Oranges and lemons
Citrus is the largest thing we grow and the reason the plot exists at all.
December to July
Algarve hinterland, Portugal
A family smallholding on four hectares of old terraces
Oranges, lemons, figs, almonds, olives and a vegetable garden, on a plot that had been left for twelve years when we took it on in 2017. We sell what we preserve, and four times a year people come and work with us.
Where we are in the year
Late August
The fig drying is finishing. Trays are going out at eight in the morning and coming in at seven, and this year's crop has been much better than last year's, which the July 2025 heat mostly destroyed.
The almonds are coming off now, knocked onto sheets tree by tree, and it will take another fortnight.
The vegetable beds are under shade cloth and are being kept alive rather than grown, which is what August is for here. There is a note about that from earlier this month.
Next on the calendar is the olive harvest and pressing day in November.
What we grow
Six things, and what we can grow is decided almost entirely by soil depth and by how much water there is. The pages go into real detail, including the years that went badly.
Almonds
Almonds are the least reliable crop we have and the one we would least like to lose.
Harvest September
In the pantry
Ten lines, made in the month the fruit is ready. Ordered by email rather than through a checkout, because at a few hundred jars a year a shop system would cost more to run than it would carry.
In stock
Bitter orange marmalade
Made once a year from the six bitter orange trees, in a stretch of about three weeks in January and February.
6.50 euros340 g jar
Nearly out, new oil in December
Cold pressed olive oil
Galega and Cobrançosa, picked in the first three weeks of November while the fruit is still turning, and milled within a day.
14.00 euros500 ml bottle
2026 crop, from September
Dried figs
Split and dried outdoors on mesh covered trays over three to five days in August.
8.50 euros250 g box
In stock, 2026 extraction
Honey
One extraction a year, in the middle of June, from nine hives on the top terrace.
9.00 euros350 g jar
Harvest days
Four working days a year, on real dates, with small numbers. Not tours. You do the job we would be doing anyway, and it is the only way we do visits.
- Olive harvest and pressing dayThe hardest of the four days and the one that shows you the whole chain, from the tree to the net to the crate to the mill, inside a single day.
- Orange picking morningThree hours on a January Saturday in the citrus block.
- Preserving kitchen dayFive hours in the kitchen in February, making marmalade and curd from fruit picked that week.
- Fig and drying afternoonThree and a half hours in August, in the middle of the main fig crop.
From the notes
Written while the thing was happening rather than looked up afterwards. There are seven of them.
- Keeping a vegetable bed alive in AugustIt is 38 degrees outside. August here is not a growing month, it is a holding operation, and knowing that changes what you do.
- Pruning citrusWe inherited seventy orange trees that nobody had touched in a decade, cut too hard in our first winter, and learned the lesson the expensive way.
- Making marmalade from a small cropSix trees give us perhaps forty kilos of bitter oranges. Here is how we turn that into about 230 jars without ruining any of it.