New Kitchen Garden, Road and River Pools

As promised here are a couple of update videos showing the progress of the new kitchen garden makeover (take a peak at what it used to look like here for comparison), meet Fanny and Felipe, and take a first glimpse of the new road leading to the river pools at the bottom of the valley.

Enjoy.  Memphis.

New kitchen terrace garden makeover



Introducing Felipe and Fanny



New road down to the rivers




Natural river swimming pools

Autumn at Vale de Moses

Hey peeps. Finally the rains have come, and the forest has drunk deeply from the soaking. As have we. The water table is rising. The bore hole is refilling and the old Moorish water mine is once again overflowing. The mornings are crisp and misty and the evenings cold enough for us to light up the wood burning stoves in the houses. That long hot Portuguese Summer has passed and Autumn has arrived. Graças a Deus.

At the start of October we were most honoured to host a lovely group from Holland who came with their yoga teacher Mijke Linders. It was the first time we have had a Yoga teacher bring their students on retreat here and it is something we hope to do much more of in 2013. Mijke led the morning classes and a few afternoon workshops, I cooked and Vonetta massaged. Twas a truly wonderful week and we are particularly thankful to one of the group, Mirande Phernambucq, who took some stunning photos during her stay.

We have one more small retreat to run this year and then we will be hibernating as a family for winter (including Christmas with Von's family in Barbados - not been back for 7 years, way too long!). But before that, we are taking advantage of the still hot sunny afternoons to look after the land. Putting the kitchen gardens to bed for the winter, clearing more of the forest scrub around the houses, and attacking the jungle of brambles and shrubs on the terraces along the 2 rivers that run at the bottom of the valley.

To help us do this we have a beautiful young couple wwoofing until November, Fanny from Sweden and Felipe from Brasil,  who are with us for a few weeks on the start of a year long adventure. They are both avid photographers and we're enjoying their view of our home in the forest through the lenses of their cameras, through their eyes. Thanks guys.

We also said goodbye to Chris and Anette who after 3 months with us to deepen their practice of Suikido, have moved on to another forest wilderness retreat space, Inner Peace, further south in the Algarve. It was a privilege to have them here with us this summer and we wish them all the best in their journey here in Portugal. Força Suikido!

In between all the people coming and going, it's Vindima time in Amieira. Grape picking wine making fun with our neighbours Laurinda and José & Eugenia. It's a harvest festival season. Families and friends returning from all over the world to gather in the sweet abundance of the vines and ensure the rivers of juice that flow are preserved in the ancient art of making wine in Portuguese Adegas.

So glorious to be able to share this experience once again (was our fifth year of vindimas), especially as we won't be making wine from our own grapes this year (half the vines unfortunately were burnt in the August fires). But we will again one day.

One day I'll make another Adega here. One day I'll get round to grafting all the old vines with new ones. One day Vale de Moses will produce wine, not the 8000 litres a year they used to make here, but enough to share with friends, guests and visitors in the winters, springs and summers that will follow.

I'll leave you with a video below on our YouTube channel, a wee Autumn update showing the charred forest landscape and introducing just one of our jobs for this season - putting the kitchen garden to bed. Instead of veggies next year, we're going to lay a lawn! After 4 years of crop planting we're gonna have grass to lie on. Under the shade of fruit and olive trees. Plus some new big beds for flowers and keeping the smaller kitchen garden beds for salads, tomatoes and herbs. Exciting to move things around again. Constantly creating. Never stops.

The veggies are moving down to the river terraces where we'll be able to irrigate them better using the water collected by the açudes (little stone dams) that we'll be restoring over the next few weeks. The açudes also mean that in the soaring heat of next summer, we'll have some long cascading shady natural river pools for us, our guests and, of course, Moses to swim and cool down in. Delicious.

Thanks for tuning in.

Memphis. 

Ready to play

We began writing this blog 3 years ago, after our Poop in Europe tour blog had run its course. The whole blogging experience has been invaluable. It's been like a rudder through the meta narrative of the story we find ourselves in. By telling the story to those that drop in once in a while to hear it, one constantly re-orientates oneself. Our blogs are also, obviously, a personal record, albeit in public journal form, of our adventure together since we jumped out of the Matrix of London back in Feb '07.

Walking in Yokes and Chains through England, touring southern Europe in a motorhome, magically discovering the once fruitful and now almost forgotten and abandoned mountain way of life of the Portuguese interior, and some houses nestled in a fertile valley that carried the same name as our dog.

How we bought Moses. How we found such kindness here. Such generosity. Such humanity in the Portuguese people. We fell in love. With the people, the culture, the language, the food, the music, the air, the water, the land, the stones, the roses. The blog is a record of how we also tried our best, although unfortunately unsuccessfully, to set up a yoga retreat together with 3 other yoga teachers from England that we invited out to join us.

After which we threw ourselves whole heartedly into restoring our own houses, with the outstanding help of local artisans, stone masons, carpenters and blacksmiths, who together with our ageing neighbours, have taught us so many things.

Skills we were desperate to learn; how to build in stone and clay and lime and straw and wood, how to look after the land in this valley, how and when to plant everything we need to live in this very particular micro climate and so so much more.

Flicking through the scrapbook of our lives that is this blog, I realised something quite clearly today. We're tooled up. We're ready for the life we have chosen. And we're full of gratitude. For all of it. The ups and the downs. The happy times, which simply could not have happened without those sad heart breaking times. It all had to happen exactly as it happened. That's just the way it is.

Being connected into a land as beautiful, as mysterious, as powerful as this, a human can actually live in harmony with planet earth. Seriously. Life works like this. It's enough.

