses the same amount of electricity as a light bulb. I make a litre of yogurt in the evening and leave it overnight. It's perfect as it is, with no whey, however, we like our yogurt a bit thicker so I decant in the morning and leave it to drip through a jelly bag (giving the whey to the pigs, but you can use it for cooking and baking). The result after a few hours is the thickest yogurt ever..........but half the quantity I started with. This in itself is a wonderful revelation, you can get greek yogurt here but it's really expensive and as I only go food shopping once every two to three weeks this way we can have it everyday......

Yesterday I visted a friend who has a seville orange tree, she very kindly gave me 12 oranges and last night I made orange curd, thought it would be a bit of a faff but no it was easy, we now have 5 jars sitting in the fridge, but probably won't last long....the greek yogurt mixed with orange curd is aboslutely delicious.....there goes my new year healthy eating plan......oh well, small price to pay for such fresh and amazing food

thanks very much, tar

2012-01-04T01:36:00.000-08:00

thanks very much, tar.

really its thanks very much ray mears, as it was through an episode of bushcraft in sweden that i found the answer to a problem that had been troubling me.

i had first seen the programme a long while back and was struck by the use of pine roots and stumps to make pine tar. if you wikipedia pine tar, at (www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_tar) you will find a whole history about its use. from buildings to baseball, ships to sheep.

it was, as they say, the beginning of the story.

whilst i understand that some out there, who may not know me, may think i am a little eccentric, or wholly mad, and perhaps even some people who do have an idea about how i am may also think this? i would like to try and alley your concerns as best i can. i would like to think, that what i do is just that. think. think and then think some more and then when i'm done thinking, think about it some more, and then do it. however, sometimes with all the best will in the world it doesn't turn out that way. sometimes there's still not enough thinking, and there is going off not entirely cocked.

for those of you still convinced of the madness theory, who might argue its not the lack of thought but the choices, i would say that my choices are generally not driven by the ease or speed with which a thing can be accomplished. few things, in my opinion are better because they were accomplished quickly. better to do it properly.

my choices here are driven by how well i believe they are integrated in the scheme of what we are trying to accomplish overall. which, in this instance, is about how we relate to our immediate environment, and live within it, as part of it.

it means not being wasteful, but trying to utilize every conceivable part of a thing, and then trying to think up more and better uses. particularly for resources, which are never limitless and frequently require great physical effort to obtain. this i would argue is the guiding idea of permaculture or self sufficiency. make the smartest choices you can based on what you are able to obtain and the ways in which you can use them.

what we don't have is any money, and what we do have is a fair bit of experience, knowledge and tooling, and these are probably the principal and defining reasons why i do the things i do. yes, if the things were available here and we had money i would, i'm sure, like everyone else end up buying some of them. however, we are living in a third world country where there really aren't many things or access to things other than what is available, and it necessitates being inventive, resourceful, and capable. three of my favorite things, to mis-quote mary poppins.

intelligence isn't about your ability to pass aptitude tests, its about your ability to recognise the correlation between things, and to use that information in ways that help your practical understanding of it. trying to be self sufficient is all about that. how you find more and more inventive ways to use the things around you that involve less expenditure of effort and money.

in terms of resourcefulness, and use of resources, pine roots are a good case in point. following felling the tree, there is always an amount of waste, the brashings and the stump and roots. i found an answer for the brashings, the great fonds of needles on branches too small to cut for firewood, are great to burn in the bread oven, after all there is only so much pine needle tea you can drink. but what about the stumps? well you can cut them close to the ground for firewood, but that still leaves the roots, you can let them eventually rot into the ground, but the more resin they have within them the longer this takes, in the great bogs of the world they get preserved for thousands of years, and generally you would do best avoiding burning them in your stove or fireplace because they are too resinous, so what better way to use them than making pine tar, and one further thing, as a by-product of the process of making pine tar you get charcoal. two for the price of one.

several times i had been asked how i was going to treat the timber frame to prevent both insect and fungal attack? although i had planned on using diesel and have used it, it was only ever to be a temporary stop gap solution, so to speak. i wanted something that would be a more permanent answer. having the timber pressure treated was never an option, nor was the possibility of buying timber that was more durable than the stock i had. that would have been going against the whole ethos of what i am trying to do here. build a house, the old fashioned way, with the materials available. which meant using timber from our section of the forest. it was also unaffordable. the cost of sufficient timber that was more durable for the basic frame was over £5000 and pressure treatment was way over the £1000 mark. so far the pine tar treatment has cost me about £10 in turpentine and linseed oil, and i expect it to cost less than £100 in total.

so how do you prevent insect infestation and how do you deter rot? essentially they are two different questions, that can often have two different solutions. in our situation, where we have no budget, i needed to find one answer, that was cheaper than affordable, that was essentially free. and pine tar was the answer.

the question came to me a while ago, how did people treat their buildings 4 or 5 hundred years ago or more? if you take a look around south eastern england you will see that there are a lot of ancient timber frame buildings. how did they survive so long without using treated timber? or having damp courses? or even foundations? how did timbers survive placed directly on the ground? well if you look at the foundation-less buildings that are several hundred years old a number of them will have had sill repairs or replacements or be suffering from some kind of settlement or collapse because of rotting. no matter how hard oak or any other timber becomes with aging, it is difficult for it to withstand the effects of constant contact with moisture indefinately. similarly, areas where water or moisture gather, valleys on roofs, roof plates, chimney carcassing, window sills and transomes, become hotspots for decay. however, timber that has been treated with pine tar on a regular basis during its lifetime holds up better. very much better. the very existence of ancient timber frame buildings is testament to that. finland's oldest church (www.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borgund_stave_church ) , over 800 years old is a great example of this, its pine shingles on the roof are tar coated.

pine tar is a biocide, which means its a natural active preventative to rot and infestation from insects. the resin from which it is made is the thing that keeps the tree free from rotting or being eaten.

as for the process, its pretty simple.

gather a pine root mass or stump,

if its roots, ideally you want to leave them in the rain for a bit to wash off the worst of the dirt and clear out any stone before you take your chainsaw to them, or use an old chain, and then you want to cut it up into bite size pieces to allow the process of destructive distillation to remove the tar from within.

get two tins, one with a lid that fits. make a drain hole in the bottom of the lidded tin, and place that over the other tin (the catcher).

dig a hole, and place the catcher tin in it, and backfill around it. fill the lidded tin with bite size bits of resinous pine either the stumps or root mass, (the smaller you cut it up the easier it is for the tar to be released).

set a fire around the top tin and let it burn for a couple of hours.

by the end of the burn all being well you should end up with an amount of liquid tar

word of caution, you need to make sure the top tin with the resinous bits in is as air tight as possible (other than the drain hole), or the gases from the destructive distillation will ignite, and reduce the amount of tar you get. it is also advisable to keep the catcher tin out of the fire or the tar will ignite also. leaving you with nothing, but a burnt mess.

so far, i have found that if you can directly light a strip of wood from the stump with a match, then it has a reasonable amount of tar in it, and if you can't light it, don't bother cutting it up for tar making. this is a quick time and effort saving test.

to make a coating that you can use on timber i would recommend cutting the pine tar with spirit of turpentine, and linseed oil, in roughly 1/3rds, using more or less turps depending on the viscosity of the tar and the penetration into the timber you want. for the first coat you probably want more turps than tar. you be the judge. do some tests. how long will it be effective? i don't know. how soon does it need reapplying? i don't know. like creosote it depends on the situation.

i thought i was going to need a large amount of tar. after todays test with 100ml or so i've changed my mind. a little goes a long way. ta.

the daily grind

2011-12-19T12:51:00.000-08:00

I've allowed myself a little bit of poetic exaggeration for the sake of a good entry title, but needless to say I do not do this grinding everyday....but wanted to share with you my new toy.
Kindly donated by a friend in the UK, it's finally come out to play......

i have managed to grow enough maize and soya to grind up my own non-GM pig food. I have by no means been able to grow enough for the chickens aswell but hopefully next year there will be more, so for the moment the pigs get it, they won't be around for much longer, so want to continue with their non-GM diet until slaughter

On previous entries I had mentioned about my heirloom black soya. I started off with about 20 seeds and the first year I harvested about a kilo, which I planted this year, this year I harvested about 8 kilos, about 4 of which I will plant next year. It's a great crop, needs no care or water and produces well. It's a great source of protein for the animals and as the animal feed here is mostly GM soya and maize, growing my own takes us closer to where we ant to be, self sufficient and GM free

autumn watch

2011-11-09T11:35:00.000-08:00

so much time has lapsed since I last wrote i don't really know where to start.

Am currently caught up in the olive picking season, which I am having to do on my own this year, it's challenging to say the least but will be rewarding in the end. I have picked all the trees on the house side of the farm

and have started on the olive grove, the other side of the valley

it's rained alot, and for the third year running the other side of the chicken coop has proved a very cosy place to hide, in amongst the tools and rat poo!!!

we've had storm force winds and brilliant sunshine, which found me climbing trees in my knickers!!! (no photo!!)

The garden is still producing loads of stuff

cabbages, tomatoes, peppers, beetroot, spinach, celery, carrots etc.

I've also planted clover and in-between the clover, onion sets and garlic, an experiment, we'll see what the yields are like next year.

Also continuing to plant out brassicas for the chickens.

I've still got the occasional raspberry

and have made a whole new row on the fruit meadow of autumn fruiting raspberries

and finally dug up the tayberries that I'd accidentally planted in a row with loganberries, so they now have their own special prickly row

The compost has been turned (thanks Tony),

the citrus trees covered for the winter, first with some old fleece but it got ripped to shreds by the wind, so I had to do it all again with shade netting

and here's a few random pictures

fibbonacci

2011-10-03T02:03:00.001-07:00

the fibbonacci sequence - is a numerical sequence where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers, starting with 0, then 1

see also the golden ratio - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio

both things constantly occur in nature, in a self replicating way, from soft spirals of shells to the perfect arterial design of trees.

sometimes things have a way of working out that you could not have planned for, as such, sometimes very much for the better, and sometimes not. building this phase of the frame has been an entertaining experience. in that, i have had to learn quickly. sometimes it has meant adjusting things, and sometimes even re-doing things.

the very size and shape of the building was not entirely determined by the book i was following, nor by the space in which i had to build, but owed some to the size and shape of the trees that were on our land that i felled for construction. they in large part determined what i have so far been able to build. in it was their natural selection that evolved the parameters of the site into the fibbonacci sequence almost to the thousandth point.

generally, in construction, sequences are very key. not only in the way in which things have to go together, but also in the way in which you do things.

in essence, much of building, outside of the art and craft of it, boils down to your ability to prioritise sequences and repeat procedures.

as you progress along your way as a builder, you are often in a position to refine and redevelop those sequences, and sometimes even throw them away.

it depends, as they say here, on many things, particularly on what you are doing and the way in which you choose to do it. if, for example, you have a number of the same activity to achieve, you may choose to do it all at once if it is feasible.

it isn't always, as there are many things which can prevent that, for instance, i have something like 60 odd braces (in number, and description, in that, they are not uniform) to cut and install, and a number, as yet undecided, of collar ties, which approximate the shape of the braces, their method of construction and installation.

if you were very methodical in your approach you might consider cutting them all in one go. it would achieve one objective, having them done, but it would leave no further room to change the way in which you were doing it in response to the rest of the construction.

and here's the thing. timber framing needs to evolve.

it needs to evolve as a response to what you are doing and how you are doing it, in addition to the materials you are using; the shapes, the forms, the inherent strengths and weaknesses, the relation to other parts, and conflicts of position, and location.

i had been loosely following a design by jack sobon, in his excellent book 'timber framed house', i've used his design for the sizing of timbers and choice of joints, but have changed the dimensions.

in so doing, i've changed the house. you could call it serendipity, you could call it luck, you could call it fortuitous, but somehow, somewhere along the way it has developed itself thru my hands into a design that is the golden section, the very fibbonacci sequence itself. that is why the building looks so harmonious, because even on an architectural level, mathematically, it is.

it takes a lot to break away, to follow you heart, to listen to what you are doing, and be responsive to it. but then, if you can, sometimes magic happens.

in the vast majority of professional construction all you are dealing with are very uniform materials, of given sizes and dimensions, with specific requirements for placing and fixing. framing in non-dimensional timber (nominal sizes, and timber not sawn square on all faces) is a whole other book. invariably, you end up with a combination of systems of layout and cutting, square rule (where everything relates to everything else from one squared face to another), and the scribe rule (where no meeting of two faces is equal, and one or both of them has to be adjusted to conform to the shape of the other, to make them fit together).

here, in portugal, even the weather plays a role in your ability to sequence things. to cut all of one thing in one go, assumes that between the time of setting out and cutting, and installation there is nothing acting on any piece which has adjusted its shape or size. in an environment where 42 degree heat is frequent, it can have a massive impact on the fitment of timber to timber. the previous perfect faces of mortices and tenons, of braces and housings, of scarfs, and socket joints, can all distort in a very short time, sometimes irrevocably; and you have two choices, either adjust one or both of them, if possible, or live with it.

in the process of changing Sobon's design to fit both my site and the building's requirements, i changed the way in which i needed to construct the house on my own, without a crane, and without a team of 57 other people, in point of fact, without anyone. for instance, it meant halving the height of the main posts, and having twice as many of them (stacked one on top of the other) which in turn meant increasing the number of braces (there are twice as many as in his design) which has added a huge amount to the construction time, as they are all scribed into their housings.

