Moving abroad is a time of change. You change your language, your culture, your food, your social circle and just about everything else. And with your new home comes the challenge of a new garden. There’s no point in trying to transplant your Northern European garden habits and ideals to a Mediterranean climate. Instead you should embrace the new opportunities being presented to you.

Why spend all your time, effort and valuable water resources on a large lawn, or on plants that need a moist, shady aspect? Now you can grow stately palms or architectural agaves. Maybe you fancy growing olives or citrus? Maybe, like me, you are a fan of succulent plants in all their infinite variety. Or using all those ‘hot’ colours that can look so out of place in dear old Blighty.

Look around at your neighbours gardens, especially the Portuguese, who have generations of gardening knowledge to fall back on. They have the experience of what grows well in your area, as well as an intimate knowledge of the weather, the soil and any locally prevailing conditions, and will be more than happy, in most cases, to chat away and pass that knowledge on to you.

You may be lucky and move to a virtually frost-free, subtropical Paradise, but the chances are that your new garden will have unforeseen problems of some kind. You may be battered by salt-laden gales near the coast, desiccating your plants. Or you might find yourself in a frost pocket, especially in valley floors where cold air moves downhill, but cannot escape once it reaches the bottom. Or you may find your self in a fire zone.

Out of all the problems you may encounter, this is the most serious. And your garden is your first, and possibly the last, line of defence.

After a fireYou may remember the firestorms in Central and Northern Portugal last summer, and you may be looking for advice or ideas to make your home and garden safer. Even if you are a long term resident, there is always something more you can do to make things safer, especially as the weather heats up and summer approaches. For this reason, I recommend that everyone who lives in a fire zone gets a copy of “Gardening with Fire: the essential self- help manual for Home and Garden design in areas at risk of fire” – not as a cheap plug for my endeavours, but in order to understand better the complexity of the role of fire within the ecology of the region, and for the extensive advice that could save your home, your garden and even your life in an emergency!

However, in this small article, I will try to outline some practical tips for you.  Lets start at the edge of your land or garden:

If you have a very large garden, or a farm or smallholding, you may think about having a firebreak cleared around your land. If you call in a bulldozer to clear a conventional firebreak, always remember the following:

Have the debris ploughed in or removed.
A cleared firebreak must be renewed every year to be effective. If this is neglected, the break can become dangerous within one season, as grasses, thistles and other flammable plants can take hold.
Clear your firebreak in late spring or early summer. There is no point in clearing over the autumn, winter or spring, as plants will grow back during the rainy months and all your hard work will be to no avail!
bullet Bulldozed fire breaks can lead to erosion on steep hills, although the chance of this is less if native plants take hold in the wet months, to be cleared again once the rains stop.

Future fuel for a fire

Try to make sure you have no trees that touch those in surrounding vegetation if you live near forested or overgrown land. If you do, try to reduce their fuel load by removing their lower branches and cutting out any dead or decaying wood. The spacing of trees and shrubs can be crucial in determining the spread of fire. Canopy fires, when flames have spread into the trees themselves, as opposed to surface fires along the ground, are difficult to control and highly dangerous due to the large fuel loads available, and the fact that the opportunity then exists for burning debris to be sent high into the air to spread secondary fires over a wider area.

Your firebreak should at least be as wide as the height of the surrounding vegetation.

With the edges of your land being safer, you can concentrate on other features that will lessen your risks within your garden. Let’s start with a rather wonderful little term I picked up from somewhere: FINGER FUELS!

This basically translates as clearing your garden of any dead, or dying, dry fuels that are as wide as your finger, or smaller. This means that those of you with big hands will have more clearing up to do! All fires need fuel to sustain them, and these small dry twigs, sticks and grasses are amongst the easiest to ignite. By keeping your garden clear of these you will be greatly lessening your risk of a spark landing on something very flammable, or a surface fire spreading along the ground.

Do you have climber growing up your house, or tall trees nearby? These issues are dealt with more comprehensively in the CD-Rom, but in a nutshell:  keep all climbers, if you must grow them against your house, away from your roof, and from the area immediately around your doors and windows.