Yet, if you believe the soothsayers, independent economic analysts and other pesky bloggers, our current dominant global civilisation known as the monetary market economy, finds itself on the verge of pending doom and collapse. I reckon they're probably right. I hope they're right. I can't yet see how it can be fixed. It's set up to keep rewarding the most powerful, the most wealthy, time after time after time. While enslaving millions in debt so they have to carry on earning cash to pay for the life essential food, water and services that we are more than capable of providing for ourselves.

And contrary to the very definition of economy, this current "economy", is anything but. It is the most wasteful, polluting, non sustainable, murderous, species annihilating version of a human civilisation that this old planet of ours has ever seen. If we survive it, which I am certain we will, I suspect history will remember this particular human epoch simply as Democratic Capitalism.

Wake up.

Before it's too late.

If you have any land in your family, however distant in relation or miles, go. Go now. Learn how to build. Learn how to cultivate food. Learn how to live in harmony. Learn how to love the earth. Learn the old ways before we lose them. Convert all you have, it's alchemy. And it is a whole heap of fun.

Do it! Jump! Blog it as you go. What's the worse that could happen?

In peace and in play,

(Just off to pick up a little black Labrador cross German Shepherd puppy from Joshua's friend Paulo. We'll let you see her shortly I'm sure...)

Memphis

Hi Ho Hi Ho, It's off to WWOOF we go.

What a wonderful thing is Wwoofing. It has been so lovely working, eating and spending time with the Wwoofers that have come to Moses this year. Linwei, Peter, Liz and now Julie and Damian. A beautiful exchange of energy. They provide manpower and good company. We provide hospitality and great food that Arlene is cooking up every day.

This is Moses, our 3 bedroom cottage that we first restored and lived in for 18 months as a family while we were restoring our farmhouses up the hill. We are renting this cottage out for holidays and retreats later in the year, but for now it is providing super Wwoofing accommodation.

Here's Peter the Hungarian. "Egészségedre" amigo! We miss you already pal, and do so very much hope that we will meet again. Hopefully we'll go one day to your place in the Hungarian mountains and you can arrange a pálinka tasting tour, like the one I subjected you to around the Adegas of our local villages. I look forward to bouncing little hungary hungarian peters up and down on my knee while you catch a fish.

I am also most grateful to Peter for introducing me to the notion of Wabi-Sabi. The Japanese art of imperfection. In one masterfully hammered 9" nail in the roof structure of this new herb garden shed, his only nail in fact, he managed to reposition the perfectly vertical door post to a most imperfect 20 degree angle. One nail and his mark is left with us for us always to remember the man and smile!

Liz left us on Thursday. She threw herself into anything we asked her to do and to listen to her evening pre dinner piano recitals waft through the house out over the terraces was simply divine. 2 new hedgerows on the terrace (where we are slowly creating a cricket net garden) and one new line of conifers and rosemary bushes on the path down from the farmhouse. Thanks Liz. Thanks for the pictures too and the song you wrote for us. Fabulous. Hope all goes well in Morocco and beyond.  (Follow Liz's travel blog here.)

On Monday an English couple, Damian and Julie, arrived from a 3.5 months trip round Morocco and wanted to stop at Moses to repay some of the generosity they received over there. They've industriously cleared one section of forest from the rock roses, small pine trees and straggly cuttings of the gorses and lavenders, enough for Liz and I to shred 33 bags of woodchip . Our own pot pourri for the dry toilets. Nice.

They've helped plant trees including three beautiful living sculptures on the water garden terrace above the sugar maples at the top of the land. In 3 big holes that River dug out last year, there are now several huge upturned pine tree roots. 3 or 4 birch trees are planted right next to them at angles from the centre. Over time we hope the birches will thicken and mold into the roots, creating a strange gnarled sculpture all by themselves. It felt like a big Art Attack in the forest. Like an installation in the wilderness. One that wont be ready to truly appreciate for another 15 years or so. Just when the maples start to leak their syrup.

And as they had the know how, we let them prune the old pear trees in the kitchen garden. Yesterday it was a bit rainy, so Julie linseed oiled the stairs in the house and Damian lime painted red the courtyard walls, digging up the old fig tree for good measure. It's all go, every day.  All those little jobs that are on our endless mental lists of things to do here. Well, with these lovely wwoofers, it looks like we might get a good crack at getting quite a bit of that list done. How do you spell relief? WWOOF.

At last the hammock Michelle gave us a few years back is up on the yoga eternity deck. My days. No better way to relax as the sun goes down. We've also had a couple of yoga classes from River on this deck, when the afternoons have been sunny enough, it can be mid twenties. Delicious temperature to unfold our mats and ourselves.

Kids are good. Been a bit end of termy poorly with snivels and coughs. But as they say round here, "é normal, é o tempo". Ellie had a music concert at school this week for their Founders Day. Played the Titanic splendidly with her class on the recorders. Josh got himself elected President of the Pupil Association as well to boot. Cinco estrellas filhos! Make us proud dont ya just!

Far from the maddening chaos of rising global revolution, crashing economies, earth expanding quakes, radioactive volcanoes, we know how extraordinarily lucky we are to be here, living simply like this, in the middle of the Portuguese forest mountains and valleys. Yet our hearts go out to all of our fellow earthlings who are suffering unimaginably at the moment with what looks to all intent and purpose, like a vortex of death and destruction over our planet.

Hang on in there fellow earthlings. Hold tight. It's gonna be a bumpy few months ahead. Somehow we gotta come out the other side of all this in love. And if you have not yet done so already, sell all you have and buy land. Love and land. That'll do.

In respect and peace

Memphis