Daily Life Building a Homestead in the Spanish Hills

After the fire and after being away from the farm, it took us a while to kind of get back into our normal life again. Although the fire was officially under control, everything was still weird for a few days. There were still huge wildfires blazing in other parts of the province and smoke and ash fell down on us for several more days, not letting us forget how lucky we were that for now at least we were safe. Despite the chaos at the end of my trip, my little break had actually been really refreshing and had given me a lot of energy to crack on with projects back at the farm when I returned. But firstly there was a lot of harvesting and just general garden work to be done. Mauro had done a really good job while I was away and the garden was looking great. Nothing had died, okay two things but I forgot to tell him where they were so that was fine, and there was lots to harvest. There were also lots of other little jobs that needed doing so as usual I went around with my trusty notebook making a list of everything that I needed to do. I think we're going to pull up the squash in this bed as well. It might look like it's still doing well, it's still looking, well it's still growing and it's obviously still alive but it hasn't been sending out any more flowers for a while. I've already harvested like 20 little squash from here so I think it's pretty much done in terms of productivity and what I'm going to do is take it out and then plant some little beans that I've got near the base of the corn and hopefully they'll grow up the corn. That's the sort of three sisters idea, normally you would have the squash, the beans and the corn all together. I think I just didn't have any beans started when I did this bed. Anyway we'll see what happens if I add them now. This tray of beans fell out of the greenhouse so it lost all its labels and half their soil and half the beans as well so I don't know what anything is but some of it is still alive so I'm going to plant it. I think this courgette is going to go as well which I'm kind of sad about because this courgette just made the most amazing courgettes and I would love for it to make a couple more but I don't think it's going to. It made these amazing yellow courgettes. I don't know what the variety is, it came from a seed packet that was just labelled heirloom courgette but it must have made about I don't know 10 or 12 and they were just delicious, enormous and I was so happy with them but yeah I think this plant is done. And then at the end of this bed we've got a couple of sunflowers which I'm gonna take out as well and then we've basically got a whole bed free apart from a little bit of New Zealand spinach growing here in the Forgot we actually had some chilli plants under here next to the courgette which have been pretty smothered. They've actually done pretty well considering this one's not doing too badly. So I've got a lot of stuff that I need to process or do something with at the moment. Apologies for the messy state of the table, that's just how things always are at the moment. We can't seem to keep this table tidy. I'm starting to get some tomatoes, we're getting some corn. I planted quite a few different varieties this year just to see what I liked. This is the strawberry corn so that's been drying for a little while. I've got quite a few of these. This one is a like a rainbow corn, you can see it's all different colours, it's really pretty. This one wasn't properly fertilised, you can tell that it hasn't got all the little corn bits on it but that's okay. The problem was that I didn't plant enough of each variety in each block so the pollinisation wasn't great because they're wind pollinated and you need a big block of them together for that to really work very well but that's fine, it was just experimenting really. And lots and lots of courgettes. I'm going to make now a courgette sweet and sour kind of pickle so let's do that. This is going to need a really big pot because I've also got six onions to go in and a lot of sugar. I'm not sure, I think maybe the tall one. I make a lot of chutneys and pickles as you might have seen on other videos for various reasons actually. Firstly it's just a really good simple easy way to use up extra produce. The recipes are also pretty flexible and foolproof, you can generally just put in, as long as it's got vinegar and sugar, you can play around with the flavourings and the ingredients and it's generally going to be tasty I find. And it's also just a really good thing to have, it means that we can make really simple kind of boring meals and add a big dollop of chutney on the side and that meal is then really tasty. So it's really helpful for the kind of cooking that I do which is often just seeing what vegetables we've got, maybe just cooking vegetables and rice or making a bowl of whatever is available with some sort of grain or bean or something and what makes that plain meal really tasty is just a big dollop of chutney on the side. We do that a lot and it makes cooking a lot simpler. So I've saved a few seeds here from the heirloom courgette which was my favourite. This stuff will go to the chickens and what we're going to do is pop these in water for a little while, 24 hours maybe, and that just loosens this little shiny gelatinous film that you get on cucurbit seeds. So that kind of ferments away