Volunteering at Quinta Pomar, an Organic Farm near Tavira
I’m already almost halfway through my wwoof stay at Quinta Pomar, the second place I’m volunteering at. It’s a very different experience than at Altanure. Let me tell you all about how it is here on this beautiful organic farm.
Quinta Pomar
The Location
Quinta Pomar is a small organic farm in Santa Luzia, a small fishing village just outside the town of Tavira in the Algarve in Portugal. The beach is only a 10min bike ride away. And it’s only 3km from my previous volunteer place Altanure. Both are lovely places but very different and I’m happy to experience both ways of doing things.
The location is beautiful. The farm is spread out over two plots of land quite close together, there’s just an avocado orchard owned by someone else in between. On one plot of land there are the volunteer quarters, the old farm buildings that will soon be renovated into beautiful holiday apartments, a meadow with goats and sheep, a range of vegetable beds, the citrus orchard, some carob, almond, olive and pomegranate trees and some other recently planted fruit trees.
On the other side, the other plot, there are more vegetable beds, the owner’s house, some holiday apartments and a beautiful swimming pond. There are also chickens, pigs and a flock of peacocks.
What They Do at Quinta Pomar
At Quinta Pomar they do weekly csa vegetable boxes and they have a market stall on the big market in Tavira on Saturday morning. They use a more traditional way of farming the land – using a tractor to till the land but they don’t use any chemical pesticides or fertilisers. They use manure to fertilise the land instead.
They grow a variety of different vegetables and fruits. At the moment there are leeks, onions, garlic, kale, broccoli, carrots, red beets, potatoes, spinach, Brussels sprouts, zucchini, fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, lemon balm, mint), oranges, lemons, peaches, … ready to harvest on Friday morning. Other plants like the tomatoes and cucumbers have been planted and will also be ready for harvest soon.
It’s really wonderful to see all these veggies they harvest here weekly. At Altanure the vegetable garden wasn’t established enough yet and besides fava beans there was almost nothing to harvest. In fact the food we ate there came from from a veggie box from Quinta Pomar!
The way they work here is very different from Altanure. Here they use a more traditional way of farming where they til the soil, add manure to it to fertilise and generally try to keep the soil clear and uncovered. They grow the vegetables in long beds, usually not really doing much interplanting different varieties of vegetables but just keeping long rows of specific veggies next to other rows of specific veggies, which of course makes sense in a market garden as it makes it much easier to harvest bigger amounts.
At Altanure they follow the principles and patterns of nature much more, work according to the no-dig system and try to interplant different plants, bushes and trees to create different layers like in a forest. They add compost to enrich the soil and mulch heavily to try to keep the soil covered so it doesn’t dry out so easily.
Now that I’m here I can totally see how tilling the soil with a tractor on a bigger farm can make the work go faster and easier but it has the disadvantage that it releases carbon in the air and destroys beneficial soil structures and underground life – like the fungi that make all sorts of connecting systems underground that help plants grow and keep the soil moist. Also the fact that they don’t mulch here makes that they probably need to irrigate much more. But all in all I’ve been very impressed by the good quality of the soil here at Quinta Pomar, especially after seeing how hard and difficult the clay soil was to work with at Altanure. Maybe the occasional tilling of this rock hard clay soil is not a bad thing if it makes it more workable. It definitely shows that both systems have their benefits and their downsides.
Volunteering at Quinta Pomar
I arrived here on Saturday the 14th of May, two weeks ago and will stay here for one month in total. At the moment there is just one other volunteer here, but sometimes they have many more especially during the summer months.
Because it’s just the two of us right now I have my own room in a container and we share the outdoor kitchen and bathroom (just a regular bathroom here, not a compost toilet).
