Agriculture

Olives

There are three olive groves here, encompassing an area of some 4 ha. Parts of them are heavily overgrown and the trees have suffered severely from very large oak and pine trees which take away the air and light needed. Parts of the olive fields have probably not been cultivated for forty years. With painstaking manual work, the beautiful old trees are being freed of creepers and drastically cut back. Trees in the vicinity which hinder growth and the sun's rays are felled. That is how a cultural landscape of several centuries' standing is revived. Mr Barras, our 80-year-old neighbour is a genuine South French farmer. He has two cows in his barn and makes his own cheese and wine. At the same time, he still keeps numerous chickens, ducks, sheep and goats. He cultivated our olive groves up until 2011 but has now handed this work back over to us and remains available to us with his wealth of knowledge and sympathetic advice.

Honey

Ten bee colonies are now at home on our plot of land.

Water

Our service water is treated using solar panels and with renewable raw materials in state-of-the-art systems.

Energy

Away from the buildings, some 500 m south-west, a solar park is under construction on an area of 1 ha. The extremely cold winter 2011/2012 brought the Southern French electricity grid to its limits. Several apartments are heated electrically, making it necessary for shops in Nice to switch off their advertising signs in order to avoid overloading the electricity grid. We help progress with the paradigm change to renewable energies in France.