Hi, I'm Harriet. One year ago I packed up all my things, left my husband behind in the city and came to live here, an abandoned small holding in the hills of eastern Spain. I had my dog and my laptop but I didn't have any furniture, running water, tools heating, or basically anything else. One year later things have changed a lot. In this video I'm going to show you everything I did over the year turning these four acres of abandoned land into the homestead of our dreams. When I moved here in September we'd actually owned this farmstead for about six months and in that time we'd managed to get a small solar setup installed, we'd cleared the house of junk and we've done a fair bit of land clearance so now we could actually see what we'd bought. When I first moved here we had no furniture in the house so I stayed in a semi-converted van that some friends had conveniently parked on our land. I was working full-time remotely online so I cleaned up a little table that had been in the house previously, put it in the upstairs room and started doing my job from there. [Music] My plan was to spend every spare hour I had in the evenings and weekends working on the house and the land, trying to make it more livable. You might have thought getting some furniture was my first priority but actually the first thing I did was make mosquito netting windows for all the windows and doors because whilst working I was being eaten alive by mozzies and it was just driving me mad, and that just felt like the biggest priority at the time. I had literally never stuck two pieces of wood together before and could probably count the number of holes I'd drilled in my life on one hand, so this job took me a while and the end result was kind of wonky, but when it was done being in the house was a lot better and one year later those mosquito blinds are still serving us well. After that I did turn my attention to the furniture. We like to buy or find things secondhand wherever we can so I scoured Wallapop for good deals on furniture and ended up finding a house clearance taking place in a nearby village. The house was a treasure trove of antique, traditional furniture, agricultural equipment and other random odds and ends and if I could I would have bought the entire contents, but our house is very small so I left with a sofa and chair set a wardrobe a coffee table and a bunch of cool stuff like these demijons, and this wash basin which I had all the intentions in the world of using to wash our clothes and has ended up as a place where we dump random pieces of rubbish. I also bought a bed and a mattress and I made a little set of shelves to put my books, and I put up a couple of little clothes racks as well so that I could hang my clothes, since the enormous wardrobe that I'd bought didn't actually fit up the stairs into the bedroom. As September turned to October the temperature began to drop, especially in the nights, and my biggest priority then became preparing for the winter ahead. I hadn't anticipated how chilly the stone house was going to feel, even fairly early in the year in October, so I soon realized that I needed a wood burning stove. This meant cleaning up the hearth area which was basically just compacted dirt and it was very dirty and dusty and not really suitable for using. I laid a brick base and smoothed over all the cracks in the walls with cement. I painted the inside and I bought a stove which we somehow managed to get into the fireplace. But a stove alone is no good without something to burn, so we built a little shelter to store all the wood we intended to buy, we bought the wood. we put it in the shelter and then we were finally able to light the stove and have a nice toasty evening in our little house, which was slowly starting to feel more like a home. [Music] As the winter progressed I really struggled to get much done whilst I was here on my own working all day. The days were short and the light was pretty much gone by the time I finished on my laptop. At weekends my husband came to visit and we did get a few things done like repainting our little terrace, [Music] tiling the storeroom floor, and harvesting a lot of canes so that they could dry over the Spring and be ready to use in the garden the following year. We had a few visitors and we did a few nice little garden projects like planting broad beans and making these little planters out of old tires. We went on a lot of dog walks exploring the local area and began making friends with our neighbors. In December I started the first big project that I really tackled on my own and I decided to fix our water situation. I took a week off work to do this because I just couldn't see how I could possibly get it done otherwise. I had to replace a pipe which came from a natural spring and carried water to our land. This was our irrigation water which was supposed to flow into several storage deposits along the way and end up in one final huge deposit right by the house. This deposit had been empty and looking really sad and depressing for a long time and I had a dream of getting this deposit full of water again and making it into a kind of wild pond type space. But the first step was fixing the 300 meters of piping and clearing out all the deposits. [Music] [Music] I did actually manage to fix all the piping in that week and the deposits all slowly began filling up again with water. We now have 60 000 liters of water storage available which is constantly refilling. Over the following spring I added lots of plants and fish to our big deposit as well and it is now a beautiful wildlife haven, just as I imagined. The water is clear and free of algae and mosquitoes and it attracts all sorts of insects, birds, amphibians and even reptiles. [Music] I