Hi there! I am Joseph.
I have been an immigrant, or expat, 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 mid-Winter as we do a few maintenance jobs on our farm. It is a chilly winters day, and the cherry orchard is now deep into its dormant, sleeping period of the year. The trees are leafless and bare and now is the ideal time to make sure they are pruned, fertilised and to give them the very best start for next season as we can, so they can be healthy, happy and producing!
So, I begin by getting my little compact 15 horsepower tractor out from the garage and loading up the tools I am going to need for the day into the box at the back. Tiger, my cat, had to be moved as she was sitting on the tractor, keeping away from Lilly the dog, I think. She was not too happy about moving but soon scarpered up a tree to where Lilly could not play with her.
I introduce myself and speak about what we have planned. Firstly, we drive up through the main cherry orchard and up to the sheep barn where our compost bins are. You may remember, if you are a regular viewer, that these compost bins were made in one of our first ever KZitem videos! once the box was brimming with beautiful, aged manure / compost we drove it down to the main cherry orchard and started unloading the compost into 'doughnuts' around the trees, this stops the trees getting burned from the high levels of nitrogen in the compost.
My father and I spread the muck for a few hours, it was a good day for working with manure as it rained a little bit, not enough to bother us but definitely enough to help soak the goodness into the soil of the fruit orchard.
Once that was all finished, we began turning our sights from the roots and what they needed to the canopy of the trees. Pruning is a relatively simple task, which most people fret about unnecessarily, it seems daunting but is very easy when you know a couple of simple tricks and take it one tree at a time.
I explained how to prune a cherry tree, it is the same process pretty much with most fruit trees kept at dwarf size for fruit harvests, that process is basically put to turn the tree into the shape of an inverted umbrella, whereby you prune out the inside of the tree, making sure each branch has enough airflow and sunlight penetration.
After the cherry tree pruning night started to fall and my father and I felt like some down time, so we set up our rods ready for the next morning and shut all our livestock away for the night.
Once the morning, we went up to our local village ATM (Multibanco) and showed you all how to print out fishing licenses in Portugal, as they renew every January 1st, so we needed to get ours! Then we went down to our local dam / lake, Barragem do Pisco and spent some father, son time together for a few hours. We did not catch anything but that was half expected given the temperature. So instead went to our local fishmonger for lunch, not quite as fun as having caught the fish yourself, but oh well.
Once home with the goodies from the local fishmonger, some filleted wild pollock and sole, a more sustainable option to say a cod or something, we got all our ingredients together in the kitchen and spoke a little about what we plan to cook, a nice hearty, warming Fishermans pie, topped with a creamy mash and served alongside buttered peas. I show you all my recipe on this British classic and then ate a big plate all to myself, yum, yum!
At the end of the day I sat on our veranda, pondered the week past and reminisced on all the jobs and activities we did. It was a lovely winters week and my father and I had a lot of fun sharing it all with you, thank you so much for watching with us. Have a lovely week.
See our journey to self-sufficiency / permaculture / organic farming as expats 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!
Hobby farming in Fundão
- Growing vegetables, raising meat and foraging on our cherry farm in Portugal’s Beira baixa.
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.
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Негізгі бет FRUIT FARM - HOW TO YEARLY MAINTAIN AN ORCHARD - CENTRAL PORTUGAL HOMESTEAD -LARGEMOUTH BASS FISHING
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