01
Slow by design
A poc a poc
Nothing here was built in one go. The caseta, the porch, the corral — one project that took fifty years. We plant and build at the pace the land allows, not the pace a deadline wants.
Foia BlancaFarm
We grow fruit, vegetables and olives on a small family farm in l'Alfàs del Pi. Everything here was kept alive through the hard decades by a woman called Pepica, who lost her mother at six and her father at eleven, and then worked this land as the only woman among five men.
We farm the way she did. Slowly, with what is already here, and without wasting anything.
0years
One family, one hillside, without a break.
0trees
Eight in every ten are medlar. The rest is everything else we send.
0metres sold
When the coast came, nobody here sold. Not one.
Baskets
The Foia Blanca Harvest Basket
A box of whatever is ripe, the week it is ripe.
€30.00Small€50.00Large
Picked ripeChanges with the seasonGrown here
The same orange, and not the same orange at all.
Most fruit sold on this coast was picked unripe somewhere else and spent two weeks getting here. Ours crosses a terrace.
Distance to you
Foia BlancaPicked here, on the terrace
Supermarket produce1,500–2,500 km of cold chain
Time from tree to table
Foia BlancaUnder 24 hours
Supermarket produce8–21 days
Picked at
Foia BlancaRipe
Supermarket produceGreen, to survive transport
Varieties
Foia BlancaLocal landraces, chosen for flavour
Supermarket produceA handful bred for shelf life
Water
Foia BlancaRain-fed and deficit irrigation
Supermarket produceIntensive, often in drier regions
Who grew it
Foia BlancaYou know the name. It is on the letter.
Supermarket produceUnknown
Six principles, and none of them are new.
They were not written in a strategy meeting. They are what you end up doing if you farm this particular hillside, with this particular amount of water, for long enough to learn.
02
Water is the ceiling
L'aigua mana
Between 350 and 450 millimetres of rain a year and four dry months. Every crop has to earn its water, so most of what we grow is dryland or on deficit irrigation. That decision comes before any other.
03
Nothing leaves the valley
El que hi ha a un pam
Stone from the terrace itself, lime from the comarca, mulch from our own prunings, compost from the kitchen. The old houses here look like they grew out of the ground because they are the ground, reordered.
04
The old varieties first
Les varietats d'ací
Tomaca de Mutxamel, alficòs, gínjol, ceba babosa, moscatell for pansa. Landraces bred for this exact heat and this exact soil, most of them nearly lost when the fields emptied.
05
The wall is the farm
El marge
Dry stone, no mortar, each stone wedged against the next by weight and judgement. A wall done right stands two centuries. One done badly lasts until the first autumn storm — and takes the terrace with it.
06
We do not sell the land
No es ven
When the coast arrived, a terrace was suddenly worth more empty than full and most families sold. This one did not. Everything you see exists because of that one stubborn decision.
The medlar is the first fruit of the year in Europe.
La joia de la comarca
Not the first of our year. The first of the continent's. While the rest of Europe is still waiting on anything at all, the loquat is coming off these trees. Around 240 trees of it stand here — four in every five we have ever planted.
It is a demanding fruit and that is the whole point. It flowers in autumn, so the fruit is tiny and vulnerable exactly when the cold arrives — one bad night and the crop is gone. It bruises if you look at it wrong, which is why supermarkets pick it hard and it tastes of nothing. Ours is cut ripe and goes out the same day, because it has no shelf life to protect.
Irrigation150–300 mmDeficit only — at fruit set and swell. Any more and the flavour thins out.
What is planted here
- AlgerieMarch – April
The Callosa variety. The backbone of the comarca and the earliest off the tree.
- Golden NuggetApril – May
Larger, later, sweeter. Extends the season by three good weeks.
- CardonaMarch – April
Firmer flesh, holds the journey better than the rest.
- PelucheApril – May
The one people who grew up here ask for by name.