Newsletter Terradomilho Autumn 2013 After a warm summer with guests in the Safaritent, and family and volunteers on our land and in the house, we are heading for autumn now. Autumn in the Algarve means, that after two months without a drop of rain, we are having a little bit of rain again, once in a fortnight. Enough rain to start up agriculture and gardening again. In the Algarve they call autumn: “the little spring”. Potatoes, cabbages, beans, lettuce, it all is being planted again, to be harvested in winter. Apart from a drop of rain now and then, the weather is very nice in autumn in the Algarve, with 80% sun and an average temperature of 25 ºC. In general, spring and autumn are the nicest periods to stay at our land and in our Safaritent. So: feel free to mail or call us, when you have enough of the fifty shades of grey and pouring rain in your country. The land: the accessibility of the land has increased quite a bit, with new concrete steps on our terrace-land. We cleaned quite a bit of our wild land, to make it more safe in the dry periods. Last spring we ‘opened’ a new part of our land, two big terraces near the river at the westside, of 200 m2 . Those terraces proved to be very fertile, they are delivering corn, beans, pumpkins, eggplants, sweet potatoes and.. peanuts! Bummer of this summer: we lost our walnut-tree; we planted it two years ago, it grew well and all of a sudden it just died, we don’t know why. Our plum trees are doing exceptional however: we made 60 liter of plum jam and quite a bit of candies from sundried plums. We bottled 40 liter of applecider, together with our neighbours Ken and Frank. Our salvia-nursery is doing well; we think that next year we can start an internet-shop for those perennials. As well as for our palm trees, that’s another collection we are building up, also together with our friends Ken and Frank. The Animals: We have 9 chickens now, so the egg-production is getting there. Our goats Bianca and Kimberly had a male visitor in the house, for a couple of weeks. His name: “Rapazinho”, that’s Portuguese for “Little Boy”. Well, he wasn’t particularly small and his testicles had the size of Bordeaux-wineglasses. We think he did the job: the goats look pregnant. So it’s probably going to be little goats, goatmilk and goatcheese in half a year. Safaritent: We had guests in the summer, several from Holland and our first guests from Belgium. For autumn we have only one application so far. Kind greetings and maybe we’ll see you at Terradomilho, Tom en Monique
Posted on: Tue, 17 Sep 2013 21:08:57 +0000
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