Rise of the Machines

We’d been mildly bothering Carlos the building supplies guy for a few weeks about bringing one of his big diggers in to help rearrange a few things.We’ve had a couple of rearrangements in the valley already and it usually involves setting a site visit, walking, talking, pointing and head scratching, and then waiting weeks for the agreed machine to rock up.Our most recent bothering was on our umpteenth trip to the tiles and taps place to sort out a still unresolved confusion with the builder over shower and sink hardware..Usually-very-calm-Carlos was a little stressed so we light-heartedly nudged him before moonwalking out as he mumbled something about talvez amanhã de manhã (maybe tomorrow morning).So when a car trundled down the drive at 8.30am the next day, the dogs were almost as surprised as we were (too be fair they’re a bit slow until they’ve had breakfast).Carlos had sent his digger guy, and after some walking, talking and pointing (and virtually no scratching of heads) he asked if we wanted to start straight away.We nodded enthusiastically and naively and headed off to the shops.Thank you for reading Off-grid and Ignorant in Portugal. This post is public so feel free to share it.Half an hour later we met the big digger delivery truck coming the other way on our dirt road and Mr Digger and his 21-tonne truck were already 3m deep in trenches.The bigger the digger the harder it is to undo mistakes – once things are done, they stay done – but our new trench seemed to be heading in roughly the right direction.The extreme gardening was to deal with the large piles of eucalyptus roots which have been languishing on the property’s perimeter since the whole adventure began.Our first job had been to cut down the eucalyptus forest occupying our flattest land with our bestest view and then dig out the deep roots and either burn them, bury them or truck them out.We’d opted for burial over climatic impact or cost with the intention of creating a mound of amazing water-retaining soil to feed growth over the next 30 years, but had to wait until they had dried out and reduced by about half the size before digging them in.That time had come and with a deadline for opening and an ugly fence to bury, there was an urgency requiring a certain level of bothering.Bothering doesn’t always work here; in fact, it sometimes has the opposite effect.But not bothering also has the opposite effect, so we are constantly striving for the correct level of balanced bothering.We are clearly not getting that balance right in a couple of key areas, but it seems the town hall now has the paperwork it needed three months ago and hopefully we will imminently receive our plan for the water infrastructure.But while I digress, do check out the movie…Landscaping is an important part of our project and a little vineyard will look great and maybe even make us something suitable for human consumption at some point in the future.It’s taken me a while, but I have finally accepted the fact there is no way we can plant wine grapes next Spring, as Ana has been saying for months, for a whole number of reasons not least that there are far too many other things to do.But there are some things we can do , and so the focus for that patch of land is to prep it as well as we can for a Spring 2025 planting.This involves taking soil samples to see if the area is even appropriate for grapes – even though quite a few people we have spoken to have shrugged as if to say “why not?”The 3m trenches have revealed our soil profile and it appears to be about half a metre of soil on top of thick clay...hmm.With that in mind, and a lot of soil improvement to be done, we also need to work out which other machines need to be arranged.Mr Digger said we’d need a smaller bulldoz