it has also meant a return to what he refers to as not only a more modular way of construction, but also a more three dimensional way of building. rather than prefabricating the entire building, or even large cross sections, i choose to reduce the amount of pre-construction to a minimum, by raising the structure as i went along, and prefabricating only the minimum amount of components that would enable that.

essentially, that meant finding the bracing material for one area, then cutting it. getting one of the girding beams on site (the beams that run from the back to the front) and a pair of posts to support it. setting out, then making all the cuts, cleaning them and only checking the pre-assembly of the braces. i couldn't pre-check the fit of the thru mortices, as i couldn't manage into position the posts into the beam on my own, too big, too heavy, too awkward, and that's just the posts. so i measured carefully, checked and re-checked countless times, and hoped i was right. but, when you are measuring off of sides whose edges aren't square, there is always room for error. so far, i haven't been out by more than a few pairings with a slick chisel or plane.

even in the relatively short time, one summer, between felling and milling, and the start of assembly, the big timbers have dried a lot, and have lost quite an amount of weight. when they arrived at the road side, i could hardly even manage to bar up one end of an 18ft (6m) 8x10 (200x250mm) now i can lift one end, thou not that far. so it meant, initially, even getting the girding beams on site was a mission, let alone working them.

i think its really important to be able to respond to the building as you erect it, especially when using non-linear material. shapes within the non-linearity of certain materials inform your choices of where to segue in other parts. sometimes forms present themselves in places where you hadn't expected to see them, that add a new dimension to the to structure. and although i am a staunch supporter of form following function, sometimes though, the form needs to be allowed to influence the function. what i am looking for is a balance of form and function, where one doesn't just dictate the other but improves and transforms it. the key, as a friend used to say, is in the word.

often with building, when something looks right its because it is, and if it looks wrong, equally, its because it is.

in sobon's book, for ease of construction he suggests cutting the braces out of straight and squared stock. easy for setting out, but not very interesting.

its only when you begin to put the frame together that you can see other things, such as the intrinsic beauty of the brace, and how more natural curves not only soften the design but are every bit as strong if not stronger, particularly when they operate primarily in compression. not only are they in keeping with the traditional construction of frames, they serve, like diminishing rafters, an other purpose; using smaller section stock to cut your brace from, and keeping the curves, you reduce the amount of trees you have to fell, and utilise parts that would often end up as firewood.

curved braces add a lot, they have a greater elegance of shape which contribute to an overall flow of the frame. they help the frame breathe, like they are still a part of the living tree. invariably, you can't buy curved braces, you have to cut them yourself. and that means seeing them in the tree, seeing the wood for the trees.

pissed piggie

2011-09-29T00:49:00.000-07:00

For the last few days I've been collecting windfall fruit and giving it to the pigs to eat, great free food for them and healthy to boot.........

Yesterday morning I arrived at the farm to discover that the youngest pig was having trouble walking and standing up, she also seemed completely confused.......

In my usual dramatic way I assumed she'd suffered some kind of brain injury, had a dreadful disease or had had a stroke or seizure. After a quick chat with husband and some shouting I called a friend, who suggested she may be drunk. In observation it would have seemed that he was right and husband proceeded to take the piss out of me and the pig, lots of jokes etc. I, on the other hand was still being deadly serious about the whole thing and rather concerned, I stayed with her all day and had to leave as it got dark, with her lying in the middle of her field. Stupidly I didn't sleep a wink and as soon as the sun came up today, I went to see her. There she was all tucked up in bed with her mum, she walked out of the house like nothing had happened. I am releived and feeling obviously rather silly, I shall never hear the end of it no doubt. It was the quinces that did it apparently, now the locals tell me don't give them quinces!!!!!

Bloody livestock

festa-ing

2011-09-19T00:06:00.000-07:00

We never take any time off together, or go anywhere together for that matter, so we decided that this year we would visit all the Festas in our area. Every weekend from July until the beginning of September most of the villages in Portugal have their own Festa, a party to the likes of us, but most have a religious significance, processions, church services, but also local bands,
raffles, I failed to win the first prize again, a goat

big sit-down meals and tasty snacks

We visted the Vinho Festa, were we banged a lot of nails into a piece of wood, much hilarity was had, mostly with the ridiculous hammer. The first one with a nail down, pays for the nails, 10c each, the last one down, buys the drinks, and here in Vinho, you can hit anyones nails...we literally got hammered!!

Unfortunately for us the evening events don't really kick-off until after 10pm which makes it difficult to attend (I am usually in bed by 11pm), but we persevered.
We planned each weekend carefully, making sure we went to the village with the best band on Friday and Saturday nights and by Sunday we were burnt out but attended non the less.

We gate crashed a procession in Pai Das Donas, visiting each open house with the father and son accordion players, eating snacks and drinking some very dubious alcohols, always being forced upon us This particular event started very strangely as we really were clearly not part of the village, but we knew the accordion player and his wife and were begged to stay and continue, by the end of the night we had made lots of new friends, some of who only come once a year. Pai Das Donas is a tiny village with a permanent residency of 9!!

We nearly got the hang of the dance (although we were still the laughing stock of everyone!!)

There is a lovely sense of celebration here in the summer, a celebration of life, a real family event, a coming togetherness. Something I've not experienced before. It's amazing to feel part of that and to be welcomed into the hearts of so many not to mention the houses and the food and the drink.
Thank you kind people of Portugal/obrigado gente amável de Portugal

more things figgy

2011-09-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

Preserved figs in lemon and brandy syrup

yum yum

seeds and what not

2011-09-11T03:04:00.000-07:00

I have been breathing a sigh of relief as the season changes I can finally get out and do some stuff, I love this time of year in the garden, bit of a neat freak anyway so clearing up is one of my favourite things on the farm, have been collecting seeds and continue to harvest the soya beans,

I now have over a kilo for planting out next year and hope to have at least 3 more kilos from the crop on the borrowed meadow. it has been a very good crop on our farm, needs no watering at all and maybe one day i will have enough to feed the chickens, just need to figure out a way to pod them that isn't so time consuming. If anyone wants a starter pack (about 20 seeds is what I started with) let me know, would be happy to share.

Also did an experiment this year with blue hopi corn, planting a couple of rows either side of my corn patch to see how much cross-pollination there is, figured that the crossed stuff would show up in amongst the blue, the only stuff that crossed was my own, so that is good, am saving some seed for next year

and the rest will get ground up for the chickens. Blue hopi corn contains 30% more protein than normal corn so will be growing even more next year for the birds, slowly getting away from the need to buy in feed for them, two ingredients of which are genetically modified, corn and soya, have now proved to myself that i can grow both so, we'll see what colour the chickens eggs are after consuming the blue corn!!

The wildflower meadow has died back and I have collected all the sunflower seeds, these will also go towards bulking out the chicken feed

harvesting the chillies and tomatoes for sauces and my favourite, chilli jam

wondering around picking figs fresh from the tree, feeding the windfalls to the pigs and making fig marmalade

making loganberry jam with fruit from the freezer

More seeds I have collected in abundance are

Cherokee trail of tears beans

Yard long beans

Parsnip (Gladiator)

and hollyhocks

again, if you want any of the above, please let me know, I have loads

walking on the dark side

2011-09-07T07:14:00.000-07:00

I've been spending some time over in our chestnut woodland, mostly clearing the path.

There are some really really old chestnuts the trunks of which are still standing and acting as grandparent trees

Our concern is that there are a lot of dying pines standing in our woodland and above that will fall in the next year or two, rick doesn't have time to fell them at the moment and we'll have to let nature takes it course. It's a very beautiful, cool and dark space, a pleasant reprieve from the blistering heat on the rest of the farm

upcycling shit

2011-08-06T07:58:00.000-07:00

Ha, some of you facebook readers may have seen this week that I'd been shopping at the bins again. It's a great time of year here at the dump and various hot spots, all the wealthy city dwellers come to spend part of their holidays here in their ancient relatives' houses and take it upon themselves to throw everything less than 5 minutes old away.
Some of last years throw away items included these lovely food tins (one lid missing)

an old mattress was made into a curtain

and now this, as it was a shirt and is now a skirt I have decided to call it "the shit", i was reminded of a time when I was very very young (and slimmer), my friend and I used to wear shirts as skirts, using the sleeves as a kind of belt. Now that I am a bit bigger it was all a bit bulky at the front (and I have enough of that, thank you) so I cut the top off, sewed up the arm holes and sort of overlapped them, so that they look like pockets and turned over the top......

Everything has been salvaged from the bin, cleaned and put to another use

10,000 hits today!!!!!!

2011-07-24T01:43:00.001-07:00

well not 10,000 in one day, just 10,000 in total!!!
I know maybe by some peoples blogging standards that's not many, but I'm surprised and wowed
thanks for looking

yard long beans

2011-07-20T14:05:00.001-07:00

sills

2011-07-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

a month can be a long time in construction. sometimes there's a lot of progress, and other times nothing much seems visable. its often those less visable times when some of the hardest work takes place. now imagine two years where not very much was visable, yet work never ceased, hard work, really hard work, with little to show. it can be very demoralising, and you have to dig deep to find little things to get happy about, and little things to keep you going.

so when the frame work finally began, a month ago, i can't express my current joy, at being able to finally get to do my job. it has been literally as well as figuratively an up hill, or rather up mountain struggle.

in the last month, the first two phases of the frame came together. cutting and setting out the sills and tenoned tyeing floor joists, and cutting and fitting all the ground floor floor joists.

i have been using a reference for the design and construction of the house, its not all out of my head. i have been adapting a design that jack soborn developed in his book 'building the traditional timber frame house'. i have other references, but his is the main one i'm following.

it helped me decide on sizing for timbers, forest cutting lists, and milling guides. essentially you need to be going into the forest with a fairly clear idea of the size and quantity of timber you are going to need. and to give you you an idea, just for the main frame alone its truck loads, several big truck loads.

i have milled a fair bit of the frame on the portable chainsaw mill, over half, and the rest was milled in the nearby town.

i've sent the first pieces of the frame down the mountain, to the construction site, and set them out, cut and fitted them.

when using a guide, for what ever, remember this, its a guide, its there to help you, not hinder you, if in your best judgement you need to veer from it, have the courage to do that, and don't be slavishly copying it. even architects carefully considered plans rarely work 100% in the reality of the construction site.

i changed his plans to suit my needs and the timber i had available. all the sills are 9x8's (225x200mm). i omitted to use 10x8's for the girding sills for two reasons, first the reduced run of the girding beams, slightly less than had been allowed for by using 10x8's, a reduced total width of building, which in turn reduced the length and weight of the floor joists that would need to be supported, and the inclusion of a substantial concrete pad-stone in the centre of the girding beam run to half it's total run, and finally because i had run the ends of the girding beams onto the foundations as opposed to being housed within the end sills, and resting solely on a housed tenon.

instead of two long sills, connected by a long scarf joint in the centre bay, i decided to have three sill sections front and back which tenon into the centre girding beams and end sills.

the end sills had blind stub mortices, most of which were housed, as they weren't on reference faces.

a number of the thru mortices were also housed. the primary reason for housing these mortices in this instance was to increase the contact area of the tenon and mortice where the shape of the sills or girding beams ran out of true, wayned off, so to speak.

to prevent the girding beams from spreading its necessary to tie a series of floor joists across all the bays. this meant they all had to be tenoned. blind stub tenons, that were half housed for support on the lower half of the tenon.

all the sill tenons and tie floor joists were bored out 1 1/2inches(") across the face of the beam above the mortice housing to take a 13/16ths " hand split oak peg.

i've cut about a hundred or so, so far, i'm likely to need more like 300 for the total frame. they were split out of blocks of oak i felled last year, and planed into pegs 12-16" (300-400mm) long.

in a couple of places i substituted 6x7's for 7x7's for stair trimmers.

the rest of the floor joists, at this level were generally 7x6's (175x150mm), which had pockets cut into the girding beams and gable end sills to house them, they were reduced to 4" (100mm) in depth where they drop into the pockets. although this reduces their sheer strength their stiffness is retained. this is done to avoid having to cut an enormous housing pocket in the girding beams or sills, which would require their cross section to be even greater to compensate. so effectively you end up with a 6x4 but with massive stiffness. and one of the principal requirements you need from a floor joist is stiffness.

housing the floor joists in this way, and using large sectional timber as opposed to 2x material allows you not to have to use herringboning or nogging between floor joists. there's no worry about their stiffness or racking.

garden stuff

2011-07-03T11:40:00.000-07:00

From this

Onto this

Equals this

I have never seen so many bees on my newly created wildflower meadow, am soo chuffed, you can't see all the other flowers, but they are there, slightly dwarfed by the sunflowers

The raspberries have done exceptionally well this year and will fruit again this autumn, then I can dig some runners up and create more lines

Have also spent an age hauling sacks and sacks of bark down to cover the whole area, so far about 2 truck-loads has only just covered the blackcurrants,

will do the other fruit when it cools down a bit.

The rest is all self explanatory

austerity measures

2011-06-30T01:24:00.001-07:00

This week we have been talking about more cut-backs that we can make, having received yet another bill for work to our house in UK and more truck work that needs to be carried out, we have been discussing what else we can cut out of our lives. We've pretty much cut out everything non-essential, limiting our truck journeys, cutting back on the frequency of shopping trips and what we buy when we do go food shopping. If we have any processed foods it's in the form of biscuits or crsips, that's it. So we decided to give them up.

And then this arrived!!!!!

Thanks to the continued support and generosity of friends and family, life doesn't have to be so hard!!!

scotch eggs

2011-06-18T13:07:00.000-07:00

trying to empty out the freezers has meant defrosting a lot of pork, Rick has made a tonne of sausages and after running out of hog skins, we decided to keep the rest of the sausage meat and use up some of our eggs.

