A SELF’ISH LIFE
Growing up in the sixties, some of my earliest memories were of my Dad out in the garden on a Sunday morning, doing the heavy work, digging beds over, under my mother’s careful instruction.
She was the boss – and woe betide anyone who played football too near to her greenhouse – the font of all things in the garden.
WE HAD A traditional front garden – with plenty of flowers and structural planting whatever that was, but I was always more interested in the ‘goings on’ in the back – raspberry canes, runner beans and all sorts of (then) weird and wonderful vegetables which somehow made it to the kitchen table in various guises.
Fast forward 40+ years to my current situation, armed with my mother’s most trusty tome, The Complete Food Garden by John Seymour, I started to explore the possibilities of growing a significant proportion of my family’s food requirements.
We all know that it tastes better if you grow it yourself, but with just a short walk from the veg patch to the kitchen, it is immeasurably healthier for you.
Coupled with all the various tactics used to artificially maintain the freshness of produce,
I am sure that you only need three of the so-called Daily Five portions of fruit and vegetables if you have not bought them from a shop.
Here in ‘rural Spain’ I am convinced moreover that the vegetables we buy from the village shops (not the supermarkets) have less food kilometres in them than the similar offerings in the UK but nothing beats the freshness of your own produce, with no sprays or pesticides in sight.
Surely this must be better for you.
With this in mind, we started off slowly in our first year, with the obligatory tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers sowed religiously in early spring. We decided that the UK planting seasons had to go out of the window, and plumped for buying whatever seedlings were available from the co-operativa.
If the locals were planting them, then it had to be the right time to plant them!
Armed with our small successes of the first year – lovely tomatoes which ran out by the end of August, we decided to build three deep beds (which were increased to five by the end of the summer) and grow a little more and of a greater variety.
As we now had chickens, we could incorporate their waste straw in our compost heap which dramatically increased the fertility of the soil and led to greater results.
This year we had twice as many varieties and our tomato season lasted longer. Apparently the secret is to carry on planting until the end of May/June and they will continue to thrive in October.
Not quite what we were used to in the sunny UK.
THIS YEAR WE have expanded again, digging over an additional fifty square metre plot with the aim to grow as much vegetables as we can and preserve, in various ways, the extra we will produce.
To grow this much, we need our own water supply, and as such have a well that is some 120 metres deep, and produces water at a very sedate 300 litres per hour.
The pump is slow in that it effectively ‘screws’ the water up the pipe but has the benefit of being powered by our solar panels, thus negating the requirement for a large generator; the rest of the water we collect from various roofs.
This all fits in with our view of a more self-sufficient, or self’ish life.
Our hens seem to thrive – we have a fluctuating population, and yet three of the old girls that were with us from the start still manage to produce an egg or two between them.
Ollie the rooster, is the proud dad of quite a few hens now, and as I write we are expecting – two new first-time ‘mums’ have been nesting for the required 21+ 1 days.
As to how many chicks, we are not too sure, as they have managed to snaffle a large number of eggs between them over the last week or so,and are probably sitting on about twenty.
Not all will hatch out, but if we can have about six or eight pollitos we will be very happy.
LAST YEAR WE had rather too many roosters and whilst we managed to give away a fair few, we decided to bite the bullet and kill and eat a particularly naughty specimen. We packed him off to our neighbours and they dispatched him with very little fuss. He sure tasted good, a completely different texture and flavour to store-bought produce. We managed to kill and cook two more ourselves, but decided that it did not sit too well with us.
IF NEEDS MUST, then we shall do it again, but for now we will give away any new ‘gallos’ and have the eggs from any new hens.
With the ‘dynamite’ straw from the hens going into the compost bins, and our liquid fertiliser – comfrey and nettle tea – being applied to any plants, we have had a lot of success and aim to expand our comfrey plantation this year. Once planted, it is quite difficult to eradicate, but we can harvest twice a year from it which is more than enough for our current ‘huerto’ or ‘hort’.
WE HAVE ALSO been experimenting with spraying it directly onto our olive trees with encouraging results.
At least it has not killed them!
And it is free – my neighbour is only too glad for me to pick his nettles – odd that we do not have any and yet he sprays his finca with weed-killer twice a year.
Must be something in the herbicide …
Short URL: http://www.chroniccat.com/?p=291
Posted by editor
on 2010-04-30 Filed under Food, Home & Garden, May 2010.
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After reading your article decided to plant comfrey…but to no avail,that is to say I cannot find the seeds or plants or even what the catalan translation for “comfrey” is…can you help???
Hi there
The Spanish name is consuelda, and in Catalan it is consolda, but I have never seen it here – I had to buy seeds from the UK in the end.
They have grown well and two years down the line are still doing well. I have just started some more off by seed, but they are taking an age to germinate.