The vegetable gardens
The three vegetable gardens play an important role within the entire garden and contribute to its structure. They provide vegetables all year round, even in winter, while spring offers the real profusion of them.
The vegetable gardens are worked by hand, cultivated naturally: fertilized with animal manure, weeded by hand and mulched with grass clippings or vegetable waste, never treated with chemicals. They are irrigated with drip irrigation, sparingly.
Seedlings are produced from the end of December under a small cold shelter, a structure of reeds covered with a transparent film. Direct sowing begins when the soil warms up, from mid-February for the hardiest varieties.
The vegetables from the garden go straight to the plate, and the virtues of this very short circuit are perceptible even to the most obtuse palates.
Small-scale livestock farming
For the fellahs, livestock breeding is second nature. They place it, in their unconscious hierarchy, above agriculture. No farm, however small, is without a few animals: a few sheep, a few goats in the mountains, one or two cows for milk, if there is enough space for fodder, the inevitable chickens that circulate freely around the house and even in the inner courtyards, turkeys, rabbits, and more rarely ducks or geese.
In the countryside, this small animal husbandry is a welcome addition that fits in perfectly with the crops: the animals feed on the fodder produced, the weeding, the pruning, and provide manure in return. Finally, a hen is occasionally brought in to liven up meals, to honour the visit of a relative, and the ram is sacrificed at Eid el Kebir, the "great feast" literally, or Aid al Adha (the feast of the sacrifice), the main religious feast, an opportunity for families to get together around this ritual.
In Dar Rana, there is always a place for animals. They bring life, an unparalleled animation.
The two donkeys are regularly used for transport, pulling an indestructible cart. They are also used for soil work. Two of them pull a wooden plough in narrow plots where tractors cannot enter. Finally, they produce abundant quality manure.
The farmyard is home to chickens of various breeds as well as turkeys, while guinea fowl roam freely under the olive trees. The space available to these small animals and their varied diets allow for the production of quality poultry for the kitchen.
The sheep are happy on the farm, and the products of the weeding, the vegetable tops, and the pruning of the olive trees are usually enough to feed the few residents.
