hola from spain

hi. new here. ive used this website for referencing in the past but just getting into permaculture and happy to find out that im familiar with this forum. me, my partner and our one and a half year old daughter live with my mother in the south of spain. my parents were travellers in the UK, they would move from place to place with their horses, wagons, goats and chikens they moved to spain in the early 90's with a community of people. they settled and bought properties in the same area. our land is around 1500m2 including the house, which is mostly original, built over 200 years ago using natural materials. the roof has been replaced, part of it using old traditional techniques and more recent parts using concrete. the land is south west facing, quite steep and a lot of clay. we have 4 big olives with other little ones dotted around, 3 almonds and some little young carob trees. we live just below a nature reserve. there is water from the grid but no electricity so we use solar. the electricity posts are getting nearer but im happy with our solar system, be it only a small one. we actually have two solar systems. one for the original house where my mother lives and a seperate one for our place. my mum lives in the original old house and we live in a self built extension. from the outside it looks like an old lorry box for storage but built off the lorry box is a bedroom, bathroom and kitchen/living room. we built using as much reclaimed materials as we could find and the rest is made with concrete, which i dont really like but its what ive been shown. for the kitchen and bathroom we had a 9 month time schedule (due to our baby being born) so I decided on concrete for ease and speed. i would like to have used clay thinking back on it since its natural and so readily available. our neighbours are building a cob and pallet house! weve always had a little garden but it gets hard in the summer.  I'd like to learn more about growing food and how to use the land (thats conveniently below the house) for caching and storing the rain if it ever comes!
we have a pig as a pet and I use her manure. we recently got chickens again. i do strimming and plan on giving the cut grass to the chikens in the dry season and try a hot compost when the grass is green in late spring. I do vermicompost. we love our worms, they do amazing stuff. sory for the long introduction. I've been on permies quite a bit recently learning lots. thank you for this website. feel I've probably got more to say but going to leave it here for now.

Sounds like a great lifestyle! Welcome!

Hola Sonny

Great pictures, nice looking place. You definitely have a budding vermiculture expert right there!

Hi,
may I ask where in south Spain?

hi Abraham, we live in the mountains of Velez Malaga in a municipal called Cutar

Wow! That's the heart of the Axarquía. So close, yet so remote!

Sweet wine was very common in the area, but since the Filoxera plague it doesn't work as well anymore. But I wonder whether permaculture practices could revive this crop.

nice to hear from someone local on permies. we are on the outskirts of cutar closer to embalse la vinuela. its mostly olive secano, they do still grow grapes closer to cutar but more and more they are converting the land into irrigated avocado and mango crops

Hola from Mexico! Welcome to permies, In the part of Mexico where I live we sometimes use greenhouses as COOL spaces to grow things in the hot dry weather. These greenhouses are fitted with fans pointing out on one end and a grate at the other that constantly has water dripping down it. so outside air is pulled through the water and cooled. When it's about 40°C outside in the midday sun it can as cool as much as ten to fifteen degrees cooler inside. These are usually large greenhouses, but I've seen videos of sunken greenhouses in the Andes of Peru, called walipini that are also used to create microclimates that allow typical kitchen vegetables to be grown when the outside climate is inhospitable, either too hot or too cold.

Melissa Ferrin thank you for sharing! really enjoy learning how other countries with similar climates to here deal with the long dry season and irrigation techniques. gracias

i want to use the olla watering technique but i cant find any vessels that are adequate. we have a lot of clay here so maybe i should learn how to use it 🤔

Sonny Hegarty wrote:i want to use the olla watering technique but i cant find any vessels that are adequate. we have a lot of clay here so maybe i should learn how to use it 🤔

If you have clay, then you just need drip irrigation, in case you are watering your crops. You may install a drip irrigation plastic pipe, or if your prefer a more sustainable method, take any recipient with enough capacity, make a few small holes in its base, and fill your recipient with water whenever you need to irrigate. You may bury the recipient 5 or 10 cm. The dirt cheap method is making use of old 1,5 litres plastic bottles, stick them in the ground with a metal bar, upside down, cut the base so it can be opened and closed again, and fill it with water. It should be dripping for hours. If you aren't comfortable with plastic bottles (I am not!), use any container, terracota are best.

Consider, though, that any crop that you grow following a method will force you to keep doing this same method again and again, unless it's a perennial. I mean, if you develop a landrace tomato seed that grows spectacularly with a drip irrigation, then you have to drip irrigate these seeds for best results.

Sonny Hegarty wrote:i want to use the olla watering technique but i cant find any vessels that are adequate. we have a lot of clay here so maybe i should learn how to use it 🤔

I got at local potter to make me one - actually I have had 2 different ollas made (~10Euros each). I never really got it to work properly for me bc I wanted automatic irrigation... I live on the other side of Malaga. If you want you can try the 2 ollas I have?