Soon, we will start spending more and more time on the site, and really getting started. We’ll need to get ready for other members to come and help us regenerate the land. 

We will set up a kitchen, WCs and some showers so we can work and camp for some time with a few people. 

That will require us to repair the shed and convert it to a dry place in winter and safe place to have a stove in summer. 
A compost toilet or two will be added for obvious reasons, and a cold shower (for now), to rinse off the day after working in the sun.

We have 3 wells on site, in different locations and in different states.
One is just a hole in earth and stone (the highest and closest to the ruin), the other one has a stone wall that needs some maintenance and the third one is the biggest, build in solid stone and just needs cleaning…that last one we can do ourselves!

Due to being abandoned for over 30years, there is a lot of debris and in the first two cases some doubt to the structural stability…. fun, right? =) 

We will need some experienced help with that and estimate ca. 3.000 Euro to reach that goal – that includes the highest and main well to be walled and covered, material included.

One main thing we need for the quality of life is water, since rainfall in Portugal is abundant in winter and scarce in summer, we will try to store and infiltrate water into the ground.

Some highway bridges built higher up our water shed have heavily impacted the natural flow and we have less water in the region than previously.
Will need to store some rain for our growing forests and gardens!

For now, we have 2 reservoirs planed – a dam pond (30x10x3m) and a higher placed dug out pond (12x8x2m) and calculate 2-3weeks of work with an excavator to dig out some swales and ponds.
We are thinking minimum 2.000 € – and have asked for some budget bills…

Help us plant the rain!

This is our biggest challenge now – our ground is stony granite mountain soil with a high percentage of sand – high infiltration rates and it does not hold water well.

While there are a lot of options, we need it soon and do not want to do it in purely artificial material – so we are going with bentonite-mats. This will probably be our most expensive single post…

… we asked for a budget bill, and are calculating with 12.000 €
Again, we need all the help we can get! 😉

We will need some equipment to manage and maintain the project, in a way to make it possible…

 – Ca. 500 €: Greenhouse and/or grow tunnel for saplings and propagation of our vegetation. We just want to by some plants to start and go from there.

– Ca. 2.000 €: Woodchipper to generate mulch and create soil.

– Ca. 500 €: Auger, to dig probably over 1000 holes for our future trees in a manageable time frame. 

– Ca. 200 €: Trimmer, to clear the terrain with some precision. We have too many blackberries. =)

– Ca. 200 €: Motor saw(s), to get rid of our forest of Mimosa (acacia) trees, that are highly invasive.

Now we are getting to the lovely part…
We are trying to work with an ecologic association here in Portugal – they have a project that sponsors native trees and helps you with the planting, if you promise to take care of them, keep it ecologic and do not cut them for 35years.

This is incredible, we are still amazed, but have gotten into contact with them. We will see soon, what fruit those trees bear =)

Nevertheless, we still need a lot of diversity, and all kinds of plants for bees, water ecosystems and the gardens, so any help is welcome.