Down on the Farm

Finca del Molino, Valdeolmos, Monday, end of March 2008 where I lay my scene. First day saw me adjusting to life in a foreign country I was pleased to be in and a language I was keen to understand. Angel, the owner of the Finca had gone to work and his wife Rosa, spoke no English so chores were off for the day. Angel had told me in emails that his place was not an organic farm and on living here for a while it is more of an experimental project for the familly and friends. All which I´m sure reap answers for the greater good of mankind.

Angel´s house was built 15 years ago but he says he has not lived in it all that time. It is a house I warmed to immediately and as I´m extremely sensitive to my manmade surroundings I was glad of this. Perhaps it was the previous day spent mostly traipsing around in the sun and the thought of being stranded that meant as soon as I walked in I felt welcomed or it could have been due to the hippy hangings on the wall and teh cute picures painted onto the pastel coloures walls.

My bedroom is a little room off teh main living and dining area that lets light in through two of teh internal walls with glass bricks at the top. There is a window facing south to the back of the house and the back land with curtains that are a little too transparent for my liking. To try and solve this I raised an old blind that was folded at the bottom of the window, inbetween the outside and inside glazing.

The floors are tiled throughout, some now lifting a little out of place and the windows in the bathroom are a little rusty, the shower holder up on the wall broken, but all this only adds to some sense of charm to this place. It being a B and B somewhere hosting travellers as they come and go in a fairly impersonal fashion would make this a depressing place. But it has been lived in by a familly and been made their own with personal objects. Glad to be feeling at ease here, I looked forward to a wealth of information on sustainable living.

My first task was to paint a summer house with oil. Not exactly what you would call organic (although the oil was sunflower and Angel said the price had gone up threefold within the past year because of people using it as fuel for their cars. Painting that whole cabin seemed a bit daunting all by myself and tedious. But I was happy to do it as on walking in I recognised the smell of new wood from my own summerhouse back home and was pleased for the comforting memory. Dragging the stepladders out of teh unused swimming pool, finding brushes and rollers in the tool shed dodging the wasps that inhabeted it for a while, I decamped for a day at the top of the farm´s land in the cabin. Having once decided on some sort of plan - roof first, walls then floor - I set about to do my part. The activity gave me alot of time to think as you can imagine.

Too much time to think though as a week and a bit of that and my next task was to weed the permaculture flower beds. This I was looking forward to as it was what I had come to learn about. The amount of weeding though that had to be done, I was not looking forward to. And all by myself! Gloving up, kneeling down, dodgy hoe in my right hand I became a human jukebox to stave off the brutality of natural silence. The natural silence, which is in fact natural noise. The noise of birds, insects the village church striking on the hour and at half past, the builders a couple of fields away building a new housing estate and distant cars on dusty roads. My own music and imagination became enlightened against nature´s white noise.

Weeds vex me. They are illusive and masters of disguise. I found that those with the most horrendous of foliage that pricked and hurt were in fact the easiet to up root. They had one thick root that grew vertically down, allowing for little anchorage. On pulling these up I would be glad of the achievement of a whole, unwanted plant being removed. I felt equal negativity when the plant broke away from the root system leaving a hidden part of it buried in the ground so that it may rejuvenate. The hardest of these weeds to pull up were those that had leaves which were fairly inconspicuaous but a tremendous root system. I had to srcrape and excavate the soil around teh plant to get a firm grip of the very base of the plant and pull with focussed force. If successful then the weed was retrieved with an alien like tentacle system that I was afraid to look at for too long in case it might come alive (I think this is an image put into my head by a bad Harry Potter film).

The weeds are not taken to a seperate composting department but simply strewn straight on top of the straw covered beds. Permaculture requires that 70% of what came out of the environment, stays in the environment. The straw is to provide a culture for the plant to breath on top of the soil. This way of nothing added, nothing taken away means that the plants grow in an obvious more naturally way and also, the ground they grow in becomes better year after year. The beds are lines of mounds that have been dug from the land and shaped. It is important I learned that one doesn´t step on the beds so that the soil does not become depressed. The emphasis here is on as little human interfierence as possible. When I had finished weeding I replensihed the supply of straw with a smell that reminded me of mucking out stables.

I weeded in total 2 gardens and a tunnel. I hoped that I did a good job because a few weeks after I got to actually plant some things that would be harvested in July for the familly to eat. Delicately lifting the seedlings from their plastic shells, and placing the in moist soil, I felt quite some responsibility to the end process. I felt extremely glad to be part of teh process too and on finishing planting I was strangely uplifted. My back ached and I had dirt under my fingernails but I had never felt better. Like I had really achieved something important.