Well there's still no news on the licences , the current excuse , sorry reason is the august shut down , we've had a tax bill from the rambler association and sent that off to Seville but we still await the big news.
So I'll not bore you any more with that , we had a caller the other day , very nice old Spanish chap in a well loved straw hat that must be just as old as he is , he could not speak any English and did not have his reading glasses shall we say so using the translator on the pad was out. He seemed very friendly and very animated as he acted out what he was trying to say in the lunch time heat .
I invited him in and the lovely wife sorted out some iced tea, with his skill at mime and our improving Spanish we pieced together that he wanted to pick our almonds, a bit of a coincidence as the the lovely wife had only mentioned it in the village shop the day before, not got a grape vine yet ?
Well he had a deal in his head and once we acted it out we agreed , not sure if it was a good or bad deal but a % of something is better than 100% of nothing or a week in the searing heat on a DIY jaunt.
So he agreed to call back the next day and start as they were already falling on their own . The next day they arrived a team of three and a noisy dog and away they went sticks clicking in the distance for 6 hrs then off for lunch and back the next day, and the next and the next and then over 500kg's later their done.
Each day the chap , Carlos called at the cortijo said hola and acted out where they were going and at the end of the day he called in and said adios. This day he called in and said we needed to go to his casa, so surprised and a bit confused off we went behind his laden van, down the ramblas over the hill and were there a nice little casa stood alone with another noisy dog !
We were invited in by his lovely wife and we all sat around the kitchen table saying hola and asking if were all well , then Carlos gets the coffee on the go and introduced his young grand children. We wound our way through the usual safe topics of weather and how long you been in Spain then we reached the nut in the husk so to speak.
It was his lovely wife who started to explain that the young ones were her daughters family ? , ok, and they live with her daughter and husband with them ? Ok, their grand children , ok , then his lovely wife said she lived with her mom and grandma in the casa ? ? , ok , eh, then the syntax sunk in she's not saying LA casa she's saying SU casa , I sat bolt upright , su casa eh eh mi casa , yes she used to live in our cortijo with her parents and they lived with their parents all in our cortijo well you could have knocked me over with a barra de pan, her grandma was born in the cortijo I think in the 1880's and reckons it's over 200 years old , wow .
So after showing some current pic's of our place we got the tour of theirs , typical Spanish style with a formal dinning room that looked almost unused as the dinning table was swamped with family pictures , their wedding pictures from 50 years ago and as you may remember it was ours 30 years ago so more happy coincidences .
We have invited them up for coffee and a tour next week .
Well after not wanting to be a farmer to being handed a factura from the dealer for the almonds it's all change, can you be called a farmer if you do nothing ? Well it works for Boysy in green grass and half the House of Lords so may be you can.
Carlos says they need water to be really good , I agree , but it's only rained here 5 times since April 2013 and two of them it never wet the path ! So I bet they need a drink but I can see the agricultural water supply meters from the drive and ours is capped off and I'm sure the cost of connection will not be rewarded by a world almond shortage boosting the price. So some nights of rain in the coming months would be welcome but not so much that the rambla cuts us off from the market !
When asked if he wanted to pick the olives he said they are no good as they are very small and thin skinned and unlikely to recover, yes they need water ! We have lots of irrigation pipes their wrapped around all sorts of things and poke up out of the ground all over just like grannies knitting bag thanks to the flood of 2012, but there unlikely to get connected . We have a 40,000 L deposit tank but that is just as dry as the olives we planned to refit the rear gutters to fill the under ground tank but will it ever rain enough ? Is that why their missing already ?
Typical farmer it's always the wrong weather and is there a EU grant ?