Eating From my Garden EVERY DAY for a Year [timelapse]

Just over a year ago I set myself a challenge for 2022. My challenge was to eat something from the garden every single day for a whole year. For a bit of background my name's Harriet and I live with my husband Mauro on four acres of land here in the hills of eastern Spain. We've owned the land for about two years and I've been here full-time for a little over a year so this is all pretty new. We have renovation work to do, a stone ruin to restore and lots of land to figure out how best to manage. But one of the main goals for us and one of the things I've always been desperate to do is grow a large amount of our own food. This time last year I didn't have all that much experience, I had no experience of growing and gardening in this climate, I'd only just fixed the irrigation system that brings water to our land and our land had been unused for many years and was in need of a lot of care. So I decided to get going, I would set myself a challenge and I would eat something from the garden every single day of the year and that I would also document it. So this video is about how that challenge went. Oh hello, where did you come from? But you were inside! So I think it's going to be a really fun challenge, it's really just a way to encourage me to think about different ways I can cook and use the things that we're growing, be a bit more creative, eat more seasonally and locally as well obviously and also challenge me to really get the garden going and have stuff growing throughout all the months of the year. So so here in front of the house is one area where we've got a few beds. There's not a whole lot growing in here at the moment, there's a huge cauliflower which seems to be putting all its energy into leaves. I think there's actually still a pumpkin or two hanging around here which just don't seem to be ripening. We've got a bed of brassicas, one level down so I'm just about a metre lower now. We've got another bed area in front of the house, that's where I was just a banana, mint, kale, more kale growing here, a few seedlings in here, a lemon tree, a pomegranate tree here which has no leaves as it's winter, a little section of turnips and radishes, here's one which is looking particularly promising, more broad beans, some young, very young brussel sprouts, lemon verbena which is a perennial, a young quince tree and a slightly more successful lemon tree. And then down another level just in front of the water deposit which is behind me, we've got one of our main fields. So this field has quite a few vines in it, it also has some orange and tangerine trees. We also have one olive tree in this field and just now at the start of 2022 I'm starting to develop this field a little more into rows. So I am literally in the process of building these beds right now, so at the minute we've just got a few rows. I will probably in the next few weeks just extend this bed along here. So yeah this is what we've got at the moment, it's not a huge growing area but hopefully we'll be expanding it throughout the year. For the first few weeks of this challenge I took everything pretty seriously. I had a spreadsheet where I took notes of everything that I ate from the garden every day. I took a little picture or video clip every single day and uploaded it and had everything organised into files and folders. And I was generally eating a lot of green leafy stuff which was mostly what we had at the moment. Lots of kale, other brassicas, radishes, so that was kind of stuff I was eating. I also ate actual radishes from time to time, although to be honest I prefer the leaves and the seed pods. I once found some potatoes which I thought had all died so I was pretty happy about that. And I also picked herbs and things like that which were growing around the garden. So it's kind of funny, a guy wanted to write an article about us in the local paper and he wanted a picture of me with like in the vegetable patch showing what we were doing. So I thought I would pick a load of stuff and put it in a basket and pose with this basket of produce. Which means I had to pick a lot of stuff. So yeah, I've got this basket of radishes and leaves and things to use over the next few days. We also started getting lots of wild asparagus in February, which was really nice. And I also sometimes ate stuff that I had jarred previously, which I decided also counted for the challenge. Today we are having some olives from last year. Today we're trying something very exciting and new. We're going to try these beans that I harvested and dried a few months ago. I don't know how they're going to be, these are... oh you got dripped on! Oh you silly cat! Tofu, get out of the way! These are the beans from inside a variety of runner bean called Judea and I dried them and now I've boiled them up again and we'll see what they're like. Okay so we have the beans which I've boiled. Well I soaked them in water for about 24 hours and then boiled them for maybe an hour and a half. It took ages to rehydrate them, which I then just cooked with some onions and a tomato sauce. And we've got some homemade hummus and some salad. Not inedible, well they're nice, they're