About Me

We moved out to Portugal to live a frugal but better , simpler and peaceful life, our house is a very basic, semi ruin, up in the hills outside Figueiro Dos Vinhos, where we work our land, enjoy life with each other and our dogs, and hope to make the smallest carbon footprint we can,

Thursday 18 March 2010

Spuds , spuds and even more spuds...

Well, considering we do not usually plant many potatoes as we dont have adequate storage for many, this year is a little different...
We usually plant just a few , enough to give ussome lovely early new potatoes when they are still expensive in the shops.
We were in town a couple of days ago when we bumped into a near neigbour (well the next valley) and he asked if we had enough seed potatoes.... I said we just had a few as we dont plant many...
That evening he arrived at 7.30pm with a bottle of wine and a couple of huge boxes of seed potatoes... what a lovely man.. so yesterday, we spent all day... and I mean ALL day strimming, then rototilling , then planting a huge patch of spuds... More than enough for us ....
This is actually a good thing, as we have some friends , a lovely young portuguese couple who are having a bit of a rough time at the moment, the husband has just lost his job, and the wife has had to stop work while she has very invasive treatment for cancer, they live in an apartment with their two children so do not have land to grow veggies, things are a little tight for them moneywise , so we plan to grow as much as possible and give them all the surplus... they have been so good to us , Rik stays with them whenever he needs to stay in Abrantes overnight, they feed him every weekend when he's at Softball too... this way we feel we can help out a bit at least.
So we are in for a bit of the wet stuff agin for a few days... at least its warmer though, and in between the showers we'll be clearing the land and hopefully starting to plant, everything else is on a back burner for now...