I grew up on the fringes of a small market town in southern England at a time when growing all our own fruit and vegetables, keeping chickens, wasting nothing, and living in a house without central heating on which we did all our own maintenance was a perfectly 'normal' and natural way to live. Nobody thought twice about it.

I studied ecology as part of a biology degree at university in the 1970s, but didn't finish. Something essential was missing. I had no sense of what it was at the time, only that being directed into ever more narrow academic specialisation felt instinctively 'wrong' and the subject had lost its juice. How could something so lifeless successfully model life?

The sense of a mismatch between our models of the world and the reality of it kept growing as I went on to work in a number of different areas in the UK, Europe and the United States, and the discomfort it caused drove me into exploring a wide range of subjects looking for answers. That led me into training in and practicing natural medicine for a decade. When I eventually came across permaculture, there was a recognition and an immediate 'Yes!'.

Moving from Scotland with my 3 children to practice permaculture and natural building on a quinta (a smallholding or homestead) in Portugal in 2010 involved, for me, stripping much of that lifetime's learning, experience and discovery down to an ever more simple and practical conception of life. As the building and renovation work on the quinta comes closer to completion, I will be working to pass that on through the project's website and in residential courses here.

A note on updates

Most of my updates will be posted to my project page which is now up and running, so if you want to follow what I'm doing, you'll get more news following Quinta do Vale. Hope to see you there! Happy growing!