AZENHA DO PISÃO DOS PANOS

The only fact of being human has a huge impact on our environment. With the building of big cities and the humans being so far away from nature, man-caused environmental impacts increased to numbers never seen before.

We try to have an environmentally healthfull lifestyle making many little steps in order to minimize our impact and who knows maybe leave a positive ecological footprint?

We try not to bring inorganic material (paper, plastic, glass, metal, etc ...) home. When we need to do so we put to be recycled only what we cannot reuse.

Organic waste: All the kitchen, vegetable garden and animals waste goes to a compost box and in a few months is transformed into a high quality soil.

Paper: The soft paper (napkins, etc) goes to the compost box and the other paper is used to start the fire (in winter) and goes to the recycling in summer.

Plastics: The bags are used until they are rotten, then they go to recycling. The water bottles make a nice cover to the green house!

Milk boxes: We developed a "tissue" of boxes. After washing the boxes, they are fixed together in order to have a nice impermeable and thermic protector tissue! The main problem is that it only stands for one year when used outside.

We have a water hole to the house and a pit to water the garden.

The rain water collected by the roof is directed to a 200- litter-barrel. This water is used to make ciment, to water the plants, etc...

To warm the water we have 50 meters of black polietileno (watering tube) in the roof that gives us 100% of the hot water we need in summer! Unfortunatly during winter we use gaz. One of our dream would be to produce our own methane one day.

All the used water goes to a tank with two parts:
Fermentation tank - There goes the dirty water (from the toilet). In this tank are developed anaerobic bacterias that contribute to the fermentation of the organic products.
Filtering tank - The rest of the water comes to this tank that contains a sand/pebble filter.
If the filtering tank is full, there is an exit and if the water has the required quality it can be used to water the trees.

We have instaled 1100 W in Photovoltaic Energy. In order to avoid the environmental impact of the bateries, all the energy we produce is "injected" in the public electricity network.

The garden hasn't any kind of chemical fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide or any others "cides"!
It is fertilized with the compost and with the generous contribution of the horse!
The insects aren't controled. We try to spread the garden with diferent seeds and with a lot of weed around. With this "technique" the insects are spread and we favour the occurency of natural predators.
The snails are controled by hand (the chickens love them!).

We don't eat animals in our house, and we try to have the same attitude with our owns and with the wild animals.
We try to identify all the species (animal and vegetable) that we can find in our place. It is an infinite work and we had already 100 species. Click here (in Microsoft Word) to download the file with the scientifical and the portuguese common names.