olives are in and the yurt’s as cosy as a sheep’s belly

Maurice and Natalie and two person sized bags of sheep’s wool insulation accompanied me this weekend for some farming and fresh air- well apart from the air directly underneath the insulation when you are squashing into the yurt roof. sheep’s wool is the greenest of the green, which means the dust that comes off it is not toxic glass, but it still gets in your eyes and mouth. i opted for sunglasses and a scarf round my mouth as protective gear.

meanwhile my guests got busy harvesting olives. i’m proud to have helpers coming to do farm work, everyone enjoys themselves and it’s work that i just don’t have time to do. i’ve just registered on the WWOOFing website as well because my trees really need some love and attention and my plans for the next few months only involve stone, diggers and lime mortar.

the olive harvest was much better than last year – two buckets full! but there’s still half a tree of good olives, and three trees of small ones – maybe ok to make oil? – left if anyone else wants to come and help!

on sunday afternoon we walked up to the viewpoint on the hill in the sunshine – amazing every time, i love it up there, i should go every weekend.

do you want to see photos?

fire

we made fire. bernat made steps. i’m making a shed out of two bed bases and still battling on with the adobe bricks for the yurt porch

these guys held up my journey down on friday

yoop yoop, the broken coffee table makes a perfect no wheeled bike stand. if you keep enough crap you find a use for everything

my first fire

worker

work

250 litres and counting….

the veg garden is looking super after all the rain, chardtastic

and with the help of teflon and hardware, and a short but animated discussion of physics in the building supply shop, the 1000 litre cube is in place, collecting water and feeding the hosepipe. which is an eyesore, but as i always said part of the ethos is that people can see where things come from, and where they go.

talking of where things go, i emptied a year old dry toilet bucket. it was pretty gross. i’m sure last time i did this it all just looked like nice earth, but this time, hmmmm. by the word of all internet blogs after that long it is not dangerous, but i hid it up and out of the way anyway.

bernat’s best bit was when he made the tap stop leaking, and his worst bit was deciding to use an upsidedown bucket as a stepladder. it didn’t hold. oh, and his other best bit was when he casually said “is that rock supposed to be there?” i was like “yes dear, they hold the roof on.. oh hang on.. darn.. no that massive rock sitting in the gutter is not supposed to be there.”  i’m amazed that the gutter stayed hanging and the mystery of why all last weeks rain yielded only half a tank is explained. gaaarrrrrrhhhhh

a storm on saturday cut short our calçotada (well we hadn’t managed to get calçots it was butifarra mainly) but the sun and a downpour at the same time created a special world of glittering raindrops and waterlogged trees. it also gave me a chance to see where the various buildings leak. the yurt = behind the stove, the house = above the bed. eek. so my best bit of the weekend was when, after a quick inspection i fixed what appeared to be a gaping hole in the roof, just by shifting a few tiles.

jobs done.

trees

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something you’d never see in the uk, but do see fairly regularly in spain is lorries carrying humungous hundred year old olive trees on the back

i planted some 3 year old fruit trees – nectarine, peach and apple. lets hope they do better than last years. if all goes well, in a few years they’ll be full of fat white blossom like the surrounding orchards. healthy fruit bearing trees are so lush and dense with flowers, it was like driving through snow on the way back with white petals flying around in the wind.

i also created a little world of seeds – (yes, we’re all anxiously waiting the “after” photo in a couple of weeks) and with any luck those of you who come and help out in the next few months will be eating straight from the garden…

as far as building work goes i re-measured the plot to make absoultely sure the design will fit (second time lucky) and am still doing more sections of my amazingly wonky mud wall yurt porch

spring has sprung

and gary, although not helpful in the traditional sense of the word, provided entertainment of the surreal kind. mainly because i was reduced to tears of laughter by the idea of one of my neighbours seeing him strolling around in the woods in his shorts, in february, playing the clarinet extremely badly

the truth is, considering this is the first time he’s ever seen a clarinet, that he’s not doing too badly

i, meanwhile, was clearing out the house and putting in a spanking new bed and creating a new feature for the party…. the crack den. an area of junk and mattresses where i hope to provide a cassette player with mixes of approproate music for the after party party.

i was going to do something useful on sunday but our morning bike ride accidently turned into a 30 km jaunt. all part of the tour guide training – mental note: the via verde goes nicely downhill in one direction, but getting back is a haul.

the wine’s in

almost a shedload of grapes

Manuel, his wife and I were out in the fields cutting the bunches of tempranillo and talking about the ancient rock paintings they remember from their childhood – about 20m from my place. i haven’t found them yet

overall this was an entirely random weekend : thursday at the centre of the dutch holiday universe, near Cambrils, with a bunch of fairly well known soul djs and a toff named charles. i ended up sleeping in the van next to the beach. probably not legal, but it was only in my dream that someone caught me.

friday : i drove the windy route back to my place, far too curvy for 8am, but i passed right under the mountain with the huge plateau that i look at from the highway each trip.

hundreds of litres of water and look what i have to show for it

i managed to get an appointment with the council man about my planning permission but it was a spanish mañana situation in the most frustrating of ways. so i bought myself a present

spot the new item

then i tried to get to work.

have you ever done a job that is so ridiculously bad that when you give up and decide to take it to a professional you can’t because your attempt is an embarassment?  trying to cut the hole to put the sink in has worked out like this. i broke 4 of the miniscule saw blades that Mr R the technology teacher helped me procure. before each breakage a wiggly line crept a few milimetres around the edge of the circle. talk about the wrong tools for the job, i have brought the whole attempt back to barcelona and realised that i’ll do much better with a penknife saw. with the rapid approach of winter and a list of jobs including : stove in, insulation up, build porch, i do not have time for this cocking around. get a grip gurney.

the rain started in the afternoon and by 17h i was truly stuck at the yurt. thanks to movistar for the mysterious disappearing phone signal.

a rainy walk

up the hill

woke up to a fine day saturday. after a short attempt at using a drill to saw around the sink whole (that didn’t work) i got down to manuels for more grape picking. i made the mistake of getting into city clothes before i went to pressure wash the mud out of my wheel arches and arrived back in bcn splattered.

this weeks prize question :

i found this in the tool box, what is it?

love the trees

its all about letting the helpers choose their own tasks, this weekend  saw an italian whose parents produce olives and wine (get in!!) and a columbian squatter who lives in a “house” considerably worse than my place at the land

they got right stuck in to the pruning and gave some serious loving to the trees… thanks loads my new random wolf pack friends

oh and we did the all grossing ascotastic task of emptying a 9 month old toilet bucket… it was totally fine, didn’t smell and not even any paper to be seen

getting set up for the party……