Part of our big plan is to produce a lot of our own food, and if we end up hosting guests, producing enough to provide tasty dishes for them too. The reason for this is that we believe that the way food production is happening now is unsustainable. Global population is expected to grow to 9.7 billion people by 2050. Meat consumption is increasing as developing nations become richer and aspire (in some cases) to western diets. We don’t think the world can cope with that!

We think that the diet of the future is going to have to be mostly vegetarian, and that, where possible, we should be using the land we currently use for livestock to produce locally grown veggies.

Our personal contribution has been to cut our meat and dairy intake, which we started about a year ago. We basically eat meat now when someone else offers us leftovers. Going further, we wanted to reduce our consumption of plastic-packaged, airmile-heavy fruit and veg by growing them at home.

Richard and Suzanne kindly allowed us to use their dormant veg garden, so that was our first major obstacle out of the way. Jose Pedro, the handyman and erstwhile farmer lent us a rotivator (a small plough) to turn over the soil, as well as some other tools, and we were away!

Our first plot was approx. 4m x 6m below an existing but neglected strawberry bed. When we arrived it was all overgrown with weeds. Jose Pedro and I rotivated it, then we threw on a wheelbarrow of rotted cow manure, watered it and left it for a few days for the weed seeds we’d disturbed to germinate. After that we weeded again, hoping that we would have got rid of the worst of the weeds before planting.

I decided that since our plot was on a hill, we should have terraces. Anna wasn’t too bothered with that concept so I dug out the terraces all by myself. I used an azada, a short handled pull-hoe, which is the ubiquitous gardening tool in Spain and Portugal, and once you get used to it, an absolute winner. I assumed my back would be crippled within five minutes of picking it up, but they are actually far superior to spades for all tasks except digging deep holes in my opinion.

We had four terraces in our first plot. On the top one we planted carrots, broccoli raab (like sprouting broccoli) and turnip greens (you eat the leaves). The carrots were extremely patchy; not all of them germinated, and of the ones that did, we would occasionally find a sad, dried up stem which something had severed from the root. Suzanne tells us this is probably cutworms, it could also be mice. The remaining carrot tops are looking nice and bushy now, and we just harvested our first carrots! They are a bit smaller than supermarket ones, but very tasty! We have more carrot seedlings growing in planters to protect them from predators, and we will plant them out when it gets a little cooler. The turnip greens grew very fast for a few weeks, then went to seed (flowered) so we pulled them up and fed them to the chickens, getting 10% of the energy back in delicious eggs! The greens are a distant memory now, but we think they were very nice fried up in a bit of oil. The broccoli raabs are still growing, the flower spears haven’t developed yet, and if they don’t hurry up we will miss them while we’re back in the UK in September! Lots of things that we didn’t want to flower have done so because of the heat, so I find the broccoli raabs’ reluctance slightly annoying!

The next bed down contains lettuces, onions, basil, chillis and what we thought were ordinary cabbages but were excited to discover the other day are actually romanesco broccoli! The lettuces were awesome for quite a few weeks, we had two big bowls of salad per day from them. Now, lots have gone to seed and others are just going rotten and dying – we think it might be chafer grubs in the soil as we have dug a few out. We are replanting and hoping for an autumn crop!

The onions are brilliant so far. They have required very little maintenance and look like they will give a good crop, although we haven’t tried any yet. The basil went in a bit late, but is absolutely loving the long hot days – it has developed huge leaves which taste amazing! Our two chilli plants are doing well and have produced a lot of very hot fruit, we are just hoping it all ripens before it gets cold at night. The brocollis are just starting to show their heads so we are watching them with baited breath, hoping that they get big enough to eat before something else eats them for us!

The second bed contains tomatoes, with more onions and lettuces planted in between. The tomatoes have been relatively high maintenance. We were told to watch out for fungus so we have sprayed them with a copper spray as well as watering them separately from everything else and making sure the sprinkler doesn’t get the leaves wet. Some of the leaves have become diseased and we have had to keep an eye on them and cut off any bad ones. We also spent a lot of time at first pinching out extra stems to stop the plants getting too unruly. For all the hassle though, the tomatoes are delicious – the best we’ve ever had. We have a lot of fruits ripening on the plants now and it looks like we will get a good main crop in a few days.

