Looking back after the fires.

It's been a long time since I wrote some words because we have been incredibly busy. Not only with recovering from 2017 but also Spring has given us lots of rain and thus weeds. Also the popularity of our little restaurant in Coimbra has grown so we needed to spend more time on that side. With kids definitely on number 1 we decided to leave the blogs for a little later...

So first of all THANK YOU! With our "Today's ashes are tomorrow soil" we collected enough money to plant 300 trees. We did make a difficult decision to not plant Galega due to the faqt it gives a lot of problems on our terroir and also we could not find local grown trees which gave a risk of introducing Xylella and at all costs we need to avoid that.

But how is the old grove after the fire? Well, incredible to see how fast olive trees start growing again. But this year there is not a lot of fruit to be found. Good though that all the animals have returned. The wild boars, foxes, squirrels and birds have returned. We do miss the fact that the views have changed and also our lands have been more exposed to the olive fly as the forrest supplied us with an natural barrier. Since this has been mostly burned we need new strategies to make this plot economical. We are studying and found it interesting how north east is almost fly-free and attached to an eucalyptus field and south/southwest is full of fly (but also more fruits) and attached to abandoned and burnt olive grove and more open area.

Another observation was how the galega fruit on northeast have more of an protection (waxy white coating) and these have little to no bite marks. I'm guessing the Kaolinite (Kaolin Clay) strategy might work for this grove, lets see..

Unfortanetely nature gave us Leslie on the 14th of October 2018 and again the grove was hit, leaving many branches damaged. Another sign climate change is real and we will have to deal with these kind of events on a regular base. We will not give up and continue for sure!