First Year's Harvests (Big and Small!) from our Homestead.

Okay, so this area is a bit of a disaster. It's certainly abundant. I think we've got a leak in the bottom of one of our water canals, which is why this area is so green. This isn't what I was going to show you, but there's so many of these. Look at these. Have you seen this one? I only noticed it this morning. Look at that. And look, look behind. It's a bendy one. I don't know why it's so bendy. And then there's the two that are in the tree. I haven't been here in a while, actually. Let me see. Let me get a better angle. It must be so strong. We shouldn't let them get too big, otherwise they're going to fall, right? I think they're going to snap the branch soon. Yeah. I think we need to take these down. Yeah, pretty big. I honestly can't believe the size of that, of this vine. It all comes from one plant. Yeah, it starts over here and it's going all the way over there. I can't even show it. It's going up that tree. It's going down here. It's going up that tree. It's going over the back of the wall of the water deposit over there. It's also going over this wall. That's where we got the record holder. And into the next field. And I think, oh, I think there's a huge one in here as well. Yeah, of course there is. Una, no. How are you going to get up from there? Huh? I don't think I can lift it up. What? That is... How is it so big? What? I'm going to bring it back. It's so much bigger than I thought it would be. I should start printing invites for the christening. The changing of the seasons is such a magical time and it always seems to come just at the right moment. Just when you're feeling like you're done with summer and you start getting that longing to be cold again, the sun starts rising further to the south and you have to put a jumper on in the early mornings when you start the day. You need a second blanket during the night and you realise there aren't quite so many flies anymore. Little by little, these changes add up and at some point you realise it's just not summer anymore. But for now, we're not there yet. The start of September means the start of some of the big harvests here in eastern Spain. The grapes, almonds, figs, carob and a little later, the olives. Okay, I can't reach anymore. We're just waiting for the machine that has the little electric fingers on it, which will make this job a bit easier. So we're doing the almond harvest today at our friend's place. Our almond trees don't look anything like this, so we're not getting any almonds from our place. But yeah, we're hoping to finish this in two days. I think he's got about 70 trees. Right, do something funny. You're trying to flick it at me? I think you need a bit more training. You're doing it one by one. Well, there's not that many on the tree. There's not that many left. What are you talking about? Yeah, so the electric fingers cannot be found, so sticks it is. Got a new stick? Yeah, it's much better. As you can probably tell, the basic aim here is to knock the almonds off the tree into the big nets which are laid around the base. We continued with a mixture of sticks and the electric tool and with three or four people bashing each tree. Most were done in well under 10 minutes. After you're done with the tree, you drag the nets along to the next one and you tuck them in nice and tight around the base so that you don't get any almonds falling down the gap near the trunk. And then you start bashing again. Once your net is full, you spread it out into a big square and one person drags one end across to the other end, rolling all the almonds up into a pile. Then you can dump the pile into a crate, picking out the biggest twigs and sticks that have made their way in. This is embarrassing. The one box I filmed and you messed it up. We've been harvesting all from the same variety of trees. These are the ones that we've been harvesting. They look like this and the variety is Marcona. The different varieties become ready at different times, so we've been sticking to the ones that are all ready at the moment and also to sell them. If you want them to all be from the same variety, you can't mix them up if you're going to sell them. But we've just seen this other variety of almond tree that he has as well and this one, oh we can't remember what that one's called, can we? He didn't say the name. It's got these huge, oh this one's full of ants, not that one. It's got these huge almonds in it and they're soft enough to break just with your hand. And look at the size of this almond. Okay, this is a double one but they're enormous and they're so good. There you go. By the end of the second day, we had done most of the trees and collected hundreds of kilos of almonds, the excess of which would be sold in a local cooperative. As always, what could have felt like hard work really didn't because we did it as a group and we had a lot of fun. And also having never done almonds before, Mauro and I also learned a lot from the experience. And then at the end... Every couple of days we've been measuring the sugar content of our grapes to check when they're ready for winemaking. They weren't there yet but over in the next valley in our friend's vineyard the time was right. Of all of our neighbours, I think Miguel has the most stunning views from his valley. We harvested his grapes in the evening and it was just the most beautiful time of day. The sun's starting to dip below the hills, infusing everything with a magical glow. Unfortunately, the vines had suffered a lot of damage from wild boar and rabbits this year and possibly also the long drought which we've had. All in all, the harvest was less than we might have expected in other years and the damage meant that the bunches needed a lot of sorting through to pick out the few grapes that were actually viable from each bunch. We did the sorting separately later on, which meant we spent less time hunched over in the field and more time sat comfortably in a circle with friends, drinking beer, chatting and sorting grapes. After selecting the best grapes it was time to crush them, which is traditionally done with your feet standing in a bucket. The natural yeasts and bacteria present on the surface of the grapes are what causes the fermentation of the mixture into wine, so the whole crushed mixture gets tipped into a fermentation vessel where it'll ferment for up to two weeks. During that time, twice a day we need to plunge the solids to the bottom of the vessel using a big plunger and take various readings such as density and temperature until the wine is ready. And then, well, there's a second stage but I'm not sure about that, we'll worry about that when we get there. Well, we