Sylvia Farley – New Nurturing Potential’s contributing editor in the area of ecology and the environment – here continues her “weblog” of her experiences, experiments, highs and lows, but overall joy of doing it “her way” in Spain.
It is autumn, October 1st
2013. There has been no rain for several months and temperatures are still high
80s in the shade. There has been a lot to learn in the garden.
A nursery corner on my
roof terrace contains succulent cuttings and lettuce seedlings. The first lot
of lettuce simply dried up in the heat, but later batches are benefiting from
cooler evenings and lots of water. I have rigged up a hose to the roof and led
it under the base of my rooftop naya, a netted,
fly-proof, outdoor area where I can sleep in summer and protect my cuttings and
citrus plants in winter. It is also the only place where cucumbers survived
this year. On my finca, tomatoes and peppers were
picked ready dried, although, surprisingly, celery, parsley, and leeks are
thriving in a dense cover of weeds.
Irrigation is a major
problem which I am currently tackling in holistic fashion with a combination of
shaped channels, gravity feed, inundation, and drip. Hopefully I shall be able
to plant winter crops before too long, chicory, radish, pak choi, land cress,
and Chinese leaves which will get enough moisture from morning dews off the
river as temperatures fall, even if the long threatened rain never arrives.
Every week we are promised
rainstorms next week. One day the forecast is for continuous showers and
storms. A day later, wall to wall sunshine is predicted for the next month.
Whatever the prognosis, the weather circles our little river meander
and swings around the outside of the circle of hills that protects us. We have
had lowering black clouds, ominous rumbles of thunder, a single flash of
lightening, and then the lot evaporates and the sun reappears in a clear, azure
sky. Apparently there has been torrential rain all around, but not a drop for
my poor plants to drink.
I have been learning about
food preservation, campo style. With roasting temperatures and riverside
humidity, nothing keeps more than a few hours without refrigeration. Although I
bring ice in a cold box every day to preserve the day’s fresh food, without a
reliable, cheap source of electricity, it is necessary to manage long-term
storage in a more primitive manner. Solar and wind electricity complement each
other, but are weather dependent and only to be used sparingly for light and
low voltage applications. Gas fridges are expensive options and petrol or
diesel generators are for pumping water and emergency use only.
Most fruit and many vegetables
can be sun dried. I have successfully done this with figs, plums, tomatoes,
peppers and olives. A lot can be preserved in alcohol, such as peaches,
cherries, and apricots. More can be bottled in their own juice, like grapes and
tomatoes, and many more used to make wines and vinegars, such as grapes and
pomegranates.
Of course, salt and sugar
and even wood-ash lye can also be used, with or without vinegar, for jams,
jellies, pickles, relishes and chutneys, but there are dietary consequences to
too much salt, potash or sugar, just as there are to storing meat in oil or fat
as our ancestors did.
Storing tomatoes, thick
skinned, slow ripening varieties used to spread on bread with salt and olive
oil, need little water until they actually wilt. Cut when beginning to turn
from green to gold, the fruit will keep a year or more, becoming deep orange
and soft: a tasty puree in a bag.
Fruit vinegars are the
healthy, refreshing cordials of our great-grandmothers. Fruits, steeped with
sugar and wine, or juices with added yeast and bacteria, ferment for only a few
days to make tart, richly coloured liquids that can
be watered down to drink.
Similar cultures of kefir
grains, yoghurts, and wild yeasts can be kept as everlasting starters, used for
probiotic fruit or milk-based drinks as well as sourdough breads and cakes.
Every few days, most of the batch is used for drinking or baking, keeping back
a little to add to more liquid or flour base where it continues to grow until
next time.
The surprising thing is
the realisation that all these “germs”, yeasts and
bacteria are actually far better for us than the sterilised,
pasteurised, disinfected and irradiated produce that
looks so pretty in the supermarket. They have not “gone off”. They supply us
with micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. They stimulate our immune systems
as well as helping to combat disease by keeping our internal flora and fauna
strong and healthy.
Perhaps our future
survival as a race really does depend on going back to the sustainable practices
of the past.
My store cupboard no
longer contains packs of freeze-dried, chemically preserved, powdered, tinned,
or sterilised commercial products. When I open my
cupboard doors these days I am faced with home-made salsas, sauces, purees,
relishes, chutneys, pickles, and fruit leathers. Bottles of dried figs,
apricots, plums, mushrooms, and apples are good just as they are or cooked.
There are all kinds of tasty sweets and savouries,
bottled, dried, and made into jams, jellies, marmalades, conserves, and
preserves.
It is as time-consuming as
most other aspects of self-sufficiency. But it is infinitely satisfying,
piquant, and individual. No-one else in the whole world is likely to be sitting
down this evening to mixed salad with fresh cheese curds and pomegranate
rubies, lamb with home-made mint and apple jelly, roast squash with caramelised tomato ketchup, home-made strawberry and
yoghurt icecream, fermented milk drinks and home-made
wine, white peaches preserved in vermouth and olive leaf tea, all processed
within minutes of gathering.
No, I am neither losing
nor gaining weight, nor am I dancing till dawn, but as a gentle drift into
second childhood, I can recommend the good life, Spanish peasant style.
