Hi there! I am Joseph.
I have been an expat, or immigrant, living in central Portugal along with my beautiful girlfriend Mariana for six years now.

Together Mariana, my father Clinton and myself, would like to show you a bit of the daily goings on around our Portuguese farm / homestead / smallholding and all of the work we are doing whilst renovating, starting building projects, working with our livestock, DIY and trying to grow our little families own food!

In this episode we welcome you to join us in spring time as we show you the absolute best place to buy vegetable plugs in our local town, located in central Portugal.

We start on our local farmers market in Fundao, a great place to visit any time of year, but especially great during the spring time when all the locals are planning their farm for the year, with vegetables, trees and livestock.

Mariana and I buy a selection of four varieties of cabbage and four varieties of lettuce. We begin our veggie garden like this as these crops are a staple for our livestock (maybe a cabbage or two for us too!). Every year we grow a fodder crop for the animals on the farm as we prefer them to eat as much produce from our farm as possible. The veggies will be rotationally planted and every few weeks we will buy more to replace the ones we harvest daily for the livestock.

After we had all our veggie plugs we make our way back to our own farm. I get changed into my farm clothes and talk a little bit about our tractor trouble this week, I know this seems to be a theme this spring with the tractor already being out of action twice. Fortunately this time it was just an inner tube on the front right tire. So I got it repaired at the local tractor supply shop and fitted the wheel back on the tractor.

I drove our little compact 15hp Yanmar down to the veg patch, a place I have missed the last few months as due to Marianas pregnancy we did not have a winter patch this year. I first of all used the tine harrow to break up the soil and rip out any larger weeds. This worked well and I took the tractor back to the farm house to change the implement over to the rotary tiller. This then broke up any larger clods and made the soil easier to work with. I know lots of people will want me to be doing a ‘no dig’ veg patch, but I am not interested in trying this method, I like tradition and I wish to do things the way my family would have done for centuries, plus this is how all the locals do it and I prefer to do as they all do here. Regardless if it is the best method or not.

My father, Mariana and I got to planting the veggie plugs and it felt good to get dirt under our finger nails again after a long break. We mustered up an appetite and made our way back to the farm house kitchen. I rustled up a simple and quick Mediterranean shrimp in spicy tomato sauce served on local rustic bread. It was very nice indeed.

I made my way up to the sheep barn and showed you all the outcome of mother pigeons nest, both babies hatched and one was half the size of the other, so inevitably the weaker runt died, I was actually surprised it made it out of the shell in the first place as it was so weak.

We took a little look at our irrigation set up too, as the weather warms up the trees and plants begin to rely on us for their water, our garden area of the farm is irrigated by a sprinkler system which fires up out of the ground on an automatic timer. I turned them all on for the first time this year and they all seem to be in good working order. Good news for me as I did not fancy sitting on the ground and fiddling with sprinkler heads for an hour or so.

It was a splendid week on the farm this week, we did quite a lot of agricultural based activities and it really was good fun to get back into the veg patch again. Thank you all so much for watching, I hope you all have an amazing week ahead, see you in the next one!

See our journey to self sufficiency / permaculture / organic farming living in Portugal, trying to produce as much of our own food planting vegetables, growing fruit trees as well as looking after all our animals, such as our chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, quail, rabbits and sheep – Shortly pigs too!

Follow us on Instagram @farmerforfun

IF YOU ARE PORTUGUESE OR TRYING TO LEARN PORTUGUESE PERHAPS CONSIDER TURNING ON SUBTITLES FOR THIS VIDEO, MARIANA & I HAVE CREATED SUBTITLES IN PORTUGUESE, MAYBE THEY MIGHT COME IN HANDY WITH LEARNING A WORD OR TWO! CLICK THE ‘CLOSED CAPTIONS’ BUTTON ON THE VIDEO AND THE SUBTITLE OPTIONS WILL APPEAR.

PLEASE HELP US TO CONTINUE CREATING THIS CONTENT BY CONTRIBUTING TO US ON PATREON

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