think fixing the water really unlocked everything else in this project and I started the new year with so much energy and enthusiasm to start working on the land, something I hadn't really felt able to do until I was sure we could access irrigation water. In January I pruned most of our olive trees and I also started digging a number of garden beds in the fields closest to the house and closest to our big water deposit, which I'd earmarked as our first kitchen garden area. It was a space where I wanted to grow veg intensively and basically just learn as much as I could about growing food for ourselves in this climate. We had water but I wasn't totally sure how to use it. I did some experiments with flood irrigation and also with drip irrigation. As the months went on I started more seedlings and I dug more beds to accommodate them and slowly the garden began to take shape. Meanwhile I was also improving the outdoor shower area, which was actually just a bag of water hanging from a tree, and with Mauro's help we also made a proper composting toilet to replace the bucket we've been using before. Talking of compost, I'd started a wormery and also lots of compost piles over the last year or so and the first pile we started was beginning to look like it was pretty much done, so that was exciting. In February we celebrated a year since we bought the land. We had a little party and all our local friends came. They helped us put up a big bell tent which we were planning to use to begin to welcome visitors, we planted a few trees and we cooked a rather dubious paella, and just generally reflected on how far we'd come in that last year, and felt so grateful for all the lovely people we've become friends with along the way. As the hardest, darkest weeks of winter began to draw to a close and the first signs of spring appeared, I began to feel a little bit overwhelmed with how much I wanted to do in the coming year and how little I felt I'd been able to achieve over the winter, beyond basic survival. In March we made two major changes. I left my job so I could work full-time on the homestead, and to save money we gave up the flat that we'd previously been renting in the city where Mauro was working. Instead he went to live with his parents and we brought everything from the flat to the farmstead, which was a squeeze, but it was great to have everything finally under one roof and feel a little bit more like this was really our home. Suddenly now I wasn't working I had so much more time available and the first thing I did was build us a proper bathroom with a hot shower and a sink. This was actually a huge leap in terms of complexity and skill for me as I'd never done anything like this before, and I made my fair share of mistakes but I eventually figured it all out the end result made such a huge difference to our comfort here, and became absolutely indispensable as the days warmed up and I got increasingly sweatier and dirtier by just doing general work on the farm. I was always so grateful to be able to end the day with a pressurized, indoor shower at a temperature of my choosing. So that was a really good job to have done. Despite getting the bathroom done and now having all the free time in the world, it rained pretty much constantly and I found myself unable to do very much at all apart from shelter indoors. It was really frustrating but things began to pick up and look brighter again when my mum came to stay for six weeks. The weather really brightened up and we did a lot of work outside. The kitchen garden was beginning to take shape. We dug lots of extra beds, worked on the pathing between the beds, got lots of seedlings in the ground and sowed lots more. Now it was dry we could also work on improving our solar setup. During the grey weeks I'd struggled with power here on my own, so as well as reluctantly buying a generator we added two more panels to our solar array and changed the angle so that they would work more efficiently. With help from our workshop group I also built a chicken coop and run made with recycled pallets, and began raising our first set of eggs in an incubator. [Music] Around Easter time we also started learning more about natural building, which was something we've been interested in for a long time. We went to stay for a few nights at the Freedom Farm in Aragón and learnt about working with cob. We came home and Mauro made our first mud and brick stove which was partially successful but really a great initial learning experience. Our eggs hatched and we got a pair of nanny goats to add to our farm, which was kind of unexpected and resulted in me having to put up an electric fence in record time, but I got it done and we welcomed our new lovely noisy ladies to our homestead with the hope of having them in milk next year. We bought some more live hens since only one of our eggs hatched, re-homed a cockrel from a friend and now have a healthy flock of six chickens who are currently giving us two or three eggs a day. We also rescued two kittens, one of whom immediately had a litter of kittens, we raised the kittens, found a new home for them, sterilized the cats, adopted a new puppy and... nope, that's it for animals! Meanwhile I was mostly just working on the garden at this point. My living arrangements felt pretty comfortable and the biggest priority to me at this point felt like experimenting and learning as much as I could about growing food. The whole point of this homestead for us is to be as resilient as possible against whatever the future might bring, so learning to grow and preserve our own food and manage our land in a sustainable, closed-loop kind of way is really the key to this. I tried all sorts of things in a very scattergun approach this