Quinta Felgar is a small farm in the beautiful Mondego valley in central Portugal. Situated in a small side valley away from the main river, its bowl shape means that we have a range of different microclimates from shady north slopes to sun-baked southern slopes. This enables us to grow a wide variety of plants and trees including many olives, chestnuts, walnuts, apples, pears, peaches, plums and cherries amoungst the several types of oak that cover most of the land. With huge granite terrace walls and a stream with many waterfalls running down the centre of the land, the farm has been here for a very long time. I have no idea how they moved some of the enormous granite boulders that make up the terrace walls without modern equipment! Abandoned for many years like many Portuguese farms, we have been fighting the undergrowth to bring it back into production and build ourselves a house. We're currently living in old horesebox whilst we build between working trips back to the UK. We're lucky enough to have no mains electricity at all in the valley (which is one of the main reasons we bought here!) but are setting up a photovoltaic solar system. We are very lucky with the geography of our land on which the stream runs from the top to the bottom which gives us the possibility for a small hydroelectric system which we will hopefully be connecting soon. It also means that we can gravity feed water for irrigation to most of our land which we are setting out with drip feed irrigation for our organic vegetable gardens and all the trees. But life here is idyllic. Our little girl has space to roam and wonderful little friends and already knows a lot about different types of trees and plants! Discover more about our valley at www.alternativeportugal.com