Summer Solstice 2024

Summer is fast approaching now. Almost overnight the land becomes dry, the grass starts to turn yellow and suddenly we’re on high alert for fires. The farm is far from ready for fire season; all the excess vegetation still needs strimming, low branches in the forest need cutting back, everything needs to be ‘cleaned’ so there’s nothing to burn if a fire comes through. Strimming is one thing I can’t do with Dimitri on my back and the few hours I get a week when a friend takes him just isn’t enough, but clearing the land by hand with a scythe is hot, exhausting work and on top of all the other things I have to do, it only happens sporadically. In their absence I suddenly realise just how much the horses used to keep on top of all of that for me - not just on my land, but on the neighbouring pieces of otherwise abandoned land, too.

Over near the mountains, the horses (and mule!) are doing a great job clearing my friends’ land and soon they all begin to look as fat as they did before we left the UK. All except Taliesin who, for the first time in years, no longer appears skinny. I try to visit them at least twice a week to just check in with them, hang out, and give them a good groom. They come eagerly over when I call, and sometimes when I leave, Micheál shouts after me. I’m gratified to know that to them I’m more than just 'the human who gives them food' and am actually an integral part of the herd. This feeling is cemented when, on one occasion, ten days slip by between visits and when I do eventually go to see them, the whole herd gives me the cold shoulder. Instead of coming over when I call, they ignore me, making me search for them in the 6 hectares of olive trees, and when I do eventually find them, it’s as if I don’t exist. They refuse to greet me, show no interest in me whatsoever, and walk off when I try to groom them…all except for Micheál, who is uncharacteristically clingy and cuddly. He leaves the herd and follows me back across the field to the entrance where he stands letting me pet and cuddle him and even happily accepts me putting Dimitri on his back. This is most unusual behaviour for him. I get the message: the herd feels abandoned. It’s time to bring them home.

On the 9th of June, I leave Dimitri with Vlad for some much needed father-son bonding time and head over to Lugar da Pedra Alta with my friend, Jax. We saddle up Taliesin and Oisín and set off to ride the 20 kilometres back home across the valley. I ride Taliesin leading Dakota one side and Micheál on the other and once again I feel like my old, pre-baby self. It’s wonderful to be back in the saddle, moving through the landscape with my herd, witnessing the little interactions between them - Taliesin pulling faces at Dakota for even daring to exist, Micheál when he becomes bored nipping at poor Taliesin until he reacts with a kick and a squeal, Oisín’s determination to always be in the front. They're each so individual, such big personalities. It makes my heart swell. I love my herd and I'm honoured to live amongst these equines. They're all excited, bursting with energy and seem delighted to be back on the move. They know they’re heading home so they stride out, covering the kilometres in a surprisingly short time. 

Back on the land I put them straight to work eating down the neck-high grass on all my terraces and adjoining plots of abandoned land. It’s good to have them back, to hear them shuffling around outside the tiny house, snorting, sneezing and stamping. All the reassuring little background noises that I never notice except when they’re not there. I’m also happy to have the manure for my compost heaps again. In fact, the only downside to having them home is that now there are flies everywhere. 

Flies are a seasonal nuisance that I somehow manage to forget every winter, only to be reminded again each spring. Most days in the hot season I am woken up by flies landing on me, their tiny legs tickling my skin. It drives me nuts. And no matter how many screens I put on the windows and doors, no matter how many flies I swat throughout the day, no matter how many fly papers I hang around the place, I still seem to have a swarm living in the house. Last year I hung a mosquito net around the bed to stop them getting waking me up but this year Dimitri is so active and into everything that I can’t use it - it will either be destroyed by him pulling on it, or he’ll get tangled up in it during the night. It’s just too risky. I remind myself that this is only a season and try to see the positives in the situation: fly swatting is a great way to release of any frustrations.

June is hay-making season. Every year I cut hay on a friend’s land, and this year one of my Portuguese neighbours, Zé Luís, kindly sorted out some extra fields for me to cut. He likes to help out in whatever way he can, and in return I try to repay him by providing him with as much horse manure as he can possibly use for his garden. We find a local man to cut, turn and bale the fields, then it’s down to me and Zé Luís to bring the hay home. Most of the fields are inaccessible with a pickup so the hay has to be loaded into the small trailer on the back of Zé Luís’s little tractorette, driven to the edge of the field, then loaded into the pickup I’ve borrowed from a friend, strapped down, driven to the farm, dropped, then stacked in its final position. This is much more handling than I’d like. It's hot, sweaty work and the grass seeds work their way into my clothes and scratch at my skin, the dust gets up my nose, I itch like mad and long for the work to be done so I can shower and get into fresh, clean clothes. I’m not going to lie, I hate making hay, but it saves me a lot of money so it’s worth it for a few days of discomfort. I notice how unfit I am this year and how lacking in energy and enthusiasm compared to previous years. It’s embarrassing how Zé Luís, who is 78 and recovering from cancer, has more stamina and is able to load the heavy bales better than I am. I blame it on a year of motherhood and not being as active as I used to be. 

On the final day of hay making, Dimitri is ill. He woke crying several times in the night and had a mild temperature. In almost a full year of life this is the first time he’s ever been sick. I’m torn: stay with my baby and give him the comfort he needs or get the hay in ahead of the rain so the horses can eat this year. It’s a tough choice but the horses win this time. Dimitri goes to his favourite auntie, Jax, and I go to make hay. We get the hay baled, stacked, and covered just in time. There are heavy downpours and thunderstorms. Poor Dimitri has 3 nights of fever, each night his temperature gets higher than the night before, then subsides during the day. After the third night I take him to the local health centre. Unable to find an obvious cause for the fever, they send us to hospital where they run a series of tests, concluding it is a viral, rather than bacterial, infection and send us home with paracetamol and instructions to bring him back if anything changes. The fever abates, Dimitri cheers up, and a day or two later a rash appears, cue another trip to hospital because there was no medic available at the health centre. Rubéola they concluded, which I think translates to Rubella, or measles, but who knows? Either way, Dimitri was fine. First illness overcome just before his first birthday.

