Rede Local de Permacultura / Local Permaculture Network

A nossa piscina biológica e perfeito para nadar neste dias tão quentinhos!
Our Bio pool is perfect for swimming in these hot days!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbPw5KgUzA8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1EP5P7C6Tk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWyqK30kWk0

Can’t help but wax lyrical about this, but we’re really enjoying the experience of eating juicy warm sun-ripened fruit fresh off our own trees and bushes. There’s a vast difference between the vibrancy in a fresh ripe plum or peach that’s reached the peak of perfection while still being very much alive and attached to the tree, and the teetering-on-the-brink-of-decay ripeness (if you’re lucky enough to get it to ripen before it goes mouldy) of fruit purchased in your average supermarket.

We did get to enjoy some of our peaches last year, but this year there’s been both more rain and more work on irrigation on our part. As a result, the trees have been much less water-stressed and the fruit is much better.

Peçamos desculpa mas não vai ser posivel fazer o curso este ano. Nossa intenção é para fazer o curso na proxima primavera.

Lola the crazy (and very adorable) kitten!

With the blackcurrant bushes overflowing, we found ourselves thinking of delicious things to do with them. Having picked over 3 kilos in a few days (even if we did eat quite a few on the spot) it was obvious that we had to preserve them somehow. This turned into a blackcurrant feast with jam, Swedish-style blackcurrant cordial, bottled fruit and a yoghurt and blackcurrant cake – so good we had to make it again the next day.

We’re posting the recipes for all these things below, just in case anyone else is in the same situation…

Blackcurrant Jam

This jam is simple and delicious (we know because we already ate a whole jar!). Currants are a great fruit to make jam with because they’re high in pectin – especially when just under-ripe, though ours weren’t – so they set without adding any other fruits.  This recipe is from the River Cottage Handbook of Preserves.

We used

1.5 kg of blackcurrants, without twigs or stalks (though the shrivelled bit left from the flower can stay)

2,250 kg of sugar

900 ml of water

Put the currants with the water in a pan and place over a low heat to bring to simmering point. Leave for 15-20 mins (the fruit should be soft but not totally disintegrated), then add the sugar and stir until it has dissolved. Then, bring to a full rolling boil and maintain it for 5 minutes while stirring.

Remove from the heat and continue stirring gently for a couple of minutes to cool. You’ll know if the jam is ready by testing for the setting point. When it is done decant into sterilised jars – from our currants we got (more or less) six:

Jam!

Bottled Blackcurrants

This is a great way to preserve the little delicious black balls themselves. This project was also a way to test out using the solar cooker and oven to sterilise jars, which was definitely the most work-intensive part! To sterilise jars we boiled water in the solar cooker (at about 88 degrees centigrade) and filled up the jars, which we then left in the solar oven for some twenty minutes.

Jam jars sterilising in the solar oven, with the screw tops in hot water

We needed:

1,750 kg blackcurrants

1,2 l water

450 g sugar

a few lemon verbena leaves from the garden

The actual bottling involved cleaning the blackcurrants and packing them into the jars, with a few verbena leaves layered in each. Then, we added the syrup we made from the sugar and water – it should be at 60 degrees. We closed the jars without tightening the lids much and put them in a deep pan with a tea towel at the bottom filled with warm (38 C) water up to the jar necks. The point of this step is to create a vacuum inside the jars  by slowly heating the water to simmering point (88C again) and letting it boil for just a couple of minutes before removing the bottles and tightening the lids. After a day or so, they should be properly sealed and last for about a year… Fingers crossed.

Adding hot syrup to the jars

To be continued due to low solar power…

Hedvig & Sara

Muito obrigado pela vossa presença!
Fotos para recordar aqui
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lozza_75/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lozza_75/page2/

We were looking for a free holiday when we found out about Wwoofing. Sara and I live in East London, and being Portuguese Sara gets thoroughly sick of grey skies and rainy days by the end of a long English winter and starts to pine for her homeland. When we hit upon Wwoofing Portugal it seemed the perfect way to sate both her longing for 30 degree temperatures and ours for growing fresh vegetables, having had to give up my tomato and chili plants when moving house last year. I didn’t really know anything about growing organic food and permaculture, having largely ignored the movement considering vegetables in the UK to be expensive enough already, but we were attracted by the yurts, the bees, and the prospect of debating the collapse of civilisation.

The joy of arrival was only slightly tempered by our accomodation being moved from the then-uninhabitable yurt to a cosier (smaller!) caravan, and we soon realised that this was a symptom of life at the Quinta being more relaxed than we could possibly have hoped. It’s no picnic, we get up at hours I normally only see from the other end of the day to shovel horse-shit and do the heavier jobs that are unbearable once the mist clears and the temperature climbs, but when we have time free in the day I recall Sophie suggesting we take a picnic to the river, so sometimes it is.

There is certainly a lot of work that I would not describe as fun. Scrubbing yurts and weeding (especially in the heat of the day) is in no way my particular cup of herbal tea, but I was surprised to find that once done, and done well as part of a team, the satisfaction is considerably greater than that gained from, say, skiving off in the shade to ‘blog’, as I’m doing now and do a lot back home.

I wouldn’t say that wwoofing is for everyone, but the great thing about Quinta des Abelhas is the relaxed attitude to it: no-one has ever asked me if I’ve done my 6 hours of work on a particular day, and they haven’t needed to. With such a variety of tasks available to get on with in our own time, everyone seems very happy to spend a few hours making a mosaic, some time in the garden, a dip in the pool to cool off and then off to the kitchen to bake bread. There was no question that taking two days off in the first week to go wild in Porto at San Joao would be a problem, and likewise when Matt screeched to a halt in the 4×4 when I was on the way to watch the football, saying “Need a volounteer to put the yurt up, it’s gonna rain!”, it didn’t occur to me to point out that I’d already done 6 hours work that day. If my employer in London asked me to work an extra hour for free I’d be laughing all the way home. I even missed the Holland game yesterday to watch Andy’s Geoff Lawton film, “Creating a Food Forest”, which was a revelation. It’s great to realise that there’s a way to live off the land without stripping it bare and spraying it with pesticides. I would recommend coming here to wanting to learn about permaculture, as long as you don’t mind shovelling shit at 7am.