This is a little story of ...

... a farm in northern spain, Posade del Valle, 33549 Collia Arriondas, Spain, near Picos de Europa. Phone; 985841157

Today 14 of november, on our first day we make a tour on the farm. It is a cold crispy frosty automn morning. Special of this farm is that a Hostel with a restaurant is is combined with the farm.

This farm has meadow mowers that are alive! Sheep stay and graze parts of the hills. After some time they are brought to the next field. Some horses will follow and after that even the chickens will be part of the rotation. The sheep give the farm wool and meat. In the restaurant the lamb is prepared for the quests. Also the eggs are served.Because of the good use of the fields many wild plants and flowers are growing back in the fields. This brings back also insects and butterflies. And we as a group of mixed european permacultural, interested in raw and wild and traditional food can pick a nice diversitiy of wild plants for our salad.In an enclosed vegetable garden many veggies for the restaurant are grown year round, as the climat here allows year round growth.The sheep are also herded on a long hill full of apple trees. many traditional

cider appels are grown. The farm brings the apples to a locval juicer and the apple cider juice is served (instead of orange juice) in the restau-rant.Then a sudden wind blows, automn leaves fly in the sky. To our suprise this wind is very warm, it feels like a late summer evening. And again, a strong blow. Trees are bending. We are told this is called „the chesnut wind“, as this wind comes often in automn and makes the chesnuts fall out of the trees. And indeed many chesnuts fall on the path, and we start collecting them. The wind is warm coming right over the atlantic ocean from Africa. The wind brings warm soft rain.

We bring the chesnuts inside to make some delicious meals with them:1) breakfast: take a chesnut, peel the chesnut also the second skin and take small bits. Chew very well and enjoy the sweet taste.2) store: take some chesnuts, peel the first skin. let soak for a night. peel the second skin and dry in a dehydrater less than 40 degrees celcius. When dry grind to a powder to stock.3) raw chesnut salad; slice the soaked and peeled chesnuts very fine and mix with other veggies.4) traditional recipy of cooked chesnut with kale; see another place in the booklet.

Next day we walk down the mountain (hill says our spanish team) to the ches-nut festival in the region twon of Arriondas. We pass by many stone enclosed gar-dens, full with the large tradtional kale plants we used in the chesnut recipy. Along the raod we find many different wild edible plants like fennel, malva, milk thistle, chickweed, purple nettle, ., In the chesnut festival we find an incredible amount of different chesnuts. Large, small, all noted with different names. These are local va-rieties, maybe not even botanically different, but for shure different for the local ex-perts. One of the names is marina. Sounds so nice. Many different cakes made with chesnuts are sold and also freshly pressed „raw“ apple cider. Our Spaish host tells me he is going to plant chesnut trees soon. There is a problem with a new type of disease in the area. He says his new trees are inoculated with special fungis that withstand the disease.