The third bed has beetroots as well as more lettuces and onions. We got purple beetroot seedlings from the market in Potes, which turned out to produce quite bitter roots – they are nice cooked but we can’t eat them raw. Anna also got some golden and albino beetroots from The Real Seed Catalogue which have a much more delicate flavour and have been delicious sliced thinly in salad. They are also a lot lower risk when it comes to staining clothes / furniture!

In the fourth bed we planted five tiny plants which we thought were pumpkins but turned out to be marrows. They grew super fast, quickly covering their own bed and beginning to invade the surrounding ones. They have produced loads of massive marrows, which we now have to find a way to eat, or give away. Apparently the locals feed them to the pigs over winter, but since we are without pigs, we will have to look up some recipes!

A few weeks after planting up our first plot we decided our ambitions were bigger, so we decided to develop the other side of the garden as well. This side was similarly overgrown. The first thing we did was put in some more lettuces, just loosening enough soil to plant the seedlings. They have never done as well as their neighbours on the rotivated side, we aren’t sure if this is because the ground is too compacted or they didn’t get any fertiliser (or both), but we definitely saw a difference. We then planted coriander and a few cucumbers alongside the lettuces, but this time we dug out bigger holes and made sure we mixed in a fair bit of manure to give them a chance. These plants have all done well, the cucumbers are really prolific and the coriander grew very strongly through several harvests before going to seed in the dry weather.

We had been reading about no-dig gardening, which is basically where, instead of digging and turning the soil, you use a thick layer of compost or rotted manure to both kill off underlying weeds and create a bed for planting. Apart from saving you the trouble of digging, this is meant to be good because it allows the underlying soil to retain its structure, along with any beneficial fungi that are in there. We decided to give it a bash so we built two more beds filled to a few inches depth with rotted cow manure and left the underlying soil intact. In went cucumbers, beetroots, more carrots, courgettes, melons, pumpkins and beans. So far everything has been really good. The one issue we had early on was that the manure was too coarse for the seedlings and didn’t hold water very well, so the plants were loose and dried out easily. If we did it again we would use older manure and make sure it was broken up finer. The beans have done really well and we are harvesting every other day at the moment. The cucurbits (melons, courgettes, pumpkins and cucumbers) are all “heavy feeders” and have grown really well; we discovered today even the melons are producing fruit! The beetroots and carrots are a bit smaller and less tasty than their compatriots on the ploughed side; we found out after we’d planted them that carrots don’t do well in very rich soil, producing a lot of leaves and not much root. That has certainly been our experience.

Overall the garden has been a great success for us. Almost everything grew well, and it is extremely satisfying sitting down to a lunch that you produced yourself, especially when it tastes so good!

We have learned loads about gardening that will inform our future project. The main thing is that anyone can do it given the time and inclination and a bit of investment for tools. The next lesson is that time invested up front pays off later with better crops and less maintenance. We will definitely need to plan more thoroughly for a bigger garden and take into account crop rotations and disease control (since we started from scratch this year we didn’t have to worry about diseases built up in the soil from previous years’ crops).

We weren’t sure how we would take to gardening, but we have both really enjoyed it so far, and we would encourage anyone who is interested to grab a fork (or an azada!) and start cultivating! We would absolutely recommend The Real Seed Catalogue (http://realseeds.co.uk/index.html) to get your seeds. These guys provide an amazing range of seeds, which are all open-pollinated (meaning they are not hybrids and if you want to, you can save the seeds from your crop and plant them next season). They are based in Wales and have also gardened in Spain so they are well-placed to advise on varieties that will grow well in British or Spanish climates.

We have tried to save some of our seeds this year; we have courgettes and pumpkins. We will see how we go, and maybe expand our efforts next season.

By volume, our diet has come largely from the veg garden over the last few weeks. We’ve grown strawberries, beans, broccoli, courgettes, cucumbers, lettuce and other salad crops, coriander, basil, onions, carrots, cabbage, chillis, tomatoes, pumpkins, marrows, beetroots and melons. Richard and Suzanne already had several fruit trees here giving figs, plums, greengages, apples, mulberries, hazelnuts and pears. They also have five chickens which lay too many eggs for them to eat, so we are having some of those too, but before we left the UK we weren’t eating eggs and we could manage fine without them. We didn’t try to grow staples like wheat or chickpeas this season (the learning curve is steep enough already), although we are keen to try sweet potatoes and perhaps chickpeas next year.

