Three eggs today

In January we fulfilled one of our living-in-the-countryside dreams and bought three chickens.

After David had eyed up expensive, finely combed Basque fowl and we'd considered the pros and cons of a cockerel (he looks after his girls but might have your eye out with a claw) we eventually settled on three point-of-lay bog-standard red hens from the local garden centre. They were only about five euros apiece, but by the time we bought a coop, some food, a feeding trough and a water dispenser it's going to take a year or so to repay our investment.

We tucked them up against the freezing winter winds with generous piles of sawdust and stacks of straw bales, bought 'Chickens for Dummies' and hoped for the best.

Eventually, one morning around Valentine's Day (the traditional start of the laying season) we found our first tiny brown egg nestling warmly in a corner of the coop. After that the eggs became bigger and bolder, but only ever one a day which seemed to signify that only one chicken was in lay (unless they were taking it in turns).

Then last week one of the hens shuffled herself down into a big pile of straw in the chicken run and began to make a nest. David predicted the second egg of the day and he was right - we got a little brown speckled one. We celebrated with eggs for breakfast on Sunday.

It was all going well until Sunday afternoon when the chickens were pootling around happily in the shade of the pine trees. (They have their own run, but usually escape and wander around until we put them back.) We'd forgotten that the puppy was off her lead. There was some barking and clucking, then a lot of squawking, flapping and pounding of paws. The puppy isolated one of the chickens and chased her down down the terraces into the forest, David chased the puppy, I tried to herd the other two chickens into their coop, David rugby-tackled the (very happy) puppy in a gorse bush and dragged her back to her kennel, and eventually we pulled the miraculously-not-dead-chicken out of the forest. Only one egg the next day.

But then today we had three eggs - hurray!

Olive toil

The olive harvest is just coming to an end here. Around the start of November we began to glimpse vast dark green collection nets spread out on the hillsides between the silvery olive trees. As we sat outside a bar enjoying a cold beer in the evening, carfulls of tired, dirty people would pass with sacks bulging with the tiny fruits to join the queue for one of the village's olive presses.

Spain is the world's largest olive producer (see Wikipedia) and there are certainly a lot of olive trees around here. In London, olives and their oil were, to us, an expensive delicacy. But here they are trodden underfoot, we can buy big bottles of luscious, yellowy-green oil for not very much money at all, and quite a few people can't even be bothered to pick their crop as they've got too much left over from the year before.

As it's our first year we were keen to carry out a harvest from the trees on our land and get our own olive oil pressed. We've been anxiously watching the fruits grow all year, wondering whether a green olive would turn into a black olive (it did - via purple) and waiting for an indication that the time was right to begin the harvest. (Some magic meteorological moment determines when the olives are at exactly the right stage of oiliness, wateriness and not-greenness.)

Olive blossom in May

Olives ripening in early September

One warm sunny day towards the end of November, when most of our olives were soft and purply-black, and after our immediate neighbours had picked theirs, we decided to begin. David had been watching the neighbours work their harvest and had picked up some good tips and one of our friends arrived to show us what to do. Our land doesn't have huge amounts of olive trees (although it did once: there are enormous holes in the ground where old olive trees were dug out for some reason, possibly to sell), so we had agreed with another neighbour to pick their olives too. To have our own oil pressed at the Moli d'oli in the village we would need a minimum of 300kg.

We started by clearing the land as much as we could underneath the trees. The flatter and cleaner it is, the easier it is to spread out the huge net which will catch the olives. Where there were slopes (most of our land is sloping, in spite of the terraces) we caught the edge of the net on some low branches to stop all the olives rolling off down the hill. (NB, we learned that it's better not to have a small puppy running around at this time because she will charge right underneath the net and it will be rather difficult to extract her from the tangle.)

David demonstrating how to lay out an olive net
Koko about to undo all the good work

When the nets are ready, it's time to pick the olives. We were lucky that most of our trees have been pruned into a low wide shape so that we could reach most of the branches easily. In our right hand we held our chosen harvesting tool – an olive comb – and in our left we grabbed on to a branch of the tree and pulled it towards us. Then we scraped the comb as hard as we could through the leaves and pulled off the olives which bounced on to the nets below our feet. (This isn't as difficult or as unpleasant as picking carobs.)

An olive comb

An olive comb in action

Some people use mechanical tree shakers. In fact someone is using one right now in the valley below our house. It sounds like a strimmer – they're petrol-driven – and they vibrate the branches really hard so that the olives fall off (you can't really do this with your own strength – we tried). They probably make the job a lot quicker and easier, but some people say that they damage the tree.

Once we'd finished a tree, we had to herd the olives off the net and into a tub, making sure that we didn't flick up the wrong bit of net and see all our hard work tumble off down the hillside.

Some of our crop

After half a day's work it became clear that we weren't going to get enough for an oil pressing, which was a disappointment. Although word in the village is that it's a bad year for olives (not enough rain, wrong kind of wind, who knows?) we're holding out high hopes for next year. But we continued for the rest of the day and decided that we'd cure them ourselves. Update on the results coming soon.

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'.