Trees

Trees are a more complicated issue. How you deal with making them safer depends on a number of factors:

What type of tree is it? Some trees are very much more flammable than others. The most flammable trees in Portugal are generally eucalypts or pines and other conifers.

How near to your house is the tree in question? If it is less than its height away from your home, then you should, at least, look at some general maintenance. You could try thinning the crown to let in more light and air.

You should remove all branches to a distance of 2 metres from the ground.

Maybe your tree is of a type that would respond to coppicing, which means that a tall tree is cut back and new shoots grow from the base. These are then easier to control and maintain.

Keep the area under, and around the tree clear. Mulching with gravel, or growing a carpeting succulent plant beneath the tree can keep the cleared area looking neat as well as being safe.

These are just a handful of things that can make a difference. All aspects of home and garden design, including lists of suitable plants, ecology and habitat management, plus advice for emergencies, are all included in the CD:

Gardening with Fire: the essential self-help manual for Home and Garden design in areas at risk of fire

Gardening with Fire, the essential self-help manual for Home and Garden design in areas at risk of fire” is essential reading if you are worried about the risk of forest fire / wildfire on your property in Portugal.

Chapters include:

• The ecology of a fire zone: the role of general climate, specific seasonal weather patterns, vegetation species, plus the natural and man-made causes of fire. This chapter also deals with factors that spread and intensify fires.
• Design elements for a safer home: including sections on your roof, doors and windows, and advice on construction materials.
• The area surrounding your home: lawns, pools, trees and your home; smoking outdoors; barbecues; irrrigation; fuel and machinery; children and fire; as well as a list of suitable low_fuel plants for growing near to your home.
• Designing a fire conscious garden: firebreaks; buffer zones; wild areas; shelterbelts; as well as a study of suitable fire retardant plants for your garden, and a list of plants to avoid and why.
• Other low-fuel areas within the garden: and how to turn these into attractive features.
• Essential information about evacuation: what to do when leaving your home, and if the worst comes to the worst, emergency first aid & dealing with burns of varying severity.
• Dealing with the aftermath of a fire

“Gardening with Fire” is fully illustrated throughout, using the author´s own photographs, that dramatically show the effects of the fires that led to the loss of her home and garden – and acted as her inspiration to try to prevent others from suffering the same loss.

Most of the plants listed both in “Gardening with Fire”, and in the plant database the author is currently working on, have been selected to grow in these regions. Many of these plants have been selected also for their range of tolerances, not only to fire and extreme heat, but also to frost and cold periods. This means that they should grow in a wide variety of different garden situations.

Gardening with Fire: the essential self-help manual for Home and Garden design in areas at risk of fire

Available in two formats: A CD Rom which you will receive in the post, costing 6 euros; and a .pdf printable document, which will be sent to you via email, costing 4 euros. To order, please choose your preferred format and click on the ‘Buy Now’ button below.  All copies sold include a donation to the author’s local Volunteer Fire Sevice, the Bombeiros Voluntarios de Aljezur.

Gardening with Fire CD Rom €6

Gardening with Fire .pdf printable document €4

Large house, 3 stores, big attic with roof terrace, splendid views.

1st floor: large living room with french doors on all sides, kitchen and verandah.

Groundfloor: large entrance hall, master bedroom wth bathroom, 2nd bedroom with bathroom, walled patio garden with a shed and another rooftop terrace.

Attic: could be used as another bedroom or studio, has a washroom and WC.

Central heating, double glazed windows. and oh I forgot the attic has another washroom and wc.

Long term rent Euro 650 per month, excluding all energy bills. No children but well behaved pets accepted

Phone Leondra & Rob (00351) 238602988.

The quinta is a country home on 7½ acres of terraced lands, with olive groves and pine forest. It has its own mineral water, and a small stream. Located in the beautiful countryside of Beira Alta, nested between two rivers; the Mondego and the Alva. In the background lies the Serra da Estrela, a magnificent unspoilt mountain range. One can ski there in the winter. Only 4km from Oliveira do Hospital, a small country town, where you will find all necessary facilities, such as banks, shops, restaurants, etc.

Phone Leondra & Rob on (00351) 238602988

What’s not to like about Tomar? It’s not too big, but has plenty to keep you busy at least for a day. Tomar is a gentle, medium sized town. It’s not glamorous but it is certainly charming. Tomar has a little bit of kitsch, a little bit of retro, a smidge of fun.

