Day to Day Life Building our Farmstead ~ Off-Grid in Spain.

In January we both got ill actually for the first time in the last couple of years. Luckily we're both fine now but we were out of action or reduced in action for a couple of weeks so when we were feeling a bit better there were lots of things to catch up on around the farmstead. One thing I definitely didn't need to do urgently but did feel like doing was to make a few new compost areas in some of the terraces. Our current compost areas are quite close to the house and the main current growing area which is really handy in that sense but they're also in a kind of awkward corner which makes them quite hard to turn so I wanted to make some more accessible piles in other places. It's also just easier if you have more piles I guess because while you're clearing that area you can just easily chuck that stuff in a pile that's really close to where you're working. I ended up building two new compost areas in two of the terraces that are still quite close to the house which are the ones we're probably going to be working on most over the next few years. I was using pallets that I picked up for one euro each at a local agricultural co-op. I can fit about six pallets in the car at once so the next time I pass the co-op I'll pick up six more and so on and so on until we've got a compost area in every terrace with space to turn the compost as well. Now I need to figure out how to bring water over here to water this compost. We've got two deposits we're quite far from both of them at this point I'm not sure which is going to be the closest one to try and pump water over here from and I'm not sure if we've got a hose long enough at the moment so I'm gonna give that a go. Not close at all with the hose. We also had a slightly less pleasant task which we needed to do. So these are the pine processionary moth caterpillars and they come out at the end of winter and they have these little hairs on them which are really irritating and although they're irritating for humans they're actually really bad for dogs because dogs sniff them and the hairs like if they get in their nasal passages and stuff can cause like tissue death necrosis so yeah and apparently I don't know if this is true apparently they actually have a smell which dogs find interesting so dogs might actually go and kind of sniff out their little hairs if they sniff them on the floor or if they have kind of fallen from the tree or anything. So we're getting rid of all of these from what I can see they tend to grow on the younger smaller pines which is quite handy because they're a bit easier to reach there are one or two I've seen which I'm not sure I'm going to be able to to reach even with the extendable loppers. There's actually not many of these on our land I'm actually on a public path at the moment but we use this path a lot it's just around like the side of our land so I thought I would just be a good citizen and cut them down from here as well well for us as much as anyone else but yeah they're a bit too close for comfort. I didn't need these extra long loppers for this tree it's like one meter in the air but this is what I've got with me so I'm sure that's fine. We also finally got around to the long-awaited task of fixing the insulation on our chimney just as winter's drawing to an end. This is possibly the worst thing a human has ever built and of course there's also the normal day-to-day things that we need to do. Actually our general household chores schedule to keep the house ticking over is quite light in all honesty we don't actually clean that much because everything just gets dirty and dusty again so quickly anyway but obviously we have things like washing and sweeping and some amount of cleaning that needs to get done every so often and all of that piled up whilst there's a lot of color I don't know where to see a lot of color only feeling blue there's a lot of colors lost within a day don't rely on to get you through the night me one thing that I want to do over the next month or so is build at least one kind of um cold frame and if the design works well build more I'd like to have like a whole row of cold frames along this wall they've got some materials here if Mauro was doing this he'd have like the design drawn out and measured in a notebook and everything organized on paper the way I tend to do things is just pile my materials together and look at them and try and think and move them into different positions and see what seems like it might go together um when we rebuild the ruin we'll probably do it Mauro's way but for now and that's what I'm gonna try and do I've got some transparent plastic translucent plastic some uh sticks I've got this stuff which is also translucent um reinforced like insulated plastic as well this peels off so it will be translucent some pallets and some windows that we salvaged from a skip in Valencia so today I'm going to be sowing some seeds I'm just looking at the garden plan that I made I've never done this before I've never had enough space to plan what I would put in different places but since we've got a lot of space I thought it would be good to actually follow some sort of a plan and a schedule this year and I've got stuff planned out to sow all the way up from January through to the end of May haven't thought beyond that