Notes from our farmstead #41

The Spring before Winter

The seasons here are weird. Although the tilt of the Earth’s axis at this latitude clearly stipulates a four season, summer-waning-into-winter/winter-waking-up-to-summer ebb and flow of growth and decay, somehow Spain manages to sneak in an extra little last-hurrah Spring some time around now, where everything bursts once more into life. Flora and fauna are opportunistic here: after the September/October rains, they seize the moment. Temperatures are still warm enough for plants to put on some decent growth, flowers bloom everywhere and any chance of a killing frost is still probably a couple of months ahead.

Late October here on the east coast of Spain

Soon it will really feel like winter. The fields will be bare and the trees leafless, the sun will be so low that we’re always squinting and shielding our eyes when we’re outside, the delicious smell of olive woodsmoke will waft through the air from our stove, and we’ll have to be conservative with our lighting before around 10am when the sun’s a little higher in the sky and the batteries are beginning to charge. But for now we are enjoying the last wave of lush abundance. After such a dry and harsh summer we’re very grateful for it. We took the opportunity to strim the whole farm (a much nicer, less dusty job when the foliage is lush and green as opposed to brittle, dry stems), made bales of hay for the donkey and planted some new trees whilst the ground was soft.

Make hay while the sun shines, as they say

We spent a week in the UK at the start of the month for a wedding, which was lovely, and was the longest trip we’ve made together with Santi. Oh, and it also happened to be the first time Mauro had returned to the UK since leaving four years ago. One thing about living abroad is that when you go back, you really appreciate the mundane little things that you used to take for granted: Waterstones, BBC iPlayer, takeaway curry, pubs, rivers with water in, abbeys, fish and chips, millionaire’s shortbread, cream teas, autumn leaves, good ale, charity shops, coffee shops, farm shops, marmite, Bakewell tart, talc-free baby powder, contactless buses, mossy walls, Fox’s biscuits, you get the idea… As we’ve said before, we really hope we can start a tradition of making a long annual visit in August, as of next year. By the way, do you know someone who’d like a free holiday house sitting for us!? 😉

A week in the UK

When we got back we had lots of enthusiasm for new projects - or, rather, working through our list of open and pending projects and just finally trying to get a bunch of loose ends tied up. To this end, we actually made the quite dramatic decision that Mauro would leave his job. You didn’t see that one coming, did you?! We figured that this coming autumn/winter season is the perfect time to work as much as we can on the farm, getting it into a more manageable state and trying to get some big projects like the natural pool and the shower rebuild underway. With our current situation we just cannot seem to make any headway on anything major. Even a relatively small thing like the chicken food forest seems to be taking us months. It just wasn’t realistic to expect anything major to get done if we carried on like this and if we’re being honest, by the time Santi is a little older and maybe at school or preschool there will hopefully be another baby so this is just the way life is looking, forever, really. We’re never going to have our hands less full. SO: there was only one solution. We spend 6 months or so now, penny pinching and seeing how far we get, getting by with YouTube and what we’ve managed to save since the disastrous double-whammy of roof renovations + emergency eye surgery (we were never able to reclaim that money, sadly) wiped us out last year. And when we need to, Mauro will move to contracting, meaning he can work more seasonally and hopefully take longer breaks between contracts to spend certain seasons working on the farm instead. We don’t know if it will work but we are happy to give it a go because something had to change, if we want to make our dreams here more of a reality before we reach retirement age!

Hopefully this change means we can also make better videos, maybe moving back to weekly, we’ll have to see. And most importantly, hopefully it means we can get the farm super comfortable for guests and really easy to look after so that we can welcome a farm sitter for next August and not have to spend 3 weeks training them on the various quirks and workarounds we currently have to deal with to sustain life here. I’m also excited for Mauro to finally experience the kind of life I’ve been living here for the last couple of years, because he deserves it. Granted, things look different for me now we’ve got Santi, but I’ve been lucky enough to have my own schedule, set my own goals, follow my own interests and figure out my own priorities for the last couple of years with no boss but myself, knowing that my hard work directly impacts our family and improves this plot of land. I’ve had the time to take part in community building events and activities, drop everything (what is there to drop?) on a random Tuesday morning to go mushroom picking or help a friend fix a roof, collect firewood, chase after a lost dog, learn how to point in lime, shell almonds, etc. etc. or just drink coffee in the sun and enjoy life. So now it’s Mauro’s turn for a bit of that, too. And none of that stuff costs money (okay, maybe €1.50 for the coffee).

He’s spotty under his wooly coat!

Unfortunately we still haven’t made any more progress on our chicken food forest as we are waiting for the excavator to come and dig the pond, but we have been busy with other animal housing issues. We moved our donkey to his new field and fenced about a quarter of it (which gives him a big space to begin exploring and munching through - when he’s done we’ll extend the fencing further). We’ve also had to build a new shelter and food storage area over there which isn’t completely done yet but we’re hoping to get the roof on this weekend before we have a bit more rain forecast. Now also felt like the perfect time to get our old workshare group restarted, which seemed to have dwindled to a very rare event over the last year or so. We’ve only done one session so far but Mauro’s only been off work for 3 days so hopefully we can keep the weekly momentum going. We trialled going along with Santi and seeing how it went and it was actually great. He had a nap in the carrier, had fun exploring a whole new kitchen’s-worth of baby-accessible items, ate lunch with us and by the time we got home he was zonked.

We managed to fix our snail problem which we mentioned last month, by the way. Actually it probably wasn’t snails this time. We found a cracked joint in the compression piping with was letting the pump draw in air, and managed to fix it. In the process, we also finally connected up our house water to the storage tanks up the hill, meaning that we can get our pressurised water either from a house-level tank which we pump (using a little DC pump connected to our batteries) or gravity fed from the tanks up the hill. This just means we have some redundancy in the future should the pump have an issue again, or vice versa, if the tanks up the hill are empty for some reason. We also mentioned last month that we were hoping to sow a field with barley and alfalfa. Well, I did that, and managed to time it really well as it’s rained on and off since then and the barley seems to be growing nicely. There’s no sign of the alfalfa so I’m glad I only bought a couple of kilos and didn’t waste money on a 25kg sack, but it might come up eventually. If not, I guess maybe ants ate the seeds…

Broadcasting was really fun. Give me some more fields to sow, please!

My final totally unnecessary but very much wanted purchase before we begin tightening the purse strings was three new citrus trees: a grapefruit and two limes. We have oranges, tangerines and lemons long-established on our land and bearing fruit annually, but we haven’t managed to get any new trees successfully planted over the years. They keep dying in the winter, even with protection, so last year we experimented with growing a grapefruit in a pot near the house where it is kept warm by the radiant heat of the thick, south-facing stone walls. Gradually we will move it further away to more exposed areas year on year, so it can toughen up. Maybe after 3 years we’ll plant it out, we’ll see. It seems to be doing well, though, because it’s got about 8 big grapefruit on it this year. Since the initial experiment seemed to work, I wanted to extend it to a few more trees, hence the new purchases.

Citrus nursery (plus avocado)

So that’s about it for this month! Thank you for reading :)

Harriet 🌻