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 31 May 2011

Weeds, windturbines and water...

It seems so long since I sat down to update this blog, I think in reality its maybe been about three weeks...
I would like to thank all those lovely people who over the last few days have either emailed or phoned... or both to make sure that we are all okay... Its really touching that people care that much about us.. thanks guys, you know who you are...
There is no problems, we are all fine, its just been very hectic here, during the last few weeks, rick has had some work that has taken him away from the place for long days, very long days,  hes just been coming home, eating, showering and going to bed, Ive had a knee injury, that has meant my weeding times have to be cut drasticly, so the work has really built up here, it soon happens the weather has been perfect growing weather, good hot sunny days with thunder and rain early evening, creating ideal growing climate... sadly weeds grow the fastest...
So to combat the problem of me feeling a little overwhelmed by all the work stacking up that I just cannot do, due to injury and just not enough hours in the day... we have two good helpers arrived the other day, now I know we said we were not having any this summer, but Andy and Katja were a couple I had approached twice over the last year or so and they were always in such great demand, I missed out... so when they offered to come immediately, I jumped at the chance, and true to their word they arrived next day and have got stuck in very well, such great enthusiasmn... its excellent.
We also have our old friends Alik and Jan staying a while, making wind turbines, adapting my range cooker to heat hot water and doing all kinds of weird and wonderful contraptions ...
The plan for the hot water is this... we now have a old but good cenrtal heating radiator that rick and alik are fitting to the back of my log burner cooker, it will be connected to the mains water, the cooker when alight will heat it up,  the pipes will then run to a water tank upstairs which will be conected to a header tank and hopefully make a cheap, and good system... as my boiler has been broken a year with no chance of fixing ...I long for a good supply of hot water.
The homemade wind turbine... made from scrap wood, a car\alternator and blades made from plastic drainpipe will hopefully eventually run our lights... most of the time...
Its all very exciting... pictures will follow of successful results...
The garden is going great guns, I grew from seed tons of squashes, spaggetti pumpkins, harliquin pumpkins, normal pumpkins, butternuts, three different sizes, uchich kuri .. courgettes... oh just about 45 in total... and all are looking good... and have baby fruits on them, we've had tons of broccali, and huge... bigger than my caulis were last year... sadly rick doesnt like it... we have lettuce coming out our ears and we've just started digging gorgeous new spuds...
I love this time of the year....