We’ve been a little slow with our vegetable garden this year. I think we’ve both decided that we really don’t love gardening – therefore our aim is to concentrate on ‘commodity’ veg, the staple veg we buy regularly which will save money – and not bother with anything else.
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 🙂