We had one cucumber plant which mysteriously died – it was established and had flowered etc, yet just appeared to die overnight so not sure what happened there.

We haven’t staked the cucumbers this year, so we’ll see how they compare to last year.

Suprisingly we’re doing OK with raspberries this year. At least the birds have left us some!

The aim was to dig it over and plant a couple of trees there. However, it looks like it’s pretty much all rock, so the plan will now be to strip it back to the rock, and then build a couple of raised areas for trees. 

This is quite a nice area. It’s sunny for a lot of the day.

I think we’ll strip as much back to rock as is practical as it saves having to battle with ferns and brambles.

Here’s Millie sat with me while I was throwing a ball for Daisy.

And here’s Daisy chasing said ball. She doesn’t have as much space as she did with the patio, however, the ball is inclined to bounce at odd directions off the rock, which gives her a bit more excitement.

Here’s a nice photo of Primrose. It’s almost a year since she became ill and she is so much better now.

And here’s Percy carrying a leaf.

And here’s Roland, who generally doesn’t get much of a look in as he much prefers his own company and he was very much Pirata’s friend, who I think he misses. Here he’s being a proper cat – relaxing in the sun.

Millie and Pixie having a wander. One of the plants in the plant pots is madder, which I am growing to try dying from next year. The roots are what is used in the dying process, so I guess I’ll split the plant. I’ll wait and see what it looks like next year.

And, I saw someone do this:

They plant lettuces among their onions. Ian says that snails don’t like onions, so it could be to protect the lettuces (the fact he still has lettuces and not snail-ravaged stumps, would suggest that this bit works), but I wondered if it was to keep down weeds. Whatever the reason, the lettuces are going to seed, so perhaps the aim isn’t for a lettuce harvest.

Last year we were also on a constant battle with snails who headed for our leafy veg with glee and who could decimate a leafy plant in nano-seconds. So given the amount we were spending on slug pellets probably exceeded $$$ what we saved by growing our own lettuce etc, we decided not to do it this year. Instead, we’re doing an experiment of growing lettuce and herbs in doors. We’ll see how that goes 🙂

So we planted onion, potatoes and garlic. Birds ate the top off the first onions while laughing at the bird scarer I made from tin cans. And then our potatoes got some form of lurgy and they all died. The potatoes had grown though, so we did get a crop of new potatoes, but not the bumper crop we had hoped for. So that didn’t get things off to a great start!

We’ve also planted tomatoes, peppers and cucumber, but we’re a long way behind the man who tends a huerta across the road – he has tomatoes on his vines now, ours are still in their infancy!

The acelga from last year is like a giant now and has kept us in leaves through the winter. It’s so tall the snails can’t get to the top – which is quite handy! It’s going to seed, but we can still get leaves from it. It’s not apparent from this pic, however it’s taller than me 🙂

Our raspberries are fruiting, hopefully we’ll get to them before the birds!

One thing we are good at growing is nasturtiums. As they grow wild, it’s probably not a suprise they do well, but I do wonder if I will regret having planted seeds last year as they do seem to be taking over.

We found out last year that nasturtium seeds can be used as capers, and both the flowers and leaves give a nice peppery taste to salads – so that’s good!

We’ve got our grapevines which are doing well and our kiwiño, which is a type of kiwi fruit, similar in size to a gooseberry and without a furry skin, is growing, although it is still in a pot. We’ve also go Ludvig’s walnut tree, which we’ll plant somewhere.

Out and About

This is a different view of the village:

This is us here:

and this is the view from the top of the hill behind us. The photo isn’t in focus!

Our house is on the bottom left and I would have been by the arrow on the right when I took the pic looking back at the village.

And in the middle of the photo above, you can see the bridge which the train goes over. And here’s the train!

It’s just gone over the bridge and is heading off around the coast. The railway bridge crosses the beach and if we time it right, we can see the train cross the bridge. It’s a little two carriage train.

I saw a wild boar on the track that the bridge I am stood on leads onto. I have seen them here before, I saw a couple of young ones in the field behind us, but this is the first time I have seen one face to face. It took me a bit of time to work out what it was, as it has a long tail, not a curly one, and I first thought it was a funny shaped dog 🙂

And last Wednesday was that day! Ian has dismantled the big planter/raised bed at the front of the house as it didn’t serve any purpose and took up a lot of space. We’d just covered it over last year to keep the weeds at bay, but the cover had started to disintergrate and we decided to take it down and just make a smaller version which wouldn’t take up so much space.

But this left us with a problem as it was easy for the smalld dogs to fall from the stairs, so we thought that we’d make a concrete pot as a barrier using our mould.

It was a big job and took 100kgs of concrete!

But at least it means that a/ the dogs won’t fall off the steps and b/ after over 20 years we found a purpose for our mould 🙂

Ian also made a couple of smaller planters for the grape vines we bought. Here’s one:

and here’s the other:

The aim is to concrete or hard surface over as much as possible and just leave a couple of planters like this which I think will look quite nice.

Ian used stone from the wall that’s falling down by the horrier, which means they are really in keeping with the rest of the house.

