Winter is on it's way

We had avoided all the bad storms that we had been hearing about however it has sort of caught up with us now. We had visited friends on the coast yesterday and by the evening it started raining and the wind started blowing, the drive home was a little hair raising over the mountains, as by then the rain was very heavy with a gale force wind blowing, but when we got to Lugo there was no sign of the rain. Today things changed a little with some heavy showers and hail stones and it is now feeling quite chilly, time to start lighting the fires I think.
On our trip yesterday we did get some nice photos of the wild horses, although we have seen them in the distance before we had never managed to get good photos.
We now have our Organic hen feed from an Organic coop about 60k from us, they have to import the maize from Italy, as they explained to us that all the Spanish maize is now GM contaminated. The hens love it and cost wise it is only 50cents a 40kg bag more expensive than the conventional feed.This coop also do Organic feed for cattle, pigs and rabbits, make Organic cheese and we think are probably the main producers of Organic eggs with some 30.000 organic hens between several farms, it made us quite nostalgic and brought back happy memories.It was nice to talk to Organic people again, although our Spanish is still bad.
We have collected quite a lot of wild mushrooms and have dried them, we hope that they will retain their flavour so we can use them for soup.

Organic hen food

After months of trying to find Organic hen feed we have at last tracked it down,I had some months ago contacted an Organic farm who kept hens but heard nothing from them. Friday we found organic eggs on sale in Lugo so bought half a doz so we could contact them to locate the feed, when we got home there was a email from the farm that we had contacted months ago, they had replied but realised from talking to a helper that we had never received their reply. The Company that they told us about was the same company that we had just bought the eggs from, so I guess fate has had a hand in all this. We have now made the important phone call and will picking up the feed tomorrow, it is only a little bit higher in price than the conventional GM feed. The the hunt is now over. We will continue to use the sprouted grain as well,the hens like it, and of course we have the worm banks all active for them so they should be the best feed hens in Galicia.
The weather is now wet, but although the forecast said it would be cold it is still mild, we are still picking strawberries from the tunnel but we have now picked the last of the tomatoes. There are still potatoes waiting to be lifted, but they will have to wait for a dryer day, I hope it's not too far away as we want to plant winter barley to keep the ground covered throughout the winter.

A new kid is born

We were trying to reduce our stock, well goats really, however one of our elderly nannies presented us with a beautiful male kid on Sunday, she doesn't have that much milk so once again we are bottle feeding.
Our green manure is now well germinated and growing well, this month[where did it go?] has been very mild and we have had very little rain, the last time we had an October like this we paid for it come the following April when we got snow just as all the fruit trees were coming into bloom, still there seems to be no set weather pattern nowadays so maybe it wont be a repeat performance.
I have had to plant yet more carrots, this time in the tunnel as the mice or voles had devastated our crop, also helping themselves to parsnips.These little pests were something we didn't have to contend with in Ireland which is just as well as part of our income was from veg and herbs, still we have had a few good pickings of wild mushrooms so that's some compensation.
Our friends that came for lunch a couple of weeks ago are now realising that you should never take the word of an estate agent, S is studying for his PHD and one requirement when they were house hunting was internet connection, of course the agent reassured them, pointing out houses that he said had connection, although how he would have know this is somewhat of a mystery, and of course was not true. S and M are now faced with having to pay the best part of 1000 euros to get a satalite connection,added to that they also have to have a new roof although again the agent had reassured them that the roof was sound, in most countries you would employ a surveyor before buying a house, and maybe the Spanish do, but most of the expats don't,and end up with very costly bills, of course, if you are buying a house that seems to be cheap it would follow that you have a lot of work to do, and compared to UK prices houses are still cheap in Spain, but renovating a house, even doing it yourself is a costly past time as we have found out. Although we have built two houses in the past we had not realised just how expensive restoring an old house can be, agents will reassure you that you can do it for X number of euros, but if you double their figure and add another 10% that will bring you somewhere nearer the investment required.

Wedding cakes and tomato puree

Our beef goulash with lyonnaise potatoes went down very well and our guests were full of praise, we followed it with crepes filled with fresh raspberries and topped with our home made yoghurt, this is delicious and makes a nice change from the normal lemon topping.
Sunday was spent catching up in the garden, the weather still being warm, we have pruned most of the blackcurrant bushes and taken cuttings for anyone of our friends who want them, we have also made a start expanding the fruit cage and have transplanted thirty raspberry canes, they had done a take over bid of the fruit cage and were smothering our rhubarb, this has now been transplanted into the veg garden, after all it is a veg and not a fruit, we then took stock of what the mice- voles etc have left us with root veg wise, not a lot, once again we are feeding the wild life of Galicia. I have planted more carrots in the tunnel other wise we will be having no carrot cake at all, they have left us a few parsnips, some carrots and we have a few small swede, the leeks bolted this year, it was just too dry, but we have plenty of cabbage and kale plus cauliflower and broccoli.
A friend very kindly has lent us some small jars so I have been able to make nine jars of tomato puree.
Today has been spent making a wedding cake for friends of ours, normally we don't ice our rich fruit cakes as neither of us like icing,but we both have a passion for marzipan, however these are special people so the cake will be iced for them. I did have to get eggs from a friend for the cake as it takes a lot of eggs, it was interesting to compare the difference between her eggs and ours, although her hens are free range they are fed on GM feed, ours are just getting wheat and barley, the yokes are however much brighter colour with the non GM fed hens.