yet and I've got the beds planned out so I know more or less where I'm going to be putting things we've got a few areas by the house that I've planned um what the transitions are going to be once the old wedge comes out of there and then I've more or less planned what beds we're going to have in the main growing area that we're going to be working on this year so I'm just looking to see what I need to sow this week of January okay so it looks like we're going to be sowing some lettuces some spinach and some tomato so I need to figure out where that's going to go and then make sure I've got the beds available okay so according to my plan we're going to put a bed here in front of this gate and that's going to be a bed of spinach and over here along this wall where I was just trimming I'm going to try again to build my cold frame that didn't really work last time I couldn't figure out how to use these pallets exactly how to get the windows on top but I've come up with another idea so I'll show you that later but for now I'm going to do something really simple really cheap with materials that we've already got so that at least we've got somewhere undercover kind of to put some of the seeds that I'm about to start the same for me so this is it this is what I was thinking for now I would do just a ring of bricks and a piece of this greenhouse plastic material can't remember what it's called on top and this should be enough for the seeds that I'm gonna sow today and we'll see if it works and if it does I can either build a few more of these or if the materials have come for the stuff I love for doing like the full cold frame that I want to do along here then then I'll build that but this took like half an hour so if you haven't kind of guessed or noticed from our videos already we're all about like quick simple solutions that just solve the problem that we have right now in the quickest easiest cheapest way possible and I think that's a really good way to go because every time you do something you learn a little bit from it and it improves your plans for next time and if you haven't spent a lot of money and time on something you can do something like this kind of like a MVP kind of thing and you learn so much that you can apply to the next iteration it's just one more thing I want to do before I start sowing the seeds and that's build a table to work up because it's super annoying not having any kind of table outside to put your seeds up on and work at a comfortable height so there we go a table now I can finally plant my seeds and it's going to be a lot easier with an actual table to work at obviously it's a bit wobbly I need to put like some support across like some cross things with some wood when I have some across the legs but it'll do for now so so I've got this coconut fiber which just needed rehydrating with water and I'm going to mix that in with some compost some store-bought compost and that'll be the putting mixture I just realized I'm not using my table right so let me consult my little book fourth week of January so we're going to do some lettuce which is this one this purpley lettuce and some tomatoes a large tomato so I think I'll do the tomatoes in here um hang on I've got three kinds of lettuce here one two and some little dem this is also not going to be a flood irrigation bed this is going to be a water by hand slash maybe drip irrigation bed if I can get the tubes and the pipes and stuff that I need for that in time I just thought I'd try something different in this particular bed because I've got enough beds testing out how the flood irrigation is working so well we've gone a bit off track with the plan already this was going to be for lettuce but I just really wanted to sow some more radish um so I thought I would sow some radish here instead I've got some black radish and some daikon and some random rabbit rabbit radish from some seeds I'd saved last year these radishes have been growing so well in other places so even if the spinach doesn't do so well because I haven't grown spinach before I don't know how it's gonna go at least there'll be something in this bed I'm hoping it'll be really good well there we go that's the new bed done that's everything that I wanted to get done today done now I think I'm going to water the rest of these beds by hand and then I might assemble a wardrobe well we are finally going to deal with this pile of clothes on the floor which didn't have a home and they're going to go on here and we've also got an old chest of drawers that I found in someone selling online so with that and the wardrobe things should be a bit tidier in this bedroom there we go I've been saving hangers just for this occasion this momentous occasion of Mauro hanging up his clothes I'm so glad that pile is going to be gone what's next any spiders there's many spiders under there this little room is becoming more like a bedroom every day well not every day when we occasionally do things like bring furniture up that makes it a little bit more homely well I think that's it for today I am just gonna do one more thing before the sun goes down and that is go around and find some leaves for dinner I'm gonna make a stew and I'm pretty sure that we've got a lot of leaves to pick to put in it so yeah I think I'll leave it there and thanks for watching again and see you next time