Fruit and veg production is going to tail off in the coming months, and we are not able to preserve much at the moment, although we have made loads of mulberry and elderberry jam! Anna has just ordered a canner (an expensive pressure cooker) so we will soon be able to preserve loads of other fruit and veg and keep our surplus production for consumption during winter and spring.

We are still buying most of our calories. We buy chickpeas, cereal, flour, bread, beer and wine, margarine, chocolate, citrus fruits and oil as well as salt and spices. We’re nowhere near self-sufficient, and for the effort it would take, we’re not sure we want to be at the moment. What we hope we have done however is massively reduce our carbon footprint and some of our other environmental impacts We are no longer responsible for having lettuces wrapped in plastic and flown in from all over the world. Our biggest victory is cutting out meat. That alone over the last twelve months has apparently saved approx. 2 tonnes of CO2 equivalent between us. In terms of fertiliser, we are very lucky where we are because there are heaps of cow dung going spare all over the place. Of course in our ideal world there wouldn’t be heaps of cow dung everywhere because there would be far fewer cows, but we could use other methods like growing nitrogen fixing ground cover like borage or clover.

This season was about testing out our ideas and seeing if we could hack the work involved. We have been extremely fortunate in that Richard and Suzanne have provided so much input and advice, as well as providing us accommodation, land and tools in return for our willing but haphazard assistance with their own gardens and odd-jobs. Jose Pedro has also been really nice, lending us tools, helping out and giving useful advice. We really appreciate how lucky we are to have made such good friends! We still have loads of challenges ahead: finding and buying a property, navigating the planning permission minefield, working out a viable business model and eventually welcoming guests. So much to think about, but at least it’s good to know that the earth will provide if we are willing to put in the work!

– Dave

 

There was a very beautiful full moon this week. The moon rises right over the old woman, and there were some small clouds which made for a wonderful view and interesting light effects with the clouds throwing moon shadows! After the thunderstorms a few days ago, and the daily treat of sunrise over the hills I’ve decided that our little balcony has the best view in Liebana!

We went on another hike; a short guided walk up a small knoll, from which we could once again see the tantalising boundary peaks of the National Park; we also got a great view of the plot of land we were thinking of buying. The guide explained about the landscape and the local economy in Spanish as we went along, we found we could understand quite a lot of what was said, so that was encouraging. The rest of the group were either Spanish or French; we tried a little Spanish but I ended up talking in English about Brexit, much to Anna’s disgust.

The other big news was Anna found a cricket / grasshopper (let’s say grasshopper in honour of David Carradine) on our balcony.

The day after the walk we went to the Estate Agent to see Francine and Veronica. They had some bad news for us. The land we were interested in buying is owned by two cousins. One live here in the Liebena and is keen to sell. The other lives in Santander, and is prepared to sell, but for an outrageous price. It seems there is little chance of negotiating to something reasonable from their starting point, so we are back to the drawing board. A bit annoying considering we initially hoped to have somewhere by September, but not an unusual situation here apparently. Richard and Suzanne have been in the process of buying a ruin in the village for six years and counting!

The garden continues to grow and develop, although we don’t have any pictures this week, we will remedy in the next post. Anna’s mum and Dad arrive tomorrow for a few days’ holiday so there is excitement afoot after a fairly quiet week!

– Dave

We arrived in Alentejo in Southern Portugal to a landscape of huge grass pastures liberally sprinkled with cork oaks and wild flowers lighting up the journey with waves of colour. The sky was a rich blue and the temperature went past 30°C and kept on going. We were trying not to turn the air con on – our car is already an environmental disaster zone – but we couldn’t help ourselves, it was roasting!

We were in Alentejo visiting Jacquie and Neal who are friends of Anna’s parents. Eight years ago they created a project to protect nesting loggerhead turtles from hunters on the island of Sal in Cape Verde. After almost a decade of battling hunters, disinterested  Government officials and hostile residents, SOS Tartarugas lives on, but Jacquie and Neal have decided they need a break so have come to live the good life in Portugal. Sounds like a plan to us!

We arrived at the end of a very long and bumpy track to be greeted by Jacquie, Neal and four excited dogs, Pluto, Kuka, Monty and Mama. They are all dogs rescued from the streets, or hellish Midnight Express style dog pounds on Sal. They have gone from emaciated and terrified to well fed, energetic and boisterous – these dogs have won the lottery of life!

