Introduction

This is a blog for Corujas, a small farm, and the family who cares for it. For us, Corujas has a bit of everything. It is a place with family histories that merge into the present. The place had been in benign neglect for decades and nature took over, with a great diversity of native things popping everywhere. The house is a shelter from the sun and the cold and the patches of garden are a sample of tamed nature with some exotic species. The whole ground is an experimental field for the technologies that will hopefully ease our life and for the gadgets that keep us geek enough. It is the place we hope our friends will enjoy as their own.

We have cared for Corujas for 12 years, and it has turned from a secret place kept by big mounds of blackberries to a liveable place that will feed us and keep us warm. It has been 12 years worth of weekends, holidays and spare time to buy materials, plan a vegetable or a herb garden, collect cuttings to obtain our favourite species or wait for seeds from heirloom tomatoes to sprout.

All this time, intuitively, we have avoided cleaning too much. This leaves us with months of wild flowers on display, a different one every week in spring, as well as amazing mushrooms and dried herbs and grasses in autumn. We have also resisted the local advice to put down the various kinds of oaks growing everywhere, from pathways to walls. Every year some of them are felled and provide wood, making room for everything else to grow.

Most of the time there was no time to record or document systematically. But thanks to the piles of photos, untidy papers and the bad habit of keeping everything, we hope the history of the past 12 years will be written piecemeal.