5th June CASTELO BRANCO

I drove to the farm today (in the Ute); I feel my road positioning is much better, but I’m still trying to change gear with my left hand. I suppose the problem is with being right handed – I prefer to have my right hand in control of the steering wheel. The drive up the track was hairy; it gets very narrow at times (and the Ute is quite wide) – and it didn’t help having Mr Luis’s daughter and wife following behind me! Mr Luis was already at the farm harvesting more potatoes.

It was really sad; after we had all got out of our vehicles and greeted one another (in Portuguese and French) the daughter went off to help Mr Luis and we were left to talk with Mrs Luis – She told us that she had fallen over and hurt herself, she was welling up (it had obviously just happened), she’s a rather frail old lady – I gave her a big hug.

While they were digging up the potatoes we went and pulled up a couple of wheelbarrows of lupins; Mr Luis then told us that the lupins were edible! We’ve looked it up on the internet and there is a ‘sweet lupin’ which is supposed to be edible, but then other sources say that it can still be poisonous. Lupin seeds are also put into animal feed, as they are a good source of protein – I don’t know, there’s so much contradiction on the internet; now we don’t know whether to pull the rest out or leave them – I would like to leave them as they are pretty plants, we found some yellow ones today (the others are purple).

When we were getting rid of rubbish yesterday I took apart (and threw away) one of Mr Luis’s ‘assemblages’; I thought it was for keeping the chickens off the vegetable garden, it was made from wood, loose saggy wire tacked to a frame, old plastic blinds and sticks – whoops, apparently it was propping up the branches of the peach tree (as Mr Luis pointed out to us), which are heavily laden with fruit. So we made some suitable props from cleft poles (it looks much better!). He showed us a fruit tree with small yellow fruit which are nearly ripe; we think they’re loquats, but we have no idea how to use them.

Mr Luis is obviously a bit upset about our tidying up; all around the farm he has piles of wood (and rubbish) which we are trying to organise, today he showed us a pile of sticks and indicated that they were needed as supports for the tomatoes (i.e. leave them alone!).

We started to demolish the ‘donkey shed’ today; we took off most of the roof, which is a mixture of concrete tiles, corrugated asbestos, sheet metal, corrugated iron and some plastic sheeting. Inside the shed is a mishmash of bed heads, doors, shutters, carpet, feed sacks and anything else which might keep the weather out – I know we’re smallholders but this was ridiculous (unfortunately Mr Luis will not be pleased!). Once the shed is down Brett is going to use salvageable bits to make compost bins, then we can start mucking out (we’ve bought masks).

'Donkey shed'

Today I saw a swallowtail butterfly (just like on your wedding cake Will and Gill) and then I saw a yellow butterfly with orange splodges on it’s wings, I have no idea what it was but it was very pretty. There’s so much wild life around us; today we had a stork circling over the farm, there were frogs, including those little bright green ones, lizards (I rescued one that was floating in one of the tanks on it’s back), geckos, dragon flies, slow worm (Brett found it under a rock), hoopoes, and masses of birds we don’t know the names of.

We think we have free internet in the village; there’s a Pedrogoa WIFI Hotspot we can access at the farm, we just need to get login details – how brilliant is that? At the moment we’re using the free internet at the cafes in Jumbo (a shopping centre) in the Zona Industrial.