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Looking back at 2024

Writer's picture: Hari Hari

Crafts at Unifant festival

We joined in with Unifant festival this year, a local community festival 20 minutes from us. We enjoyed making these seats from old car tyres and recycled string and fabrics. They were surprisingly comfortable! The children made piggybanks and sculptures from clay at one of the workshops during the festival. They used air drying clay, which doesn't need to be fired.


Clearing the big Ruin

We had four enthusiastic volunteers this Summer who cleared the forest that had grown inside the big ruin on the land. It was great to see the progress and be able to walk into the ruin for the first time since we came to this land. The building feels much bigger now and we can imagine more how we would like to renovate it.

The volunteers also worked on the last big area of plastering that needed to be finished on the kitchen building.



Kittens

Catia found a box of five abandonded kittens on the side of the road near the entrance to our place. Unfortunately this is not uncommon in Portugal as there is too often a neglectful attitude towards animals. Thankfully there are also also projects support animals and also to try to educate people and make population control more accessible and affordable.

The five kittens were only around three weeks old and Catia bought powdered milk and a feeding bottle and fed them every few hours. Thank fully they all survived and we were able to find homes for them all. We kept one who made friends with my older cat, Fluffy.

We had the females sterilised when they were old enough via an animal sanctuary association who organise sterilisation for stray and and abandoned animals. https://www.starmountainanimalsanctuary.org/



Mike trial Period

Mike came to stay in July and soon after started a trial period with the intention to join the project as a resident. I know Mike from the first area I lived in Portugal a few years ago. Mike has been living and working at a co-living project and has skills and experience with building structures and eco/off-grid facilities.

He soon got into the flow here and took on several home improvement projects that had been on our list for a while:


Kitchen upgrades

Mike got to work building a better kitchen table from pallet wood and off0cuts from Julia's yurt platform. He also built an extra kitchen worktop and a wood storage shed. These upgrades made a big difference to the communal kitchen facilities! We also had a kitchen sink ready to install, so Mike set it up with a waste water filtration system and pipe to take the grey water to a reed bed. We covered the trench with gravel, which should mean less mud around the kitchen.


Water source improvements

Another big improvement was to upgrade the catchment of the spring water on the upper land. Last year we got as far as clearing out the spring area and creating the plastic wall as a dam, with a sediments box and the pipes fitted to deliver the water to the kitchen on the lower land.

Now the water level was low again, we could line the spring area with clay to create an impermeable barrier, and encourage the water to fill up behind the damn wall.

We then laid a mosaic of stones to hold down the clay and prevent animals from burrowing up through the clay, then filled it up with stones, starting from big to small, to gravel, then sand. This should filter out any debris that is washed onto the spring area. We also added a plastic sheet on top, held with more stones, to avoid the spring water being mixed with rain water.

It is blessing to have a good spring water supply, especially one that is elevated above our living area, so the water can be delivered by gravity.

We also discovered two more springs further up hill, so there is potential to build similar catchments at those points and feed the water into the same system.



Veggie Garden

Julia's work in the garden has been producing some lovely fruit and vegetables this year. We have been experimenting with beds in different amounts of sun/shade. We are finding which plants prefer the different conditions, for example lettuce prefers a bit of shade and doesn't go to flower from stress so quickly in the hot summer, but tomatoes prefer the full sun.

We were watering the gardens by hand, but plan to make a drip irrigation system now ready for next year.


Enjoying the River and Mountain

Catia and I bought a kayak and an inflatable canoe to use on the river and the lakes in the mountain close by. They are fun to play with and a nice way to explore the river, though it is a workout to paddle back upstream. We visited a few more places in the Serra da Estrela mountain this year and realise there is much more to discover there!



Helping make a clay floor

We spent a day at our friend's roundhouse project that they have been building this year, to help make the clay floor. They had already laid the layers of gravel and expanded clay balls for drainage and insulation, and had levelled the flood with crushed rock. We mixed the clay with fine sand and water using our feet and spread it out and levelled it on the floor. It was inspiring to see their roundhouse developing and to see how much we got done with more people that day.


'Rural em Movimento' event

I presented at an event in our closest Town, Nelas, organsied by Rural move, an organisation encouraging people to live in rural areas and support rural development.

Various local projects has tables to share their project, and the chance to make a 10 minute presentation, followed by a free lunch. It was my first time presenting in public in Portuguese, which was scary, but good practice!

It was nice to meet people from other ecovillage project in the area that I did not know about before, and hear about other inspiring initiatives to support the local rural area.



Mushroom season

This year, I learned a bit more about mushrooms and foraged and ate a few varieties I had not known before. We found some great foraging places in the mountains and attended a guided mushroom walk at the Autumn Market even at Cabrum, an ecovillage project 1 hour North of us.

I dried out some of the mushrooms in Catia's dehydrator. It gave me inspiration to build a solar dehydrator next year.




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