The Fire

Friday 19th June 2020

View from our garden

I was picking tomatoes with my friends Kai and Daisy in the vegetable garden when we smelled smoke. We climbed a tall tree and saw a giant cloud of smoke. We went inside for lunch and when we came back outside the sky was orange and the sun a red ball...

Ten minutes later burnt leaves and ash were raining down. My Dad went up to the track to see where the fire was and it was just on the other side of the road!

View from our track

We took our cat, Skip, and shoved him in his cat carrier and evacuated to my friends' house, where we all stayed the night. Skip had to sleep shut in the bathroom because of my friends' dog Ozzy.

My friend Kai looking out from his balcony

View from the top of our friends' road

In the morning the fire had mostly died down. We went back home: a lot of the surrounding area was burnt, but luckily our house and land was fine. 

Burnt land across the road from our house

Burnt out truck

We later discovered that the fire was caused by a strimmer spark landing in dry grass 10 km away up the valley. The fire burned through 2200 hectares. We were lucky but 30 families lost their homes to the fire.

An introduction to making wooden fishing lures

A fishing lure imitates the prey to a predatory fish e.g. small fish, small mammals etc.. Lures are made of various materials like wood, plastic, rubber and metal, but I am going to show you how to make them out of wood.

Tools for lure making

Basic tools

Slimmed down to the very basics, all you really need is: a knife, a saw, a pencil, a drill and a ruler. But if you want to make more professional lures, things will be more expensive and harder to get. 

Personally I do not have very specifically niche equipment. I have only three other things that I did not say: a band saw, a Dremmel rotary tool, and a Shinto rasp/wood file.

Band saw

Materials for lures

Wood - you will need a reasonably soft type, like pine or balsa. I use cedar and pine.

Glue - you need two bottles of superglue: one with a brush and the other with a dripper.

Baking soda - for making filler by mixing with superglue.

Wire - for twisting into lure eyes.

Split rings - to join hook to lure eye.

Treble hooks, in a variety of sizes to give you the best hook up ratio on your lure.

Lexan polycarbonate - for if you are making a diving lure.

Split shot - for keeping your lure stable in the water.

Sandpaper - to smooth your lures to achieve a good surface before painting.

Split shot and superglue

Painting lures

There are three main ways to paint lures: brush, spray can and airbrush. I use a mixture of spray can and brush (I don't have an airbrush). I also use acrylic paint pens (all paints need to be acrylic). You also need a clear coat or clear nail varnish to make your lure fully waterproof.



In this post I have explained what a lure is, and what you need in order to make one. In the next post in this series, I will show you how to actually make a fishing lure. 

Some of my home made lures

Growing Tomatoes

In Portugal, we plant tomato seeds from January to March. We use modules, seed trays or small pots for planting. Wait until the plant is a hand's breadth high, then dig a hole in a finely raked bed and put in something with lots of nutrients in such as manure, banana skin or fish heads. We use pigeon poo.
Watering system

Cut a 2 litre plastic bottle in half. Take the lidded half (save the other half to use as a pot for planting seeds), keep the lid on and drill three rings of small holes in the bottom. Then, when you dig the hole for your tomato plants, put it in with the open end sticking out of the ground and you have a watering system with no chance of mildew! Use one half bottle per plant.  

Mulch

Mulch is thin layer of dry grass, straw (wheat or barley stalks), or compost that stops water from evaporating. It also prevents slugs from eating your vegetables. We use dry grass.

Pick off apexes

When your tomato plants get to about 2 feet tall, start looking for apexes (small outgrowths that come between the main stalk and a branch).They look like these photos when you find them at the right time.

Do not pick them off if they have flowers or small tomatoes. Picking off apexes prevents the plant from spending all its energy on making itself big and instead uses it to make large juicy tomatoes!

Structure

Your tomatoes might need a bit of support, especially if it is very windy like here in the Western Algarve.

Sargo Fishing Algarve

Sargo, also known as black bream or Diplodus Sargus, is of the bream family and is commonly found in Portugal.

Tackle

A long rod, preferably 10ft to 15ft casting 20-40 grams, with a 3000-5000 size fixed spool reel, loaded with 15lb fluorocarbon or mono, a large weighted float and a size 6 hook. 

Bait

Sargo will eat almost anything, though the following are the most effective: prawns, clams, squid strips and ragworm (ragworm is also good for wrasse, which live alongside sargo).

Ragworm baited up on hook

Wrasse caught on a ragworm

Technique

Fish near rocky outcrops, sandy beaches and inshore. You do not need to cast very far at all; you  may be able to just plop the float the length of the rod away. When the float bobs under water, lift the rod up sharply and you are in!

Cook

Sargo is one of the most sustainable fish in Portugal (click here to find out more). 
You may barbeque the sargo or pan fry (skin side down). You can also roast them on a bed of thinly sliced potato. Serve with tomato salsa. 

Haiku

Great frothing bait ball
Gannets dive and marlin swim
Through sea deep and blue
.

Now it is Autumn 
Squirrel Scutters for nuts
Hides them in a hole.



















Weather turns colder
The snow falls on badger's set
Sleep, out of the chill.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic: The Gathering is a card game. To play, each player needs a deck with a minimum of 60 cards, and a 20 sided dice. A deck will be a mixture of land, creatures and spells. In the top right corner of the creature and spell cards, you will see a symbol showing how many and which type of land card you need to play them.

Three different kinds of land card

Set your dice to twenty. Draw seven cards each from your deck but do not show each other. Going first in a game of magic has some advantages so whoever goes first doesn't draw another card on their turn. Play a land card if you have one. If you have any cards that cost one land, have look to see if they would help you.

Two of my favourite creature cards

The aim of the game is to get your opponent down to zero on their dice. There are lots of rules that you need to learn. For example flying creatures cannot be blocked by non flying creatures without reach.

This is one of my favourite spells

You can have mixed coloured deck or a single coloured deck. There are five colours in Magic: black, blue, red, white and green.

Do you still want to play...?

Click here to find out more about Magic: The Gathering.

Field Mushrooms

Do not pick if not totally certain! 

Field mushrooms have pink gills (feathery things on the underside of the mushroom) but can be easily mistaken with Amanita Phalloides or death cap, but these have white gills, and Agaricus Xanthoderma or yellow stainer, which has pink gills but blooms yellow when bruised. Death cap can kill and yellow stainer will make you ill. 

When and where

I found this one in our garden this morning

Any time after rain but usually from early autumn to early spring. Pick before the gills turn brown. They prefer dark moist places but will still be plentiful out in open areas.

Cook

First peel the mushroom by taking hold of the lip of the skin. It should peel off in a few pieces. After that, pull off the stalk. If it has lots of little holes, discard the mushroom - the holes are maggot holes. 

You can see little holes where the stem was snapped off. I had to throw this one away

Fry in garlic and butter.

Other mushrooms

Usually we just pick and eat field and horse mushrooms, but in the autumn we found a Caesar mushroom. It is the only edible mushroom from the amanita family. It was delicious!