Wind in a Dry Place

Laroque des Alberes is about 8kms from the Mediterranean Sea, at the foot of the Pyrenees. I am on an organic olive orchard, where we (that's me and, right now, 5 other WWOOFers) are clearing forest to plant young olive trees. Raw/natural olives taste absolutely nasty, for anyone curious to know. Something of a mix between mush, oil, unripened bananas, and bitterness. My mouth was dry and stained with the distasteful flavour for a while after two bites out of a ripened olive. Don't ask why I took two bites. I think I hoped the second one would taste better? Then I worried that raw olives were poisonous, probably because someone who didn't know anything about olives told me that once.

The forest here is full of a lot of bushes and trees I have no idea what are, but also cork oak. Cork trees are really pretty--their bark is quite similar to that of Douglas Firs, for any west coasters who don't spend 100% of their time in the city, but are much smaller, and often quite twisted. There are Strawberry Trees that have bright red fruit and a rather mild flavour and a spikey texture. And brambles. Oh, how I hate brambles. I think I'm going to start a list of Things that are the Devil, and brambles are going on as my #3.

The farm is a vegan farm--no milk, no meat. There are hens on the farm, but the eggs go to the dogs first, and it being winter (or 'winter'), there aren't many extra eggs after the dogs. Lucy and Elise, two WWOOFers from the USA made Thanksgiving breakfast and dinner on Thursday, and did a bang up job of making pancakes and pie without the aid of eggs or butter. All were quite well filled by the end of the day.

The farm is built to be fairly ecological. There are solar panels for hot water, and the woodburning fire place also heats a radiator that warms parts of the house. There is a graywater system that takes the water from the washing machine to a small fruit tree orchard, and a separate graywater system that takes the rest of the house's waste water and filters it through two sets of plants, the last being a pond full of beautiful aquatic plants, to produce clean water for watering the vegetable garden. The toilets are compost toilets, which means no water is wasted for flushing, but it means that someone has to empty them every day and someone else has to ensure we have a daily supply of woodchips. Compost toilets are great; I've been reading a lot about them, and saw mention of a Brasilian advertising campaign to encourage people to Xixi No Banho (at least that's what I think it says...)



Yesterday I woke up CRANKY and pedalled my way to Collioures to work out the cranks. It was a day off, and beautiful, and the hills were what I needed. Collioures is really beautiful--your typical Mediterranean port town, with a beautiful brick walled harbour and an old lighthouse. The streets are narrow and cool and crooked and full of filtered light. I was disappointed I didn't remember my drawing book, but I have three weeks here and plenty of days off to return to sit in the sunshine and draw.

Last night was incredibly windy, and we spent most of our time cleaning up after the wind, and building fences to keep the wild boars out of the orchard. We plant three broad beans with each olive tree, and the boars seem to like rooting up the beans, damaging the trees in the process. I don't know what they are after, since they don't seem to eat the bean plans at all. The beans 'fix' the soil, making more minerals and whatnot available to the olive trees. (And broad beans are also one of the prettiest bean plants around...)