Scotch eggs, still warm, halved and sprinkled with salt and pepper

cock entry

2011-06-16T00:56:00.000-07:00

As much I loved Fancy Feathers, the coop had become a bit crowded with the two new chooks, the others were also looking a bit ragged from the constant mounting from the cock, not to mention his ridiculous behaviour around the water feeder. Having to replenish the water twice a day and the floor of the coop being constantly wet and smelly. The real reason though was that Rick couldn't stand the noise anymore, it was driving him to distraction. It didn't bother me as my work is further down the farm and the cock-a-doodle doing is pleasant from where I am, but Rick is working right next door to the coop and he couldn't stand it anymore. So he's now living in the village (right by our flat) with his dad and brother.

He was one of the fertilised eggs that was given to us by our neighbour which a broody hen sat on and hatched, so it seems only fitting that he has gone back to where he came from. My neighbour has promised me she won't eat him!!

top fruit tart

2011-06-09T13:15:00.001-07:00

We have been blessed this year with an abundance of top fruit, mostly loganberries. I am freezing most of them for jam making, but upon rick's insistence, I branched out of my culinary repertoire and made a tart. It's tart, it's tasty, it's a top fruit tart

wood for trees

2011-06-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

there is a saying about people who are lost, that they can't see the wood for the trees, far from being lost, i'd like to think i have found the wood within the trees.

it has been dawning on me, over the past few weeks, whilst i've been up in the forest, how inextricably linked the past and my future are. i have, to all intents and purposes stepped back in time about 5 or 6 hundred years, maybe more.

first, looking at the trees, assessing each one i planned on cutting.

assessing them for girth and length, where i thought i could use them.

then, cutting and milling timber in the forest, knowing where each part is destined to go in the frame has been a leap into the past. this is the same way in which houses were designed and built hundreds of years ago in england and all over north america. the only thing that's changed, to some extent, are the tools.

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last sunday, drawing a longbow of mine, and loosing some arrows, for the first time in a couple of years this sensation was heighten, and going much further back. every time i draw a longbow and let loose an arrow its as if the very act of loosing the arrow causes you to be hurtled back in time with it. the more ancient the type of bow and arrow the further back in time you are cast. at the end of the session i wanted a tankard of cold english ale or cider, something quintessentially english. there is a law still standing in england, but one not enforced, in which every able bodied man is to practice archery on sunday, a law that goes back many hundreds of years. i mention this, not out of quaintness, but because it illustrates how a nation was defined by an activity. some things it seems run deeper even than blood.

the two activities, timber framing and using a longbow, have, i would argue, quite a lot in common. now, that may not sound apparent, so i'll explain. for me they aren't about recreating a facsimilie of the past, but in finding something of value for now, something that existed a long time ago, something that has largely been forgotten. its about how they are made and why they are made in the way in which they are. the thing i see that links them is the understanding of wood, how it grows, and how that effects the way in which it performs. a knowledge drawn through a way of life, a connectedness to a rhythym of life that has all but disappeared.

many woods have been used for the construction of bows. and there are many different reasons for this. different bow designs allow for different materials to be used, and to be able to use those materials in a variety of ways. after all, a bow only becomes a bow when you have taught it to take the shape of the arc of the bow, until then its just a bent stick.

one of the simplest types of bow, and also one of the most effective is the longbow. its design dates back at least 9000 years, as evidence of the earliest bows found in the bogs of stelmor in germany, holmegaard in denmark, and meare heath in england. and throughout this entire history the one key component that determines the performance of the finished bow is the bowyers understanding of the billet of wood he's making into a bow. how the tree has grown, and the characteristics of how that wood performs both in compression and expansion. some woods do one better than the other and some, like yew and osage orange do both exceptionally. in creating bows its essential to have a good understanding of the different properties of different woods. it allows you to use them in different ways and to fully take advantage of their natural characteristics. for example, one of the reasons why yew is such a fine bow wood, is that its possible to take advantage of its natural growing properties, by leaving an amount of sapwood on the back of the bow which protects the heartwood during compression, preventing the bow from exploding, and then pulls the bow out of compression as much as the heartwood is driving it out. so even within the same stave of wood it has 2 very distinct properties. the fact that neolithic bowyers understood this, how by changing the shape of a bow you could create different characteristics is truly remarkable, as even now the dynamics of bow construction aren't essentially any more developed.

the same is true when you are looking for timber in the forest with which to build. some woods are better than others at certain functions. some have certain attributes that dictate their use. and even within the same tree certain parts have certain strengths and weaknesses. its about having knowledge of the different properties of trees and the wood they can provide. having said all that, i am largely dictated to by what i have available, what's there in the forest. and i am in the world of use what you have.

mostly what i have is maritime pine. which is a great building timber. its a yellow pine, very dense, and very strong.

a thing i like about timber framing in this way is the direct connection it gives you with the land, the trees, the very place upon which you are to dwell. it becomes as much a part of you as you become of it.

i like the idea of managing you own woodland to give you the materials with which to build a house. i had a conversation a few years ago with a forestry commission officer on the island of Mull in Scotland, about that very thing. he was advocating the possibility of this, and saying how the forestry commission were in the process of selling off tracts of forest particularly to communities who were interested in doing this. He referred to it as forest crofting.

for me this kind of management connects you directly with the land. it is the thing that gives you shelter, as well as providing food and hopefully water, and maybe sanitation, and possibly even power if you are fortunate enough. to be able to achieve one or two of these things is really something, to be able to achieve all would be the self sufficient dream. i don't know as yet how close we can get to that on this farm, but we will try our hardest.

New hens and stuff

2011-06-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

I have inherited two new hens from a friend, here they are

both black, one tiny but both regular layers, seem to be coping well too, having come from a free range home with no other hens or cockerels, they took a couple of days to settle in and get used to the cock-a-doodle-doing, which is loud and frequent

In-case you were wondering about the enormous egg? it wasn't a double yoker as we thought it might be, it was actually an egg inside an egg!! nobody has ever heard of such a thing, so if you have, please comment, needless to say that hen has not laid another egg since!!! shame

Bits of my garden are doing very well, especially the flowers

and the top fruit. Last year we had a few raspberries, this year I am picking at least half a kilo of loganberries and raspberries everyday.

I'm freezing most of it to make some jam later on in the year when it's not so hot.

Fleasn'all

2011-05-28T07:02:00.000-07:00

We are kindly looking after a friends dog for three months,

5 weeks in and we've had a flea infestation. We have spent almost three days washing everything in the house, spraying furniture, floors, washing endless dog bedding, backwards and forwards to the chemist for hideous products, several phone calls to the chemist, some tears and some laughter, finally last night we had a full nights sleep without being bitten....however, I noticed as I have been inspecting all our creatures that the fleas had still not left Bullseye. I have taken very drastic measures, the first day I cut most of his hair off, badly, with some dog grooming scissors,

when I noticed the fleas again today, I went back to town and managed to buy a dog grooming kit in one of the many Chinese shops we have here. I have now groomed him properly. Well sort of, he didn't like it so I had to ply him with constant treats and lots of encouragement, I've left him a pompom tail and some furry boots and his head. Sorry Keeley

and then there were none, back to square one

2011-05-27T10:18:00.001-07:00

Sadly the little one has gone...........
I was battling with my conscience because I could see that the mum was not really producing enough milk and he was crying a lot in the last day. I toyed with the idea of bottle feeding him and had to ask myself some fairly serious questions about the viability of it all and then the fact that if he survived, he would reach sexual maturity before leaving home and get his mum and grand-mum up the duff, plus all that handling makes you feel quite attached, so in a way as awful as it's been this week, it is a blessing in disguise. We also have some fairly serious flea problems and having him around was making it difficult to deal with it.

On the upside mum's eye is getting better, thanks to my friend Lisa and her miracle eye oinkment!!!!

timber hitch

2011-05-26T12:18:00.001-07:00

it had been on my mind for a while, how the hell was i going to get the huge sections of sawn timber from the roadside, down to the site. initially i needed to move a quantity of 8, 5.6m x 200mm x 225mm (or 8x9"s in old money), for the first stage of the frame. Antonio at the mill offered to try and crane them down there until he saw how far they'd have to go. but i had a plan. run a steel cable from a tree i had left in situ, down to one of the piles of stone outside the over-site. then belay the timbers down with a rope.

prior to that, i still had the unenviable task of getting the timber from the drying rack to the cable the other side of the road. you have to remember that a few weeks ago, when they were first felled, they weighed over the ton each. now they'd been milled and sat in the sun for a few weeks they had had a massive weight loss, and are probably only weighing in at the 700 or 800 pound mark (or 350-400 kg for those of you on new money). still not something you can put on your shoulder and walk with. well i can't anyway. so i devised a trolley, bought some cheap wheels and made up a wooden cart, to roll them up the hill.

finally, unloaded them, hitched them up to the cable with a timber hitch, and shoved off. using the tree trunk to act as a friction brake to belay them down, without having them cannon through the foundations like some giant medieval battering ram.

eggstatic news

2011-05-24T11:42:00.000-07:00

Yeah, the last little one survived the night, hurrah. He's doing really well and has started doing the funny side jump thing that they do at this age, he seems very advanced for one week, already wallowing in the mud bath and looking for things to eat? Mum's eye looked a little better today so will carry on with the cold tea treatment, have also dusted them and their houses with some Diatomaceous Earth

Anyway, the other good bit of news is this massive egg....I couldn't believe it when I went in to the chook house to get the eggs this morning...it's a good job eggs are soft as they come out and only harden as they hit air...wouldn't want to pass that one.

...and then there was one

2011-05-23T10:34:00.001-07:00

there is a surviving male who is very feisty and very fast, so maybe he'll make it. Lets see what tomorrow brings. Am also collecting some special oinkment from a friend to see if that helps clear up the eye infection, the eye may not have disappeared, I just may have been too distressed and inexperienced to know what I am doing, will update tomorrow

...and then there were two

2011-05-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

Rather upsettingly there were two more piglets missing today, again I looked incase they had wondered off, but no. I think that something is coming in to their feild and taking them, snake? fox? dog? bird of prey?

Worse than that, the mother has an eye infection which I have been trying to deal with, I got her to lie down today and I had a good look in her eye only to discover that there is no longer an eye there ??????

I am left with a feeling of resignation and almost despair, understanding intellectually that these things happen and it's all part of the farm cycle and of nature, doesn't change that today I feel a bit quiet and sad.

piggie porn

2011-05-19T06:43:00.000-07:00

and then there were four (again)

2011-05-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

It would appear that the fifth piglet has died or something........it did look very very small when I spotted it yesterday and was having trouble finding teats, so it could have died, either naturally or been killed. Maybe there was something wrong with it...who knows, maybe it'll turn up again, but I somehow doubt it.

When I arrived at the farm today, I discovered one of the females running around outside,

the other three were busy scrapping in the house, god they are rough with each other.

They all seem to be feeding fine.

I'm leaving them alone for the rest of the day, as I want to constantly be watching them as do the dogs. The dog we are looking after has taken to entering the pig field of his own accord and I don't trust him around the piglets, so am keeping them all away for the time being.

Five full mooners

2011-05-18T10:44:00.001-07:00

There has been a lot of controversy about weather the youngest female was pregnant. I knew she was, I had watched her mum have several seasons and her none. Rick only started believing me last week!!!

When I had a look in this morning I could only see four, when I came back at lunch time there were five. I haven't ventured in to the pig house yet to find out what sex they are, didn't want to disturb mum, but thanks to rick's canny design on the pig house, there's a viewing window at the back....

More photos when I can get some

bowl of red

2011-05-12T10:12:00.000-07:00

Elderflower cordial

2011-05-12T01:06:00.000-07:00

By popular demand I am posting my recipe for cordial here, but it's not really my recipe.

20-30 freshly picked heads of elderflower (stalks but not leaves)
zest of 2 lemons and 1 orange
up to 1.5kg sugar
up to 200ml freshly squeezed lemon juice

Shake off any insects on the flowers, then put all the flowers into a large bowl or preserving pan with the lemon and orange zest,

pour just boiled water over it all just covering everything. Leave for a few hours or overnight.

I remove all the heads etc. by hand and put them in a jelly bag and give them a good squeeze and then put the mush in the compost.

Strain the remaining liquid through the jelly bag. Measure the amount of liquid you have and pour into a saucepan.

For every 500ml of liquid, add 350g sugar and 50ml lemon juice. Heat gently to dissolve sugar. Bring to simmer, skim off scum, let it cool, strain again through jelly bag, bottle on, into clean bottles or if you are lucky enough to have a freezer, freeze it......

I do 2 - 3 times the amount above, so adjust your amounts accordingly. I've made too much today and have made a terrible sticky mess in the kitchen!!!

flower power

2011-05-07T10:28:00.000-07:00

I haven't given an update lately on the garden as I've been busy brush-cutting, having fires and getting everything ready, a lot of the plants I've propagated are in and the rest are hardening off, I'll post more about them when they look a little bit happier. There is a riot of colour everywhere, I am particularly chuffed with my over-wintered self seeded sweet peas and my sweet williams (which are my favourite cut flower), but I won't be cutting them this year as they are too beautiful where they are. I used to grow tonnes of flowers in the UK to have around the house, here I don't feel the need. We are surrounded by beauty and somehow I don't need that cheering up that cut flowers provide in an otherwise dreary life.

I do pilfer the occasional wild flower for the house and this week I was overtaken with the desire to have red roses in my bedroom, don't tell anyone but I nicked them!!!!

whine

2011-05-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

We made litres and litres of grape juice last year and on Rick's insistence some wine, which incidentally I wanted nothing to do with, convinced that a) we would need loads of special equipment which we don't have and b) it would be disgusting.

