I guess if we still lived in Ireland we wouldn't be welcoming the rain, according to a friend there it hasn't stopped all summer, but here in Galicia it is a novelty this summer, the last real rain was nearly three months ago, but this afternoon the promised rain arrived, too late for some of our plants,mainly flowers which we didn't find time to keep watered, it has however arrived just in time for my third planting of swede, which planted last Tues have now germinated, also another planting of carrots, we seem to use a lot of carrots, not just as a veg, we both love carrot cake and have a great recipe from "Cranks" recipe book.
Yesterday we found time to make our first batch of soap, I had halved the quantities given in the recipe as this was something I had never done before and I wanted to make sure it would work, it does, although it took a long time to reach the trace, we think this was due either to reducing the amounts, or not working fast enough and allowing it to cool to quickly.For colouring I used saffron which has given a delicate apple green colour. Tomorrow I will have another go using the full amounts as in the recipe.

This week has flown by, I have been very busy bottling fruit, we have had a bumper harvest of pears and have bottled 15 jars, plus the figs and plums, we still have a lot of figs and pears on the trees but we can only eat so much in a year, I will try using the pears with the figs for chutney, last year we made plum and fig and it was great, but this is the bumper harvest year for the pears.We do not bother preserving any veg, the first year we were here we rushed out and bought a freezer, we filled it with beans and peas and cauliflower, yesterday we cleaned out the freezer to make room for suckling pig that friends of ours produce,the veg from three years ago was still there and is now on the compost. What we had not realised three years ago was the fact that we produce veg all the year round, despite the best efforts of the mice and moles to destroy our crops.The hens are a little doubtful about their new diet, plus I have to remember to soak the lentils and then cook them, but someone has now provided us with a possible source of Organic feed, it remains to be seen if we can arrange transport.
All the old breed chicks that we incubated are doing well, giving us a total of twenty breeding stock for our meat production, however this will not happen until the new year, so we have bought four brown broilers which should be ready the middle of Oct, so we will have chicken dinners once a month for four months by which time we should be incubating eggs from our own stock. Anyone who has eaten real chicken will understand why we are going to so much bother. We enjoy our food, but it does have to be real food and good.

We have now come to the conclusion that we are no longer going to be able to get GM free feed for our hens, unless we can find an importer from France, which for about thirty hens is not really practical we have decided that we must turn the clock back some sixty years when there was little commercial poultry feed, and feed our hens on grains. Having been involved with poultry for a good number of years now one of the greatest problems is maintaining a diet with sufficient protein and amino acids,the amino acids, we hope, will be provided by numerous invertebrates, during the winter months we will have to provide worm banks, the protein will come from lentils which are 24% protein. We refuse to allow the international feed companies to dictate our choices, and in fact they have removed our right to make choices, which are informed choices.
Spain since 2001 has shown a 2.5 fold increase in Organic production, 60% of this is in Andalucia nearly 26% of this is arable, with some 121.000ha, the third highest in the EU, so WHY cant we buy Organic feed, the answer is quite simple, GMO contamination. 50% of Spain's organic sales are imported, this makes no sense whatsoever,it is also interesting to note that conventional feed costs in Spain are one of the highest in the EU, given the fact that they have embraced GM Maize so whole heartedly surly feed costs should be lower if we are to believe the sales pitch given by the GM companies. Spain can grow just about everything, here in the province of Lugo it is hard to find anything Organic,honey, mainly imported, milk, yoghurt, butter, cheese if you know where to look and if you are lucky, eggs . Organic meat is non existent,it is possible to buy free range chicken but at the same cost as you would pay for an organic chicken in the UK or Ireland, these free range chickens are almost certainly being feed on feed containing GMO's, which is why we wish to produce our own. Why the beef herds are not organic also makes little sense, all the cattle in our area are grass feed, and during the winter, if they cant go out are feed on hay or silage.The land is managed well, so why are they not part of the Organic production, there must surely be a market for it, and in fact we know that Irish Organic beef is imported into Spain.
Galicia as a whole would have been the ideal place to have been GM free region, and an Organic Flag Ship for the rest of Spain, in fact it has one of the lowest amount of Organic farms in all of Spain, could this be possible due to the fact that the province as a whole, with the exception of it's excellent fish does not have a food culture? Although all the ingredients are here, the knowledge of use of what they have is limited, presentation is non existent in the average restaurant, it is substantial, but food for the body and not for the soul. Maybe we were spoiled having lived in Catalonia which has a superb food culture.

