2nd July CASTELO BRANCO

After watering all my seeds (nothings started growing yet!) I didn’t have much to do (I was a bit bored actually), and Brett was still digging around the house; so I ended up wheeling mud and stones for him – 23 wheelbarrows all told, I’m shattered.

Brett's digging

There’s a quinta we pass every day with a fantastic vegetable garden; in a month we’ve seen it turn from ploughed land to an oasis, there’s a patch of sweetcorn that has literally taken four weeks (only four weeks!!) from sowing to flowering (the tassels are obvious but we can’t get near enough to see if the ears are forming yet but I bet they are) – this is our model for our garden next year.

The birds (azure winged magpies) are definitely eating our fruit; so we’ve got to do something about them or we won’t have any soft fruit for ourselves. We’re going to make some bird scarers (windmills) out of plastic bottles and stick them on the end of bamboo; we have our own bamboo growing on the quinta, it’s about 15’long  so it’ll stick right up out of the tops of the trees – let’s hope it works. Next year we’re going to feed their eggs to the pigs; which is far kinder than Mr Luis who waited for the eggs to hatch and then threw the nests on the floor for the heat and ants to kill the babies!