Hola! Good morning from Spain — and from a Jem who has, with absolutely perfect timing, come down with a stinking cold.
The show must go on.
🌿 The Grapevine Had to Go (Sort of)
We love our grapevine. We’ve always loved our grapevine. It climbs the front of the house and gives the whole place that quintessential Andalusian character. The lower part stays — the house wouldn’t be the same without it.
But the top part had to come down.
Over the seasons it’s been quietly growing with increasing ambition — trying to force its way into the house, damaging the fly net on the window, and now making its way toward the air conditioning unit. Left much longer, it would cause real damage to both.
Cutting it back felt like a proper end-of-an-era moment. Years of growth, gone in an afternoon. The vine itself absolutely didn’t want to cooperate — a firm tug from below did nothing, which led to the slightly undignified solution of going upstairs to attack it from above.
The result: significantly brighter kids’ room, a pile of vines ready for a ceremonious burning (once we sort out our fire licence), and Jem feeling genuinely guilty about the whole thing. Practical? Yes. Sad? Also yes.
🚗 Gizmo Has a Wobble
While the grapevine drama was unfolding, our car — Gizmo — decided to add to the morning’s entertainment by refusing to start. Flat battery.
Drip charge applied. Gizmo encouraged. Gizmo started.
We finally have a car. Good old Giz.
🔋 Winter Solar — The Mountain Problem
Here’s something about off-grid living in winter that doesn’t come up much: the sun moves. And in our valley in Andalusia, that means the mountain to the south blocks our solar panels for a significant part of the morning.
By 9:30am, the sun was still a good hour and a half from reaching the house. Add two overcast days after we first arrived, and our batteries were very, very low. In summer this isn’t remotely an issue — the sun is up and blasting from early morning. In December, you wait.
We waited. The sun eventually came around. The Victron system charged the batteries up to 97-98% — about as full as it’ll allow — and once we hit that, we switched on the air con units to run as heating. Outside it was a perfectly pleasant 19-20°C, but these thick cortijo walls hold the cold overnight and take a long time to warm up again. The air con running warm keeps the chill at bay.
Winter off-grid solar living is a different game to summer. You adapt, and you learn to appreciate every sunny day even more.
🫒 The Olives Are More Than Ready
The grove looks incredible. The olives are full, heavy, and turning — greeny-black and absolutely bursting with oil. We squeezed one earlier in the week. The oil ran out immediately.
They are ready. We are ready. The weather, however, is about to become uncooperative — five days of rain forecast, starting soon.
And the crates haven’t arrived.
We ordered all our harvesting gear while we were travelling — rakes, nets, and crates to transport the olives to the press. The rakes arrived. The nets arrived. The crates, which you need to actually take the harvest anywhere, have not.
We’re weighing the options: wait for delivery and hope the rain doesn’t cause any problems for the olives, or go directly to the olive press and buy crates there at a higher cost. We really don’t want to let this harvest go to waste — we’ve put so much effort into bringing that grove back to life, and the amount of olives on the trees this year is beyond anything we expected.
Case in point: we kicked a football into a tree by accident earlier and lost roughly 50 olives in one go. They are more than ready.
The harvest will happen. It might be next week, not this week, but it’s coming. The olives aren’t going anywhere.
Mañana. Mañana. Mañana.
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¡Hasta la próxima! 🌻