I stand corrected, it's ready, it's not bad we have about 30 litres of the stuff

going potty

2011-04-21T03:58:00.000-07:00

We really need the rain that we are having and the garden is loving it. However, as we don't live on the land and Rick is up the mountain with the truck it means I am walking backwards and forwards to the farm, leaving the house when it is fine and then getting drenched.......

so today I have been mostly potting on all the plants at the house.

There are a lot up at the farm that are in the cold frame, hardening off and nearly ready to go out. The next lot will go up to the farm as soon as I've planted out what is up there and made room.

milling, part one

2011-04-19T01:32:00.001-07:00

All the big wood is at the big mill being cut with Rick's supervision

There are still alot of pieces left in the forest and above the house that can be milled by us

At least another 10 days worth of work before construction can begin

out with the old in with the new

2011-04-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

I'd picked our first young broad beans the other day and made a risotto. I always cook too much of everything, always worried there won't be enough, so the following day, I made the left-over risotto into balls (well lumps actually) coated them in fresh egg and fresh breadcrumbs. Served with freshly picked leaves from our cut and come again salad bed and chipped up the last of the parsnips...

foundations

2011-04-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

foundations are their very own thing. everything needs them, everything is reliant upon them doing their job. skimp at your own peril.

i thought long and hard about the type of foundations i was going to need. i had plenty of time to think, plenty of time digging to think. i had several ideas, some of them were possible, some of them weren't. given that i am trying to build on the side of a mountain, i hoped i would be able to tie into the bed-rock and not have to dig deep footings.

there was one other issue, other than ground conditions that helped determine the finish height of the foundations, that was the two extensions that have to be segued into. i needed to finish at something the right height in order for this to happen. that meant i couldn't go too far into the ground, or too far up.

i wondered about shallow trenches infilled with crushed stone i had reclaimed from clearing the over-site, but in the end i didn't have to dig any trenches, but build forms. i set a level from a building line i described in-front of the old main building. dug down until i hit solid ground and excavated back, into the mountain, on that level.

even though the grade beam (a strip foundation laid at ground level) wasn't that deep, i used 4 continuous lengths of 10 mm rebar to ring round the foundation. at pre-described intervals i set in formers where i want to tie down the timber frame into the foundation with threaded bar.

given the relative small size of each section of the foundation, its distance from the road, and its cost, there was no chance or point of getting a ready mix delivery. so i had the dry materials delivered, mixed it, poured it and set it.

this is the chute i constructed to ease getting the sand and stone down, to save me having to barrow it, and to get it to the only place i could house it.

my feeling about using concrete in building houses is this. keep it in the ground. i'm not building an NCP carpark. its just not necessary, and there are far more preferable ways to construct. unfortunately, here in Portugal, it seems to be regarded as the only material to construct with. i would like to show people that that just does not have to be the case. that there are friendlier, more tactile, more efficient, cheaper, sturdier, more versatile materials available. principally timber. but then i would say that, i'm a carpenter.

in total, it wasn't more than 15 cubic meters of concrete, which isn't a lot if you have it delivered. mixing by hand is another issue. but in overall terms not that big a deal.

having said that, concrete is a superb material for foundations, and i would not eschew it, just on the basis of apeasment to green lobbyists. my rationale whilst building this house is that it has to be as cheap as possible, essentially free if it can be, aswell as fulfill all the structural requirements and be as aesthetically pleasing, and as finely built as possible, to the highest achievable standard. be as green as you can be, but you don't have to be an idiot just for the sake of it. use the right material for the job.

i stepped the foundation to help prevent the ingress of damp or water onto the timber frame, effectively creating a gutter all the way around the frame.

i'm writing this to show what you can do when you set your mind to it. knowledge you can come to. ideas you can find. heart, you need to have.

Mobile home

2011-04-12T13:14:00.000-07:00

The truck came today to take away all the bits of timber that Rick can't mill himself, they should have come yesterday, but as we all know now, that's Portugal, and nothing happens when you expect it. Only having to wait an extra day is nothing.

There is still a pile down by the house which apparently will be picked up on Thursday, then the big milling can start next week.

over-site clearance

2011-04-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

it wasn't until i had removed the vast majority of the main building that i could see the extent of the problem that lay ahead. the centre section of the back wall was built up over the existing rock face, which projected out over a meter toward the front of the building. you couldn't see this until a large area of stone work that sat at the base had been removed, this effectively had been acting as a buttress.

looking at the extent to which it ran, it didn't appear that it would be possible to remove and rebuild just that section without undermining the rest of the wall, so i decided, instead of leaving in the back wall, to remove it.

from this point it was possible to see more clearly the extent of the ground work necessary to clear the over-site and dig out where necessary for the foundations.

way back near the beginning of site clearance i was hoping to get away without having to run in a concrete foundation. i was hoping that there would be sufficient bed rock to toe into to act as a foundation, or to be able to dig out trenches and fill with crushed stone, as i had done with the terrace wall. however site conditions wouldn't allow for either option. because of the nature of how slate is formed i had every aspect of the process running across the site where the foundations needed to be. in one place it was soil mixed with rock, in another mud, in another slate, next to that mudstone, then rock so hard it must have been gneiss, then slate. it all ran in seams, but not evenly at the same elevation across the site, more rippling in and out like raspberry ripple icecream. (oh god if only there was such a thing here). that left very little alternative but to excavate each run on a very individual basis. remember all this was done by hand, good old pick and shovel work a lot of the time, the breaker when i needed it, and a lot of wheelbarrowing, no mini digger, no skips, no grab lorry.

just clearing the over-site i estimated i removed 30 cubic meters of rock rubble and earth.

knobs and knockers

2011-04-08T06:01:00.001-07:00

I've been taking photos of knobs and knockers, not all from Portugal, but anyway. I liked the idea and I like both the words; knobs and knockers, meaning of which, is lost in translation as I discovered when in France last weekend. My obsession rubbed off on the people I was staying with and the people I met, who all said they will never be able to pass a door and not think of me!!! nice

this, I know is not a knob or a knocker but I liked it because we had a similar one on the house I grew up in (only in English!!)

and this, cos it's lovely,

what happened to the pig?

2011-03-31T23:49:00.000-07:00

if you were wondering what happened to the big pig. this is it.

following dispatch and dismemberment it has ended up as

suffolk cured and smoked black bacon.

suffolk cured and smoked ham

and soon to be suffolk pork pies.

the process involved 3 days of salting, then immersion under a huge oak log into a barrel containing sugar, salt, spices and black beer. leave for 56 days. remove and hang in the smokehouse for about a week of smoking. mainly used oak, but also a mixture of chestnut, olive, walnut, fig, cherry woods to smoke it with. then eat.

in the manner of ray mears imimating chef ken hom, "oh, if you could only smell dis." in fact if you could only taste it. it tastes like very expensive maple smoked ham and bacon, and a bit like black forest black ham. "its good, its very good" to use the words of a master chef presenter.

thankyou pig. you taste good.

Day ten and eleven

2011-03-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

typically, it had to happen. i managed to fell 60-70 trees in a confined space, minimizing collateral damage, almost to nil, using guy lines and a winch to keep trees i wanted to fell from falling in the wrong place. then came today, day 11, and all that hard work seemed to come undone, well for a moment anyway.,

i'd felled a couple of trees by the tarmaced roadside, being as careful as i could, to avoid the overhead phone line.

a friend showed up, who works for the town council. today he was on bin duty, and he stopped to tell me i was doing it all wrong. then proceeded to show me how it was supposed to be done. apparently he'd spent most of his life felling. i gave him the saw, and asked him to show me how he was going to remove the worst placed tree, without fouling it on the phone line. 2 minutes later he'd dropped the tree, ripped the phone line out, and bowled over the telegraph pole. later i laughed about this. however at the time i was incredulous.

i realised shortly there after i could turn around that situation, and get out the other trees that were also by the roadside, and at risk of fouling the line at some other time. so they came out aswell, including one dead pine the other side of the road, which was never going to be easy to get out without hitting the line.

it was funny, he was so insistent it would only go the way he wanted. he admitted after that you can't ever know which way they will ultimately go until they are going. you can't see what's going on inside the tree, how its internal structure can cause it to go sometimes in the opposite direction to the one you set up. if anyone tells you otherwise they're kidding themselves.

up high on the mountainside some of those trees were like long bows, their growth pattern having sometimes massive disparity.

where all the tension was stacked, as they had grown very tightly on the south face of the tree and much further apart where they faced north. so even when they leant considerably into the mountainside, the moment you cut them they began pulling away, and did everything they could to go down the mountain, opposite to how they were being cut. this made for some very entertaining moments, with one tree actually falling 180 degrees to where i was trying to place it. fortunately for me it didn't do any damage.

today was almost a replay of that, a couple of times. and then during the limbing of the standing deadwood, which i dropped, pivoted over the road, the moment i cut it in two it bounced back at me knocking me over, fortunately i managed to keep the saw, which was still running, out of my way.

that was the last tree to come out today, and maybe the last for the job. a day cutting in the rain, soaked but happy to be alive.

got yer taters in yet? peasenhall?

2011-03-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

The title was insisted upon by Rick, it's a local Suffolk saying, one which is used rather frequently at this time of year, suffice to say that only people from that area will get it...sorry!!!
Anyway, we are using a quinta next door to ours (as if we didn't have enough work to do already), in exchange for us cleaning it, the owner has promised not to sell and will allow us to use it and harvest the fruit from the grapes and the olives. So here's a pic of where our potatoes have gone,

the rest of the meadow is being sown with soya beans and milho (corn) for animal feed. The meadow is closer to the natural water supply, so hopefully this year our big crops will do a bit better.

The peas are going around the outside of the bean plot on meadow two

Day nine

2011-03-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

a thing i really like about cutting trees for the construction of the timber frame for our house is its link to the past. this is the same method used by our forefathers. going into the wood or forest and observing, looking closely at each tree and assessing it for use within the building. what part could it provide is the first question? measuring its girth, and estimating the height that that girth runs, and then any subsequent pieces you might be able to obtain from it, once felled.

having a detailed cutting list is essential.

you need to be able to go into the woods and know what you are looking for, and then what you need to cut, the lengths and widths. for instance, you need to know how wide a tree has to be to give up an 8x8" post, essentially 280mm, to get a pretty square post without excessive wane (a part where the tree naturally narrows inside of the square cut, with the cut generally running out into bark).

and you need to be a bit flexible with your list, knowing that timber is a natural product, and that it may not conform just so, to your wishes or needs, sometimes you may have to go with it. it may not run straight, it may run in and out, but provided it isn't twisted too much you will be alright. just go with it. its part of the character of the tree, which will become part of the character of the wood and in turn of your home.

i like the challenge of working this way, it has a lot to do with knowing your craft. you make it work even if others might give up on it? deciding if you have enough tolerance to play with.

if you've slightly oversized on lengths it will give you a margin to work within to achieve the closest fit you can later. over cutting by much is as wasteful as undercutting. its a finely gauged thing. and that is it, its gauged, there are no fixed rules. even when you try and obey all the constraints of good building practice, and engineered design, sometimes you will have to use your common sense or experience and over-ride principals, because that's what they are, principals, guides for general construction. the closer you work all aspects of timber the more you understand about it and the greater your ability to use that judgement.

now, i only have to find timber for some of the attic floor joists. i have jigged the design slightly, so i don't need to span the entire depth of the house with the joists, as per the plan, which would've required joists at a depth of 270mm or a nominal 11", (the reasons for this in the design are to prevent overloading the girding beams). i am going to insert something known as a summer beam (one smaller than the usual dimensions), at the midway point, across the entire width of the building, spanning from bent to bent, housed in the girding beams, and additionally interlocking them. this will take any flex out of the floor joists and allow me to downsize them to 200mm, which will make finding them in the forest much easier, since i only need to find trees at 280mm diameter instead of 355+ in order to get any number out per length. as of today, theoretically i only need another five 6.6m lengths.

its been an exhausting couple of weeks, trying to find 134 pieces of timber in a stand of pine trees somewhat closely packed together. joyful, scary, constantly intense, and somewhat pressured. the last couple of days especially so, as its involved cutting down the biggest trees, the half meter+ wide trees that run the best part of 100 ft. some of them within striking distance of overhead power lines.

the reasons why i didn't clear cut are because i didn't want to take all the trees out, i don't need them all for construction. and i hope that at least some of them will survive the seco plague that's hitting the forests here, hopefully to grow and have productive lives, and maybe one day get used for some other construction project. i didn't plant the trees, and it doesn't seem right to take them all out. not yet anyway. i'm trying to manage part of the forest, and this is my way of managing it. there are other reasons, but this isn't he place to talk about them.

i've tried my hardest to accurately place the trees in slots between other trees to prevent damage. i can appreciate why some people would clear cut regardless, its easier, and a helluva lot safer. i've tried wherever possible to leave any tree standing that i hadn't earmarked for construction, unless its presence presented a real threat to my personal safety in my efforts to get another tree down. out of the 60 or 70 trees i've felled i think i only had to cut out about 5 additional trees.

i haven't removed more than a fraction of the total trees in the 2 stands in the top of the forest that we manage. if you look at it from a financial pov i was offered only €1800-2000 for all the trees in both stands, which would not have paid for more than 1/3 of the total pieces of timber on my cutting list. i still have to get everything hauled to the trackside, then mill everything/get some of it milled at the mill, but i am certain, for us, this was the right approach.

this was my original intention when we looked for a place to be self sufficient, that it would provide the materials to build a house. this is the message i want to send to anyone who reads this. there are other ways of building that aren't reliant upon huge loans from a bank (forest/woodland here runs at about E1000 per acre) and sometimes it isn't necessary to employ teams of people, you can learn to do it yourself.