Let’s start with the gob-smacker, bound-to-bowl-you-over UNESCO World Heritage Listed Convento Do Christo. It was the headquarters of the Knights Templar, aka the Iberian Crusaders. The knights were a religious order, but this place has a certain macho robustness that helps you remember that it was also a serious military base. Built in the 12th Century, the convento is a complex complex of courtyards, chapels and living facilities and there isn’t a single corner that’s not photogenic. My favourite bits are the stone spiral staircases of the Santa Barbara cloister leading to the terrace (where there is a top view of the gaudy and carbuncular pièce de résistance Manueline window) and the refectory; a vast dining room that would make the ultimate location for a debaucherous medieval feast-party, convent and piety notwithstanding. If you can’t get a bit of joy out of this joint then you have no imagination.

Time for a coffee, so we’ll go straight down to the corredore, the cobbled and pedestrianised thoroughfare in the old town. Café Paraiso is a classic, where the story goes that the local ladies had a seating system according to social ranking. Windows, most preferred. Toilets, least preferred. Don’t sit in Mrs Wapnobbles place or you´ll get a pastel in the face…. that sort of thing.

Also in the corredore is one of my favourite hotels in Portugal the Residencial União. It is the type of intimate, family run, character laden place that I want all guest houses to be like. Prim and proper like an English hotel but also cosy like staying at nanna’s. The dining room is so cute that I expect to see Poirot or Miss Marple reading in a corner. And it’s all genuine. They are not trying to be quaint or boutique, it’s just the authentic and stopped-in-time nature of the place. I can’t fault it. And it’s a ridiculous bargain to boot. The last I looked at their rates they hadn’t put them up in 3 years.

And now I’m going to rave about the museu dos fósforos. I would never have gone to a matchbox museum in a pink fit if it wasn’t for two funny Australians who directed me to the breasts in the chapel at Busaco (another sublime little secret of Portugal for another time) and on the strength of this tip, I listened well when they urged me not to miss this museum. And there you are: you might never imagine that the largest matchbox collection in the southern hemisphere could be so fascinating, or hilarious. The collection, belonging to the fabulously named Aquiles Da Mota Lima, is ridiculously vast, a superb snapshot of 20th century graphic arts. It is severely kitsch, and big fun.

What really lights my fire is that it’s the inverse of most museum collections. Your regular art collector wants their good taste, their wealth and their cultured intelligence to be admired through their collections. It can be all rather vulgar and pretentious sometimes. On display here is a plebeian obsession taken to the extreme. It is curious maximus. The first room is cute, the second interesting but after the third room and 20,000 matchboxes, you get the picture. This guy is nutty. The madness of it becomes slightly overwhelming – when there are still another 20,000 matchboxes to go – and the humanity so palpable that you can almost hear Mrs Da Mota Lima nagging Aquiles to get these damn bloody matches out of the house. So, don´t miss it. It’s (unbelievably) free and only open in the afternoons.

The best towns always have more than one historic café and my other hang is Estrelas do Tomar. I rate a place that does its specialities in a specially printed box and at Estrelas you can take home `kiss me quick´- Beija me depressa – little gooey custardy globs that look yummy, but frankly I just want the box. The rest of their pastries are just too darn tempting anyway, and the green tiles and matching dark tables and chairs are totally up my street. AND, very unusually for Portugal, they have a wicked tea selection, like they saw me coming.

Just as well god created the day with morning and afternoon tea. And just as well there’s lunch and dinner too because there is a lot of good food to be had in Tomar. I’m always on the look out for the side alley, small but personality-filled bistro, and the Tomar baixa is full of such treasures. My current favourite is Restaurant Piri-Piri which is a slight cut-above the usual, possible owing to its success with the house made sauce, and a very good wine list. The hosts are even more hospitable than your typical Portuguese restaurateurs. More great hosts and buckets of atmosphere can be found at Casa das Ratas and her sister-across-the-laneway Casa Matreno. They have the same short menu of tasty and satisfying fare with an interesting seasonal special or two, so you’ll just have to choose between the taverna style of the Ratas or the pink and green diner tiles of the Matreno.