year, from imported manure to green manures, cover crops, different mulches, different varieties of plants and vegetables... it's all been just such a lot of fun and of course I've been documenting this whole journey on YouTube as well which also began to take up more of my time since I stopped working in my normal job. With the summer garden all in the ground and growing nicely, there was still plenty of land management type jobs to do. As the grass and the wildflowers grew taller and began to dry, as the days got longer and drier, I strimmed all of our fields and even uncovered a number of fruit trees I didn't know we had. As the season progressed I started doing more jobs like seed saving and preserving. I really love these jobs because they really are the reward for all your hard work and it feels really good to be putting away jars of food or seeds for the future. It's also very convenient that as the months get hotter and hotter and working outside becomes more challenging, you actually have less to do in the field and more work to do in the shade, in the kitchen, which is definitely where you want to be when it's 40 degrees outside. [Music] Despite it getting very hot, as summer drew on there were actually some pressing outdoor jobs that I still wanted to get done before the winter, so I had to start working on those. In July I organized a long weekend of communal cobbing. We invited some friends and neighbours to help us cob the outside of a new goat shelter that we were building in preparation for the winter. We'd already built the frame with pallets and experimented with a few techniques, and over the course of four days with the help of lots of extra pairs of hands we made significant progress on the build. Iver the following weeks we managed to get the roof on and we now need to finish cobbing on the inside and put up the actual fencing for the new goat enclosure. Meanwhile, we continued working on improving our general living conditions. We salvaged an oven which some friends were going to throw away, we scavenged and cleaned more items of furniture which we found in skips and we worked sporadically on our internal wiring. We now have a few plug sockets and light bulbs in crucial places, but for the most part we still use numerous extension leads to get power around the house. We also began to improve the tipi. I moved the tipi onto a new base of sand so that it would be flat, did a bit of landscaping around the outside and built some furniture for the inside. [Music] We're now really happy with how it's looking and it's great to be able to provide a decent place to sleep when visitors come and stay. As we passed the height of summer, the garden really exploded. I can't believe how much this abandoned field has changed over the last year... well really just the last six months. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Making my first garden from scratch taught me so much and I still have so much more to learn, but now I feel like I've got more of a clue about how to manage our land and generally what direction I want to go in. By the end of August it was time to start on some of the big harvests: almonds, carobs, and grapes. For these big harvests it's common and much easier to work in a group, so we spent many days rotating around our circle of friends helping each other out with their harvests and sharing in the results. We're still in the process of that so we haven't actually processed our harvests yet but we're really excited to make our first batch of wine this year and to feed our goats for free with all the carob we picked. It's now mid-September and it's been a whole year since I moved here on my own. We've got so much still to do, we always will, but our abandoned farm is looking less abandoned by the day. I can't remember the last time we bought a vegetable from the shop and I've learnt so many skills this year and done so many things I never thought I'd be able to do. But you know what? The best thing about the last year hasn't been anything we've done on the farmstead. In fact it hasn't actually got anything to do with the farm at all. Honestly I think the best thing, the most kind of revolutionary thing which has really made a difference in my life has been falling in love with the place where we live, with all its imperfections, its problems, its challenges, the people who live here, the way things are done here. Making a commitment to a small little place in the world and saying "this is my place". I'm gonna stay here and just try and treat it the best I can. To go on a walk and know the name of every tree and wildflower that you pass. I truly believe that as humans we are meant to know our surroundings intimately and to kind of be one with them, and when we're not we feel isolated, detached and kind of adrift. We're built to care about the world we inhabit and when we do love that world it loves us back and we feel happier and more at peace. [Music] Well I think that's it for this video Thank you for watching it, I've had a lot of fun putting it together and looking back on everything we've done over the last year. Thank you if you've watched any of our videos in the past as well, we really appreciate it and it really means a lot to see the channel grow and to read all your comments and see that people are interested in what we're doing here. If you'd like to, you can subscribe to the channel and YouTube will probably be more likely to show you our future videos, I don't know exactly how it works but yeah, feel free to do that. We also have an Instagram and a free newsletter that goes out once a month so I'll leave the links to those in the description, feel free to find us there. And yeah thanks again for watching and we'll see you soon!
