Interesting times

The veg garden is going nicely. We have tomatoes, onions, pumpkins, beetroot, cucumbers and lots and lots of lettuce growing well! We have also sowed carrots, coriander, turnip greens and broccoli raab (Anna tells me these last two are to be eaten like salad, mmmm, turnip salad!), and some of these have germinated already. In addition, we have carrots, beetroot, melons, courgette, basil, more coriander and more pumpkin seedlings growing in pots on the balcony. Feeling very green-fingered!

Don’t like to dwell on the weather, but there have been some nice atmospheric phenomena!

We took a trip to Mario and Izaskun’s place last week to say Hi. Mark and Chelsea, our friends from Mazo de Mon were volunteering there so we all met up for lunch and had a good chat. It was great to see everyone again, to hear plans (Mark and Chelsea are heading to the UK soon for a visit) and to see what has been going on at Mario and Izaskun’s project. Mark and Chelsea have been busy strimming and weeding; the veg garden looks much tidier and the fields have been tamed a little bit. One thing I have realised is that if you want a lot of land out here, you either need to get to love your strimmer, or get some livestock to keep the grass down!

At Mario's

Like 48.1% of the voting population of the UK we got a very nasty shock last Friday when we woke up to hear the UK has voted to leave the EU. We think this is a tragedy for many reasons, and of course it puts our own future here in Spain in some doubt. We are thinking to just get Spanish residency as soon as possible in the hope that it will stand us in good stead if we need to apply for citizenship in future. Just one more sad little result from an all round bad situation!

On a brighter note we went to look at some more land on Friday with our friendly local Estate Agents, they had managed to find us some good sized plots which could work pretty well. Now we just need to make sure we can afford it since our savings are only worth 90% of what they were on Thursday evening!

We finally made it out today for our second walk since arriving back at Olmares. We went for a three-peak challenge, climbing Peña Carazo (2012 m) then walking the ridgeline over El Carazuelo (2021 m) and El Castro (1995 m). It was a glorious day, sunny but quite cool up top, with some cloud to break up the UV! We found a colony of griffon vultures using the thermals generated by the ridge to soar over the landscape, occasionally dropping onto something dead and fighting each other for the tastiest cuts! Spectacular birds as always, and it was great to see them doing their job, clearing up the bodies, preventing disease and keeping the place tidy!