Day eight

2011-03-17T13:42:00.000-07:00

Coming to the end of our time on this bit of mountain, not much left to take out, lots of clearing up to do though and then the hauling out. We'll be moving down to directly above our farm next, which will present another set of problems,getting the trees to land exactly where we want them and not take down the telephone line.

I'll show you some pictures tomorrow of before cutting and after so you can see how well managed the whole thing has been, not one cork oak has even been damaged.....

Here's two pictures of the dreaded caterpillars (especially for Gary)

Day seven

2011-03-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

6 trees, 14 pieces off the construction list. Need 14 big boys now, 10 of which we have, so we are adrift 4 big ones.......unless rick can do some jiggery pokery, which incidentally he's very good at!!!!
I managed to get to the farm, finally and picked some asparagus!!!! 8 pieces, one big one!
Sorry no pictures, the camera woman was a bit out to lunch

Day 6

2011-03-15T12:13:00.000-07:00

We kind of lost count of how many trees Rick felled today, about 5 or 6. 10 constructable pieces, we've probably got another 5 days to go!! we need about 50 more pieces of varying lengths and diameters, so we're over half way.....yeah

Day five

2011-03-14T08:08:00.000-07:00

4 trees, 2 blow downs, 13/14 pieces of constructable timber
No pictures, pouring with rain, finished early, dripping wet!!!!

Day four

2011-03-12T11:08:00.000-08:00

It was good today, we started felling on the next bit of mountain down from the track, it's so stupidly steep you can barely stand-up. What with all the pine duff, heather, blow downs and rain it was quite slippy, however, I only fell down twice.

Throwing the firewood up is entertaining, I'm running out of strength and most of the logs I threw came back down again, one or two nearly landed on my head!!

One tree had a great deal of internal tension (rick's words), it was leaning one way, he made the mouth cut, and was making the back cut when it did that awful spiny thing, and lent back into the back cut trapping rick's big saw. Stupidly, (his words) he hadn't wedged the cut with poundable hardwood wedges, and the small saw (which is on it's last legs) had to come out and play (because he hasn't fixed his other big saw yet). This would all have been avoidable (rick said) had he been paying more attention to what was happening up top, instead of focusing only on the cut. He said, before he started, he didn't imagine it was going to be a problem, it looked set to go only one way. Just goes to show. He said, it's quite stressful when they sit back trapping your saw, they could go any which way, and you rarely have much idea how much meat's left, and how stable the thing is.

A few of the trees on the mountainside have seco, a deadly (for the pines) and very virulent disease that's plagueing this region, any tree affected needs to come out as a matter of priority. So far, all the seco hit trees he's taken out are all usable. Now is a good time to remove lumber, before the whole forest dies from this disease. There are a lot of standing-deadwoods around, rotting where they sit, after a while they're not even fit for firewood.

Here's a picture of rick's cutting list.

After 5 or 6 trees we called it a day, as we'd been in and out of the truck hiding from the rain

He has also asked me to post a different picture of clear cut as the last one was not a good example

Day three

2011-03-10T10:01:00.000-08:00

4 trees for construction and 2 out to ease the way.
We need 134 pieces, so far we have 33....woohoooo

I got new gloves, old ones had given up!!!!

In competition with loggers all over the place, you'd think it would be nice and peaceful up there - NO
This is what it looks like when they clear cut

Day two

2011-03-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

Today we felled 7 trees, 5 for construction, the other two were in the way, they'll get used for something like 4x2 material.

I will not be able to put photos up every day or even feel inclined to take any, but 'll do my best, It is exhausting and sweaty and there's lots of biting insects and of course the proccessionary caterpillars are starting to fall from their nests at the top of the pines, not all our trees have a nest, but the ones that do get dealt with by me immediately!!!! read, stamped the hell to death!

Day one

2011-03-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Now that we are out of the ground, we need to move on to phase two of the build, the timber frame, Rick has ummdd and ahhd about the best and most efficient and least expensive way to do this and we have decided to fell our own timber, from our forest, we'll make less mess than a local logger, they won't be selective or understand.

Selectively felling makes life a lot more complicated, every tree has to measured and estimated, carefully chosen for it's straightness etc. etc. we don't want to take everything out (which is generally what people do here), so we'll call it forest management, along with creating two resources, one is firewood for us to use or to sell and the other is the frame for the house.

In total Rick reckons we need to fell at least 70 of our pines. Today we felled, cleaned and processed for lumbar and firewood 3!!!!! (and I collected a lot of pine cones!!)

RIP Betty

2011-03-03T12:32:00.001-08:00

I arrived at the farm this afternoon to discover that Betty had broken her own neck!!! she'd got her head stuck in the feeder. It was very upsetting, losing livestock in this way seems so unnecessary, foxes,yes I get that (sort of), disease, I get that too, but this, not fair, not fair at all. I've changed the feeder (again) and made some modifications to it so they can't tip it over, which was why I'd changed it in the first place. Ho hum, she was a good bird, has laid all winter, sat on some fertilised eggs when broody, mothered the chicks and continued to lay. God bless you Betty and thank you.

Boxes, beds and backs

2011-02-27T01:13:00.000-08:00

I have had a persistent back ache, won't go into technical details, lets just say it's hindered my ability to get the garden ready for spring. So, we decided to employ a local to rotavate the bits I couldn't dig. I've given up on meadow one, well not exactly given up, but I want it to be mostly a fruit meadow and wildflower area. So the loganberries, raspberries and blackcurrants will be given a raised bed (when I can find some more free wood), some fruits trees (some wild, some bought) have been planted either around the edges or in the middle of the meadow and I have broadcast all the flower seeds I collected last year,

There still remains my hardy kale patch, which I'm loathe to get rid of, as it continues to provide and there's an area at the end of the meadow by the path leading to the bridge that has extremely good soil, currently it has broad beans in it.

The strawberry beds have been planted with more strawberries (runners, potted on from last years growth) and edged, there is also a fejoa some lupin trees and a black locust here to provide some shade.

I know I'll have to move the strawberries in a couple of years, but they can go up to the fruit meadow in due course. I've planted another rhubarb but it remains to be seen if this will flourish, there are three plants now and they don't do well. Even when forced

they may well have to moved up to the borrowed meadow (more about that in another entry).

The area around our climbing frame (used to be poly tunnel) which has some self-seeded sweat peas in it, along with some sweet williams and morning glory and kiwi, is now ready for more sweat peas, which were collected last year and are growing happily in pots at home.

I have tried to edge as many areas as I can with the wood I have managed to salvage from the roof of the house, eventually I'll get it all done, but given that the area on meadow two is at least an acre, not sure how or when or even if. The parsnips and early carrots are in and under fleece.

The leaf bed is sown and covered.

The over-wintered green manure, along with the contents of the compost bin

and blood, fish and bone have been rotavated into the beds for beans etc., this needs to be left for at least two weeks before planting. The over-wintered brassicas continue to flourish (thanks to the alpaca poo) and the purple sprouting broccoli is starting to show. In fact we're eating some tonight with some home-made sausages from our pig!!

Given our water problems and the amount of energy and effort last year, I am trying to only plant things that will grow from now until late June and then from october/november through the winter. Obviously things like peppers, aubergines and tomatoes will have to go through the summer but as they too will be in a raised bed, mulched they may do better and not need so much water. We know we have to come up with some clever water saving techniques, but whilst Rick is building the house, this is his priority, it takes up all his time and in order to get this done, other things have to fall by the way-side unless I can do them myself.

Last but not least the owl box rick made me for christmas is up and am just waiting for a resident..........

If anyone would like to donate a solar powered web cam thing, like the ones they use on Springwatch, that would be great, then I can see if there is any activity, adopt a box, maybe?

Cracking on (or cracking up)

2011-02-13T03:12:00.000-08:00

We "despatched" the male pig, I will not be reporting about that here as it was wholly unpleasant and will not be repeated anytime soon. Lets just say that whatever breed the locals sold us they are not fast maturing or great meat providers!! we gave some bits and pieces to a friend and the rest is either in brine or has been smoked.

It has been decided that we will have to keep the females for another year to get what we need out of them but they are on a strict diet and we will have to wait and see if they got pregnant before the despatch of the randy male.

I have been busy in the garden, spring came and with it the promise and allure of growth and planting etc. however in my eagerness to get on, I did my back in. Something I have never done before, having been a pilates teacher for 7 years, back ache was not something I suffered from (although it was my original reason for becoming a Pilates teacher). I had religiously done my exercises and kept my back fit. There is not enough space in our flat for me to do what I need to do and the dogs dominate the only viable space, anyway, that's all excuses really, I've got out of my routine and discipline. I have recently started teaching a small class, filling in for the yoga teacher, so this has given me a renewed incentive for getting "back" on track. However, some serious anatomical intervention was called for and I embarked on a "find a therapist" quest. I found one, but let's just say I would not be recommending him any time soon......."back" to square one...self-healing.

So, I've found myself with alot of time on my hands and lying around recovering, was just too uncomfortable. So I got busy.

I made another cushion, discovering that not only can I NOT measure properly I also can't pin properly!!! notice the slightly off-centre vertical ribbon, cleaverly (or not) disguised with an "added-on afterwards to cover up my mistake" bow

next project...make a bag

Inside pockets and everything

This actualy went very well, there were no tears and very little swearing at oneself, measuring went OK as did the pinning......so I think as long as I have some instructions to follow and actually read them, my sewing is improving

Marmalade, a must have and make in February, I was given alot of seville oranges and seeing as husband loves it, I made 14 jars of the stuff. There is still some left over from last year which is looking a bit shrivelled on top, "that's ok", he says, it would make a great steamed pudding....

Getting rid of food in the freezers to make way for more, I found another bag of whole frozen tomatoes and enough chillis to make 4 more jars of chilli jam, grateful for the time I have had to do all these things and just when my back started to feel OK again the rains came!!!!, mmmm, what to do next, orange curd, another bag, and the inevitable steamed marmalade pudding

death on the farm

2011-01-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

As weren't sure of the virility of our male pig, you can imagine our surprise when we discovered that not just the adult female but also her daughter were pregnant, because they are all so goddamn fat it wasn't evident until they were about to drop.

It's winter, it's cold, it's wet.

Last week I guessed the older female was about to drop, there are signs that led me to this conclusion that I won't go into here, she did drop, every day for three days I had to pull out of the sty dead piglets, mostly squashed some a bit more than that. Today, or probably last night the young one dropped, and yet again 2 dead piglets in one sty and one in another. It's been very sad and quite an eduction. There is no real explanation for it, it's cold is the obvious one, the other one is they are all living in one house and the two adults are very large, so not surprising the little ones got crushed, it's common.

As we are trying to do things as naturally as possible, we have left them alone, I am keeping a close on them, they all seem fine. Short of investing in yet more fencing to separate them and live with the consequences of that, break outs, constant crying. We are letting them get on with it. The male chased me out of field today,

he's horny and the girls are in-heat, so no doubt they'll be up the duff in five minutes, in-time for a spring birth.

olives

2010-12-21T12:31:00.000-08:00

We decided after having picked a couple of sacks of olives that we would leave them until we returned from UK. Leaving alot of olives on the trees and hoping that the weather wouldn't be too awful. When we returned from the UK, infact the night we returned it was the windiest we had experienced here, so windy that the pig sty was moved about 30 yards, probably with the pigs in it..

When we went to the farm the next day alot of olives were on the ground, it then rained for about 4 days, so we waited. We then started picking, Rick up the trees, me either picking up olives from the ground or cleaning the olives. We finally finished yesterday. After last years shennigans at the mill we decided to use another one, not traditional, but a sight more organised. We went with 295 kilos and came out with 57 litres. Way more than we expected. I guess leaving them on the trees for that couple of weeks longer really paid off. We'll do the same next year, the only problem is the longer you leave them the worse the weather.

I've got a lovely cock!!!

2010-12-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

Turns out that I have cock! and I've called him Fancy Feathers

Not having sexed any of the hatchlings, I've been waiting to find out what sex they are, now I know, one is a cock and the other three are hens, brilliant. He is very handsome and proud and seems to be doing a fine job of keeping them all in order. The three hens are all huge and would probably be laying already if it wasn't so flipping cold. The surrogate mum (in the background, behind Fancy Feathers)

is still laying one egg every other day. Not sure where we'll go from here, need more space really and then we could start a breeding programme and rear chickens for eating as well as for eggs. We really need a proper in/outdoor pen for them all as at the moment they are not going outside, which I dislike alot. But it's the safest option and as the new ones won't let me handle them, it's impossible to let then wander off and not spend hours running up and down terraces trying to get them all back, hysterically funny and bloody annoying.

wrapping up for winter

2010-11-22T07:49:00.000-08:00

I thought I would drag you all on a tour of the Quinta. You would think that there's not much to see or tell, but apparently there is, as I found out when I started to think about what sort of blog entry I would do this week and had a look around the farm.

Starting with the animals, as you can see the pigs are getting nice and big, they are on a sort of diet as apparently I have been over-feeding them!!

I have double-glazed their house at the top of the back wall, whilst it does let warm sunshine in it also lets driving rain in, so I decided to cover the hole up with plastic and I'll continue to pile straw in there, I never take any out, they are incredibly clean animals so they never soil their bed, this way they end up with a big deep bed which they can bury themselves in, lovely.