GMO contamination.
For some time we have been trying to find hen food free from genetically modified maize. Up until a year ago this was quite possible, we do grow a small amount of non-GMO maize but insufficient for our needs. In desperation we have contacted the Junta in Santiago de Compostela but received no reply, we then contacted Greenpeace who were helpful but confirmed our worst fears. It appears that the consumer has no say in these matters and the corporations have won. Below is the reply from Greenpeace.

Hi,

Spain is the biggest grower of MON810 - GE maize - in the EU, and subsequently it is very hard to find uncontaminated maize. We have spoken to various large scale organic farmers and producers and many are resigned to importing GE free maize from France. I think your best bet would be to feed the chickens something other than maize that is still grown in Spain.

I will forward your message to our Spanish office as well, and ask them to contact you if they have more information, although Greenpeace does not endorse specific products/brands, they may be able to help you.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,

Glen

Once again it feels as though we are feeding all the wild life in Galicia, the mice or voles are having a garden party at the expense of our potatoes, we combated the Colorado beetle, we suffered blight and now the vermin are eating our spuds, well not just them, they are also helping themselves to our carrots and Jerusalem Artichokes, the flea beetles are trying to destroy our precious swede, helped by slugs, and the slugs are feasting on the lettuce, apart from that the brassicas are suffering from sun burn. Oh well, I suppose it could be worse, we could have a plague of locusts. I will not be defeated however, I shall plant yet more swede, more carrots and we have already put potatoes in one of the tunnels.
At last we have found a use for green figs, a friend gave us a recipe for Fig Konfyt, it's a long preparation , however, if the figs taste as good as the heavy syrup they end up in they should be good, we have adapted the recipe slightly by adding ginger which we both have a passion for.

When it comes to the latest technology we are both Luddites, and quite proud of it as well, however, we are always open to having things demonstrated to us, who knows, we might be missing out on something.Our last helper, had a Satnav and demonstrated it to us several times, we were impressed, especially when with it's aid, we cut nearly a quarter of an hour off our normal time to a friends house.
We have just had a charming couple camping with us for three day's, they are house hunting. We had been told of a property close to where our friends live, and we also wanted to show our visitors our friends house,a very old Galician place that needed total renovation, including the roof, which our friends have restored on their own. As we were unsure of the new route as demonstrated by our helpers Satnav we thought it would be a good idea to make use of our visitors equipment. Well this one let technology down very badly, it took us up hill and down dale, up mountains and down again, ending up where we had started, some two and a half hours later it proudly announced that we had reached our destination, No! we were nearly at the top of yet another mountain with just a rubbish bin for company, so yes, OK, the rubbish bin did state that we were in the Consello of our destination, but that was about it. Had the equipment belonged to us at this stage we would have strangled the voice, and binned it in the basura! The journey ended up taking us two and three quarter hours instead of fifty minutes. The upside to the journey was the sight of fields of sunflowers, such a cheerful plant, and not GMO'd ...YET.

There is one thing that we seldom see in Galicia, road kill, a sight which was common both in Ireland and the UK. Since we have been here we have seen a few poor hedgehogs, normally young ones which did not make the road crossing, a couple of rabbits but not much else, probably due to the many forests the wild life has no need to leave the safety of the woodlands, this week we saw a young deer lying at the side of the road, obviously having been killed by a car. We were on our way to Lugo so it was not practical to stop and put it in the boot. Imagine our surprise when on our return trip, some three hours later, the deer was still laying there, unheard of in the UK or Ireland, never ones for refusing a free meal we put it in the boot, half an hour later it was skinned, jointed and in the freezer, it yielded twelve pounds of meat, we hope to enjoy part of our bounty tomorrow for Sunday dinner.We are unsure as to the legal position in Spain regarding road kill, but it is an unusual sight.