Finally, when in Tomar, I never miss a visit to The Princesa. If the time is right and the weather is mild, she may just make herself available. However, The Princesa only conducts visits from her first floor window where she can look down on the people as they crane their necks adoringly. Is she not the most beautiful cat in all of Portugal?

Read more from Emma on her blog: Emma’s House in Portugal

I thought it would be interesting to give a slant on my sometimes perhaps slightly rose-tinted view of our move to Portugal, so I asked her to write a guest post reviewing her first six months in this wonderful, sunny country! Here’s what she said:

Sunrise on another beautiful day

Being asked to write a guest post for my husband’s blog started me thinking seriously about how I feel about Portugal after six months of living here. It also made me think about the life I left behind in London.

It’s funny how quickly I’ve adapted to some things, while other things still take me by surprise every day. Greeting people in Portuguese and driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road felt natural within weeks of being here, yet I’m still surprised and overjoyed by how bright the sunshine is each morning when I open the blinds.

The cost of life in Portugal is also something I take for granted now. I was genuinely shocked at the cost of dinner out for two last time I was in London: £100 for the meal, plus the train there, the drinks before and after, and the £35 taxi back to the hotel. Here we can get all the fish we can eat for €9 per person – and that seems normal now.

It’s also strange that the things I miss are so different from the things I thought I would. Missing family and friends was always a given, but with regular trips back to England, having visitors here and the wonders of Skype, I don’t actually feel like I’m missing out too much. It’s the little things that I’ve been most surprised about missing – things like spring onions and Thai food (yes, I am as food obsessed as my husband!)

So, how do I feel about it overall after six months? The true answer is that I’m very, very happy to be here. I’ll gladly live with never eating Pad Thai again if it means that I can stay in

Spring onions – Worth Missing Out on

this wonderful country. The people are so welcoming and supportive of (well, amused by) my efforts to speak their language and settle in their country. Each day brings some kind of small triumph, whether using a newly learned word in conversation or making our first green salad with leaves grown entirely on our balcony. Life now is so far removed from those hours spent fuming in London traffic and feeling tired/stressed all the time that I can’t believe how lucky I am to be here.

Before this starts to sound too sugar-coated though, there are definitely some unexpected downsides to living in Portugal. Mosquitoes, for example. While numerous bite-riddled trips abroad have long since taught me that my blood tastes particularly delicious to these flying cretins, I’ve never seen mosquito bites as more than a minor irritation. Until I lived here. Now every bite brings with it ridiculous swelling, incredible itching and the feeling that my skin is on fire. All of which last for days. I suppose I should be grateful that this gave me the chance to put into practice the ‘trip to the chemist’ module from my Teach Yourself Portuguese CD. It’s hard to be philosophical about it though, when my arm looks like a balloon.

Another unexpected downside is… Hmm… Ok, so I’m sitting here stumped as to what else is bad about living here. I do really want to give a view of both sides of life here, but the only other bad thing I can think of is that shampoo is a bit more expensive than it is in England. As is conditioner.

I’ve thought long and hard whilst writing this about whether I have any regrets about leaving London to live in Portugal and the simple answer is no. For someone who values happiness over money and loves the simplicity of life in the sunshine as much as I do, all I am left wondering is why I stayed in London for so long!

Ben and his wife moved to “sunny Portugal from rainy London” in November 2009 and document their experiences at http://www.movingtoportugal.org

The shop, on Rua de Olivenca 9007 (near Intermarche) will be open Mondays to Thursdays 10:00 to 16:00.

The shop has over 120 sq metres of space, with over 50 different frozen lines, a range of fresh cheddar cheeses and a huge selection of tinned and packet goods. O Caminho Natural products will also be available in the new shop.

As well as cash and cheques, Food4Brits also accept most major debit and credit cards.

If you need any more information on any matter, please email food4brits@sapo.pt or call on 911080665.

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10 July
17 July
7 August
28 August
4 September

The property is near Pombeiro da Beira.

Hours are 11am to 3 pm = Euros 25

Phone Lin on 235296452

The job is to be fulfilled between 01/06/10 and 01/10/10.

You can send your cv to info@quintadageia.com or contact us by phone: 238670010