So the vines are planted now and we planted the bougenvilia in the new planter by the front door so we’ve just got the walnut tree, pomegranate and kiwiño left to plant.

The aim of this is two fold, first, it will hopefully act as a windbreak. While the wind wasn’t as bad as I had feared last year, we did have a couple of plants blow over and break right in the front, so it might stop that happening. Also, we’re quite exposed at the back and there’s just a low-ish wall, which wouldn’t present much of a deterent to deer and boar who can cause havoc when they have access to an unsuspecting huerta!

We also bought a camelia, which we’re going to put at the front, a ‘kiwiño’ which is a kiwi type vine, but the fruit are more like gooseberry in size, a bougenvillia (which I had tried to grow several times in Villagarcia, but they kept getting burned and died during the summer – so as there are a lot around here, I hope I will do better this time), two grape vines, a pomegranate (we had one before, and did get fruit, but very small ones!), and a walnut. Ludvig has a walnut every morning, however I’m not sure how long er will have to wait before they come from our own tree!

Ian has dug over the huerta and extended it a bit. He’s planted potatoes, onion and garlic. We’ve decided as neither of us are going to win the percy thrower award of the year, to just concentrate on vegetables we buy most of, so our intention is to try to be self sufficient this year for onion, garlic and potatoes and as self sufficient as we can be for tomatoes, peppers, cougette and cucumber. I don’t think we’ll bother with things like cauliflower and brocoli, as I think by the time we’d factored in waste on top of cost of different things to keep slugs and insects away, it probably cost us a lot more than buying a bag of frozen veg!

This is what it looks like at the moment – hopefully in a few weeks it will be full of growthh!

And we had a picnic by the river inland from San Cibrao, it was one of the first places we had stopped for a picnic and is quite a pretty little spot. (Ooops, hadn’t realized I had stuck my finger into the photo 🙂 )

And the gourds are drying out too. We’re leaving them on the vine to dry till we can hear the seeds rattling in side, and then I’m picking them and hanging them in the covered area to finish drying. The mould is on a thin outer skin and that comes off when it’s washed, however it’s the mould that gives the finished gourds the mottled look which is quite attractive.

We’re still planning the first projects… 🙂

There is one lemon on the tree – but hopefully next year it will start fruiting well. There are certainly a lot of lemon trees around full of fruit, so fingers crossed…

This was it earlier this year!

One has already dried, I can hear the seeds rattling in it. The dark patchy marks on the outside will come off when it is washed, leaving a moltled pattern.

There are about 20 left on the vine. I guess a couple will rot, but that should still give us a few to experiment with 🙂

It looked a lot of fun – with so many people dressed in what would have been traditional dress. I don’t know who these people are, but it was pretty representative of what people were wearing,

People were setting up casetas on the beach, like they did for the romeria in Villagarcia. I don’t know if they rented their space or if it was informal, however at the end of the day the beach was full of these little party hubs.

We had a lot of fun watching this group of young lads putting up their caseta – it literally took them 20 minutes to get to this stage. This is actually quite a good pic as you can see the mermaid sat on her rock:

The highlight of the day had to be the mermaid with this band – it wasn’t till later we realized he was nothing to do with them – they had been mermaid bombed 🙂

Video ?

Video ?

and here’s more of the band – see how many people are dressed up!

Video ?

Video ?

There was also a Gaita band – which is the galician bagpipes Video ?

Fontao Fiesta

However the Mermaid fiesta was not the only fiesta that weekend – there was also one here!

There is a family from Pais Vasco (Spanish Basque region) who have a house in our end of the village and they were here for a couple of weeks at the start of the holiday and have been back for a couple of weeks now.

We noticed this poster appear on the bin – and the daughter and son came round to invite us to the second annual Fontao fiesta!

It was a very exclusive fiesta as we were the only other people from here who attended! However, an elderly couple who come to tend their huerta dropped in for a bit and the family who organized it had invited some friends, so it was a nice number and mix of people.

There were four different languages spoken – the family and their friends from Pais Vasco speak Euskara which is a unique language as it pre-dates the roman language and (apparently) is unique in that it is not influenced by other languages.

Some of their friends are from here and spoke Galego, other people Spanish and of course ourselves with English. It made for an interesting game of Bingo!

They put on some traditional Basque entertainment, which involved the children dressed as a bull with fireworks coming out of the horn – and some fighting with bits of foam on sticks, which I am sure must have had a significance.

Fiesta of the Fried Egg

And then Monday was the Fiesta of the Fried Egg.

This was astonishingly popular. This was the queue at 8pm when it started.

The history of this goes back to 1182 but died out and was rekindled in the 1990s. The monks used to give fried eggs to pilgrims as they were cheap and easy to do, and would set the pilgrims up for the next part of their walk.

It’s now morphed into a fiesta where people buy a plate of fried eggs with bread & beer and sit at communal tables with traditional music and activities. Apparently it goes on into the small hours (of course), however we just popped down to see what was going on and then headed home for a much less cholesterol laden meal!