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 .
Looking for house sitters on our quinta for coming winter (2010/11).
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.
This is the first in a series of Day Trips; brief reviews of some worthwhile places to visit, by
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 pi èce 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?
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
Sunrise on another beautiful day
Spring onions – Worth Missing Out on