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

Together Mariana and I, along with my father Clinton and my brother in law Lloyd, 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 early summer time as we try to transition ourselves from the full on cherry harvest, back to the slower pace of life that the farm normally assumes.

I start the week off picking a few cherries as I walk around the fruit trees, eating them as I go, checking to see what our next batch of fruit will be and how laden they are, the nesperas, or loquats, do not seem to be doing good this year, to be expected due to their biennial, self pollinating nature, as we only have one and a half trees and last year they were heavily loaded!

Afterwards I take a walk down to the poultry pasture, where we check up on last weeks new goslings and turkey poults. Both species seem to be doing absolutely wonderfully. I talk a little about the dietary requirements of each and why it is best to let them out on grass, or not do so and how to go about this change in feed stuff for them both.

My father and I pick some of the weather damaged fruit from last weeks thunderstorms and rain showers, we feed them to the hens and we boil up some hard boiled eggs for the turkeys, another old but tried method of providing sufficient protein to the growing little birds!

Lloyd fires up the strimmer and tackles the long grasses in the main orchards. A job that has been desperately needing done since all our time has been picking the organic fruits. Whilst Lloyd does that I fill up the old Yanmar compact tractor (15 horsepower mini tractor) and use the topper attachment to chop up the meadow like weeds in the orchard runs.

Later that afternoon we pick some cucumbers in the vegetable patch / garden and take a look at the lettuces and Romanesco cabbage / broccoli.

We take those back to the farmhouse kitchen and I share with you all my recipe that I use year on year for making pickled cucumbers or gherkins, with some wild dill that I foraged off the land, mixed in some mustard seeds and garlic into the hot vinegar brine and canned them up into sterilised jars, ready for this summers barbeque season, I cannot wait!

Right at the end of the day I sit down on a hay bale and recap with you all in the sheep barn, discussing our week and I even catch a mouse inside our pole barn with a humane trap, being the softy that I am I let the common field mouse go and talk a little about why I would bother to trap one in the first place if I only aim to let them go.

Note to self, get more cats!

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 with my beautiful girlfriend!
- Growing vegetables, raising meat and foraging on our cherry farm in Portugal’s Beira baixa, Fundão

Follow us on Instagram @farmerforfun

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