fine. At this point I hadn't done a lot of planning or preserving but I had made previously lots of carob powder from carob pods. I'd made chutney earlier in the year with loquats from our own trees and the previous year I'd brined a lot of homemade olives. In February I went to stay in the city for a few days and I actually took a big bag of oranges with me so that I could eat at least one every day and still complete the challenge. In fact January and February and probably March and April as well saw quite a lot of orange and tangerine consumption. So we've got here a brown lentil dal with cauliflower leaves and some black kale. We've got a chutney which is from homegrown quince and we've got some homegrown coriander on the quinoa. And I've also managed to cook while it's still light today for the first time in months so that's why you've got a decent picture of this meal. I promise all my meals usually look about this salad for a moment because I have made this salad a lot lately and it is so good. I've made it a lot more than I've shown in the videos. I've been making it pretty much every other day because it's so simple and it's a really good way to use up a lot of stuff that we've got growing in the garden at the moment. It's got massaged kale in it. We've got a lot of kale growing and this is one of my favourite ways to use the leaves. Just massage them with a bit of salt and they go soft really quickly and you keep all the nutrients in because you're not cooking them and you can throw them into a salad. I'm using radish leaves as well. The radishes produce huge amounts of leaves which are also edible. You can steam them. I haven't tried massaging them. I'm not sure if that would work but I'm steaming the radish leaves and throwing those in as well. There's a base of either wild rice or quinoa that I usually use and then anything else goes as well. Tomatoes, lettuce, all the normal salad stuff. As time went on my clips definitely became less organised. It was quite a lot of effort to take a picture every single day but it turns out I did actually take an individual picture of something that I harvested every single day all the way through to May and then it kind of changed a little bit. At the beginning of the challenge I had thought that I was going to be really scraping the barrel some days just picking little sprigs of rosemary or thyme or something just to complete the challenge. I really wasn't sure that I was going to get the garden to a point where I was going to be able to harvest something substantial to eat every single day but by May things really started to change. The things I'd planted in the winter were starting to come through and it actually became hard not to eat from the garden every day because it just had become part of my habit and my routine to go in the garden and find something that would be part of dinner like a really really local supermarket. I definitely still relied on the garden for all of our leafy greens and most of our herbs and it just became natural to go out into the garden in the afternoon before cooking and bring back a basket of stuff to eat either that day or in the following days. Throughout all this time I was really gearing up the garden for spring and summer as well. This was going to be my first real season of growing, the first season I was going into where I knew I had a reliable water source in the garden which is absolutely essential here in Spain where our summers are long and dry and you're very limited in what you can grow without irrigation. Our main garden area or what was to become our main garden area was just an empty field dotted with fruit trees and vines and I wanted to plant more trees and build a series of beds in this area. I'd originally done some experiments with flood irrigation, the traditional irrigation method, but I didn't know enough about it nor could I fix the broken irrigation canals in time for summer so I built simple stone or wood boarded beds, laid wood chips in between for the pass and decided I would just water with a hose for the time being. Building the beds took a lot of time, far longer than I'd imagined and as seedlings grew and needed to go out it became a bit of a race against time to build more beds and prepare more soil for them to go into. But I didn't mind the work, it was honestly the most exciting thing to see the garden start to come together and I was growing so many things for the first time which I was so excited about. By the end of spring I had started many seedlings, I had mostly made all of the 26 beds which we now have and I had also planted 12 fruit trees which was about as many as I thought I could handle watering by hand with the watering can. This year was very much about experimenting, learning, doing as many different things as we could, seeing what worked and seeing what we liked but as part of that we made a lot of mistakes. One thing I did was make a homemade solar dehydrator to try and deal with some of our excess stuff, particularly the plums. I put a load of plums in it and they dehydrated fine and I was pretty happy but when I put them in jars I later discovered that loads of bugs had hatched inside the jars and it was pretty gross