The chickens have also got themselves some double glazing, I found last year that the rain drives in through the door and obviously mixed with sawdust and poo etc. makes for a nasty clean-up job. So this way we are all better off and they continue to lay through the cold and wet weather. The chicks as you can see have grown up now and I still don't know what sex they are, so am just waiting for signs of laying or cockrelness??? any suggestions about how to tell would be gratefully received but I am not looking up their vents, thank you.

The citrus trees have been fleeced, I managed to kill them last year as I forgot to fleece them in time, luckily they forgave me and came back to life, this year I'm not leaving it until acuweather tells me, I've just done it early.

I have dug up and potted on some trees which will be planted around the quinta early next year

The raspberries continue to provide a small snack, it's their first year so I wasn't expecting much.

traditional red

and yellow ones

These are both late fruiting varieties, not sure what as they were given to me, I'm going to plant some earlier fruiting ones this season too, so we have them for more than one or two months.

I've left the tomatoes where they are, although we are not eating them the pigs like them, but only when ripe.

The peppers are still ripening

and when they are nearly ready I bring them home to finish off on the windowsill in the kitchen.

The carrots, parsnips and beetroot are fine and hopefully will continue to see us through the winter

as will the kale

The cabbages

and the greens

The salad and new zealand spinach may get fleeced or just eaten, either by us or the slugs...

Alot of meadow 2 has been sown with green manures

Rye grass

and buckwheat

I love that my cosmos self-seeded and came up again in the same year

and a random sunflower may make it, somehow I think not though.

These hollyhocks will flower next year

The grapes are all pruned,

the persimmons need harvesting

The river and spring gush forth, taking with it all the rotten quinces that we didn't quite manage to pick.

and finally the hoses have been coiled up into a nice neat heap, not to be used again until it's bloody scorchio and as dry as a witches tit!!

A moment of nostalgia

2010-11-12T10:06:00.000-08:00

Some time ago a friend asked me if I would make her a Union Jack cushion cover, we'd been trawling around Portobello market in London and noticed that there were a lot of very "British" wares for sale in the home furnishings shops, you know Cath Kidson style stuff. So I agreed to make one. I wanted it to have a vintage feel, so chose fabrics that were muted in colour, also my sewing leaves a lot to be desired so the edges of most of my points are a bit crap, to say the least, but it works well.

Simultaneously, in a moment of nostalgia we thought we might as well have fish 'n' chips.

Later on we are going to cover ourselves in lard and go for a long swim, maybe back to England!

kill it, cook it, eat it

2010-11-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

well it should be buy it, cook it, eat it, but kill it sounds more aliterate.
One of the things I love about the markets here is the food. Normally it's just chicken and chips, which is always good and never dodgy, today though it was buy it and cook it yourself, and pay someone else to give you chips and wine...excellent.

and then finish it off with a freshly fried fartura

the cat that got the rat got bit

2010-10-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

Poor Lulu, she was just doing her job, killing mice and rats.

I noticed there was something wrong with her lower jaw and I checked her teeth to make sure she didn't have a problem there, but she was eating fine and seemed happy so I left her alone, then her jaw got worse, and even though she was till eating I checked the rest of her jaw out. She had a massive swelling under her chin.

I took her to the vets and an hour later he had shaved her and lanced an abcess and drained about 10ml of stinky fluid from it. The only thing I can imagine that caused this is the rat, she's pretty hardy and has fights with cats all the time, but have never had a problem like this, it's only the second time in her life that I've had to take her to the vets outside of her yearly injections.....

bless

Alpaca poo tea

2010-10-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to dress and feed all the trees which we have planted since we've been here. Some trees have not survived, mostly because I didn't water them enough, some I suspect from poor stock. They don't cost much here, so it's not a terrible shame. But always trying to manage things better and do things efficiently and cheaply I was offered some alpaca poo in exchange for some livestock.

Having recently given over the whole of meadow three to the pigs (moving the fences constantly was too labour intensive),

Rick fenced off each end and now they have the run of the whole meadow. I needed to sort out the trees that I planted there, I actually couldn't find two of the almonds as my sunflowers had taken over, I dug bowls around each one and dressed them with straw and covered that in alpaca poo......

Great

NOT

Pigs love alpaca poo

I had to pick up all the alpaca poo and come up with another plan. How to feed the trees. Bit of research later....alpaca poo tea, you'd probably need one hell of a digestive biscuit to stomach it though.

No budget build-access

2010-10-08T14:52:00.001-07:00

This is a picture of where it all began, the farm, in the forest, in the mountains, in portugal.

I think its important to try and be as sensitive as possible to the environment in which we are a part, and that includes the way in which any of us build, from our approach in siting buildings, through our choice of materials, and to the method in which we construct.

In an effort to achieve this sensitivity I think its important to be thinking about what we are doing, constantly. To think about what we are doing and our relationship to all things.

As such, I would like the finished building and all the necessary ancillary work to blend seemlessly into the surrounding landscape. With that in mind I will endeavor to maintain as much of the existing landscape as possible. However, and its a big however, it was necessary to fell a number of the pines to put the driveway in. I know it must have appeared as a scar on the landscape, yet subsequent planting and natural reseeding of the area have taken place and have begun to soften it.

Further, in order to improve access to the site, and to protect it from damage due to blowdowns (which are not uncommon here) and fire hazard, as a preventative measure I have taken out a number of pine trees within the vicinity of the planned build.

And although right now, as I write this it may not look as sensitive as I would like, that is my end game, where I am headed toward.

In the beginning of this story, there was a series of farm buildings comprising several parts, perched on the side of the mountain, with terraces sloping off. Slopey terraces may be great for harvesting olives, when you want them to roll down the gathering nets, they are less great when it comes to access and building.

Our farm has an access road running though it, just above the house site, and an ancient caminho publico (that's public path/right of way, to you and me) running from that road, past the house, along the boundary of our land, and up through the forest on the dark side, to join up with another camino that runs from further down the road, through another section of our land, and from there eventually back to the village. This makes improving access to the farm or building site somewhat contentious, or frowned upon to say the least.

Access from elsewhere is just as fraught with problems. The steepness of terrain governs this region, and nothing much short of a civil engineering project can sort out our access issues. Or that's how it appears.

We could remove some more trees from the mountain side and excavate a wider pathway with at least one change of direction, wide enough to get a tractor down, but there isn't really the width of terrain to achieve that. It's very steep, but not very wide, and it would be marginal at best, and at worst it would undermine the road, which would be a massive headache.

Access back up to the building from elsewhere on the farm is equally entertaining, and would involve crossing more than one other farm to get here, negating the possibility of coming from a different direction.

So we have ourselves a bit of a situation, not uncommon here, where you have no access for plant, and crappy, at best, access for farm machinery. Even though from the roadside its not 20 mtrs to the back of the building, to the front obviously somewhat more, its awkward, steep, very steep in places, slippy when wet, or covered in pine duff, and further confined by a stone wall down the other side. Provided you are able bodied you can get up and down without too much effort, but try barrowing a load of ballast or sand down and it becomes its own stupendous game. It doesn't matter how strong you are, you can only level fill the barrow or it runs away with itself, or spills, because you have to hold it at such an elevated angle.

What I'm trying to illustrate here is that everything that goes to the farm or building has to be 'man hauled' as Shakelton would refer to it. It doesn't take long to understand why, in the past, people farming here used donkeys and mules and asses.

The no budget build-demolition

2010-10-08T14:10:00.001-07:00

Then began the process of demolishing the buildings. All of the demolition had to be done by hand to salvage as much material to reuse as possible.

First the roof off the adjacent smaller building to the west was stripped off.

The front and part of one side of that building were robbed out to further facilitate the excavation. Following the completion of excavation, i could begin the demolition of the main building.

Then I put up the scaffold,

ripped the roof off,

and began taking the walls down.

Keep this in mind when reading.
When building for yourself, certain things are going to slide, often those things are to do with personal health and safety, in your efforts to try and achieve, you push your own limits way beyond what is reasonable.

Constantly, I am faced with the question, how am I going to move this thing which weighs hundreds of pounds, yes hundreds, from here to here, on my own? Only you can come up with an answer to that. Do you ask someone for assistance every 5 minutes, or do you try and figure a way of doing it on your own that limits the possibility of you getting hurt but hopefully achieves the aim? The choice is yours, if it's a choice. For a lot of builders that choice gets made for you, and you end up doing it on your own, and your back and your joints pay the price.

This 17' 8"x10" (thats 6mx200x250mm for those of you who work only in new money) chestnut purlin weighed a great deal. I lowered it down as I demolished one side of the building, robbing stone out around it as I went, then had to slide it out of it's housing the other side, lift it out, all however many hundreds of pounds (come and lift it if you don't believe me) and hump it across the building site, and out over the scaffold.

Compared to digging out, the demolition was easy. But it still took me over a month of hard labour. Erecting scaffold, dropping walls, dropping scaffold, etc etc etc. and piling stone,

until it was all down, and I had cleared away the site, in preparation for the next phase.

When i thought it was almost done, something else became apparent, that had, until the clean up, remained hidden.

The no budget build-rubble control

2010-10-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

When I was excavating the oversite, I was thinking about the ways in which I could use the rock that I was digging out.
Here are those ways. Some of the rock, the best grade material, will go back to building the house.
The next grade, in both size and shape has already gone to building a terrace wall on top of an existing terrace.

The footing for the wall was hand dug, and that material, along with the next lot of trenching will go to in-fill a raised bed the next terrace down.

The foundation to the wall is crushed stone, graded out from the oversite dig, too small for laying, but ideal as a footing material, when compacted. It is free draining, and solid.

The wall was built using rough grade, field stone, excavated in the oversite dig.

The back of the wall was infilled with crushed stone to act as a french drain, removing the risk of rainwater backing up and causing the wall to fail. An outlet was left in the wall for grey water and rainwater run-off from the house to feed into the raised bed.

After the french drain was infilled, everything else I couldn't use was run over to level up the terrace to give both a level from which to build off of and in the future an area that will be paved. The landscaping has been left intact as possible, to help segue in the build.

The no budget build - excavation

2010-10-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

My plan is to extend the existing building on three sides, and through it's elevation. This means removing an existing building to the west, and cutting into the bedrock both to the east and west, to excavate a sufficient footprint, thereby keying the building into the mountain, rather than perching it on the mountain. One of the reasons for this was to try and eliminate the possibility of having the building rack because of sub-terrainious movement. Looking at the existing main building led me to believe there had been some movement, as most of the walls were out of upright, and ran in and out of alignment, some of that could be put down to poor construction, but I didn't imagine all of it was.

The excavation seemed to highlight the existence of bed-rock movement, as huge blocks of slate often sat slightly separate to each other, or adjacent but shifted, as if they had been wrenched apart.

Rightly or wrongly, I choose to excavate first, demolish next. My principal reasons for doing this were that I wanted to have a reasonable siting to put the scaffold on, from which to demolish the building, and in addition, I wanted to use some of the excavated rock to build a new terrace and create a level site in-front of the main building, making the process of building easier, and giving me a better storage facility.

There has been approximately a 2- 2.5m x 7m section to remove either side of the building, that ran anywhere between 1.5m-2.5m high. That has varied between a thin topsoil and bed-rock to a mixture of soil and rock.

On the eastern side it was about 98% bedrock, on the western side about 30% bedrock and the rest a mixture of variously packed soil and rock.

All of the excavation I did by hand. Most of it with hand tools. Principally, a pick, a shovel, a mattock, a breaking bar and a barrow.

Ahh the joy of pick and shovel work. It has taken a long time. It has been hard labor indeed, helped by the relentless scorching sun.

Something else that's funny, in an odd way, is the fondness you develop, and dependence on a particular tool. On the last house I built, for us, it was two things, my dewalt chop saw, and paslode first fix nail gun, ah joy. Fond memories. Two great bits of kit that really speed up framing.

I guess it's the same with everything, you develop a fondness for the tools of your trade, they are the things that enable you to earn money and to live, and maybe if you're lucky or talented they help you express your ability as a craftsman as well, if that's your thing.

With some aspects of building, depending on how you look at it, they help you develop a zen oneness with the thing you are doing. Laugh as much as you like, you will only understand what I mean by this if you have actually done what I'm talking about, and for a protracted period, don't expect zanshin when you get out your black and decker work mate and kronky homebase hand saw to do some DIY, it doesn't happen overnite, or even after a couple of years, but takes a lifetime generally. The similarity between martial arts and building is a strong one. Not in what they produce but in the way that you work. You will only really grasp this if you have done either or both of these things 'Grasshopper'.

So far here, it's altogether lower tech than back in the UK, and currently like stepping into the past as it's back to the pick. To be frank in all the years I've been building and all the ground work I've ever done, I've rarely ever had to get a pick out. Probably a result of living in east anglia, where there is no rock as such, you could always get by using a shovel, and at worst get the mattock out, but here, when you hit bed rock, there's nothing like the pick. Where it wins over an electric, pneumatic, or hydrolic breaker is it enables you to grub out larger sections of rock without splitting it all over the place and wrecking all the faces.

I used an electric kango on some of the bed rock, when it got too awkward to continue picking it out, there are only so many days even I am prepared to work when all you get out of it is a barrow full of chipings for 8 hours entertainment.

There is an additional method to the way I am choosing to work, you can call it permaculture if you wish, I would just say it's being resourceful and forward thinking. I am trying to waste nothing, I know that there will be building related waste, I am just trying to minimize it, and find another outlet for it. It's not just the cost of waste disposal, and here there really aren't the skip hire companies to haul it out anyway. It's a different mindset, about how can I use this thing to it's best and most advantageous.

