Self Sufficiency in Spain

During the early years of our part-time and then full time living in the Barx/La Drova valley most of the historic agricultural lands including the mountainside olive and almond groves were still being maintained and the village was largely self sufficfient in foodstuffs. But by the mid 1990's,when we had lived here almost ten years, more and more was being abandoned as agriculturalists started to work in the construction and tourist industries and their children followed suite. At this point we took on extra land and started to grow more and more of our daily food needs commencing with herbs and vegetables and eventually also fruits meats and olive oil, and we did so ecologically. This lead us to write the two books Growing healthy fruit in Spain and Growing healthy vegetables in Spain and then after giving a well recieved talk to a U3A Conference on Health in Retirement we expanded this to create the now published book 'Living well from our garden - Mediterranean style'. This book describes how our self sufficiency developed parralel with an objective analysis of what constitutes good and poor eating.All three books are available from Amazon Books. Today we eat well daily and economically and largely avoid the local restaurants where prices have risen ten times or more in the 26 years that we have lived in the valley as our retirement income has done the opposite . Indeed it has reduced significantly so at 76 I still intend  to keep up the home grown ethos for a meaningfully healthy Mediterranean style diet.