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,

Wednesday 12 January 2011

Sunshine!! and broad beans..

Well its brightened up beautifully, the weather yesterday was mild and dry and today it dawned dry and mild and with bright sunshine, I went to the veggie patch at 9am this morning and it was warm enough to go in tee shirt and jeans... excellent... and the forcast is more of the same all week... I went down to our winter garden in the orchard yesterday and checked out the new stuff down there, the broad beans are coming up really strong, and look excellent, although Im not counting my chickens as we generally get this far and then still dont get to eat them... Ive been saving all the wood ash from the fire for them so gave them a good top dressing of ash to help them along a bit, such valuable potash...
The winter peas down there are not too bad, a little sporadic , as they suffered a bit with the rain washing stuff out and maybe rotting some seed, but we have quite a few and this sunshine will really make them pull strongly now...
My onion seedlings are coming on too... Im so hopeful of them, never having grown them from seed before...
The Grelos is good, we are eating it in soup at the moment... and I'll plant another lot in a day ofr two.. there are still one or two caulis left to come as well, we've managed one a week for ages... I'll defo plant them late again, to have caulis during the winter has been a great help to us this year and I hope to repeat that success next year..
The cabbage is still doing okay, its slowed down a lot but the next batch will be ready any time now... Rick cannot manage without cabbage...

Im so looking forward to this growning year, I felt I missed so much last year with having to dash back and forth to Ireland. We'd planted so much extra stuff so I could preserve, and dry it all, and I never got to do much, Rick had to give so mmuch away as he couldnt cope with the workload without me.... aaaarrrhhh .