Spring Equinox 2024

Time drifts by in a gentle rhythm dictated by Dimitri’s needs and those of the animals; my days run on a repeating cycle of feeding everything, exercising the animals that need exercising, cleaning up the poo of four equines and a human baby, and working in the garden. In this way the days merge one into the other so I rarely know where I am in the week, let alone the month. After a spell of deceptively warm weather, the rain and cold return with a vengeance and the peaks of the not-too-distant Serra da Estrela are covered in snow. I do my chores between rain showers, and then scurry indoors to spend the day knitting, listening to audiobooks and drinking copious amounts of hot lemon tea because my neighbours keep bringing me lemons and I don’t know what else to do with them. It feels somehow decadent to be indulging in these simple pleasures and I relish every moment of inactivity knowing that when the rain passes there's work to be done. 

One day, Dimitri and I head up into the mountains with some friends to see the snow. Dimitri is not impressed with this bright, cold, wet new experience.

When the weather clears it’s back into the garden to pull weeds and dig over the rain-softened earth. Everything is growing so fast it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed by the amount of clearing there is still to do, but each year things seem just a little easier, the soil that bit looser, and since starting to use lots of mulch there aren’t nearly so many weeds. I plant a large patch of this newly turned earth with linseed for an early crop and I throw in some sunflower seeds here and there for good measure, hoping that they’ll survive any further cold spells and all over my manure heaps sunflower seeds I fed to the horses are germinating. I’ll transplant these into the garden when the weather becomes more stable. 

My stocks in the store room are slowly dwindling: the elderflower cordial is almost finished, many of the jams I made in the late summer and autumn are almost gone, and only a few jars of pickled courgettes and beans in mustard sauce remain from the previous year. I didn’t make any savoury preserves last year because I was too busy with the baby. The day arrives when I finally use the last of my Spaghetti Squash that was harvested back in September. I’m impressed that it survived 6 months in the damp store room, so I keep the seeds and sow them again. Spaghetti squash have been a staple in soups over the winter months.

With the arrival of this much-sought after plant, I begin searching for all those other exotic staples on my kitchen shelves and in my spice rack: cinnamon, clove, nutmeg, coffee, vanilla, black pepper, rooibos tea, bananas. Where do they grow? What conditions do they need? How do I grow them? So many of the foods I eat on a daily basis come from far-flung corners of the world, it’s astounding. If we want to reduce our impact on the planet, surely we need to take more responsibility for the food that we eat and stop putting pressure on fragile ecosystems to produce goods and we need to stop shipping things halfway around the world to meet the needs of consumers in the west because they want avocados, bananas, or even strawberries and tomatoes in January! Taking responsibility means that if I can grow my own avocados, bananas, cashew nuts or what have you, then that’s what I should be doing, and if I can’t, then do I really need those things anyway? With this in mind, I take to the internet where I find a Dutch website that stocks seeds for virtually everything I’m looking for and I spend more money that I can afford on seeds that most likely won’t even germinate. I come to the conclusion that what I really need is a greenhouse. Actually, I need two greenhouses - one for dry heat and one for humidity. Hah. One day! A few days later, I find a website selling Dwarf Cavendish Banana plants which some research tells me will survive this climate and produce fruit so I order one, along with another pecan tree for good measure. While I’m at it, I also buy some Styrian Hull-less pumpkin seeds to plant. I really can’t be trusted with money around plants!

Spring progresses and the wild flowers are coming thick and fast. The patches of yellow and white chamomile and wild brassicas expand and intensify as the broom blossoms, and soon the golden yellows of gorse, buttercups, and corn marigolds add their deeper tones to the colourful tapestry of the spring landscape. The plums, pears, and cherries come into flower, too, adding shades of delicate pink. Near the ground, there are patches of pink stork’s bill, purple Viper’s Bugloss, and in areas of clear-felled pine forest the land is speckled with delicate little Angel’s-Tears daffodils. A haze of bright green creeps across the landscape as new leaves unfurl on the willows, hazels, hawthorns, elders, and alders - a bright contrast to the darker shades of the ever-green broom and pine, and the silver-green of olive trees. The oaks and chestnuts still stand bare, their leaves always the last to emerge. The cuckoos arrive in early March and in the villages the swallows have returned to the previous year’s nests. The warm evening air is filled with the chirping of frogs and crickets and soon we’ll have nightingales singing into the early hours. Everything is busy, spring is in full swing, there is new life everywhere. On a warm and windy day, the pines begin to release their pollen, clouds of yellow billow from the tree tops with each gust of wind and everything gets a fine coating of luminous yellow-green dust. When it rains all the puddles are ringed in an eerie yellow. 

At the tops of the pine trees the Pine Processionary Caterpillars begin to leave their spider web-like nests and process down the tree trunks and across the ground in long lines, nose to tail, following a leader as they look for the place where they will burrow into the ground to transform into moths. Everywhere they go they leave a trail of toxic hairs that irritate the skin of anything that comes into contact with them and for a few days my body itches all over, the horses itch, the dogs itch and I try to keep everyone clear of the forest lest any of the creature come into direct contact with these tricky little creatures. 

My neighbour, Debra, invites the horses to come and graze her land for a week. She has several terraces of olive and fruit trees that are covered in lush grass. Now seems like the perfect time to get them away from the pine trees with their caterpillars and pollen and off the dusty hay that’s making them all cough. On a warm, sunny Sunday a few friends come over and we walk the horses over to Debra’s quinta perched half way up the steep hillside and overlooking a beautiful valley surrounded by boulder-strewn hills. The horses are delighted to have some lush grass and I spend a few lazy afternoons sitting in the warm sunshine with Dimitri, eating oranges picked from Debra’s trees, and keeping watch while the horses graze some of the less well-fenced terraces. It’s rare that I ever just sit quietly with the horses, asking nothing of them and vice versa and it warms my heart that they choose to be near us, coming to snooze next to us at the same time as Dimitri takes his afternoon nap. Micheál, my cantankerous little one-eyed Irish mule, is especially close and enjoys sharing oranges with us.

Back on the farm, the land feels empty without them, and I’m always worried that they might escape when I’m not there, so after a week, when they’ve done their best to clear the land, we bring them home again and settle back into our normal life just as the cold, wet weather returns, putting an end to the caterpillar processions and sending me back to my audio books, knitting, and dreams for the land. Spring always brings such a joyful enthusiasm for new projects and ideas for the future. I love this season, feeling the rising spring tide, seeing the seeds sprouting, the leaves unfurling, life returning to the land, the dreams of winter becoming reality.