Eco-conquering the washing machine: part 1

The other day a clever man suggested that instead of running our washing machine directly from the generator, our solar/wind-powered system could handle a cold wash on its own.

Until now I've been too frightened to even consider trying to run the washing machine without the generator. All that water-churning and spinning must, I assumed, take loads of power: too much perhaps for our little alternative system. As a consequence, doing the washing is a noisy business with the washing machine and generator thundering away together; and not very green or cheap at all as it uses up half a tank of petrol (and, incidentally, about 80 litres of water).

What I do know about washing machines though is that heating up the water takes the most energy out of of the whole cycle. As I needed to wash some sheets and I didn't want to wash them in cold water, I decided to experiment.

I ran the first half of the wash as usual from the generator. This meant that the water was heated up to 40 degrees by petrol power. Then I switched off the genny (oh, the silence!), crossed my fingers and plugged into the other system which was being powered up nicely by the midday sun.

With my hand hovering over the washing machine's off switch in case anything suddenly went horribly wrong, I watched how much energy it was using. It turned out that the sun could manage perfectly well - the machine's needs were relatively modest. (For anyone interested, it took about 15 amps to turn the drum around each time during the rinse cycle, and spinning took about 29 amps.)

A success!

Next step: to reduce the machine's water and energy consumption by getting the ecoballs out of the box and cutting out a few of the three or four rinses that it seems to think that it needs.

Next step after that: to supply water to the washing machine which has already been warmed by the sun (or at least gas until we get a solar water system).

• Spotted today - a lovely big hairy bumblebee and - I think - a hummingbird hawk moth.

Carob harvesting: it won't make you rich

Over the past few weeks we have been harvesting carobs.

It's not like skipping down to the orchard, plucking a few bright apples in the autumn sunshine and spending the evening making crumble.

A carob tree is a tough beast - it survives in poor soil with little water, and its fruit are hard, brown, shiny pods which which cling tightly to the branches.

To harvest the carob (garrofer in Catalan) - even though it's 28 degrees in the shade, you put on your trainers, long trousers and gloves. A hard hat wouldn't go amiss either.

Then you clamber down the terraces, over walls, around (or through) thorny bushes to the tree that you think will most readily relinquish its hoard. If you're feeling particularly organised, you'll tidy up underneath the tree, pulling out suckers, cutting back brambles and moving rocks. If you've got a smallish boy available, you send him up the tree with a big stick to knock off as many carobs as he can so the rest of you can rummage around in the undergrowth picking up the falling fruits and trying not to get hit on the head too much, because it hurts, and hoping you don't frighten any snakes or scorpions.

After many, many hours of hot, hard work, we (well, mainly David) had filled 20 sacks with the smelly dark pods. We filled up the trailer and drove down the hill to sell our produce to one of the many carob dealers in the village.

Lots of carobs: one day one of them might be in your yogurt

The weighbridge confirmed that we'd picked 240kg. We unloaded our harvest onto the giant pile outside the dealer and received 20 cents a kilo in return - a grand total of 48 euros. Like I said, it isn't going to make us rich.

Just a small addition to Spain's 65,000 tonne carob output

Carob farming can be fun

However, there are some interesting carob facts. (NB I've been a very lazy journalist and gleaned some of these facts from the internet. Although I've done a lot of triangulation to check the info rather than simply copying Wikipedia, I've not found the world's greatest carob expert and telephoned them to check the facts. If you are the world's greatest carob expert, please let me know.)

1) The Latin name for carob is ceratonia siliqua. Gold and gemstones were once weighed against carob seeds because people - mistakenly it seems - believed that carob seeds were uniform in weight. A one-carat diamond is 200 milligrams. Today, the carat indicates the purity of gold rather than its weight because a pure gold Roman coin, the solidus, weighed 24 carats, and therefore 24-carat gold is 100 per cent pure.

2) If you're German, you call the carob johannisbrotbaum. This is because St John the Baptist ate carobs when he was in the desert.

3) Spain is the world's top carob-producing country. Wikipedia says that it produced 65,000 tonnes in 2009.

4) The carob dealer man told us that the husks of the carobs that we picked are going to become feed for livestock.

5) And the seeds of the carobs that we picked are going to be sold to multinational companies to make the food additive E410 (known as locust bean gum or carob gum), which is used to thicken yogurts and other foods.

6) Carob is used to make vegan chocolate. But a raw carob does not look, taste, feel or smell anything like chocolate. Better to stick to real chocolate in my opinion.

7) Somewhere on the internet it claims that carobs are fire resistant. If this is true, it would be a very good thing as they grow where there are lots of forest fires.

8) Robert Byron said - rather unpoetically - that a carob tastes 'like a glucose doormat'.

Before we turn on the tap: replenishing our water supply

We were really hoping that it was going to rain around now. Last year when we came here on holiday, we got drenched in September. But, as yet, there has been nothing more than a short shower since June.

