Alentejo Wins Again

Driving a tank into a hole and digging in before the rain

With a thousand and one things to do, a deadline always helps sort the wheat from the chaff – or the wheat from the oats as it would turn out.

An incoming Atlantic storm to break the sunshine of St Martin’s Summer provided the necessary motivation to get us out onto the land and tick things off before it all turned to a thick claggy clay mud.

We knew rain would come and there were certain things that needed to be done before it did, but it was only when our weather app started giving us some meaty millimetre rainfall predictions that we snapped into action.

It was a busy week for Garfie - even while imitating the Sphinx it can be exhausting guarding his radiator by day (and patrolling the land by night)

Two weeks of warm and sunny weather had dried out our building site beautifully – the perfect time for our shipping container and would-be water filtration house to be delivered and the cement mixers to return so the polished concrete floor guys could finish the job they had dramatically stopped by way of a large concrete poop.

But of course they waited until the weather was upon us before making an albeit fleeting appearance: “roll up, roll up: get yer concrete while it lasts – one day only.”

Early morning arrival: two weeks and three days later the cement truck was back…but just for one day…the work is still not done

It was nice of them to drop by, but the problem with doing six indoor floors and six outside decks in small batches is the inconsistency in the amount of colour they spread and therefore the finished hue.

And doing shower areas and bathrooms separately – with weeks in between – does inevitably result in multicoloured floors...which really weren’t as advertised in the brochure.

We’ll work around it, but it’s very frustrating.

“Take three shades of yellow into the shower?” I guess we will

Ana came up with a new version of the three letter acronym “AWA” which some readers may recognise and relate to. It’s: “Alentejo Wins Again.”

Whatever you do, however you prepare, however you balance pushing not to hard or too softly, Alentejo is going to win...it’s just a matter of understanding that and going with the flow...which is sometimes easier said than done.

We’re lucky that our building work is not being delayed by their absence, which is apparently due to a shortage of cement in southern Portugal...for reasons so far unexplained.

Our contractor Sr Manuel and his fabulous builders Justo and Joaquim are just cracking on and getting stuff done while the window guy and the carpenter work tirelessly (presumably) on preparing all our fittings for fitting.

This week they’ve been doing a load of digging – cutting the first of three cross-property trenches to move water, waste and electricity between the houses and to where it needs to be.

Diggin’ that new ditch: Justo at the wheel, Joaquim grafting and Sr Manuel keeping it all level and above ground

We’ll be collecting all our rainwater runoff to store in a 200,000 litre pillow tank, and have ordered the biological waste water treatment system, and so the guys have been using levelling lasers to dig a trench at the correct angle to bring everything down the hill.

They added some French drains to soak up some of the surface water which will sink through the gravel around the houses, but sitting as we are on a hilltop of clay, we will need even more creative ways of helping the water run off during high rainfall winters.

With landscaping a top priority we had to take advantage of this year’s last opportunity to get things into the ground before we (hopefully) open.

We’ll have one more chance to pretty things up in February/March, but the perfect time to plant cover crops is after one big rain has soaked into the ground nicely and another one is on the way.

With storm clouds forecast we headed for the hills – of Monchique mountain in the Algarve – to buy some more olive trees to plant.

“How many would you like?” asked the nice chap at our favourite nursery Viveiro Dinis.

“How many can we get in the trailer?” Ana replied, expecting that we’d need a couple of trips to transport the 200 olive saplings we’d decided to plant as a hedge to surround our land.

It turns out he could have packed 500 in there, and so we bounced the trailer back to the Valley with the whole batch of 200 small trees and a load of work ahead of us.

It’s more difficult than you might think to find a load of old shit on social media – especially nearby manure or estrume as it’s known here – but after many hours of searching, Ana stumbled upon a large local stash of 18 month old horse dung ready to help our olive hedge establish itself.

Another trailer trip later and we had everything we needed to start digging holes and planting the trees about a metre or so apart.

If we thought that was backbreaking work it had nothing on the cover-crop seeding of the area referred to as “the future vineyard.”

We’ve had a couple of fantastic viticulturist consultants come and visit and spoke to Dorina Lindemann who runs Plansel, selling and preparing grapevine plants and making wine.

We visited her for the soon-to-be-released wine podcast and I wrote an article about the process of grafting grape varietals onto root stock...and why you do it.

Hard Graft

We’re hoping to plant in March 2025 as there’s just too much else going on right now to have the headspace for the research we need to do, but we can plant a mix of cereals and legumes to provide some organic material and fix some nitrogen in the soil.

With some help we ordered seed from the local agricultural supplies shop and had to mix the wheat with the oats...and everything else. This is what we ended up with:

Trigo and aveia forrageiro (fodder wheat and oats), ervilhaca granel (bulk vetch), tremocilha raiada (striped lupin), trevo subterrâneo dalkeith (clover), sementa relva prado florido (flowering grass seed) and tremoço reginal (local lupins).

As a student studying Irish historical geography I obsessed over one particularly down-beat film called The Field starring Richard Harris.

His character Bull McCabe has a deep attachment to the patch of land in the title: “which his family has cultivated and improved, from barren to now very productive, over a number of generations.”

I remembered his obsession with removing all the rocks and carrying seaweed over the mountain to make it the most wonderfully lush green field you could imagine.

I was channelling my inner Bull McCabe as I dug rocks out of the soft clay and hurled them into piles – imagining how wonderful our field could be one day.

We marked Thanksgiving with talha wines and a new spatchcocked Turkey technique introduced to us by our daughter Oda and prepared by Ana to perfection: “I’m never making turkey any other way again,” she said as we toured our site and heard encouraging news from friends Cam & Vera about how their tourism venture a year ahead of ours was going well despite all the challenges of “AWA.”

Our topsoil is mostly good, but we turned over quite a bit of clay in some sections while burying the old eucalyptus roots and I’m concerned little will grow there.

Ana praised my dedication and ambition to hoe and dig out rocks from a third of a hectare of land, but firmly questioned the timeline, my blind stubbornness and the mismatch between intention and reality...the rain was approaching and the seeds needed to be sewn that day.

I suppose the rocks (let alone the seaweed) will have to wait...it was another day of tough and backbreaking spadework.

We also needed to bury the first of our water tanks in the bottom of the valley. Carlos the landscaper had kindly dug the 2.6m deep hole, but had work elsewhere so we had to lower it by hand, get it level and then backfill many cubic metres of soil.

With the help of long straps, the car and the friendly Moldovans building our neighbour Daniel’s new patio, we managed to get the tank into the hole, but there was much more to be done to stop it from floating out in the rain.

In a hole, but digging it: I’ve been photographed next to tanks before, but never like this...how life changes

Hours of even more backbreaking work later, we had filled as much as we could before the rain arrived...now the sun is shining again at some point I’ll venture down through the mud to see whether we were successful.

And the shipping container? It arrived, but the guy couldn’t lift it onto our new concrete supports because of the wet ground...so it’s just been parked next to the concrete poop for now...until it’s dry enough to get a crane in and place it properly.

Ah well, AWA.