4th July CASTELO BRANCO

We got to the quinta before 8.00!! And it wasn’t too hot at that early hour. We checked on Gary; he’s tiling his bedroom floor; he’s moved all his furniture outside and is going to sleep in his other shed tonight.

None of my seeds have come through yet; it has only been four days since I sowed the first ones, so I suppose I have to be patient – I have been known to dig up beans and peas at this stage to see if they are sprouting (it doesn’t seem to do them any harm and it makes me feel better).

Brett dug over another vegetable bed for me and I sowed some Florence fennel in it; the thyme, leeks and cucumbers I sowed into trays and pots (sorbet box, yoghurt pots etc ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ – I’m so green/tight!) and the oregano has been planted in a border, near the house, so that we can watch the butterflies on it.

Mr Luis came round; he’s still on about us having our land ploughed up (as a fire barrier) but the cost is 35€/hour (we think that’s foreigner’s rates) for 5 – 6 hours (175€ - 210€), that’s a lot of money. He said we shouldn’t have pruned the vines and pointed out all the shrivelled bunches of grapes which he said had been caused by the sunlight getting to them (there were quite a few – whoops!).

Brett continued digging his trench around the house; Gary came round, he’s run out of tiles so, he said, he’s going to mix some cement with pigment and putting that down instead of buying more tiles - I'm not sure it will work. I told him that Mr Luis had said we shouldn’t have pruned the grapes, and showed him some of the shrivelled bunches. 

Brett called out from his trench (I thought he had hurt himself); there was a snake in the trench with him, it was hissing and trying to strike him (he said it had wanted to escape but he kept pushing it back, with the rake, so I could see it, which had made it a bit scared and cross – understandably).

Please identify this snake for us (Steph!)

The pickaxe is for scale - it was BIG!

It was between 2’ – 3’ long, as Brett said, it was the biggest snake we’d ever seen in the wild; we let it make it’s way back along the trench and then it disappeared into a small hole goinginto the foundations under our house!! Bloody hell, we’ve got a snake living in our house now. We don’t know what it is (we don’t think it’s an adder as it hasn’t got the diamond pattern down it’s spine); so if you could ‘google’ it, please, Steph .....!!!

We picked a carrier bagful of plums today (some we’re already on the floor courtesy of the sodding birds), which I’m going to cook up (unfortunately they’re not quite ripe enough to eat raw) and have with yoghurt for breakfast (probably for the next two weeks, as there is an awful lot of them).

When we got back to the campsite Glen came round with some mulberries; they’ve got an absolutely massive mulberry tree in their olive grove – they’ve said to help ourselves.

Mark (the engineer) is coming to our quinta tomorrow to advise us on our roof joists etc.; he hasn’t been there for five weeks so we’re hoping he’ll be impressed by our progress.