18th July FONTE DOS CLERIGOS

Another warm night; I got up early to do my chores (watering) as today was going to be even hotter than yesterday. Yippee, I have nasturtiums coming through.

Today’s task was getting some shade and making our living quarters more comfortable so we went into Castelo Branco and bought a couple of gazebos; just cheap ones 19€99, but they’re 3m square so they should add quite a bit of living space and give some shade to the front of the van. Mr Luis left some olive nets (you put them under the trees when you’re collecting the olives) which are HUGE about 50’ square; we’re going to drape one over the camper and both gazebos to act as a mosquito net and hopefully it will provide some shade too.

Our campsite st the moment

We bought the components for our temporary compost toilet; a solid plastic step and a bucket with a lid. On our way back home we stopped at the campsite to visit Mark & Glen and borrowed Mark‘s jigsaw to cut a round hole in the top of the step. The step becomes the toilet with the bucket under the hole; it works very well, every time you go to the toilet everything is covered with a layer of wet organic matter, at the moment we’re using wet straw (as Mr Luis left a load and we need to get rid of it) in the future we’ll probably use sawdust; it shouldn’t smell, when we visited Leo and Erica they were using a similar construction (not the step, that was Brett’s idea) and there was no odour from there’s. 

While we were with Mark and Glen I charged my mobile; that was something we hadn’t considered when we moved to the farm, I can only recharge my mobiles from mains electricity, all the other gadgets (laptop, Kindles, Ipod etc) can be plugged into the 12v sockets when we travel in the truck, or when we run the camper (to charge the battery so we can use the water pump and lights), which we do for 20 minutes a day, we’ll have to do this until we get a generator.

Mark gave us some sand so we assembled our clay pot ‘fridge’; meantime Brett bought 10m of nylon rope which he threaded through an animal feed sack which is now hanging down the bottom of the well  (7m deep) with bottles of beer in it – I think the well cooler will work best but you can’t keep butter in it (and our butter is liquid so it needs to go somewhere cool).

Walk before bed to check on Gary

Gary says that everywhere is quiet now as the Portuguese travel to the coast during July and August (school holidays) for their summer vacations. The weather is supposed to get cooler over the next couple of days it’s going down to 33°C, that should make it more comfortable.

View of sunset from camp