Friday, May 17, 2013

20-something of May 2013...   It's RAINING!!!, pretty hard in fact.    Hard to find time to cram everything in this month, so it's quite brilliant not to have to stress about the water-stress of the 4 dozen new almond and plum trees starting to gasp a little from the hot dry spring so far - and be able to put off the tubery drip-irrigation system for a couple of weeks - collective "ahhh".

Less than a week to the start of the 4 days of Bedlam that will be the European WWOOF convention here at the Varzea, 23 - 26 May 2013.    Rodrigo, Portugal's splendid co-ordinator and organiser of this once-every-two-years event, and his beautiful girlfriend, Charlotte, have been here a week already, planning and constructing infrastructure. Here they are with the serving and dish-washing facility they put together together over a couple of days....



... ok, I'll get a better picture next time...

We had a great work-party day at our good friend and now nearest neighbour, Silvia - mother of little David, who you will have seen with our Megan in the previous blog - see, you will soon start getting the hang of our local community-group.  About 15 people for the day made garden beds, steps and paths, seats and funky stuff besides. These work-party days are really the whole stuff of the neighbour-relationship here in the Cerca valley.  And the stuff or the future too... here are some of the kids joining in...

.... and here's Silvia...

It's the time of flowers in the valley, impossible to do justice with pictures (with my ancient digital camera anyway), but here are the amazingly beautiful "rock roses", Cistus ladanifer, which everywhere here just now...


Meanwhile, at the Bird Hotel, the chickens have moved in, but the local shop had no geese or turkeys this last fortnight, so we await Aljezur's monthly market, next Monday, 20th May, before bringing in the full managerie of fowl creatures.  

And:  brand-new, every Thursday here is Varzea movie-night, with kids' film at 7pm and a documentary film at 9 - any topic, and people are more than welcome to bring their own downloads or dvd's to show.  The idea is to provide a weekly focus for the wider community of the valley - and beyond - to interact and exchange creative ideas and plant-seeds and produce, play music, dance, and generally do the things that people used to do in this very place 50-or-so years ago, when our little valley was, by all tales, a vital social network.  

It's more than a hippy idea, it's one who's time is ripe.    As evidence, I think, is to to remember when myself and Kris came here, six and a half short years ago, there was a total absence of children in the valley. Now, along the four miles (sorry, it's down to my cycling life, I just can't get into kilometres), there are, I think at the latest count, 12 children between zero and 7 years old - with more coming pretty-much every few months!   Now, this is not just a statistic - something is going on here....

Keep in touch, and feel free to respond....

Pictures of WWOOF convention in a week or 2... 

Have fun,   Chris.