Wednesday, October 12, 2005






2003 - CORNFIELD AND BUILDERS' YARD.


We fetched up at a windy corner of Cadiz province - Costa de la Luz: should be Costa de la Viento - and with the new house came a builders' yard and cornfield. The upside was badly-neglected fruit trees in the cornfield. Pear, plum, apricot and almond.

The builders' yard around the house had to be cleared, a membrane put down and then gravelled before planting out a Mediterranean garden....

I am all over the show with this layout, but you get the picture..... a lot of work!

We put in what we thought were indigenous Med. plants: plumbago, bourganvillea, agarve, lavendar and herbs like rosemary and thyme. Compare top left with top right and you'll get the idea. Great - until the hot Levante wind came along and sucked the moisture out of them.

All around us in the "campo" are Spanish gardeners growing every veg and fruit you can think of. They think we're mad to plant non-edibles. What flowers they have are tucked in between the veg (?companion gardening) . Our neighbours are knowledgable and helpful - not to mention generous with their surplus stuff - and in another post I will show what graftings of other fruits onto bitter almond trees have done.

5 comments:

LadyLuz said...

read also another URL - www.verdesito.blogspot.com. Work I thought I'd lost I then found on this. How it got there I do not know.

LadyLuz said...

sorry..www.verdesitio.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

i love the color of your house.

Passionate Dilettante said...

Greetings! I am starting here, and reading on. Lovely start to your garden - but so much work! We used some of that cola de caballo mix on the finca, but as a biodynamic, not simply eco-friendly mix. Puzzled web-browsing has left me more puzzled: this stuff carries animal health warnings in the UK & US and is regarded as a literally noxious weed, while organic gardeners list numerous virtues. Did you get some in the end?

LadyLuz said...

Hola Mamma Duck and I wonder if you'll stop by and see this. No, I never found horsetail (which was recommended as a natural insecticide by gardeners in the north who've written many books). I did find Neem oil however in Valencia and have written about this in the last couple of months.

Horsetail is very invasive, and toxic to horses and is used frequently in organic pharmacy and the beauty industry.

The neem oil works well, though more frequent applications are more necessary than recommended.