have an escapee this evening. There she is. Don't know how she's done this. I think it's because this collar was too big so I had to drill an extra hole and I must have done it badly because it snapped. But she's all right, she's not going to go far from her mum who is just over there so as long as I've got my eye on them it's okay. She has already eaten my raspberries though which I've just covered with some pots to try and stop her from eating the very last of the leaves. This is what goats do, they eat everything including the things that you just don't want them to eat. What are you doing up here? Found something tasty? So a few more slightly disappointing things this year. Firstly, corn. It was really fun to grow and we grew quite a few different varieties. This rainbow corn, this really beautiful strawberry corn. It's dry now so I'm just taking all the kernels off the cob and I have a feeling it's going to make a very small amount of corn flour so it's going to have been a fun experiment but not a particularly productive one. I also grew amaranth this year, that was the other kind of grain I experimented with and I loved the look of it as a plant. It's absolutely beautiful and you can eat the leaves as well and the goats and the chickens really enjoy eating the flower heads and the leaves so it's kind of multi-purpose in that sense. But a bit like corn, it's been a lot of work to get a very small amount of grain actually out of it at the end. I would grow it again just because it was beautiful to look at. It seemed to withstand not being watered very much which was also really good but yeah quite a lot of work for a small result. If you compare the work that goes into getting a usable portion of grain from you know things like corn and wheat or amaranth compared to the work that goes into potatoes say, one thing I've learned this year is that I think you know for the amount of work that you put in, potatoes really do give you a much better reward. I think we're going to go all in on potatoes next year and grow as many as we can. Also sunflowers, I grew a lot of sunflowers this year especially this giant variety. I'm hoping to be able to kind of harvest the seeds but I haven't. I've just given all the sunflower heads to the chickens which they love because I just can't find a like efficient way to de-shell them all to actually get the seeds out so it doesn't really seem like a good use of my time. If anyone's got any tips let me know otherwise the chickens are gonna get the rest of the sunflower heads as well. So the perfect almond will fall off the tree kind of looking like this. It's like opened naturally a bit and it's super easy to just get the almond out of its outer shell. It's still got this hard shell on it which needs to be broken but the outer shell, the other shell comes off really easily. However there's also lots that come off that have not opened naturally so we're putting all of these together and what we're going to do is put them in a bag and let them sweat. So I've never done this before but what it apparently does is just let the shell kind of open up naturally and then they're obviously easier to shell and get the inner bit out of. So we're going to try that and see what happens but it's what people do apparently. There is a machine that does this process that kind of rolls all the almonds and lets these little bits fall off so that you don't have to peel them all by hand. We do have some friends who have that machine but for this year, for our first time, we just wanted to see what it would be like to do it by hand really. I don't want to use a machine until I know what it would be like to do it manually and it's really not that bad given that these are just for us and we're not doing it for making a profit or for selling them or anything. It's really not that bad to spend a day or so peeling your own almonds. You do it once a year and we've got almonds now for the rest of the year. All of these that have their hard shell on will need to be cracked. That's just a nice thing to do on a rainy day I think. So we'll store them like this and at some point when we feel like it we will crack them and we'll have the almonds. Una! Una! What have you done? What have you done here? What was that? There's another huge one here. We're just on a little reconnaissance trip for the carobs, seeing which trees that we've got are ready yet. Some of them are but most of them aren't by the looks of things. We've got a couple of bags of this just in case there's a tree that's completely full and we just want to get them. I've got my stick. This tree looks pretty good. Yeah they're not coming off easily though. Nah they need a bit longer. Yeah the bag is full so we're gonna close it. Let's go. Okay six kilos. Not bad. Not bad for a backpack. Yeah almost a bag of food for the goats. So we've been doing the carob for a little while and we've basically just been going out whenever we do a dog walk, taking a couple of bags with us and picking up what we find on the floor. We usually come back with about five or six kilos and we've been waiting until the moment when the carobs are perfectly ready to fall off the tree at a little tap of a stick because we don't want to be whacking the tree too hard because the buds for next year's fruit are already on the tree at this point so we don't want to damage them. So yeah we've been waiting until now when the carob is like just ready to fall off the tree and now we're going out with our nets and some sticks and we're going to collect in a more efficient way. We've got our baskets, we've got our nets which are ridiculously big. We definitely bought the wrong size there but they do help. So that's what we're doing today. Took what three minutes to fill these pots? Yeah we need more crates. Today's a very exciting day. It's plum day. Here it is. They're ready. I don't understand why this tree is doing so well when pretty much all the other trees in this field are really struggling with the lack of rain we've had this year. This fig has just given up completely. Even this little crab apple here is dropping limbs and sacrificing bits of itself to try and survive the drought. Hope you like plums. This is ridiculous. I don't understand why this tree has so much fruit. This is the most fruit I've ever seen on a tree at one time I think. It's crazy. It's such a little tree as well. Every single plum is easy to reach because the tree is just really small. It's just the perfect tree. Are you still out here almonding? You've been here for like five hours. You've been here for so long. Oh my god. That's really sore. Oh no, are you bleeding? No. No it's not quite. Almond juice but it's like very little skin.