Our water is supplied from a cisterna under the house. This is filled up by the rain running off the roof, or by Juan the water man (which costs 90 euros per delivery, or 45 euros if we share the delivery with next door).

As the cisterna was nearly empty and we didn't want to spend lots of money, we decided to get our water from another source. In the village there is a well for the farmers. As we live in the countryside, we have bought a swipe card to gain access to this supply too.

So we took our 1,000-litre plastic water cube on a trailer down to the village, swiped our card at the well and filled up. We hadn't used the cube or the trailer before, so we weren't quite sure if everything was going to survive such a heavy load. But we checked the trailer tyre pressures, made sure everything was secured as best we could and drove slowly back up the hill to the house.

Filling up the water

Everything was going very well indeed until we turned off the tarmac road and up the hill on to the track to our house. We hit a massive bump which dislodged the cube so it slid back on the trailer, burst out of the trailer's back gate and hit the ground, wedging the corner of the trailer into the ground and leaving the cube at 45 degrees, half in and half out of the trailer. We tried to drag the trailer and the cube (which was still half-tied to the trailer) forward with the car, but one of the car's back wheels just spun round and round on bare rock. It looked as though we were going to have to open the tap, let all that precious water run down the road and start again

But our Nissan 4x4 (which until now, I've thoroughly disliked for its bigness, its redness and its unwieldiness) didn't let us down. We tried again and again with the four-wheel drive engaged, changing the angle of the wheels until at last that back tyre found some traction and we could edge forward. The trailer righted itself and - with the cube still hanging out of the back - we crept towards the house.

After that, things were easy. We attached a hose to the cube and ran it down to the entrance to the cisterna. Because the inside of the cube was dirty we held a tea towel over the end of the hose to filter the water. After five minutes or so our cube was empty and our cisterna was a bit fuller than it was before.

And most of you, dear readers, just turn on the tap...

PS - seeing that water is a finite resource really makes us think hard about how we use our water. (See this blog post too.) According to BBC Panorama, the average person in the UK uses 150 litres of water a day.

I think we're using at most about 1,000 litres a week between us, which is an average of 70 litres a day per person - which is still a lot of water when you see it in front of you.

Where does it go? Our washing machine is extremely thirsty - it needs about 90 litres for a wash and we do about two washes a week. I also hand-wash some things using the run-off from the washing machine followed by clean water for rinsing. So I guess this accounts for about 400 litres a week.

That means that we each use about 43 litres a day for washing ourselves, washing the dishes, flushing the toilet and watering a few plants - gosh.

Face to face with praying mantis

Found while gardening...

Ebro kayaking

On Sunday we kayaked down a 12km section of the river Ebro.

I thought that this was going to be a terrifying ordeal - the Ebro is huge. I feared huge depths, vicious currents and lurking giant catfish.

In fact, the stretch we took from Miravet to Benifallet was tranquil, pretty shallow in places and I don't think many fish were going to come anywhere near the 70 or so of us in the kayaking group who were splashing noisily and inexpertly through the water.

The scenery was stunning, the weather was beautiful and by the end I'd almost worked out which side to paddle to turn a corner.

David and me, not kayaking very hard at all, middle right

Miravet from the Ebro

Thank you very much to Jane Shaw for the pics.

Check out the blog post of our fellow kayakers, Linda and Steve, at La Vida Artesania

The kayaking company was BeniEmocions.

The fruits of our (not very hard) labour

When I was in England this August I could feel autumn coming as the days became shorter, the rain colder and the air developed a chilly bite. It felt like back to school, like the start of the six-month British winter, time to pack away light summer clothes and find the Christmas decorations - not good at all.

Even though over the past week or so England has enjoyed a summery blast of heat, I think it's better here. Yesterday it reached 35 degrees in the shade - as hot as it's been all summer, yet the cooler mornings give a bit of a bounce to life. David's been up and out early, hacking stubborn old shrubs and suckers out of the terraces in the early morning light (well, the sun doesn't come up until about 8am), and the plants are enjoying some free water from the overnight dew.

We're benefitting from a longer growing season than we were used to in our north London garden. I planted some serrano chilli seeds on 1 July (thank you for the freebie, Wahaca), they flowered in late August and I thought we were far too late for fruits, but now we've got a good crop well on the way.

I've just planted some more chilli seeds to see what will happen. David says it's a silly idea.

We had a huge crop of figs from one tree in late August/early September. We couldn't keep up with eating them as fast as they needed to be picked so I tried drying some in the sun. They took about two days to become storable, but not completely dry. They tasted wonderful - almost better than the fresh figs as they're not as rich. However, a few ended up with maggots in as they'd been sitting outside smelling sweet and delicious for the flies and wasps. I'll try drying them in muslin bags next time, I think.

I made a few jars of chutney too. I'm giving it a little while to mature before I give you the verdict. It looks nice though.