We’re expected to work 5hrs/day, starting at 8am. At the moment the focus of the our work here is to do lots of weeding as they got a bit out of hand, and to plant new vegetable seedlings that are ready to go in the ground. Turns out weeds can go crazy very quickly and at the moment it got so bad that in some of the veggie beds it’s hard to find and harvest the vegetables amongst the massive weeds. Apparently they’ve always been able to keep it all beautifully under control but this time life got a bit in the way, as it sometimes does…
This week we stepped up the game a bit to bring everything back under control though it may take a few weeks. Jula who used to be the main farmer here but recently had been working on the new building project got back into the farming work (basically doing two jobs cause he’s still on the building project too) and it’s amazing to see the progress he has made in just a few days.
On Fridays we harvest for the veggie boxes and the market. Sometimes the owner’s teenage kids and her friend come help to get the work done.
The Challenges
There were some challenges at Altanure and it’s no different here at Quinta Pomar. I guess every time you go to a new place with new people and do new things there’s a big chance there will be some challenges. While the challenges at Altanure were mostly of a physical character, the challenges here are more interpersonal.
The owner Tamar and Jula are both lovely, but I’ve had a little bit of a challenging time with the other volunteer here. He’s a friendly guy who means well so I don’t want to be too negative but we’re simply not on the same wave length. We have very different rhythms both while working and while doing stuff in our free time and have a different sense of humour. Sometimes I feel like we’re speaking two different languages even though we both speak English and this has already led to some heated discussions. Coming from Altanure where I had a lovely and very easy time connecting with Rosanna, the other volunteer, and her boyfriend Rodrigo it makes this experience even more contrasting.
But like always, you learn from these challenges. There might be some times that are difficult in the moment itself but it’s always interesting to reflect on it afterwards and take some positive lessons from it. And ultimately this is only a temporary experience. In just over two weeks I’ll be on the road again meeting other new people who I might have a better connection with and maybe I’ll be able to catch up with some old friends too… In the mean time I will just try to focus mostly on the work and the beautiful location and be okay doing things in my own rhythm…
My Birthday at Quinta Pomar
Thursday was my birthday and while I wasn’t sure it be great considering how things were going with the other volunteer it actually turned out lovely. In the morning I helped Tamar, the owner, plant out over 50 tomato plants and afterwards she treated me to a wonderful birthday lunch at her favourite restaurant here in Santa Luzia, Alcatruz. It’s a local fish restaurant in a little back street. We had some very tasty grilled fish and a nice piece of almond cake for dessert.
Afterwards I just enjoyed the peace and quiet at the swimming lake while getting some phone calls and messages from friends and family at home.
What’s next?
I’ll be here at Quinta Pomar until mid June. I’ve decided to go traveling after I leave here and maybe try some creative experiments and work on new illustrations. This way I can give my body a rest from the physical work cause while my body has definitely gotten used to it and gotten stronger some of the work, especially the weeding, can be hard on the body.
I have days that my fingers feel a bit inflamed from pulling the big long rooted weeds and since a few days I seemed to have developed sesamoiditis in my right foot, at least that’s what Dr. Google tells me, but it seems likely. It’s basically inflammation of the tendons around the tiny sesamoid bone on the ball of the foot. It seems like an injury you can get from too much squatting and putting weight on the ball of the foot. And I’ve been doing so much squatting during the weeding. And because I tore my meniscus in my left knee 18 months ago, I can’t put much weight on my left knee/leg while squatting, which means I’ve been putting it mostly on my right foot, which obviously hasn’t been good.
I’m sure it will be fine. It’s not even very painful, it just feels weird, as if there’s a lump under the ball of my foot. I’ll just try to sit in a different position while weeding in the next few weeks and ice and rest my foot as much as possible. Maybe see if I can put some extra cushioning inside my shoes… But it’s definitely going to be better to give my body some real rest before I get back to more wwoofing later in the summer.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to visit some new destinations soon! There’s a good chance I’ll be heading across the border into Spain for a little bit to a few places in the south of Spain I’d like to see. And then slowly head back into Portugal to make my way north by August. I have a 3rd wwoof place organised starting from the 22nd of August near Santa Cruz, an hour north of Lisbon. I’ll see how everything goes. I might try to find one or two short wwoof experiences before I go there if I feel like it, or maybe I’ll just travel for the whole two months…
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