Another day on the farm

- June 05, 2019

I'm not sure if many of you know that my family and i run a smallholding tucked up in these mountains. We have goats, chickens, and have a large garden full of food which keeps us fed for nearly the whole year. Each day we learn and try to produce more to last us the year. With storing the food, by drying, pickling, fermenting, freezing, heat processing, we manage for about 8months of the year.

It is my goal in life to try to sustain myself and my family, without buying food from big cooperations, causing massive amounts of plastics to be thrown away, and learn to eat seasonally our organic produce. The goats give us milk, cheese, and meat. Most of the time the goats seem to be birthing their babies, so we don't seem to gather enough milk regularly to make cheese. When the time is right and they are without babies, we make the most of it, milking 3 times a day, and making into cheese. We let the males grow to a good lifespan before we turn them into meat, and skins for the family, we store that it the freezer, and on occasions we make a traditional goat stew call Chanfana.

Most of what we grow is potatoes, a big yield each year stores in our wine cellar below our living area, in huge chestnut chests. Year round we grow a particular cabbage that grows tall called Galega. Of course when the summer months come by we try to grow as many fruits as we can, the sweet kind and the vegetable kind, like tomatoes, we make that into puree, and sauce, and chutney, peppers are pickled, chillis are dried, courgettes are fermented with flat beans, squashes are stored whole in the cool cellar, kidney beans and butter beans are dried. Sweetcorn is picked and we eat that fresh, but also dry it to store to grind into flour. We have access to fruit and nut trees, giving the whole village tons of cherries, plums, apricots, walnuts, chestnut, to name a few.