A few weeks ago the spout once again broke off our teapot, this to us is a disaster as we drink a lot of tea, I had mended it on several occasions, the last time using epoxy resin which did the job for a few months, however as this had now failed I considered it time to buy a new teapot. Not a problem if you live in Ireland or the UK, but try finding a teapot in Spain, that does more than two cups, plus I wanted a red one! So online I went, first to M&S no luck then B&H same story and then Argos who did have teapots but only small ones, so I thought lets be really silly and try Amazon, the selection was endless, but all I wanted was a large teapot in red, and I found one, ordered it and it arrived safe and sound, thank goodness for Amazon. I had not mentioned the old pots demise to anyone, so imagine my surprise when I unpacked my birthday present a couple of weeks later, from a friend in Ireland to find .... A large teapot, and yes it is red, and this one is BIG.

The weather is still mild but now it's damp, but it did stay dry enough to get the first veg beds prepared for early planting, and the rhubarb is through and hopefully we will have our first pickings in a couple of weeks.

Our poor lemon tree has an infestation of sooty mould, normally caused by aphids so it will have to be dosed with stinging nettle spray, this will also feed the tree, so double benefits.

The storks have now arrived back from their winter vacation so it feels as though spring in on it's way.

From snow to rain and now the temperatures are up to 10c during the day, none of this seems quite right. We had very strong winds two nights ago, up 125k an hour, we had no damage but other people have not been so lucky, one friend lost his chimney! A lot of trees are down, and advertising hoardings broken in half. So far we have had very little snow, but we have another two months of winter to get through yet, and we can see it in the distance on the Cantabrican mountains. A lot of people are still without electricity, but we have been lucky, I guess if we didn't have a generator on stand by we would have been amongst those who have lost power.
We had already planted blackcurrant bushes when we first moved here and they do very well here ,so now we have bought two redcurrants and a blueberry bush in the hope that they too will like it here. The only thing we dont have is gooseberries but as I have never had any success with them in the past we will give them a miss and just live with the memory of them.

Happy New Year to one and all.

With the new year comes new life, we now have twin female kids born a week ago. Unfortunately the mother is one of our older goats and she had no milk for them so we have two wee things which we are bottle feeding, so much for having kid meat to eat!. The father is a young billy and young billy's seem to sire females. Our youngest cat rather had her nose put out of joint with these things demanding time from us, but she quickly got over it and now pretends they aren't here.

We feel as though spring is not far away despite the snow on the ground and have at last placed our seed order, a bit experimental this year, we are having a go at celeriac and Florance fennel, we have never seen these seeds on sale here, or the veg themselves so we will see what happens.

All the onions and garlic are planted in a tunnel, the onions last year did particularly well in the tunnel so we are hoping the garlic will as well.

For years we have wanted to skip Christmas, this year we nearly managed it.

Although it's good to have a celebration in the middle of winter it's all the commercialisation that comes with Xmas, although in Spain it's not quite so bad as in Ireland or the UK, it's fast getting that way.

The first Christmas lights were up in the shopping centres at the beginning of Nov.

Christmas eve we made a concession with some holly and ivy to decorate a small area in the dining room.

Christmas day we went for a Chinese meal with some friends, and St Stevens day we had a nice meal followed by a Xmas pud I had made last year, and of course a bottle of wine, on the 27th we had some friends over for a meal. That was our skipping Xmas, maybe we can manage to really skip it next year, like a school report, we could do better. Maybe we will just celebrate Yule Tide on the solstice.

The downstairs loo has taken two months to complete, although it's the smallest room in the house it posed some problems not least that it was below the septic tank level so we had to install a macerator, however it was finished in time for Xmas

[ All I want for Xmas is a downstairs loo] and the overall effect is great, no traipsing upstairs during the evening or trampling mud through the house to wash your hands when working in the garden, we also now have a very nearly completed pantry, so we have good storage space for all our bottled fruit.

The next project is to complete the stairs to the kitchen, as these are going to be of wood I might live to regret this if mud gets trampled in! Once this is done come the big job, converting the old kitchen and attached barn into independent accommodation.

I have got rather behind with this blog over the last two months, autumn came late, but winter has now started. There was some beautiful autumn colour and so many different types of fungi and this year at last we managed to grow melons. Some people have no problems growing these, but I always have, the ones we produced were not planted, they appeared! obviously we had not got the compost heap hot enough and the seeds must have been in the compost we put into one of the tunnels, whether we can do the same again remains to be seen.

We have made a far bit of progress over the last two month though, the sun room is now completed and the downstairs loo is done, the pantry is now well under way.

The gander hunt

Last January we lost our gander, as readers of our blog will know this turned into quite a saga, well the story continues. Two months ago we were having our doubts as to whether the new ganders were in fact ganders,a hint was the fact that they appeared to be laying eggs, well at least they were sitting on eggs but it's not unknown for ganders to do this while the females go out to feed, we had however set eggs in the incubator as well, nothing happened!! We had also seen the original geese trying to mate the 'ganders' in the pond, something was clearly amiss. We decided that we would contact the agricultural shop where we had bought all of our geese . As we no longer had a Spanish speaker staying with us we thought it best to email our request, the reply was affimitave, so we followed it up with a phone call to confirm that they could get a gander and that it would be at the shop waiting for us on Monday. In Spain we seem to travel vast distances to get what we need, and the geese are no exception, the shop being some two and a half hours drive away. Well, we arrived at the appointed time to find that the man in the shop knew nothing about it. After Simon had explained with his now vastly improving languge skills[a cross between Castilion Catalan and Galliegan] the man realized that we had in fact traveled a long way and that there were definite arrangements made and he knew exactly whom to phone! Someone somewhere had not passed on the message that the gander should in fact be in Padron, not still running around his field some forty km away, so with the aid of the map, plus an address and a phone number and a very protracted detailed list of directions we continued our journey, this time to the coast. The new gander, and yes, we do think he is a he, was awaiting us. It was by now two fourty five and we had planed to look for tiles for the downstairs loo in Santiago de Compestela, and were also due to go to lunch at three with friends who live an hours drive from Santiago[ in the right direction for us to get home] so the tile hunt was abandoned, a phone call made to our friends to explain what had happened, and a look at the map as Simon was sure we could find a shorter route to our friends house. Nice theory, the map showed a nice road, much shorter than the one we had come by, across the mountains, what however the map didn't show was how windy the road was, and in fact to get ten km nearer our destination you in fact travel twenty km. It would have been a beautiful scenic route if it hadn't been thick cloud and fog on the hills (mountains in our language, over 900 m, about the height of Snowdon).

At sometime in the future we plan to return to this coastal atea as it has great scenery and some interesting Celtic remains and monasteries but this will be for the warmer months.