The property the guys have bought is big – 7 hectares of meadows and woodland, with two olive groves, an orchard and a big veg garden thrown in. There is a beautiful slow river with deep clear pools  running round three sides of the land. A couple of chickens were also part of the deal, more on those later! The lady who had the property before hadn’t done much to manage it over the last few years, so things have gone to seed a bit. We planned to help Jacquie and Neal get back on track!

Our main job was to re-locate the chicken range. Chickens weren’t envisaged in the plan, but the vendor insisted they either stayed at the property or be summarily executed, so the guys gave in and inherited them. The old run covered one of the best views from the house so we helped move it. This turned out to be quite a lot of work, removing rolls and rolls of rusty old wire, pulling out concreted fence posts and relocating everything, all the while keeping one eye on the chooks and the other on the dogs in case they got any ideas. Eventually we finished and were very proud of ourselves until we came out one lunchtime to find the rooster had hopped over the fence we’d just built and was hanging out in his favourite old haunt. It took quite a while to get him back through the gate, which was annoying having just found out he could hop the fence with ease! Having said that, the new vista looked good!

One of the cool things about the property is that there is a borehole (free water) which, apart from supplying the house, supplies a drip-irrigation ring going to the orchard and the veg garden. This means that trees and plants all over the property can be watered just by turning on one tap, and the drip system also saves a lot of water – Neal said a neighbour had recently installed a drip system and gone from using 10,000 L per day to 2,000 L – an 80% reduction! The problem was that everything was covered in waist high grass and we didn’t know how the system was laid out, or really whether it still worked. There were lots of bits of loose hose lying around – was a working irrigation ring just a pipe dream? The solution as it so often is, was a strimmer . After a day of petrol powered destruction I was able to dig out the whole orchard irrigation system. Once we’d found the main (satisfyingly large) tap we turned it on to the exciting sound of high pressure water rushing through the pipes. As we watched the orchard we started seeing jets of water spurting up all over the place – more of a large scale ornamental fountain than a drip system, but it works and with a few tweaks Neal will be able to water the orchard from his sun-lounger!

One hot afternoon we went to visit a family who are just starting out on their sustainable living dream. Mica and Sandra and their two kids have bought four hectares of land at the end of another very long track! The land is on a big slope so they had to get a bulldozer in to chew into the rock and create a plateau. On this they have built a small wooden cabin with outdoor toilet, shower and kitchen. Mica is now busy building a garden to feed them all. He said the plateau has actually come in handy. It is made of the rock fragments that the bulldozer chewed out of the hillside and is actually quite easy to dig. It is very infertile of course, so when he wants to plant something he digs a hole, fills it with topsoil from the bottom of the valley, then plants into that. Seems to be working so far, everything is coming up vigorously! We would love to come back and see how things are looking in five years’ time!

We were with Jacquie and Neal for just under two weeks. It was an amazing time, characterised by work in the morning, long lunches, then afternoons spent chilling in the shade, going for a walk or a dip in the river. It was so hot when the sun was out – the first beer of the evening always went down a treat! The river around the property was a massive benefit. There was loads of wildlife to be spotted or speculated about. We saw mallard eggs and turtles as well as otter scat – an exciting prospect for Jacquie and Neal! A river has definitely been added to our wish list, which keeps getting bigger and bigger!

One clear night Neal set up the telescope out and we spent a fascinating couple of hours stargazing. First we focused on Jupiter, which was high in the sky, affording a good view relatively unobstructed by atmospheric interference. Once we’d found our planet we sharpened up the focus to see a small orb featuring a shaded stripe through the middle – the famous colour bands across the gaseous surface. We could also see three of Jupiter’s moons orbiting their planet as they have for billions of years. This view, first scientifically recorded by Galileo, allowed him to prove that celestial objects orbited things other than Earth, and was the first real scientific challenge to the theory that Earth was at the centre of the Universe.

After Jupiter we moved on to Saturn. Neal set up the focus and I looked through the eyepiece to see a bright white planet with an extremely distinct white band around it – the rings of Saturn just sitting there right in front of my face! I’ve never actually seen them before and it was a really awesome. I guess I always assumed they were there since I learned about them as a child, and I’ve seen plenty of satellite pictures and artists impressions, but I never imagined what they would look like from here. A weird, wonderful and VERY FAR AWAY neighbour! Thanks Neal for re-awakening our awareness of the Universe!

It seems like the guys have landed in their paradise, but we are still on the hunt for ours. After two wonderful weeks it was time to hit to road again and head North, back to the Picos de Europa. We had a little stop to make on the way though…

– Dave