Belated Greetings..

Yep Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Boas Festas!!!
Well thats all that over with then. We've been so busy this year we just didnt have time to get into town to update this blog. We've had a great couple of weeks, considering we are pretty antisocial people really, we've been inundated with invites to eat and celebrate with friends that we've been overwhelmed a little. All in one week we had Solstice dinner celebrations with some lovely dutch friends, a dinner out with English friends a few miles away, and Christmas Portuguese style on Christmas Eve with some friends Ricky plays Softball with from Abrantes. Ive never eaten so much in my life... it was all really wondeful though.
We now have some friends from england arriving for a two week visit today, so lots of cooking and organising for me.

No news on Ricky's job yet, we hope to hear more on that first week of Jan or so, its going to take time to set up a scheme this big so we'll not be splashing the dosh around too soon.... heheheheh

The weather is still wet... very wet, its turned very mild again but we have the stream back running through the kitchen, ahhhh well, maybe we will get to dig out the back wall of the house this summer.... hehehehe Ive lived with it three winters now, another wont kill me...
We've been logging and trying to get wood stacked to dry out, we've still plenty of dry stuff but at this rate it wont last long so its a continual thing for us, as the cooker eats it up.

The garden is still ticking over, just the cabbage and turnips for eating now, the broad beans are going ok , I never get too confident of broad beans, they are sneaky, and tend to let me down when i'm not looking....

The main project on the land for us now is that we are planting an orchard, we try to reclaim more of our land each year, this time we are working on a big patch at the bottom of the hill, fruit trees are very cheap at the moment so we splashed out and spent 18euros.... on some more trees, and combined with the ones we planted last year (in a really stupid place that now have to be moved) we'll be able to plant our new orchard and have, 3 plum trees (different varieties) 3 Pears (different) a granny smiths apple, a Gala Red apple, 2 cherry trees, and 3 Almond trees. We also have 2 tangerine trees down there that are full grown and in a bad way, Rik will prune them hard , and an old apple tree we'll do the same too and hope it picks up eventually.
All this will hopefully give us plenty of fruit in a few years.
We so love planting trees, it feeels like we are giving something back to the world...
We have to contunie all the strimming down there yet , days of work....
But good 'making a differnce ' kind of work.... such a buzz of satisfaction we know we'll get when its all done...

More later