so I had to give the whole lot to the chickens. I also ruined an entire batch of sauerkraut, had to throw away several jars of carob powder which also got bugs in and I had lots of underwhelming harvests. Some of the experimenting I did was with growing more staple food like potatoes, corn and amaranth. I was really interested to see how this was going to turn out, to see how much work would be involved in growing, harvesting and processing these kinds of things and to see whether any of them seemed like they could be something that we could actually grow and could become a staple food for us or whether it was just not going to be worth it. I'm really not sure this is a net gain in calories. So yeah I learned a lot and I've still got so much more to learn of course but some stuff did go pretty well this summer. Here's a look at some of the stuff that we were eating over those months. When they're about this size you can just pick them as they are, slice them up like you would run a bean or something and they are so delicious. This broad bean area needs to come out I think pretty soon so regardless of the size I think the broad beans are going to get eaten in the next few days, eaten or preserved somehow because I really want this space back. Okay this is a typical day lately where I've got a whole mix of things from the garden and that I foraged while I was out on a dog walk. We've got chard from the garden, we've got a few plantain leaves, wild onion flower, we've got some thyme, some rosemary, some sage leaves, a little bit of nettle left over from yesterday and this is all going to go into a stew. So it's June now and we're almost halfway through this challenge and it's getting hard to continue the format that I started where I just show one thing that we're eating every day because these days we're eating all sorts of things in all sorts of different formats from the garden every day. This is just a typical lunch which I thought I would show you. We've got a pea and mint dip on a cracker, I've got a stir fry with kale and broad beans and peas from the garden with some coriander on top and I've got a salad with three types of lettuce from the garden and these little pickles that I made a few weeks ago as well so there's maybe six or seven things in here. From about July onwards my documenting of what we were picking and harvesting definitely became a bit more sporadic. At this point I was thinking that I probably wasn't even going to make the video, it all just seemed a bit silly and pointless. It was clear the challenge was we were going to complete it. I'd also harvested the garlic at this point so you know we use garlic every day in the kitchen pretty much so even with just the garlic it was clear we were going to be eating something every day and it really wasn't a challenge anymore. But I did carry on taking some pictures and in the end I did decide to make this video so here we are. As the summer drew to a close it was time to start on some of the big harvests. On our land that was basically just these ridiculously large pumpkins that we'd somehow managed to grow. They'd spread from a single plant to cover the footprint of about an entire house and they'd also gone vertically wherever they could. In total we harvested about 10 of these beasts with six of them being really big. I don't actually have scales capable of measuring the weight of the entire thing but when we sliced one up to cook one slice came in at 600 grams so we reckon the whole thing has got to be at least 10 kilos. Okay so we know Una weighs about 10 kilos. Yep. Now we're gonna compare because we don't actually have any scales big enough. Oh this is heavier. It's heavier? Not not much but okay but yeah. If you want to see what we cook with some of this stuff I'm thinking we've still got a lot more to eat so I'm thinking I'm going to make a video of a week or however long it takes to get through an entire one of these and show you everything that we cook with it. At the minute our kitchen is super ugly and in the middle of renovations so it's not a great place to film anything but when that's looking a bit nicer I'm sure we'll still have some of these to eat so I'll show you what we're cooking. So squash was about the only thing we had massive bounty of this year. To get through some of it we've started swapping some of it with our friends and neighbours in exchange for things that they've got a surplus of. Potatoes, almonds, olive oil, things like that. In fact swapping became a bit of a theme as the year went on and we got to know our friends and neighbours better and we got to know what kind of stuff they were producing, what kind of stuff they weren't producing, what they wanted, what they needed to get rid of. We swapped a lot of our pumpkins and we also swapped quite a bit of other stuff over the year as well. Oranges and also eggs which we were starting to get in abundance at this point. Just before the summer we got our first chickens and by autumn we had expanded the flock to nine hens and one cockerel so we're getting about seven, eight, sometimes nine eggs a day at the moment which is quite a lot for us but eggs are a great unit of exchange so they've really helped