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,

Tuesday 12 October 2010

Liquid feed, Lavender and lumpy bits...

Well its been all go the last few days, my brother in law John left early this morning on his way back home to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The weather for him this year sadly hasnt been the best, it rained pretty much every day since we picked the grapes.. but today is beautiful again, sunny and quite warm .. John and Rik managed to get the logs all chopped and split and now my barn is crammed !! There is a huge pile in the sun drying out and then I must stack it. I dont mind, just looking at it makes me feel warm...
The wine is in the barrel, we just about managed the 120 litres we hoped for, its very strange, this year it will be Rosé which we've not had before, so many of our red grapes just were too poor quality to pick. I'll try to bring the camera in tomorrow to show some pics of it being pressed..

Im having a day off cooking today, as with John being here Ive been cooking up a storm most days... and now we are getting ready for our first batch of new helpers who arrive the end of this week.. so I'll be cooking a lot then too.
I have more onion seed to plant now the weather has perked up.. plus all the vines to clip...
I'd like to repaint the kitchen floor soon too. Plus a huge Lavender bush to prune and hopefully plant all the clippings and make a lovely Lavender hedge to border what will be my new medicinal herb garden..
Yesterday I made the final cut of my big Comfrey plant, Im making liquid manure with it, Ive been told to just cram all the leaves into a big bucket (I used 20 litre old paint tins) and cover with water, seal it up and leave it till spring, it will be all rotten and stinking, but perfect for the land, especially tomatoes... so Ive prepared 40 litres.... hehehe
John also helped me dig the first Jerusalem Artichokes of the season the other day, he'd never seen them or eaten them... he couldnt believe we were going to eat 'all them lumpy bits'... but he did... and he enjoyed them too...