For this year we have many changes and many interesting things getting planned.

Our main objectives for this year is to merge more with the tourism side of the project offering our clients lots of activities and participation in the everyday tasks.

We want to make permaculture more visible around Casa Vale da Lama and bringing the food closer to the kitchen. For this reason we are redesigning our Sweet Spot garden adding more herbs and also vegetables for the kitchen staff to pick up.

At the same time we are designing and implementing Hortas do Vale, our market garden continuing the work that Mattia started last year. The idea is to create a permaculture market garden. For this reason we redesigned a bit the distribution of the garden, planned windbreaks and hedges and a perennial strip for trees in the middle of the field. Another interesting element of the design is the division of the field in Plots of 5 annual beds each one divided by one bed of perennial. So in total we have 12 Plots of annuals (60 beds of 25m each) and 12 perennial beds. Soon we will make a blogpost with the design and more photos of the implementation. The objective of this garden is to feed ourselves and continue the small CSA* we started last year.

Soon we will have also a new farm shop in the Welcome centre of the farm, where we are planning to extend our products and also offer bulk foodsIf you want to join our CSA or want to have more information about it you can visit our page or contact us.

Winter is going by and we are almost finishing the pruning or our trees with the citrus trees being the last to prune. This year we had an abundance of tangerines and oranges and we still have, so if you are interesting in getting some of our organic citrus let us know.

Our sheep flock is ever-growing. This year 8 lambs were born and are growing pasturing in the South Slope. We also purchased a new fence, called SmartFence and the first weeks of trial show us that we will be much more efficient and effective containing our animals and moving them through the different plots.

Since November we switched our chicken feed to organic certified (before they were getting a mix of non-GMO cereals) and they are providing us steadily with delicious eggs through the whole winter.

Also for this year we welcome any micro business partners that want to join us. If you have any project that you would like to develop and feel that Vale da Lama is the place let us know.

And last we would like to inform you that we are looking for a partner to join our Regen team. We are looking for someone familiar with Permaculture, Regenerative Agriculture (Holistic Management, Keyline, Agroforestry, etc) and with some practical experience in this field. We would like this partners to join us in our everyday activities and co-create with us the Farm that we want to become. We offer an annual contract and accommodation. If you are interested in joining us let us know.

*CSA – One way to stimulate local farming initiatives is through Community Supported Agriculture, or CSA in short. CSA is a food production operation that is made viable by a community, and a community that is supported in its healthy food needs by local agriculture.