Home is where the heart is.

Although we lived in Spain for nearly eight years it was never home, it was interesting, and we met some lovely people, but Ireland never left our hearts which is why we have returned.The only thing that we miss are some good friends that we made during our extended holiday, which is what Spain rather felt like although we never stopped working, first building a house from scratch and then a major renovation job.
We have now completed everything that we wanted to do to the inside of our new home so we are now free to develop the veg garden and create an orchard. We had already planted some fruit trees, plus soft fruit and now I am waiting for a delivery of more fruit trees, including a peach, yes you can grow peaches in Ireland, I was inspired by another Irish blogger who has had a wonderful crop in her polytunnel, which is where we will plant ours.
All the veg that we had planted back in May before we returned for good has done well, once again we can feed ourselves from the garden, with enough potatoes for the winter months, all the green veg did well for us as well with plenty of cabbage and perpetual spinach to last through the winter months, so once again we are back on the road of self-sufficiency.
We have bought a pair of large breed meat rabbits who will be ready for mating in the next couple of weeks, and our hens are now laying so come the spring I will set some eggs in the incubator and rear the young for the table.
For things that we can't or don't want to produce ourselves we can buy from local organic friends, we have beef on order and our turkey is coming from another friend. Pork for a while gave us a bit of a problem as we knew of no one who was producing pork, we were then told of 'The Real Meat Shop' in Roscommon town where we can by free range pork and pork products. Unlike Spain it is easy to find all we need organically, mostly in our local village.
We have had our first visitors over from Spain but the weather let us down a bit, although we still managed to have a couple of picnics and take them to places of interest, hopefully the next time they come the weather will be a little kinder to us.