About Us

In the Beginning

We’re Mr & Mrs Dirty Boots.  Sometimes the Dirty boots are actually Dirty Flip-Flops as it gets pretty warm here but you get the gist – we’re a bit outdoorsy and dirty much of the time.

Mr Dirty Boots is the skilled craftsman of the gang – he’s in charge of building projects, digging when the ground is hard and the use of most heavy machinery.  Mrs Dirty Boots is in charge of all home-preserving, cooking (except chips as they’re Mr DB’s kitchen forte) and hen management along with the twice yearly strimathon.

The finca is run jointly though and so when Mr DB is being a skilled craftsman on some big building job, Mrs DB will be head the labourer in charge of concrete mixing, and shovelling of whatever needs to be shovelled.  Similarly when Mrs DB decides to preserve way too many onions for example Mr DB will be called upon to help peel them all and indeed any nasty task she can think of.

So anyway, we live on a piece of Spanish mountainside harvesting olives and almonds for not a lot of money and try to provide for ourselves for as little as possible.  To that end we’ve kept chickens for meat, hens for eggs, dogs for company and a cat for well nothing really – he’s pretty useless!

We’re off-grid with no services to our finca which means we rely on solar and wind power for electricity, collect rainwater, recycle our grey-water and just about anything else which will make us more self sufficient.

We hope you’ll find the tips within this ‘ere blog helpful, useful, entertaining and occasionally funny.  Give us some feedback when you do as it can get  lonely on this mountain!

For a more self sufficient future

Twelve Years Later…

So we’re not stuck up a mountain any more. We’re back in the UK, and after a few years closer to civilisation we’re back in the country in our forever home. It’s not too dissimilar from the finca, (definitely a similar work in progress) but does have most mod cons including that wonderful extravagance, electricity from the grid, and refuse collection which still seems very luxurious. Oh and there’s rain (well not this summer but usually).

So we can grow flowers now just for fun!

There’s been a major addition of a boy wonder dirty boots, and a changeover of pets (it’s been a while) so things are a little different.

A few acres keeps us busy, well fed and very happy.

We’re still trying hard to keep things low impact, greenish and be self reliant, and I feel like writing now and again so the blog is back on intermittently at least. So um hi again interweblandpeeps…

Mrs Dirty Boots