It's me trying to be as thoughtful as I can. In part this attitude to building has evolved over my career, and in part this place has offered me the opportunity of looking more thoroughly at how I do what I do, and also it was something I read in john Seymore's complete self sufficiency handbook, he advocated an approach to farming that did the same, waste nothing, what grows on the farm stays on the farm, and using things to benefit other things, beyond the immediately obvious, for instance the reasons you would keep pigs isn't just for their meat, but also to rotavate, to consume waste matter, and to fertilise your land by spreading their own muck, not easy to get shrink wrapped meat in sainsbury's or asda to do that.

The no budget build-chainsaw preparation

2010-10-08T13:17:00.000-07:00

Things have a way of happening, and early on, prior to any of the construction process, we got offered the possibility to purchase for felling, a number of walnut, chestnut and cherry trees in another mountain region.

Prior to felling, I tried to envisage, in the traditional way, components of the house, whilst they were still part of the trees. I can't tell you yet how successful this was. In times past, all the component parts of the house were numbered as the timbers were cut out of the trees, to enable the subsequent framing of the house on site, I couldn't do that, but what I could see was a possible use for most of it.

I felled a lot of trees, and so far have processed a lot of raw lumber into useable material for construction, but not anywhere near enough, a tiny fraction of the lumber needs for a wooden house. It was a sensible and sensitive approach. I've been back to the site a number of times, and am glad to see that all the trees have subsequently coppiced, and where there was one trunk, there are now twenty or more shoots growing up. Rather than destroying a habitat, it has been a habitat that has been managed in a sustainable and sensible way, utilising the existing native hardwoods. A lot of people see the chainsaw as the epitomy of destruction, i would argue that it depends on how you use it.

The lumber came in a number of loads, some of it is still parked on the driveway awaiting processing.

The no budget build-explanation

2010-10-08T09:54:00.001-07:00

It's a funny thing, when it comes to things, there are always other ways of doing things.

Sometimes it's easy to get hung up on technique, or form, or both, or if your are making something, to get hung up on materials, or the way you see things.

Sometimes doing what feels right goes against everything you have learnt. Sometimes that may be the best course of action, and sometimes the worst.

Sometimes it takes a lot of experience to have faith in doing what feels right, and sometimes the reverse, sometimes your experience can get in the way, and you inadvertently hold yourself back.

It's a bit like that line in Joseph Heller's book 'Catch 22', when captain Tapman the group chaplain is trying to explain his inability to see major Major, "You can see him, but only when he's not there." To which he's rebuked by a senior officer, "are you describing some mystical experience...?" because that's what it can sometimes boil down to, a mystical experience with whatever you are dealing with. And sometimes you can find the extraordinary in the mundane. Although this isn't an article on mysticism, but building, they can be one and the same. It depends, on how you look at it.

It's common knowledge that there's a fine line between genius and madness, perhaps its a little less common to understand that often you need both, and that many times they are the same thing, like light, which can be both a wave and a particle, it depends on how you look at it.

For anyone reading this that doesn't know who I am, and to give you a context, I am a carpenter and builder, a woodsman, a bushcrafter, a maker of things, (by the way, that's not a picture of me, if you didn't know, but Marty Feldman).

We moved here a couple of years ago to try and become as self-sufficient as we could, that in essence is why I am doing what I am, in the way I am.

Part of that idea included building a house that would be as efficient and ergonomic as is possible for me to manufacture. A house unlike any I had either built or was part of building before, but using all the knowledge and skill I have gained in that time. Having said it will be unlike anything I have previously built, it will of course bring some of those parts together.

I've built stick frame (contemporary timber frame) where you build with relatively small section timber in a modular way that's essentially held together with metal fixings, nails, screws, ties, fastenings, brackets, straps and hangers, and I've always worked on the renovation and upkeep of traditional timber frame, post and beam style houses, that are essentially held together with the type and strength of housed joints and wooden pegs, but never built one. Its like the holy grail of carpentry, like building the birchbark canoe was for me in terms of bushcraft.

Those of you that know me, know that I am obsessed with old technologies, my wife calls it obsessive crafting disorder, OCD. flint knapping, firelighting, shelter building, canoe and paddle making, bow making, knife making etc etc. I want to bring the approaches of the old ways and some of the technologies and integrate them into the building of a house. Potentially, it will make it a very eccentric hand crafted home, bespoke, as opposed to mass manufactured, with low energy embodied materials. Hopefully a thing of beauty will emerge, a nest not a box.

When you speak to people who build their own home about the reasons they are doing it, it's often because they want a chance to design the way it looks or performs, and sometimes because for them it's a more affordable way of owning their own home, or a home they would like to own. To an extent these are things I want, but it would not be true for me to say they are what's behind why I want to do this. I like making things, and building a house is like a giant (rick ocd) project. But, one that I hope, will have real value outside of my own interests. I like to challenge my abilities, constantly push them.

I want to make something that is essentially simple, functional, beautiful and a joy to live in. A place where you can breathe out rather than a place where you can't breathe at all. A haven. Conversely, I am all too aware that the process of getting there is far from easy, at times unpleasant, painful physically, emotionally and spiritually. Building can destroy people and relationships and be the obverse of the very thing its trying to achieve, harmony, balance, a place to nurture and be cared for, a place to live more fully. Inevitably, by the time you complete a build you need to breathe out, in every respect.

Already, the process of doing this has taken longer than any complete build I have undertaken or been a part of. I know there are many reasons for this. Even with all the best will in the world sometimes things don't always run how you might like them. Some days things appear to go well and other days you get deadlocked or worse, driven backwards, all I know is if you can stick it out and try and keep hold of the end picture, things have a way of evening out over time. And the maxim, 'what do I have to do today?' will see you through the project, and help you feel less daunted, one stone at a time, one day at a time. When you break it down into little bits, hundreds, thousands of little bits, it might surprise you what you can do, even eat an aeroplane! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito)

There are 'strange attractor' type benefits to building yourself, for yourself, and on your own. Sometimes the delays in apparent forward progress actually work for you, as you are able to refine your ideas and the way you do things that isn't governed by time. Some might call that indulgent, but the pressure of deadlines is always there in the back of your head.

What I intend to do is build a traditional post and beam timber frame house, with a stone face, and internal straw-bale infill with lime render. To make a building that's as sensitive to its environment in terms of vernacular context as well as choice and use of materials, and in this way to build economically from a labour and financial point of view. To be as pragmatic as I can about what I do and how I do it. To constantly try and achieve the highest possible build quality I can, in respect of fitness of construction, elegance of design and proportion, and functionality.

Where-ever possible, to use the materials on the farm, to salvage stone from the existing buildings and any excavated during the site clearance, and to harvest timber, where I can, from the forest. Where I need to purchase materials, to source them as locally as possible.

To build in a modular way, using a combination of American and English approaches to framing, that benefit being able to achieve this singlehandedly. That means "no" to barn raising, and lifting of entire bents (a large section of frame) as I don't have a crew of 30 or more, and "yes" to adapting the methodology of stick framing, where you essentially put up one piece at a time creating the bays as you go.

Building one storey at a time allows you to use smaller length posts, stacked, and not have to pre-assemble the entire bent. And raise it as one. The acquisition and assembly of shorter span posts and beams is more manageable, although there will be more joints to cut.

In order to get to that place I have a lot of work ahead of me. I first have to carve out two sections of the mountain, one either side of the existing main building, and then demolish the main building and any other buildings necessary, but to leave as much as possible of the existing stone work in situ.

Juicy fruits

2010-10-07T14:38:00.001-07:00

Have been getting hot and steamy with a friends juice extractor steamer thing.

I've made about 50 litres of red and white grape juice

We've still got grapes left, the best ones, which I am planning on making a bit of wine out of, the weather looks like being rubbish for the next few days, so I may be treading in the rain!!!! doh.

Bombos de S. Nicolau, de Pardieiros

2010-10-05T13:19:00.000-07:00

I'd heard there was a festa today in a village near us, the sun was shining and it was hot, I'd heard it was a bean festival but it was also Implantação da República a celebration of the proclamation of the Portuguese First Republic in 1910. I only know this because I went to the bank this morning and it was shut. So, after we had hauled a tonne of oak off of someone else's land (a favour) and Rick had wrenched his back, we popped up to see what was going on. It turns out it wasn't a bean festival or a republican celebration, it was the anniversary of the local Bombo band. Lots of friends and friends kids are in this band, they are very loud and even louder when there is more than one band.

Here's a delightful video sample for your ears and some charming pics to go with it all.

sorry can't get video on here at the moment, will try again tomorrow

first fungi find

2010-10-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

here's a beefsteak fungus, great example. We've spotted more which we will go back for when they are ready. As you may remember from last years posts we like to eat them with bacon, preferably on a Sunday morning, but any day of the week will do!!!

Quince Jelly

2010-09-27T04:56:00.001-07:00

Ingredients:

2 lbs of quinces
1 lemon (just the juice, sieved)
white granulated sugar
water to cover

Method:

Wash and roughly chop the quinces

(no need to peel, decore or depip) and place in a heavy bottomed saucepan.
Barely cover with water. Bring to the boil and simmer gently with a lid on until soft. If the quinces are very firm this could take several hours. Check it every now and then and add more water if necessary.
Pour the cooked fruit through sterilised muslin into a large clean bucket or bowl, I hang my jelly bags up in the kitchen above a bowl, some people like to get all fancy with chairs or stalls, I'm limited by space.

Leave the jelly bag to drip overnight (or about 12 hours).

Measure the juice the next day, Pour the juice into a deep heavy bottomed saucepan and add 1lb/454g of white granulated sugar for each 1pt/570ml of juice. Add the lemon juice. Heat everything, gently stirring from time to time,boil for about 10 minutes before testing for a set. Test every 3 to 5 minutes until setting point is reached.
When jelly has reached setting point pour into warm sterilised jars using a funnel and ladle.
Cover immediately with plastic lined screw top lids or waxed disks and cellophane tops secured with a rubber band. If you don’t think that the jelly has set properly, you can reboil it the next day. The boiling reduces the water in the jelly. I have done this in the past. Ideally you should try for the right set the first time.

Label when cold and store in a cool, dark place. Away from damp. Eat with toast!!!

Fig, honey and mascarpone tart

2010-09-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

This year is a fantastic year for figs, we thought it would be terrible, but no. We have two varieties on our land green and black, I'm sure they have proper names, i think the green one is called a drop of honey (pingo do mel), locally anyway.

Just eating them fresh off the tree is pure decadance and really the only way to eat them. I have made some fig and lemon jam/marmalade stuff which is very nice. We found the recipe for this tart in a Nigel Slater book. Decided to make it with some very expensive ingredients. When I asked Rick what he thought of it, his reply was "I'm not sure".

That is not the right reply

Apples and quinces to come and how to make a curtain out of an old mattress!!!

much ado about milho

2010-09-19T15:33:00.000-07:00

When we came to Portugal to attempt to be self sufficient, we knew that ultimately you want to be able to grow your own animal feeds as well as food for your family.
The food for the family bit was easy, I've done that for years and kind of know what I'm doing. Although a bit more water would be handy!!!
There will always be failures when growing food , it's part of the whole thing, but hopefully where you fail you succeed in other areas.

As we are growing our own meat now and wanting to rear it in the best possible way we have decided to try and grow our own animal feeds. It seems to be impossible to buy complete animal feeds here without Genetically Modified maize and soya in them, because of this we have been buying three cereals separately for the pigs; wheat, barley and maize (the white stuff which they tell me is not GM), we feed these grains along with endless peelings from the ladies of the village and various scraps. We have the grains ground up by a friend in the village, who has an old stone mill.

Quite determined to grow more for the animals, to cut down on expense and to be able to control what they eat we decided to grow some maize (milho). I sourced a hybrid F1 which is fine(ish), at least it's not GM, we planted what we thought was a lot. We got told off about how we'd planted it (this is normal procedure). We watered the living hell out if, I weeded it; back-breaking. We ran out of water, we left it, we de-leafed it and then picked it. We pretty much copied the locals.

Picking the mal-formed and patheic cobs was heart wrenching. I bit my bottom lip alot and awaited the humilation at the de-hulling machine. It didn't come, thank god. They, I keep reassuring myself have been growing this stuff for centuries, for me it was a first, I am not spraying anything, they are. We estimate we got about 40kg. We need about 800kg!!!!! that's not to mention the wheat and barley...........

The soya, on the other hand has been spectacular (thanks Andy). I was given about 20 black soya bean seeds which I planted. They have been brilliant and I have harvested 700 grams, which is a hell of a lot of seed. I will plant all these seeds next year and hopefully have such a massive soya harvest it won't matter if I don't have 800kg of maize.

That is the point I was trying to make, the stuff you think is going to be a doddle ends up being a complete failure and then some funky heirloom plant produces so much without any attention at all....genius. II think that you can apply this rule to almost everything in life.

Spicy aubergine chutney

2010-09-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

This is hot!!!!

2 lb (1 kg) aubergines
3 tablespoons salt
6 oz (175 g) soft dark brown sugar
12 fl oz (350 ml) white wine vinegar
3 oz (75 g) seedless raisins or sultanas
1 tablespoon tomato puree
5 cloves of garlic
1 lb (500 g) onions
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
3 red chillies

Slice the aubergines, put into a colander and sprinkle with the salt. Leave for at least three hours, then rinse and dry.
Meanwhile, put the sugar, vinegar, raisins and tomato puree into a bowl, mix and leave to stand.
Finely chop the onions and red chillies and place with all of the other ingredients into a pan.
Heat gently, stirring until the sugar is dissolved, then simmer until thickened.
Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal
Makes about 3 lb (1.5 kg) of chutney.

changing of the seasons

2010-09-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

The end of the summer (even though it's still scorchio) was marked with Rick's birthday and the Grande Arroz Doce, the Guiness Book of World Records was entered and 450 kilos of rice pudding made..Unfortunately it was burnt. Terrible shame for the village and all the visitors who sat at the esplanada all day, salivating, not a shame for my pigs who love it!!!!

