Early Autumn Harvest Photos

With two children in our lives, we are finding it difficult to find much time for the blog.  Please forgive the brief  posts, and enjoy the photographs.

Most of the photos are from our Zone 1 gardens to use Permaculture lingo.

This time of year, the peppers are finishing up and ready to be harvested.

Odin is helping to process a Luffa Gourd. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luffa

Shiso has been allowed to self seed and now is growing in most of our vegetable gardens.

Peppers, Aubergines, and Shiso out compete the weeds and taste great.

We have our composting toiled fully operational now and in daily use, creating amazing HOT COMPOST.

Steve and Barbara lent a helping hand this summer and we closed off another section of cleared jungle for a chicken run.  With 30 birds, the first run is a dust field now and needs to be replanted with a Nitrogen fixer, maybe alfalfa for the chickens to eat.

More Aubergines, yum-yum!

Well that is it for now.  More to come as time allows.

Update from the Flores Fruit Farm Summer 2014

It has been quite some time since we have updated the blog.  In that time we have done the projects posted below.
We are without a vehicle or phone line, so we do not have the opportunity to use the internet often.  We will try to write more explanatory blogs as time allows, in the mean time enjoy the photos of our project.
Mitra will be turning 1 and Odin will be 3 this August Both boys are thriving with sunshine and love and healthy foods.  They don’t seem to mind living in a construction zone.

The Hydro-Electric project has been functional for one year now. It is not completed, but works fantastically as is.  In time we will maximize its output.

The view from our backyard.  So much concrete work and terraforming yet to do. 

Our primary banana patch is expanding yearly where jungle stood before.

We are getting lovely  bunches of fresh fruit more frequently as the roots dig into the rich valley soil and the sun penetrates where forest shadowed before.



The citrus orchard with limes and sweet oranges that is home to our chicken flock is completed fenced now.  This allows us to gather ALL the eggs that are laid daily. 

The chicken manure feeds the fruit trees and the chickens eat the weeds and pests for us.  On average we gather 6 eggs daily. 

We are doubling the size of our flock this year to replace old chickens as needed.  Soon we should have a surplus of eggs to store for winter.

The road to our house is getting a bit bushy without traffic.  We decided to “ring-bark” the remaining large Eucalyptus trees rather than risk dropping them.

Our front yard with an amazing view of the Atlantic Ocean.

The primary vegetable gardens making use of the stone walls we hand built so long ago.

Our house and front yard.

Our lemon tree and grapefruit  are producing fruit regularly now after we planted them in 2008.

We want to start a new blog site, as we are so much more than ‘Magnus and Konswan’ at this point.  Whenever time allows us to create the new site we will post a link to the new page.
For those who helped us resolve the driving license fiasco, THANK YOU!
Magnus now has a Portuguese drivers license and no problems with the Portuguese police after paying a 200 Euro fine for driving with an United States Drivers License for over 90 days. 

Fruit Orchard is Operational

To date we have planted over 50 fruit trees, more than 99 hedges and about 400 flowering ground cover plants.

We have been steadily clearing away the forest and jungle for three years now.

After the initial phase of cutting is done, the second phase begins.  This consists of seperating out timber, firewood, brush piles and weeds.  Once seperated, it takes about a year to let it all dry out enough to either burn or move.  After this, the weeds attack with all the newly available sunlight to help them germinate.  After the weeds are pulled, then it comes time to plant something wonderful.



The location above is finally planted with Limes, Lemons, Avocados, Coffee, Sweet Orange, Tangerine, and Custard Apple.



Above is one of the surviving Sweet Oranges from previous owners.  Most of them died from rot or disease owning to the lack of sunshine as the jungle covered them over.  We managed to salvage 4 Sweet Oranges and 3 Plums from the jungle.



Here is a view of the upper portion of the fruit farm.  The other orchard spaces contain plums, bananas, loquats, strawberry guava, tamarillos, and apples.

Our goal is to double the number of fruiting trees over the next five years.  We have only cleared 50% of our jungle land.  From that portion of newly cleared land, we have planted trees on 30%.   We will leave the jungle clearing phase and focus on cleaing up the areas we have already cleared. in preperation for planting Apricots, Nectarines and more apple varieties.

Fruit Trees Breaking Dormancy

We planted these four trees our first year on Flores.

Typically it takes 3 years before the first fruits come, we are keeping our fingers crossed.

Every year we top dress with a sack of horse manure and train them.

Our apple trees, pruned and trained correctly we hope.
Our lemon tree.

Ruby Red Grapefruit

3 Year Anniversary of Our Arrival on Flores

When we arrived, we found that the jungle had overtaken the fruit farm, and that the house had fallen down!

Our original plan was to live aboard our sailboat, while we fixed the property. However, the shipwreck changed that plan and we began working on the house first. This way, we would have a place to live while we worked on the land during the following year.

Our next challenge was to get building materials to the site. The original builders had used Oxen to pull the stones along an old path. We had a modern idea...using gravity!

The nearest road is 150 metres, as the crow flies to our house. An inconvenience for us was the river and valley between the road and our house, making the trip by foot about 600 metres!

The send off...

Magnus´s mom and Steve spent their summer vacation helping to bag sand and send concrete blocks across the valley at dangerously high speed.

The recieving end.

Here the house is taking shape.

Now, the forest surrounding the house needed to be cleared.

Gardens and fruit orchards need as much sun as they can get, and this thick jungle was not helping.

We learned how to build free standing stone walls, allowing us to terrace our most protected property for food production.

Collecting stones from all over the mountainside, bringing them to site via foot and wheel burrow was a challenge. But now, we have an abundance of food.