The Garden and Harvests

At 15 litres, my stash of elderflower cordial for the year is almost complete, complemented by some rose cordial, a blend of rose, elderflower, and lavender, and an experimental batch of tilia (linden blossom) cordial. I also made 15 litres of elderflower and rose champagne, 15 litres of plain elderflower champagne, and a further 15 litres of tilia champagne. The honeysuckle is out now, perhaps I’ll make some cordial and champagne with that, too. 

The broad beans are all finished. I pull them up, stripping all the pods off the stalks as I go and blanch and freeze them for use later in the year. I replace them with potatoes and plant bush beans that will dry out for using over the winter months. Furthering my quest for self-sufficiency, I sow some rice, millet and more quinoa, although I have only just finished processing the 2.5 kgs of quinoa that I grew last year. It’s not something I use a lot and I find that trying to get rid of the saponins to remove the bitter taste is a long and laborious task. It involves a lot of soaking and washing. In the end the easiest way I’ve found is to fill a fine mesh bag (the kind you take to the shops for fruit and veg) and hang the quinoa in my water tank overnight, then wash it a couple of times, then cook it and change the water half way through cooking .

In the garden the summer crops are starting to come into their own now. This year everything seems to have had a slow start, in spite of the early sowings, but at last everything is taking off.  The tomatoes have their first fruit, the aubergines are coming into flower, the beans, after a bit of a struggle, are thriving, same for the corn, cucumbers, and peppers. The peas are finished and it’s almost time to harvest the flax and the tremoços. I let the last of the broad beans dry off on their stalks then open up the pods, leave the beans to dry in the hot sun for a few days before storing them in jars to sow again in the autumn. I harvest seeds from the oats, wheat, and what I think might be rye or barley that has grown up in random places all around the land, sprouted from undigested seeds in the horses’ feed. I plan to sow these again in the autumn as winter cover crops and in-situ mulch for next summer and perhaps I’ll even start harvesting the grains for chicken feed, or to grind into flour for baking. Just another step towards being more efficient in the garden and more self-sufficient with food and/or animal feed. 

I recently began reading the One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka and I like the idea of condensing the bulk of my garden work into twice yearly sowing and harvesting: a large winter crop (oats, wheat, barley, rye, tremoço, flax, lentils etc), sown in October and harvested in the early summer, followed by a summer crop (rice, millet, quinoa, maize, sesame, chickpeas, beand etc) harvested in the autumn. Finding the best crops and fine-tuning the sowing and harvesting times may take a while but I feel it has the potential to work really well and to bring me to a new level of self-sufficiency whilst reducing the amount of time I spend actually sowing, maintaining and harvesting plants. More and more I’m going off shop-bought ‘food’. Grown with artificial fertilisers, sprayed with chemicals, grown in seriously depleted soils (or worse, not even in soil at all but hydroponically in a soup of chemicals), then shipped from goodness knows where and sat on the shelf for days on end; even the fruit and vegetables hardly seem like food anymore, let alone any of the processed, packaged goods that line the shelves. Everything seems empty, lifeless, void of any nutritional value. No wonder people are in such poor health these days if this is all they’re eating! If I can grow more of my staples, not just seasonal vegetables it’ll be a huge step in the right direction. 

Recently I’ve come to realise that my answer to most of the world's problems these days is to simply grow more food. It’s possibly the most powerful thing we can do. Want to fight climate change, reduce your carbon footprint and generally be more eco-friendly? Grow more of your own food! Want to improve your health and wellbeing both physically and mentally? Grow more of your own food! Want to save money? Grow more of your own food! Don’t want to support the tax-hungry, war-mongering governments of the world? Grow more of your own food! You get the picture. 

The People’s Market

In Portugal markets are all the rage. Every week there’s a market somewhere nearby where you can buy fresh fruit and veg, clothing, basic household items, and seedlings for the garden and fruit trees. These markets are always well attended by the Portuguese; this is where most of them get everything they need for planting in their gardens. Then there are the eco markets, usually organised and attended largely by the foreign community. Here, there is usually a good range of homemade preserves, essential oils, second hand stuff, unusual plants, homemade soaps, vegan cakes and cookies, and all sorts of good food. Unfortunately the nearest of these eco markets is about an hour’s drive away so I rarely manage to go. However, a friend of mine started an initiative to do such a market every month in Fornos de Algodres, less than 5 kilometres down the road. The first edition of the ‘People’s Market’ was held in May with a fantastic turnout from both Portuguese locals and foreigners alike. It was a great event with lots of interesting stalls and really nice vibe, but there was only one food stall. So for the June edition I decided to have a food stall using as many homegrown ingredients as I could. I made stuffed vine leaves (vine leaves from the land) with tremoço sauce (using homegrown tremoços), and quinoa salad using last year’s quinoa, freshly harvested peas, broad beans and onions from the land. I also offered homemade rose and elderflower champagne, elderflower cordial and rose and lavender cordial. Unfortunately the weather forecast for the day was abysmal. Even though the hail, high winds, thunder, and torrential rain never came, it was enough to deter both stall holders and punters alike, but the experience gave me some ideas for future market stalls and opened a possibility for a small farm-based income stream (which would be very welcome as financially I am nearly always in dire straits) and a chance to show people what’s possible.