I’m a bit behind with this blog! I’ve been spending more time over on Facebook, you can follow me for shorter updates and ‘like’ Funky Raw for raw news. But I do plan to start updating this blog again now, as we’ve finally stopped travelling and found somewhere to live… The article below gives an update to our life, it was originally published in Funky Raw Magazine Issue 26:
If you remember back to 2010 my partner Jolita and I set off on a journey to find a place to live – land where we can grow our own food and run raw retreats and holidays. Well, eight countries and two and a half years later, our travels have come to an end, and our new life starts in Portugal. We’ve purchased 5 hectares of land in a “Parque Natural”, relatively remote and peaceful, with its own spring for drinking water in a reasonable climate – hot summers and mild winters, we still get some frosts in winter but also some lovely sunny days.
There are lots of olive trees on the land plus a few other fruit and nut trees including figs and kakis and so far we’ve planted apples, pears, figs, cherries, apricots, lemons, almonds, blueberries and raspberries. And we’re looking forward to planting a veg garden in the spring.
We want to create a forest garden so we read the book Forest Gardening by Robert A de J Hart. It is a wonderful book, although not the one we were hoping for! This book is a general introduction to the forest garden concept, told through the author’s own experience of growing his forest garden, with ideas on how forest gardens can change the world for the better. The book we wanted is a practical guide to creating a forest garden, we’ve now ordered what we hope is the book we need, Creating a Forest Garden by Martin Crawford. We watched a couple of videos on Youtube from Martin, he’s been doing a lot of research on forest gardens whilst growing one in Devon.
The idea behind a forest garden is to try and emulate a natural forest for minimal maintenance and environmental benefits, but with trees and plants which produce food and other useful resources, making use of 7 layers – large canopy trees, small trees & large shrubs, shade tolerant shrubs, perennial plants & herbs, ground cover plants, climbers & vines and root vegetables.
We’re happy to report that there are loads of wild greens on the land and lots of wild nature, birds, frogs, and some interesting lizard creatures we’ve never seen before, orange with black spots!
There are two houses on the land which we are in the process of restoring ready for running our retreats, more news soon…
