Garden project 1: the water tank
In many traditional Portuguese houses the ground floor was often used for non-living purposes: keeping animals, storing foodstuffs, making wine etc. The house next to our rented one was full of their produce: onions hanging in plaits from wooden beams, potatoes supported in hessian sacks, wooden boxes full of eggs, buckets and buckets of dried beans; it was choc-a block with goodies and cobwebs. This house, Casa Lima, used the ground floor for making wine. It contained huge wooden barrels,…