We danced alot at the local Festa's and other people danced alot too. We processed alot, at night and in the day

I also had the great honour of meeting a 1956 Olympian athlete who has inspired me to go running every day, I figured that if an 80 year old can do it what the hell am I wingeing about. I now run 25km a week, not bad.

The outdoor cafe has packed up, the Lisboans have gone home. We can now park our truck again!!!

The bunting will remain all winter no doubt, constantly reminding us of the good times we had, it will blow away and block up the drains and get caught up in the trees and in the river, eventually being washed away by the heavy downpours that will govern our lives for the winter months.

jams and chutneys

2010-09-12T15:59:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to post this for ages and just never got round to it. It's quite a busy period now. Everything in the garden is ready at once. In between making endless rounds of tomato sauces, cooking up peelings from various festa's for the pigs, I've been making loads of jams and chutneys. I wanted to share the recipes with you, so here they are. Let me know how you get on, aubergine chutney to come.

Spicy Peach chutney

1.75kg (4 lb) sliced peeled peaches
175g (6 oz) sultanas
2 cloves garlic, minced
75g (3 oz) chopped onion
150g (5oz) chopped preserved ginger
1 1/2 tablespoons chilli powder
1 tablespoon mustard seed
1 teaspoon curry powder
900g (2 lb) dark brown soft sugar
1L (1 3/4 pints) cider vinegar
4 tablespoons pickling spice

In a large heavy pot, stir together the peaches, sultanas, garlic, onion, preserved ginger, chili powder, mustard seed, curry powder, brown sugar and cider vinegar. Wrap the pickling spice in a spice bag or muslin and place in the pot.
Bring to the boil, and cook over medium heat uncovered until the mixture reaches your desired consistency. It will take about 1 1/2 hours to get a good thick sauce. Stir frequently to prevent scorching on the bottom.
Remove the spice bag, and ladle into hot sterilised jars. Wipe the rims with a clean moist cloth. Seal with lids and rings, and process in a barely simmering water bath for 10 minutes. The water should cover the jars completely.

Peach Jam

2.5kg/5lb just-ripe peaches
The juice and zest of 3 lemons
1/2tsp salt
11/2kg/3lb caster sugar
3 vanilla beans

Wash and cut the peaches, then crack the stones of two and take out the kernels in the middle. Lightly crush the kernels to release their nutty flavour and set aside.
Place the chopped peach and the lemon juice into a saucepan. Add the salt – this will bring out the flavour of the fruit – and simmer very gently for 20 minutes. Add the sugar, stirring to combine.
Once the sugar has dissolved, turn up the heat and boil rapidly until setting point is reached. Once you think it might be ready, do the "wrinkle test". Place a spoonful of jam on a saucer in the fridge for a few minutes to cool. Run a finger through the jam: if the surface wrinkles, it's ready. If not, return to the stove and boil swiftly.
Add the cracked kernels and allow the jam to rest for 20 minutes for even fruit and juice distribution. Spoon into warm, sterilised jars.

Fig Marmalade, or Marmellata di Fichi:

2 1/4 pounds (1 k) figs
1 1/8 pounds (500 g, or 2 1/8 cups) sugar
The grated zest of an organically grown lemon
3 tablespoons whisky or brandy (optional)

Wash the figs, break them open (be on the lookout for bugs), and combine them with the sugar in a bowl. Cover them and let them rest overnight. The next morning transfer them to a pot and heat them over a moderate flame, stirring lest they scorch, until they come to a boil. Add the lemon zest, reduce the heat, and simmer, skimming away the foam occasionally, until a drop on an inclined plate doesn't run. Transfer the marmalade to sterile jars, seal them, sterilize them, and when they have cooled transfer them to your pantry.
Note: As a variation, stir 3 tablespoons of whiskey or brandy in with the lemon zest.

Chilli Jam

For about 6 jars:
500g very ripe tomatoes
4 garlic cloves, peeled
4 large chillies (seeds left in if you want your jam hot)
6-7cm of ginger root, sliced
300g caster sugar
2 tablespoons Thai fish sauce
100ml red wine vinegar

Blitz half the tomatoes with all the garlic, chillies and ginger in a food processor. Pour into a heavy bottomed pan, add the sugar, fish sauce and vinegar and bring to the boil, stir slowly and reduce to a simmer. Dice the remaining tomatoes finely and add them to the pan. Simmer for 30-40 minutes, stirring from time to time. The mixture will turn slightly darker and stick. Store in warm sterilised jars and seal while mixture is still warm. The longer you keep the jam the hotter it gets.

Beetroot Relish

1kg Beetroot
500g onions
750g cooking apples (peeled and cored)
500g raisins
3 tablespoons ground ginger
1kg granulated sugar
1 litre malt vinegar (actually I used all sorts of old vinegars as I had no malt and a friend also told me that if you use malt vinegar things take longer to "be ready")

Peel beetroot and grate, dice onions and cooking apples. Combine all the ingredients in saucepan, stir the mixture and heat gently until sugar is dissolved then raise temperature until boiling. Continue gently boiling with occasional stirring until mixture is thick. (approx. 2 hours) To test when ready create a trench in the surface of boiling mixture with the back of a spoon. When the trench does not immediately fill with liquid, the chutney is ready. pot into sterilsed, hot jars and seal.

go forth followers and make

saints preserve us

2010-09-01T13:41:00.001-07:00

Some time ago I had a wonderfully misunderstood moment that I wanted to write about, but I wanted a photo to go with it and then the moment went and the potential blog post was lost forever, Today, however it presented itself again, so it seemed rude not to act upon it as am always inclined to think that everything happens for a reason so maybe I am meant to tell my silly little story.

On my way home a few months ago our neighbours stopped me and asked me if I had one of these.

Always on the look out for quaint antiques, I said no, I don't have one of those, ahh they said then you should have this, your neighbour Isabelle will bring it round at eight o'clock. Imagine my delight when she arrived at eight and I opened the box to find saints inside, lovely.

I'm not religious at all but do like a bit of religious icononery (there's a pun in there somewhere, of the french persuasion, me thinks). Oh, where shall I put it, Oh we'll just put it here on the shelves above the TV for now. I sat and looked at my new box of saints and thought, this isn't right at all, I have completely misunderstood something. I asked my young friend what it was all about and she explained that I keep the box for 24 hours, make a donation in the money slot and then pass on to my neighbour. There was me thinking that a) I'd finally got the hang of the language and b)my neighbours had my best interests at heart and were that desperate for me to join them in their catholisicm that they gave me a box of saints......

oh well.....it tickled me silly and now the box has come back again and I have to make yet another contribution, I thought about putting some condoms inside, but not sure if the slot is the right shape.......ha ha

piggie update #5 and goodbye again

2010-09-01T13:20:00.000-07:00

The last piglet (that we planned to sell) went today. He's gone to live on our friend's farm with loads of other creatures including alpaca's!! I only got a little bit upset as I know he will have a good life and I have just received a text from the new owners telling me they have put Lily the goat with the piglet for the night for company and protection (he's still a little small). I haven't told them that he may take all the goats milk, I'll let them find that out tomorrow!!!

We now have just the sow and boar and the young sow. I think the adult sow is pregnant again and potentially about to drop.....doh. Our livestock management leaves alot to be desired, I hope she has a small litter again.

Church going

2010-09-01T00:56:00.001-07:00

Having enjoyed myself so thoroughly this year at the festa's, and seeing how much work goes in to organising them, I decided to offer my help for the last festa in our village.

I've never cleaned a church before so was delighted to be asked to clean this one, here's a pic of me (rare for me to post pics of myself) and my friend's daughter

The shortbread of millionaires (and peasants)

2010-08-25T01:16:00.000-07:00

I've mentioned before that getting hold of ingredients here is tricky, having cravings for things can be well, frankly pointless. But sometimes, just sometimes you can crave and create with little effort.

I searched around on the internet for the easiest recipe and trust me there are some long-winded, almost scientific recipes out there for millionaires shortbread.

This is the easiest one by far:

The following are the ingredients for the shortbread base
8 oz plain flour
4 oz butter
2 oz caster sugar

Ingredients for the caramel filling
4 oz margarine or butter
4 oz soft brown sugar
2 level tablespoons golden syrup
5 fl oz condensed milk

Ingredients for the topping
4 oz plain chocolate
½ oz butter
Preheat the oven to 180oC, gas mark 4.Grease an 8” square tin.

Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the flour and stir until the mixture begins to bind together. Knead until smooth. Press evenly into the tin and prick well. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden and firm. Allow to cool in the tin.

Place the filling ingredients in a small saucepan and heat gently, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Slowly bring the mixture to the boil and then boil, gently, stirring, for 5-7 minutes, until thick. Allow to cool slightly before pouring over the base.

Melt the chocolate and butter together and stir well. Spread over the caramel filling. Allow to set before cutting into squares.

piggie update #4 and goodbye's

2010-08-24T15:14:00.000-07:00

Whilst keeping these pigs has been challenging and rewarding, nothing had really prepared me for the feelings I had today when we had to rustle two of the piglets into a cage and transport them to their new home. We had decided to give one piglet to the lady that had been giving us whey and she accepted (unwillingly) and then asked if she could also buy one for her daughter. So that is where they went today. I had been dreading it and was right to, I hated every minute. Catching them, driving them and then delivering them.

I cried all the way there, and all the way back. I sobbed my heart out for those little pigs. I think their new home is crap, I mean really crap. It's a concrete pen in a building with little natural light, no straw for bedding no nothing. It really really broke my heart. I knew it would. But I know the new owners, who have been farmers all their lives see it differently. Maybe it wont be the only home those pigs have, maybe they'll get to run around again, who knows? They thought the pigs were beautiful and fat, which they were. And I'm sure they will look after them because they are important. Everything else on their farm is pretty well kept, and they are wholly self sufficient and running at a profit. But the reason I cried wasn't really about how they were going to be kept, it was about loss.

For us they aren't just food, they have, albeit slowly, cleaned and turned over some of the land, and hopefully they will turn over more, they have deposited muck on the land, and perhaps the strangest most untangeable part, they have given the farm life. In a very real sense they are the life of the farm. It will be a very desolate place when they are all gone.

Given different circumstances I would interview potential buyers for any livestock we rear, I would want to visit the farms of said buyers, but we don't live in that kind of world (no-one does), all I can do is rear them the best I can, give them a really good start in life, freedom, happiness, health and fresh air,

I know that what happens to them after is out of my hands. Yes I could just not do it, and to be honest it was never our intention to have so many pigs all at once, but, that's life. Sometimes circumstances change you.

I guess what I am saying is, that as awful as it feels to be so emotional about your livestock, if I wasn't, I'd be worried, because that would mean I had stopped feeling and that's not right either. We both love all the livestock, and try our best to keep them as well as we can, given our lack of knowledge and financial constraints. But, it hasn't been that difficult so far, we've been fortunate I'm sure, for nothing that bad has happened and they have done everything we could have hoped for them to do.

They're not pets though, they are livestock, they will die at our hands at the time we need them to, and provide us with food, as long as we can keep them alive and well long enough, and that's our part of the bargain. Theirs is to be the farm animals they are and do the things they are supposed to.

I'd like to think that if you love them and care for them you will get more back, not just in the health and well being of your livestock, but a return inside yourself. When you give something of yourself you'll be surprised what you get back.

Life is shit

2010-08-22T03:07:00.000-07:00

I was wondering why, when I read everyone else's blogs they are always so positive and upbeat, I'd had some ideas about this before and often felt like I myself was being a bit smug every time i posted some wonderfully positive event on my blog.

I haven't written much lately for lots of reasons but mostly because nothing in "my" world has been good. So I got to thinking that maybe I should break with tradition and write about something negative and crap. Life is not always just about all the good things that happen, it can't be, anyone who tells you (through their blog or otherwise) is a liar or deluded or very very lucky/fortunate.

I am living in an area of outstanding beauty, I've chosen to live a different way of life, I don't have to get up every day and work for someone else, I can eat when I want, go to work when I want and go to bed when I want.
All that sounds pretty good eh? yup and nope.

I am not always enjoying myself, in fact lately it's been the opposite, I feel guilty because I feel like I "should" be enjoying myself or at least grateful. I feel like I can't talk to anyone about feeling crap about my amazing life, because it's somehow seen as ungrateful or negative.

It can be very isolating and lonely not to mention confusing. The events of the past months have been quite overwhelming and although we have recovered (not financially) we are up and running again, it has knocked me and my confidence for six.

I am often not sure what the hell I am supposed to be doing here, other than being a housewife and occasional vegetable grower and livestock rearer. That doesn't cut it for me and I don't know how to make it cut it for me. This is the first time in my life that I haven't had a job, either working for someone else or myself, it's the first time in my life that I haven't had to get up at the crack of dawn everyday. It's the first time in my life that I haven't had to be somewhere on Monday morning. One day blends in to another, weeks whizz by and then months and I seem to have achieved nothing. I can't help with the house build as it's really too physical at this stage, I can't grow any vegetables because it's too flipping hot. I can't go outside because it makes my head hurt. I never thought I would say this but I actually hate the sun and wonder what in god's name I was thinking when I suggested moving to Portugal.