What could you do to become more self sustainable? Well, start your own vegetable garden. These are not easy times, things are not as they used to be and nobody knows what we can expect in the coming year. What keeps us going is that we can become a bit more self sustainable on our …

The first step dealing with when you want to start a vegetable garden is where to start your vegetable garden. Picking the right spot requires a bit of time. In this blog you will find some things to consider while finding the right spot. After all you are going to put a lot of effort …

Sweet Basil is an easy, straight forward plant to grow. In this blog you will find all the things you need to know for planning, companion planting, use and storage of Sweet Basil. It also provides you with information about the type of soil it needs and the pH it will grow in. One place …

Let’s go deeper into the soil matter. In this next chapter you will see what you need to find out about the soil in your vegetable garden. Soil… What is soil anyway? Soil that is good for agriculture consists of more or less: 48% minerals, 25% water; 25% air and 2% organic material. These 2% …

This blog teaches you two ways of making compost. It gives a detailed description of how to make quick and slow compost.  What you need, how much you need and what type of construction you need.   What you basically need to make a compost heap is three types of organic material: brown material, green …

Did you know you can prepare your vegetable garden with chickens? Chickens can help you in your garden and orchard in many ways. We use them as our little helpers. One of the things we use chickens for is to prepare the vegetable garden.   A month before we start  the garden, we fence in …

Garden layout We live about 6 km from the town of Monchique , which is a pittoresk town in the hinterlands of the Algarve. In the town there are many terraces where people keep their vegetable gardens, mostly from people who live in town. Our friends Anna and Carlos, who live in town decided to share  …