News from our farmstead #42

A new pace... and new faces!

Sometimes I sit down to write this newsletter and I really have to rack my brain to think of any successes to impart, or even recall what we’ve done over the last few weeks. It feels like I’m often explaining away our apparent lack of progress (too hot, too wet, trips away, hospital appointments, etc) and promising high and mighty things for next month instead, which of course never materialise on time.

Well, for once it actually does feel like we have some real progress to share. Things feel like they’re coming together and moving at an exciting pace, and of course this is because Mauro is currently off work (as I mentioned in the previous issue). Things didn’t start out so well, though, as it happens. Perhaps you remember how, when I left my software job two years ago, immediately after becoming free and ready to jump head first into work I was rained off for the entire month and basically had to shelter indoors with no electricity, moping around by candlelight until I could finally get outside again. Funnily enough, the same thing happened when Mauro left his job. Well, it’s not funny at all - perhaps you saw, at the end of October, the news of the terrible flooding in Valencia. Although we are far from the city and inland/upstream enough not to experience any flooding ourselves, we did also receive record breaking rainfall over the course of about two weeks. The minor damage and inconvenience caused in our area was nothing in the face of the complete devastation and loss of life that areas of Valencia and nearby towns have seen, so I’m not complaining - but it certainly added some drama to our lives. When it rains in our area of the world, it rains hard. It’s not the kind of rain you can dress for and work through. All you can do it stand at the window and look out in disbelief, and pray that you didn’t leave anything valuable lying around because it’s surely washed away to sea, never to be seen again. That’s when you’re not bailing out a bucket somewhere! Days without sun also mean days without power, unless we can go and charge our backup batteries up at the house of some on-grid friends. It can even be difficult to go out anywhere to escape the dark, damp house because it’s just dangerous to drive in this kind of weather, and you never know which roads are going to be washed out. I’d never seen or heard rain like we had over those days, it was really something.

One of the ramblas about a week after the heaviest rain. Not at it’s fullest, but still pretty impressive.

Anyway, once the storms finally subsided and we’d dried all our towels and aired out our house, we could begin to get back to normality. Last month we finally completed the last lingering bits of paperwork in the purchase of our new additional 4,500 square meter plot of land which we’d been embroiled in buying for the last year, which was a huge relief. Not least because we’d actually begun work on it already, to get a head start! There was a lot of rubbish and dead wood that needed clearing, so we continued on that, and then began the task of fencing the area and preparing it for our donkey Moses. The fencing took quite a while, and I only did about a quarter of the entire available space. Thankfully it doesn’t need a fence running round the whole perimeter as it has 2+ meter tall terrace walls to keep donkeys from escaping. We then began work on a shelter which as I write this is almost finished, minus some guttering. But even more exciting than all of that - we found Moses some friends! In the span of just one week, we met, agreed to adopt, and welcomed two new female donkeys to our farm! Rarely has any project I’ve been involved in gone so smoothly. They seem to have settled in well and although the two females are clearly more bonded to one another than to Moses, tolerance of one another has been increasing daily and we’re at the point of where we’re even seeing some affectionate nibbles going on between them!

Mariola saying hello

And there’s more good news! The old garden, which I abandoned whilst pregnant and had barely set foot in since, is making a comeback! In just a few days I was able to recover a number of beds, plant a bazillion broad beans, a couple of new trees, artichoke, spinach, leeks, chard, celery and other winter bits and bobs. I was sort of dreading getting back in this garden, expecting it to be an impossible job to bring it back to its former glory, but it turns out that I’ve got so used to the slow, slow building work we’ve been mired in for the last year I’d forgotten how quickly a bit of weed whacking and compost scattering can transform a space. I’ve also set myself some limits. We’re not having 22 beds like we did before. We’ll have… I don’t know, but not 22. Most of the area will be given over to trees. The garden is easy to maintain now, in winter, whilst it rains occasionally and growth is slow, but a big garden really is an enormous amount of work in spring and summer when you have to water it and keep the crazy growth under control. And then deal with all the food coming out of it. In fact, I didn’t actually think I’d return to this garden whilst Santi was small and I planned to be growing in pots and raised beds only, but it turns out all my raised beds are quite shaded - ideal for summer, but now in the winter, some things are looking a bit stunted and I realised I need some garden space right out in the sun, too.

I was pleased to find the soil looking really healthy, another reason not to give up on this garden after all the work that’s already gone into it.

The other reason it’s taken me so long to tidy up the garden is that building work always seems more urgent, and there’s always building work to do, but now Mauro’s free we’re trying a bit of a change of roles. I’m the donkey and garden girl, Mauro’s now the builder. I need to feel free from the pressure to keep building so I can actually get back in the garden guilt-free and grow food for us, which is the main thing we’re here to do, after all. I also need the time to work properly with the donkeys. I feel like Moses was kind of “on hold” this last year, whilst we were trying to get the land situation sorted, and I didn’t spend the time with him which I should have done. I should have grazed him more, worked more on his lead skills, taken him on more walks, worked on his phobia of spray bottles. Santi was my excuse, of course, but actually it’s perfectly possible to work with the donkeys whilst Santi’s in the carrier, now he can go on my back. It’s just a lot easier now we have a bigger space with easier access and fields I can separate off so that I can work with one donkey at a time. The two new girls, Trini and Mariola, are really lovely and it’s such a lot of fun to go out walking with them. The great thing about having three is we can take one out at a time and the others have each other for company so they don’t complain (too much). Of course, three donkeys also produce three times the amount of manure, and I already had a backlog of donkey compost from Moses, so I need to start gardening again so I can shift some of it! And all the weeds that are coming out of the garden are being hugely enjoyed by the donkeys so it all works out nicely, in a circular way.

what goes in comes out… goes in… and comes out again

Anyway, enough about donkeys or this newsletter will never end. Our final exciting news is that we have started the total rebuild of our shower area. Our old shower was my first DIY/building project and although it does technically work, it’s ugly, dark, mould-prone and the drainage is hit-and-miss (I think something sporadically lives in the pipe, I can’t think of any other explanation). I know we could do so much better now. The project will involve converting an old shed into the new shower/toilet, reclaiming the old bathroom as a storage room, and building a new covered outdoors area for utilities. We started by laying a concrete slab (our first one!) and building two enormous and majestic pillars to support a roof. As I write this we have a carload of bricks waiting to be unpacked tomorrow morning as we can continue with step three, which is to rebuild the dodgy shed walls. Luxurious showering facilities are on the horizon, as is a washing machine, after 3.5 years without one! Good times are coming, folks!

as I said, majestic

So, that’s it for this month,

See you soon, Harriet 🐴