Foraging and farming: food from the land

After a wet spring the land around our little house is lush and green. My husband David (the Spanish Gardener) is busy strimming and tidying for his clients, scything his way through knee-high vegetation. And we're looking forward to growing and gathering what we can from the land this summer.

Here's what we learned last from last year's successes and failures.

Wild asaparagus
Long, green spears of wild asparagus pushed up after the April rains in 2012: they are delicious fried quickly in a little olive oil and sprinkled with salt. See this post.

Apricots
We didn't really grow the apricots; they grew themselves on the little tree in front of our house. We got enough in early June to make several jars of not-too-sweet golden jam.

Apricot blossom

Nisperos
There are a couple of trees nearby from which we scrumped nisperos (also called loquats). You peel back the vibrant orange skin to find a juicy sweet fruit, sometimes with a touch of sharpness. In the centre is a large, glossy brown stone. They probably would have made a good, spicy chutney but I didn't get round to it.

Cherries
A tree on the corner of our land was covered in cherry blossom in the spring and I watched and waited for the fruit to grow and ripen. Then, all of a sudden, it disappeared - the birds had got it before we had a chance. So we bought bagfuls of cherries from market stalls in the village.

Pimientos de padrón
These are delicious picked while green, fried fiercely in olive oil until they blister and blacken, then served immediately, sprinkled with coarse, crunchy sea salt. Most taste green and fruity, but the occasional one is fiery hot. Well, that's the theory. Ours are all - every single one of them - super spicy.

So we've given up eating them in the traditional way - it's just too painful. We've roasted some in the oven and stored them in a jar covered in olive oil. These will be good on pizzas. The rest we're using as fresh chillis in curries and Mexican dishes.

Serrano chillis
We're still using up the free packs of seeds we picked up in Wahaca in London a couple of years ago. They were slow to germinate in 2012's late spring which had some cool nights, but in late summer they started to fruit and then turned red in the autumn sun.

Tomatoes
While it's true that we can buy delicious and cheap tomatoes in the village, we couldn't resist growing some of our own, so we decided to go for cherry tomatoes, which are expensive to buy. We had a bit of a slow start - May was chilly and the seeds didn't germinate until well into the month. However, the summer sun really got the plants going and the fruits were ripening by early August. A sun-warmed, sweet tomato straight off the vine is a lovely thing and we thoroughly enjoyed our harvest.

Of course, there was a glut so I dried some in the sunshine with some stalks of rosemary spread out on a baking tray (it took a couple of days) and then put them into a jar covered in olive oil. The rest I roasted in the oven and made into soup. But cherry toms aren't as good as big tomatoes for this - you get too many seeds. This year, we've got some seeds for some more unusual varieties to experiment with.

Figs
The tree on our driveway produced a steady crop of small green figs over about six weeks from mid-August. I'd been warned that some figs have a little white worm inside, so we cut each one in half and examined carefully before eating. Figs are very rich and some people prefer them cooked or dried. I dried a good batch in the sun over a couple of days, keeping them safe from flies under one of those Women's Institute-style muslin umbrellas. And I included some more in a compote with some peaches, apples, cinnamon and sugar. This worked well with yogurt for summer breakfasts.

Fig chutney in progress

Grapes
There's a small grapevine that grows up a west-facing wall of our house. It produced lots of black grapes in August with no attention other than a bit of pruning and pinning up earlier in the year.

Cucumbers
We grew several plants from seed, but only got a couple of fruits before they succumbed to powdery mildew.

Melon
I'd saved some seeds from a variety of small melon we'd grown successfully in London. The plants grew and began to fruit, but the mildew got these too.

Herbs
Basil thrived in the Mediterranean sun. Parsley too. Oregano is doing so well that it's gradually taking over my little herb garden, although the species I've got (I don't know which) doesn't have a very pronounced taste. A few different types of mint seem pretty failsafe and new stalks have been popping up happily over the past couple of months. Coriander (very frustratingly as it's a herb that we can't buy easily here - I miss our Cypriot delis of north London which sell enormous fragrant bunches for 75p) rushes to seed every time I try.

And so the new growing season has started -we're looking forward to seeing what comes up.

To grow fruit and veg or not...?

We've just completed our second summer in Catalunya and we're getting used to the differences between our vast, terraced, sun-beaten plot here and the small north-facing back garden we had in London.

In spite of the chill, rain and gloom in London, we managed to grow a lot of produce outside our little ground floor flat - tomatoes, courgettes, chillis, basil, rocket, beans, cucumbers - even mini-melons. It took a lot of commitment, a drip watering system and a greenhouse, but we loved doing it - and eating the results (pics below).

I also became an expert in cooking and preserving damsons; we had three trees in the garden and one overhanging it (they were there before we moved in and we couldn't bear to destroy them). Each year we rushed to pick the kilos and kilos of hazy purple fruit before the wasps moved in to suck them dry. We had damson chutney (I've just started my last jar from 2010, and it's dark and rich and delicious), jam (not as successful), flavoured vodka (just damson, and a Christmas-themed one with raisins, cinnamon, allspice and ginger), crumble, sorbet, etc, etc.

When we moved here, we dreamed about how easy it would be to grow all the Mediterranean fruit and veg that taste so much better sun-warmed and plucked straight off the plant. But if you take a rational approach, there's a balancing act to be struck. We can get cheap, fresh and delicious fruit and veg from the groceries in the village, as well as from the little old ladies who, for a few summer months, open their garage doors and sell figs, tomatoes and peppers grown on their own plots. At the same time, we don't have mains water, which means that there's a significant cost to be borne in keeping everything hydrated during the dry summer (and sometimes, spring, autumn and winter) months. 

So last summer, as we'd just moved in, we didn't grow much - just a few tomato plants that the previous owner kindly left, some chillis and some basil in a pot. We had a lovely harvest of figs from the tree on the drive too. You can read about last year's harvest here.

Early this year, though, my (I won't call them green) fingers were itching to get started on some planting. I'm the most impatient gardener - I get frustrated if the seeds haven't germinated within 24 hours - but still I love it. I spend most working days indoors, on a hard chair typing away at my computer and it's wonderful at 7 o'clock to turn off the machine, stretch, pour a glass of cold white wine and go outside to soak up some warm sun and potter around with some seedlings and some soil.

More soon on our mixed successes with this year's fruit and veg.

Santa Tecla: La Diada Castellera

Tarragona's Santa Tecla festival is underway and we visited on Sunday 16 September to see the first day of the Castellera - the human castles.

Groups competed to see who could build the highest human towers of different formations. There is always a good, strong base of dozens of the biggest, toughest men, their waists reinforced with an enormously long, black sash that's wound round and round. These men form a giant, circular rugby scrum.

On top of their shoulders climb a group of about 12 slightly smaller men to form the next level. Then up and up they go - each new group shinning up the backs of the others - until we reach six, seven and eight levels. The penultimate level is of delicate teenage girls, wobbling as their ankles are firmly gripped by the men below them.

And finally a tiny child topped with an enormous crash helmet - a boy or a girl of no more than six or seven years old - climbs as fast as they can up the tottering tower to stand and raise their fist at the pinnacle.

Occasionally, they all crash down, but the mass of humanity below seems to cushion the impact.

This was the winning team with their single pillar, five people tall.