us in terms of having stuff to swap and offer to friends and neighbours which is really great. We also helped out with some communal harvests in the autumn, olives, almonds and grapes. Faces merge and change, but your face remains the same. The swallows will be here by dawn, when we're finally sober they'll be gone. The trees will bloom, the nights will melt, we'll always remember how it felt. In September after the grape harvest we made two batches of wine, or we attempted to. We made one batch with the grapes that we'd harvested at our friend's place. We did this properly, we had a big metal vat to ferment the crushed grapes in, we took its vital statistics every day, we measured its density and temperature and stuff like that until it was ready. We gave it its second fermentation and we bottled it up and then we printed out some nice custom-made stickers which Mauro made so that we could distribute the wine amongst all the people who'd helped in the harvest and give some bottles away for nice Christmas presents. As for the second batch of wine, well that was really just an experiment and honestly I just got lazy with that and I didn't properly attend to it. I probably let it sit around for about a month which is way longer than it should have done and at the end what we basically had was about four litres of quite nice red wine vinegar which we really didn't mind because we use that all the time and actually it's definitely something I would choose to make again next year. As autumn turned to winter I kind of let the garden slip a bit to be honest. Other things going on in life just kind of took over and everything just got started way later than it should have done. The seeds got started too late, everything went out too late, we had a lot of rain which brought out a lot of slugs just when the plants were small and I just planted them out. It was all a bit of a disaster and it still kind of is but amazingly we're still getting lots of leafy greens. We haven't got any of the root veggies and all the winter stuff is not ready yet. The stuff I really would have liked, you know, the brassicas, the cauliflowers, it's just not ready yet so I'm kind of disappointed about that but we are at least still getting lots of leafy greens and amazingly some of the summer stuff just kept on producing really late into the year. In December I was harvesting oranges at the same time I was harvesting peppers which just seems kind of crazy and yeah of course I was also not that great at documenting any of this but anyway here's a few baskets of stuff that we harvested over those months. So anyway now we're back at January again and it's been a whole year we're back to eating oranges every day. We've seen a full set of seasons come and go. I've obviously learned a lot this year in terms of just gardening skills, how to grow in this climate and all of that stuff which is kind of new but I think if I had to take one thing away or one maybe less expected thing away it's that I've realised I'm realising that I don't need to do everything and I shouldn't aim for that. I think this first year I really tried to do everything. I tried to grow everything from seed pretty much. I barely bought any plug plants. I felt like if I wasn't starting my own seeds, making my own compost, doing everything kind of here, it wasn't really doing it right and I've realised now that that is just the wrong way to think about it. Maybe at some point we'll get to that and it'll be great but definitely now and maybe never like that's not necessarily important. I can actually just focus on the things that I like doing and there's no problem turning to other people to do the things I'm not so good at. If there's stuff that I don't really enjoy growing, I'm having a hard time growing or we don't really like eating, I don't have to try and grow it. If certain things are a lot of work or they're just not what I really feel like focusing my time and energy on, I don't have to do them. I can carry on buying olive oil, almonds from our neighbours. We don't have to do everything here right now. The idea of being like totally self-sufficient, it's an interesting idea I think to think about what you can do for yourself a little more to stop yourself from relying on global supply chains and industries that you maybe don't want to be part of or support but you're never going to be 100% self-sufficient. You're not going to forge your own tools or make your own shoes probably and you don't have to be 100% self-sufficient in the garden either but I think it's really important it's figuring out what you like doing and what you want to spend your time and your energy on because you can't do everything and also figuring out what other people around you maybe want or need or have and need to get rid of so that you can start working on those kind of connections which is going to make you more resilient in the long run rather than just what you can produce on your own piece of land. Anyway I think that's it, I feel like I've gone off on a bit of a waffle at the end. Thank you for watching this video, stick around for another year if you want to see what we're doing with our garden in 2023 and I'll see you next time!