News from our farmstead #37

A strange anniversary

An advance warning: occasionally I use this newsletter to muse on life matters (see one year without a job) rather than update you on our homestead progress and I have a feeling this might be one of those issues. We’re now three years in to this newsletter and there are nearly 2,000 of you reading it now which is crazy to me. Thank you for being here - and if you’re one of the folks who religiously opens this newsletter but doesn’t usually comment… I’d love to hear from you. What do you like reading about? What would you like to hear more about? How did you get here? Should we include more Tofu pictures?

Don’t forget to stay hydrated!

Anyway, let’s get a few things out of the way first. How are the raised beds going?

Great, obviously. I’m still ahead of my totally self-imposed and meaningless schedule which I’m taking extremely seriously, which means we are almost done with July’s bed and also got a bonus bed built, in an old bathtub. One added benefit of the raised beds, which I’m dotting around all over the place, is that it gives me a chance to see what grows best in very different conditions. The main garden was mostly fully exposed to the sun and although things like trees, vines and walls did provide some variation in conditions, in the summer the whole area was just hot. With our raised beds, I’ve been able to tuck the bathtub right under a strawberry tree where it’s permanently shaded and I’m hoping his might be the solution to being able to grow lettuce all year round. So far the results are looking promising! 🤞

Late planted lettuces are still too small to be visible above the straw but they are alive!

We’ve also been working a lot on the kitchen and I am working my way through a long list of jobs to get it “completely finished”. I’ve managed to salvage a set of cupboards which I truly believed were beyond help, so I’m very happy about that. Were they worth the incredible amount of time an effort it took me to get them looking half decent, or should I just have hung a curtain in front of them 6 months ago and been done with it? Definitely they were worth it! I’m stubborn and I wanted cupboards and I’ve got cupboards. As for drawers… don’t ask me about the drawers.

A miracle in action

In another self-imposed but less meaningless deadline, I’m determined to get an oven installed in time to bake Santi a cake for his 1st birthday at the end of July, and in order to do that, certain other things need doing, such as moving a bunch of electrics around and finishing the backsplash, so we’re working on those things too. We also tiled the remaining areas of the house which weren’t tiled, rendered the remaining un-rendered wall on the front of the house, continued on the massive tidy up job around the house, finally emptied our main deposit, saved the fish, subsequently buried the fish (they didn’t like their new home, hence the bathtub becoming our bonus raised bed), hung some fly screens, totally reorganised the pantry and started work on a set of steps from the car down to the house. So… we’ve been busy.

Rendering

And in the midst of all of this, a strange anniversary went by…

The 12th June marked a year since I first stepped foot in Castellón General Hospital, where I was being admitted with early labour contractions at 24 weeks pregnant. A weird thing to commemorate, given all the other things that have happened this year, but actually this 12th June felt very circuitous. I was in fact back in hospital myself for a scheduled surgery to remove my thyroid after discovering the early stages of medullary thyroid cancer, caused by a genetic condition that had only been picked up in the first place thanks to Santi’s own health issues shortly after he was born.

Since getting pregnant - or rather, since deciding to try and get pregnant - sometimes it’s felt like everything has been going wrong in our lives. One thing led to another, and other things decided to happen simultaneously too, like Mauro’s retina detachment, the drought, etc. Overall, I’d had this slightly foreboding feeling for a while that the stars must have shifted at some point around 2022, and since then the universe had booted us into the playing field of “unlucky” people. Not that anything we’ve had to contend with is exceptional, but it just seemed like a lot at once and it has been a (probably very necessary) reminder that nobody is immune from life’s knocks and bruises forever. I guess, after many years of feeling unusually blessed in life, and taking that for granted, my overall outlook was beginning to shift. I noticed myself sometimes looking at other people, living (what appeared to me, on the outside) like carefree, straightforward lives, with their glowing pregnancies, healthy babies and conventional, working houses and thinking “wow, you don’t know how lucky you are.” It wasn’t envy; it was just this weird feeling like we were living in a different dimension to everyone else.

Of course, everyone has their fair share of battles and demons. Lots of people have an unfair share. Maybe the problem is that they’re usually kept quiet, swept under the rug. It’s easy to assume, from the outside, that everyone else is doing just fine. That’s why I’ve wanted to be upfront about the things we’ve been through lately and not just share a highlight reel. I still find myself guilty of putting a positive spin on most things I post - I rarely feel like picking up the camera or writing an Instagram caption on a bad day, but if I wanted to be truly honest with you all, maybe I should. But this recent saga genuinely has left me feeling more positive, almost as though it’s made everything else make a little more sense. I know this is just my brain trying to make sense of random, unlucky stuff, but I’m fine with that. That’s kind of what a brain is for, right?

I don’t feel like we’ve been unlucky any more. In fact, the opposite. If it hadn’t been for everything that happened this year, I very much doubt I’d have ever been diagnosed with my genetic condition until much later, when it might have been too late. There’s so much more I could say too, about how thankful I’m feeling for the way so many things have played out, which could have played out differently. Overall, I’m in a surprisingly good place, and now 2 weeks post-op I’m also feeling much better physically too. In fact, I’ve just realised that the permanent twinge in my neck which I’ve had ever since Santi was born seems to have disappeared since the surgery, too. Maybe they tweaked some things around in there while they were at it…

Apparently they used a kind of suture that doesn’t leave any scar at all!

Taking a break from filming whilst we were inundated with medical appointments also gave me a chance to see how I could be doing things a bit differently. It was refreshing to be able to just focus on what needed doing, and doing it at the natural pace required to do the job right, without worrying about getting it finished for a video (or choosing the project with a video in mind in the first place). I feel like, despite literally having an appointment every day some weeks, we got more done over the last month than we have in a long time and I felt generally less rushed, like life was somewhat less chaotic and I was spinning fewer plates in my mind. So, I’ll definitely be trying to take some of what I’ve learned forward into the future and I’m very much in the mindset of “when a video happens, it happens” rather than holding myself to a strict weekly schedule. Having said that, I am planning more shorter, Patreon-only content and I’m excited to start sharing that.

Welcome to Santi’s book club

We’ve also been trying to make a point of enjoying life a bit more. So much of our free time and energy has been focussed on the renovation, for so long, we’re really out of practice at allowing ourselves to do anything else. Mauro hasn’t had time for a hobby for God knows how long, and 95% of our trips out of the farm are to buy materials, go to the hospital or do laundry. I wish I was exaggerating! It’s hard to break these habits and I won’t lie and say we’ve suddenly completely reevaluated our lives and how we spend our time, but we are intentionally trying to say “yes” to more whims, stay off screens when we’re not working and spend more time with books and each other. With that in mind, we’re taking a short break to Rome (a bit of a babymoon re-do) next week, we’ve been going for lots of spontaneous ice creams in the bar, walks in new places and Mauro’s getting back into ceramics and making some nice pots and bowls for our almost-finished kitchen.

So, that’s the last month. Maybe next month I’ll be able to declare the kitchen fully finished! We’ll see…

Until then,

Harriet, Mauro and Santi