HOW TO CLIP CHICKENS WINGS - LIVING ON OUR FARM IN CENTRAL PORTUGAL - FARM WORK AUTUMN MAINTENANCE

Hi there! I am Joseph.
I have been an immigrant, or expat, living in central Portugal along with my beautiful Portuguese girlfriend Mariana for six years now.

Together Mariana, my father Clinton and myself, would like to show you a bit of the daily goings on around our Portuguese farm / homestead / smallholding and all of the work we are doing whilst renovating, starting building projects, working with our livestock, DIY and trying to grow our little families own food!

In this episode we welcome you to join us in mid Autumn time as we are living a typical day in our lives on our cherry farm near Fundão, in a central Portuguese rural mountain village.

First thing in the morning my father Clinton & I fire up our 15 horse power mini compact tractor and head up to one of our smaller olive groves, Mitzy follows us in tow. Once up there I introduce myself and explain a little about what we are doing today.

The mornings sunshine feels warming on our backs after the chilly nights dew drops sit idle on the ground. The clouds on the horizon however are dark grey and ominous. Our olive nets, or toldos, are lying on the wet grass underneath the olive trees as we just finished our harvest. So we set to packing the nets away, folding them all up and transporting them back to the storage underneath the farm house, ready for next year.

After packing all the nets away my father, the puppy dogs and I brush ourselves down from the olive debris and say good morning to the flock of sheep. They were all sitting at the vineyard gateway watching intently to see what was going on in the next field... Must be better than television for them!

Once the olive nets were all transported back down to the farm house we bring the chainsaw up and set to chopping up some year old cherry prunings, to make them 'wood burner size', just as with the nets we transport all this wood down with the tractor and wheelbarrow underneath the house where it can be protected from the wet weather to come over winter. Once more the sheep watch our every move and motion from the fence next to us.

Godfrey, head of the flock, makes himself known by thrashing in an oak tree nearby, letting us all know he is there and that he is the boss of this field! I stop to chat with Godfrey a while and give him a head scratch, he runs off back to the girls when he realises they were not impressed.

Straight after we finished, we head back to the farm house, where we stop at the calçadas, cobbled driveway, where lots of autumnal leaves have settled. This calls for a spot of leaf blowing with our STIHL shredder / leaf blower. Getting rid of these wet leaves that fall and settle on the calçadas. These can be very slippery and we would not want Mariana or my mother slipping over!

After a hard mornings work we set to the kitchen where I rustle up a simple alheira lunch, but this simple Portuguese dish has anything but a simple backstory, these bread, poultry, game and other meat filled sausages were responsible for saving thousands of lives during the time of the Spanish inquisition, at which time Jews and many others were persecuted. The alheira sausages hanging in the families smokehouses tricked people into believing the family that resided there ate pork, of course these sausages require a slightly different preparation, here I show you how they have always been traditionally prepared.

Our final job for the day was to put a stop to some of our flighty, feathered friends. Yearly the poultry moult their old feathers and grow new feathers all over their bodies. This means they get that fresh, youthful look back after their feathers may be pecked, dirtied or pulled at throughout the year. It also means that they can fly again, since we trim the feathers every year. This is a relatively imperative job if we wish our poultry to be free range. As the pastures are all fenced but should a good gust of wind blow at the right time a daring duck or courageous chicken may be sent flying high over the fences and into the neighbours farm, where wild dogs could be residing. Watch as I show you how to clip chickens wing feathers, a completely painless process.

At the end of the day Mariana, Chloe and I sit down in our lounge, light the fire and thank you all for watching. Mariana explains a little about what she has been doing the last few weeks and her bonding process with our new little baby.

See our journey to self sufficiency / permaculture / organic farming as expats living in Portugal, trying to produce as much of our own food planting vegetables, growing fruit trees as well as looking after all our animals, such as our chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, quail, rabbits and sheep - Shortly pigs too!

Hobby farming in Fundão
- Growing vegetables, raising meat and foraging on our cherry farm in Portugal’s Beira baixa.

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Видео HOW TO CLIP CHICKENS WINGS - LIVING ON OUR FARM IN CENTRAL PORTUGAL - FARM WORK AUTUMN MAINTENANCE канала Farmer For Fun