Food for free

We have now been able to pick some mushrooms, last week we found a few chanterelle mushrooms but it might be a bit early for them, last year it was November but we have gathered some field and parasols today to go into the goulash that we will be cooking tomorrow for some friends.We have to hope that it works out well as one of the people coming is a trained chef, so it has to be good! However, I hate recipes books, this probably goes back many years when I was doing my hotel and catering course, I was taught by a great cook who never used a book, she just remembered it all, the good thing about learning this way is that you can ask questions, with a recipe book you cant, I also have an aversion to all these cookery programs, once again you cant ask questions and the chefs never explain the why and wherefore.There is one program that we both enjoy however, Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall of River Cottage fame makes cooking fun, he is not a chef by trade but he is passionate about Organic and Local food and has done a tremendous amount for the green movement plus his campaigns over poultry, he is very much a finger dipper, if it tastes right leave it alone, if it doesn't, work out what's missing.

The last month has been very busy, we have had friends from France who we hadn't seen since we left Catalonia staying for a few days so there was a lot of catching up to do, we also had helpers here at the same time, most of my time was spent cooking and exchanging recipes.
We have had a bumper crop of peaches this year but I only had nineteen jars left for bottling so gave friends the rest. We have also had a mass of butternut squashes, so far we have harvested twenty from just two plants and there are at least another six to come providing we don't get any early frosts.
We also have a load of tomatoes, I had hope to be making tomato puree again this year, but have run out of jars, now that we are making our own yoghurt we don't get any jars.
Our maize was disappointing, a number of factors contributed to this, firstly geese attack, then the goats thought they would help themselves and the drought didn't help matters, still they are harvested now and stored away from mice, we hope! The ground has been cleared from weeds and rotorvated and now has been seeded with green manure, a combination of red clover alfalfa and phacelia, we are hoping that the weather is kind to us and we get decent germination, then next spring both the goats and geese can help themselves before we rotorvate it all in.
We will be growing more herbs next year, adding Arnica and Echinacea to our collection, this is thanks to a virtual WORLD BAN on herbal remedies, it is fortunate that I had done a herbal course years ago so will be able to make most of what we would normally use, there are some exceptions, so I guess we will just have to wait and see just how Draconian these bans are going to be.
We have had some rain in the last week, so now is the time for us to go forraging for mushrooms, we are hoping to find more Chanterelles than we did last year, once tasted, never forgotten, just lightly fried in a little butter and black pepper and served with home made bread, wonderful. Of course there other mushroom worth collecting,field mushrooms are good, as are the parasols and the inkcaps, many people use wild mushrooms in various recipes, but to us it seems a shame to loose all that subtle flavour by adding other things to them, unless of course you have a glut of them.
We also have had our first real harvest of walnuts, despite pruning the trees in Feb, which is not the right time,and they bled profusely, they had a second pruning from the council in Aug, which is the correct time, although we lost quite a few of them at this time we still have around seven kgs , enough to last us even though they are one of our favourites, we will be trying the rabbits on the chestnuts, I have couple of recipes to try out, but they are not one of my favourite things, still, we hate waste so will give them a go.

The Big Secret

Our next helper is not due for a few weeks, it would appear from her emails that she is well travelled and likes to use public transport, before she comes to us she will be staying in another part of Galicia and had wished to travel to us by bus. We have tried to get the necessary information for her via the internet.
Although the bus companies have web sites, none appear to publish time tables. This appears to be a great 'State Secret', they give information as to the fleet of buses and the fact that you can get discounts, even pictures of their offices, nice to see that they have desks and chairs,one has a picture of a road with their bus on it,maybe to reassure you that they do have a bus, but no time tables!
We have come across this problem before when wanting to travel from our village to Lugo, it appears that to find out the times we have to go to the bus station in Lugo and ask there, there are several companies that operate within Galicia, but the information is only obtainable from the different kiosks at the bus station, often these are only manned for twenty minutes before a bus is due to leave.
Last year we also had a problem in trying to get the train time table, the only way to get this was to have a password to enter the website, this has now been changed, but it did result in us taking a plane for an internal journey, not very eco friendly.
Tourism has always been a big part of Spain's economy and it does have quite a good public transport system. So come on Galicia, get your act together and publish the times of transport, don't be so shy, people do want to use it.