Our story

Before

Marta grew up in Lisbon and spent every summer of her childhood on her grandmother's land in the Alentejo, which is where the idea came from and also where most of the practical knowledge came from. Tom is from Yorkshire and trained as a joiner. They met in Lisbon in 2009 and Inês was born in 2011.

By 2015 the plan of getting out of the city had turned into an actual search, which lasted about eighteen months and was mostly an education in what we could not afford. Anything with water, a house you could live in and land that had been kept was well beyond us. What was within reach was land that had been left.

Buying something nobody wanted

We bought this place in the spring of 2017. It was cheap for three reasons: it had been abandoned for about twelve years, the borehole did not work, and the access track was in a state that made every viewing an argument about whether the car would make it.

What it did have was terraces, an old orange orchard that was still alive, and a slope facing the right way. Marta walked it once and said the trees were worth saving. That turned out to be true and it also turned out to take six years.

The first summer, with no water

We completed in April and by July we understood the problem. The borehole was silted and the pump was seized, and getting it working again cost more than we had budgeted for the entire first year. Until it was done we were carrying water in tanks in the back of a truck, and we still lost eleven trees that summer.

That is the thing nobody tells you about buying abandoned land in a dry country. The house can wait. The walls can wait. The water cannot wait, because every week without it is trees you do not get back.

Two and a half years in a rented house

The building here had a roof over roughly half of it. We rented a house in the next valley for two and a half years and drove over every day, which sounds miserable and was, in fact, a reasonable way to do it. Tom did the roof and the first two rooms himself in the winters when there was less to do outside. We moved in properly in the autumn of 2019, with two rooms finished and the rest of it plastic sheeting.

Inês was six when we bought it and eight by the time we moved in. She is fifteen now and knows how to prune an orange tree better than either of us did after three years, which is a fair summary of how this has gone.

Getting it wrong

The first winter we pruned the neglected orange trees far too hard. They looked wonderful in February and by June they had thrown water shoots everywhere and the newly exposed bark was burning in the sun. We lost a whole tree and two large branches over the following two years. That is written up honestly in the note on pruning citrus because it is the single most useful mistake we have made.

There were others. We watered a little every day for two summers, which trained the roots into the top ten centimetres of soil and made everything more fragile, not less. We put honey supers on in July expecting a summer flow that does not exist in this climate. We mulched two centimetres deep for two years and wondered why it made no difference.

The first things that worked

The first real orange crop was 2020. The first olive oil was in 2019 and there was almost nothing of it, thirty one litres from the twelve old trees, and it was the best thing that had happened to us up to that point. The vegetable beds went in in 2019 and started feeding us properly from that winter.

We started selling preserves in 2021, in small quantities, mostly to people who had eaten something at our table and asked. The pantry as it exists now, with ten lines and a price list, came together over 2022 and 2023.

The first harvest day was an olive picking day in November 2022, and it happened because six friends turned up to help and we realised the work genuinely went faster and was much better company. That is still the reason those days exist.

What it actually pays

Not everything, and we would rather say so than have anyone think this is a self supporting idyll. Tom still does joinery work for part of the year, mostly in the winter and mostly locally. The smallholding covers its own costs, pays for the things it needs and contributes to the household, and it is not the whole household income.

The harvest days and the pantry together are what make the difference between the land breaking even and the land being a hobby, which is why we do both, and why the prices are what they are rather than lower.

On labels

We are not certified organic and we do not describe ourselves as organic anywhere on this site. We do not use herbicides. We have not used a synthetic insecticide since 2019. We feed the soil with compost and chipped prunings rather than feeding the plants with anything soluble. All of that is true and none of it is certification.

The reason we have not certified is cost and paperwork against our size. At 2.6 worked hectares with ten preserve lines, the annual cost and the record keeping do not pay for themselves, and we would rather spend the same money on mulch. If we ever do certify we will say so and date it. Until then we will describe what we actually do and let people judge it.

For the same reason we have never entered anything for an award or gone looking for coverage. There is nothing wrong with either. It just is not what this is.

Where it is going

Nowhere dramatic. The trees that went in between 2018 and 2022 are still coming into full crop, so the next few years should produce more without us planting anything new. We would like the orchard soil to get to three per cent organic matter, which at the current rate is a decade away. Beyond that, the plan is to keep the walls standing and the water honest.

If you want to see it, come on a harvest day. That is the only way we do visits and it is deliberately the busiest and least tidy way to see the place.