Our own watermelons 😋
In all these seven years we never have had such amazing watermelons from our garden: só sweet, só juicy and só full of nutricions... só very different than the ones you buy in the supermarket.
We dó have other types of melons too, like Galia and Cantaloupe and they are very tasty too, but they just don't give that high a yield as the watermelons do.
How did they even dig the wells ❓ 🙄
“Burro a tirar água” means: donkey for retrieving water (from a well). This used to be the main way of irrigation. In some places they still do this.
We have a well (poço) on which the mechanism is still in order, the buckets are gone (we still have them, but they’re old, rusty and leaking). Maybe someday we will restore them and get a donkey…
The well needs a good cleaning too by the way 🙄
Click the image to watch the video
Portugal is different
As you can read in this article in the Portugal-section of the (static) website, the rules for alternative building here are less strict in certain (agricultural) areas than they are in urban and coastal areas.
The reason for that is that many regions in the north and the centre are facing a decline in numbers of young people: most of them go to the big cities to find work.
Next to that the Portuguese system has one layer of authorities more than most other European countries, and the lowest level is the "freguesia" (the lower-mayor and a few other officials). They have a huge influence on this local level and often they have a more liberal view to the matter of alternative living-styles.
Who are we?
We are two Dutch people, both born in 1961, married in 2014. We both had the same dream all our lifes: to live a simple life, away from the ratrace, with and from nature, doing all those things that our ancestors did like baking bread from our own homegrown wheat and warming ourselves in the winter using a woodstove.
We also have some sort of apocalyptic view towards the future, not from a religious point of view but more a realistic one: mankind is destroying earth and we are not so very confident that this destructive behaviour will improve soon, so we want to prepare for the worst.