and then you can slip it off and you get the seed. I'm not 100% sure what the reason for this is, it's just what you do with cucurbits. I don't know whether it's because the little film kind of inhibits germination for some sort of chemical reason or whether it's just more prone to mould and stuff like that so you want to take it off before you store the seeds. I haven't been able to find any answers on Google, it just says that this is what you do, it doesn't really explain why so if anyone knows I'm just curious. Come on Una, do something useful. Help me round up these chickens. Can you help me round up these chickens? Hey, what are you doing out here? Hey, come on, come on, back you go. Come on, back you go. Come on, back you go. Una, Una, can you help with this? Una, come on, back you go. That's right, come on. Oh, you're too big. Come on, back you go. Well done Topu. This is just a fun little project that I'm doing to make some shade over some of our garden beds. It's still very hot during the day even though the sun isn't quite as strong as it was maybe a month or so ago and for little plants it's kind of hard, especially stuff that you direct seed. They suffer quite a lot in the middle of the day so I've just been making these little posts basically with shade cloth stapled to it and it seems to be really helping the plants that are growing in those beds so I'm just doing a few more. I don't know why I'm using good wood for this, I should really be using pallet wood. This is really stupid but never mind, I just had this wood and I didn't really have anything in mind for it and I'd had it for ages so I just thought I would use it up. Okay so I'm making a decision about the tomatoes and they're gonna go as well because, well some of the tomatoes because they're just not thriving and I'm gonna pick them all, put them in this box and let them ripen off the vine and pull the vines out because yeah there's no point letting them hang around if they're just not really doing anything. Yeah they're just not looking super healthy, they look like they want to kind of finish but the tomatoes are mostly still green for the most part. Not that there's that many tomatoes anyway, they've not been very good this year because they're all volunteers mostly and they've been very hit and miss. Well although the plants looked pretty sorry for themselves, I've actually got quite a lot of tomatoes so what I'm gonna do is leave them in this box. There's a couple that had some defects so some of these will be for the chickens but the other ones I'm gonna pop them in here with a few ripe tomatoes in at the bottom as well because the ripe ones release a gas which will encourage the other ones to ripen as well and yeah I will leave them for a little while and then hopefully do some cool stuff with them. We've got some basil in here. The goats like tomato, let's see. Goatee, goatee, goatees! Goatee, goatee, goatees! Nice? Yeah? Okay so the goats approve of the tomatoes so what we're going to do is bundle these up with some twine and save it for the winter or for some time when we maybe don't have so much prunings and stuff to give them. Oh the sun's in my eyes and I've got sweat in my eyes. It's just something I've been experimenting with the last few weeks just bundling up bits of trimmings and leaves and things like that and just leaving them to dry outside and I will store them in the ruin for when we want to use them. I guess it's like what you would call tree hay which is like branches bundled up and dried and it's a kind of hay but instead of being from grasses it's from trees. I just thought it's an interesting way to kind of store food for later in the year. We're always looking for ways to feed our goats for free in fact we do feed them for free but tree hay was just one of those things I wanted to try so that's what I'm doing. So what I'm going to do with this bed now is just rake back the mulch which is just straw and I'm going to sow in a autumn winter green manure cover crop. I might at some point plant into that if I need the space but I'm not sure. At the minute I just don't want any beds empty and I don't need to fill it with anything and I'm just generally trying to do a bit of a rotation with green manures and crops. I haven't really got a system yet but I'm just trying things out. Okay I think that's it for this video. I'm just gonna spread out the rest of the straw back on the bed to protect it from the sun. I'd say I'm probably about a third of the way through the garden jobs that I had listed so I'll carry on with that but it's more of the same just in other beds. So thank you for watching this video. Before I go I just wanted to let you know a couple of things. Firstly we have an Instagram. I'm sure lots of you already know that but if you don't you can find the link to it in our description if you want to follow us there and we also have a newsletter. I don't think I've ever mentioned that on this channel but if you're interested in what we're doing and what we're up to we send out a newsletter once a month it's free and you often hear in that newsletter about stuff before it makes its way into the videos so if you want to kind of know a little bit in advance what we're doing what we're planning sign up to it. It's only once a month we won't spam you but yeah just thought I'd mention. Hope you have a good week and I will see you in the next one.