Hello from Southern Catalunya, Spain

[sue100]

Hi,


Myself and my husband moved to southern Catalunya ten years ago to try to develop and live a more sustainable life. We live with our 5 dogs, 6 cats, 4 pigs and 12 chickens on a rural finca of about 10,000 sq metres on the side of a mountain. We live off grid and water is from an agricultural supply, which we use through osmosis for our drinking water. We grow everything organically.

We are pretty much self sufficient on vegetables and this year we planted 63 different fruit and nut trees to give us self sufficient fruit in the future. Our pigs are used for breeding, and off spring fattened and home killed to give us lovely ham, bacon and pork.

This year we invested in a small dehydrator to use for drying fruit and veg for winter use instead of freezing. In autumn we collect from our land carobs which we give to the oigs, and olives for oil and for the table.

We are still very much in the learning phase of all this, as the climate here is so different from northern England where we moved from, so we hope to be able to ask advice, gain insight, and where possible share our lives with you in the future with like minded people.

All the best
John and Sue

[MKG]

Hi Sue and welcome to Ish (and say hi to John for us, will you?).

You'll certainly fit right in here.

Mike

[ojay54]

Hello to you both,should have thought all that sunshine would have dried your produce without the dehydrator! (desperately needed here in Worcestershire.)
60 odd fruit trees take some planting,so hats off to you.What did you plant?

[Green Aura]

I'm not at all jealous. No, not even a little bit.
Welcome to Ish

[sue100]

Thanks for the welcome everyone.

The dehydrator is needed believe it or not to control the temperature, as air drying can be too hot here and flies can be a further problem. The only crop we air dry is tobacco, which can legally be grown in the EU so long as you pay the local duty on it. However when curing tobacco we still have to use a heat pad, again to maintain the correct temp.

Trees planted this year are almonds, walnuts, late and early oranges, late and early mandarins, lemons, ruby grapefruit, eating and large cherries for glace, plums, peaches, nispro, donut peaches, pears, apples, red and white grapes, and pomagranite. As less as 4 mulberry trees which are used here for shade, these are pollarded before the leaves drop every year to keep the trees low and allow the branches to form an umberella giving the shade.

[Oink]

Welcome Aboard.
It sounds like you are living the dream. :)

[tosca]

Hello and welcome. We moved to Bulgaria for similar reasons and after 16 months we are pretty self sufficinet in fruit, veg and nuts. We have fruit and nuts in the garden and have others that we don't grow 'donated' by the neighbours, we also exchange produce with others for what we don't grow and for straw. But it is far too cold here in winter to have olives and citrus so there will always be something we need to buy. We have chickens for eggs and OH is going to see how he feels about getting pigs next year after he has been to next door's killing in December. Don't know about Spain but here the killing of animals is done at home.

Hope you find the site as useful as I do.

[ina]

63 fruit and nut trees - my goodness, that should give you a bit more than what you need for self sufficiency!

No, no - I'm not at all envious, either... How could I be???

Ah well, I'll stick to my northern garden, where I mainly seem to grow slugs...

Welcome to the forum, anyway.

[littlemissrose]

Well I'll just come out and say it... I'm jelous... verry verry verry jelous.

But that doesn't matter. Welcome to ish