The Kitschen Garden Shed (all puns intended)

The Garden Shed

It was my birthday recently. Señor Faztudo gave me the best present ever and I want to share it with you. For a long time I have imagined a particular place in the garden where one day I would have my  hippy shed. I know I have written about it before and pondered how one day I would sit with a niece or two, a gardening friend or even one of the cats and gaze out on my developing garden as it grows, with nothing better to do than dream and muse. Well that day has nearly come and although it isn’t finished yet, the shed was up in time for its inauguration around midsummer’s day. People came for its grand opening, people who have become very precious and all of whom have eased our transition into this new country, one way and another (in fact several people came whom I didn’t know at all and that was a delight in itself) I burnt joss sticks with one lovely neighbor, bedecked the doorway with rasta ribbons donated by another and settled into the wonderful lime green planter chairs which appeared in the shed, complete with up-cycled denim cushions and an artificial lawn. We even had an official opening ceremony with a friend who helped us lay the foundations and build the beautiful stone paths.

My lime green planter chairs, upcycled denim cushions and foam flowers

I called it the “Hippy shed” initially because I had thought I would bedeck it with Moroccan accoutrements which are quite easy to get here, since we are only a short hop across the water from Tangier. In my youth, which occurred sometime between the mid- sixties and the mid- seventies, I suppose I thought of myself as some sort of flower child and I wanted to return there, and revisit the times by using luxurious wall hangings, camel gourds and the like. But, the birthday presents I have been given have changed my mind somewhat. It can still be a hippy shed, but I am changing my mind about the decor.
Occasionally I watch UK television on the internet, especially on hot afternoons where temperatures have been in the 30s and sitting under the air conditioner is the only sensible thing to do. So I have wiled away a few hours watching the most eccentric and uniquely British “Shed of the Year” competition. I was gobsmacked by the ingenuity and sheer whackiness of the entrants and the wonderful inventive and quirky garden edifices entered for the competition. One crazy guy had made some garden decking with a shed on top into a boat and sailed happily down the river in his garden shed! Another built the most exquisite Chinese tea pagoda in a garden in Sussex or somewhere, complete with a little bridge over a koi carp pond. So it set me thinking about what my entry would be and what kind of shed could you have which was different from all the wonderful sheds entered for the competition.

The nascent kitschen shed

I’ve decided what I’m going to do. I am going to create The Garden Shed. In fact it might even be called the The Kitschen Garden Shed, because inside my shed will be…A Garden!

Pottery chicken, soon to lay Onyx and Amethyst eggs

Now I have the germ of an idea, my imagination is running riot. Water, as you know is a big problem in the Algarve. So most of the garden in my shed will be artificial. I am also going to make it the kind of garden that future grandchildren will be enchanted by. Garden gnomes will abound. Fairies will peep out of bunches or psychedelic flowers, artificial banana trees will harbour toy parrots, larger than life metal ants will crawl up the wall, rubber pythons will wind themselves around the chair legs, clockwork frogs will say” Ribbet Ribbet”, pottery chickens will lay real marble eggs, plastic fish will sing. In short, it will be totally over the top. Anything goes.
Artificial flowers seems to have changed since the sixties when they were all hard plastic. A gardening friend, who is a wonderful gardener and totally dedicated to the plants and flowers she nurtures in her garden was absolutely horrified when she realised that some palms which she was admiring in our garden centre were artificial. That’s how good some of the artificial plants are nowadays. They jump up and dupe you. Horrifying to a real gardener!
The first decorating decision I have is what colour to paint the internal walls. I am considering a cerise pink or a dayglo blue. Perhaps a sort of “Teletubbies” or” In the Night Garden”effect might create the right ambiance. I already have the artificial grass to put down, the lime green chairs and the pottery chicken, so I’m off to a good start.
In the name of garden decency and respect to Señor Faztudo, who doesn’t really go for anything hippy, except me, we’ll keep the outside a conservative grey and maroon to match the house and fit in with the rest of the garden. He sits by patiently however, with that amused smile of his, as I begin making flowers out of recycled bottles and the tissue paper some of my birthday presents came wrapped in and planning where I can get some artificial trees, although a Face Book garden friend suggested a real Monstera might work. Maybe some large real green plants would do well and get less dusty than artificial ones. I can also use it to dry flowers, such as the lavender I have grown in the garden.

Lavender drying

The wonderful thing about The Garden Shed, is that it has made the bottom part of the garden begin to feel like a garden, rather than a field. The paths we’ve made with blood, sweat and tears converge on it and bring the garden into focus, drawing the eye and giving it a “lived in” feel.
Despite being eager to get going on the decor, I am sure the insides will evolve and grow quietly and unfold perfectly, as any ordinary garden does. Like anything in life, it all starts with an intention, the rest just slowly and wonderfully takes care of itself. May all our intentions be fun, my  gardening friends. Peace and Love Dudes,  Far out!

They call me Daisy…..that’s not my name!

“A Rose by any other name would smell as sweet”…the problem is I don’t know any of the names of the roses in my garden. I bought most of them from a famous German supermarket in the sale for Eur 1.49 and I’ve thrown away the labels. I will be forgiven for this, I’m sure, they’re  not old roses or special roses after all. But I have a far worse problem, in that I’ve planted quite a lot of different plants, both bought, borrowed and occasionally even stolen, (albeit it only little pieces) and I don’t know the names of most of them. This is starting to cause me problems, as friends ask me the names of plants they particularly like and I haven’t a clue! Actually, that’s not strictly true. I know an Aloe from an Agave, or a Salvia from a Penstemon, I just don’t know what comes after that. It’s a shame really, as according to my mother, one of my first words was Aquilegia. Being a rather precocious two year old I corrected a visitor, who called the plant a Columbine. It’s all been downhill since unfortunately.

When I was a teacher, I once had a class with four Jason’s. I could never remember their surnames, so I invented them. One was called Jason The Red (he had ginger hair) Another, Jason Basin (pudding bowl haircut) Jason Mouse (he squeaked a lot) and last, but not least Jason Fireraiser (He once set fire to the class notice board) Now I am doing this with my plants, in the absence of my ability to identify them correctly. I walk round the garden checking on their progress, I note Agave Biggus Spikus is getting bigger every day, whilst Agave Variegata Pipsqueaka is not really doing much. Penstemon Freebius Seedpacketia is bursting into flower, whilst Aloe Aloe Aloe Whatasallthisthenus, (which is what I imagined I might hear any minute as I was furtively half inching the cutting this plant grew from) has put up several baby plants.

To complicate matters further, I am learning the names for plants in Portuguese as well. I can never remember the English for Coriander nowadays, because I am too busy thinking of it as Coentro. A lot of wild flowers are called Boa Noite, according to neighbours, which means Good Night and I am still thinking of some flowers by the nicknames we had for them in Wales, Snapdragons for Antirinhiums, Roarydumdums for rhododendrons and Wet-the-bed for dandelions. No wonder I get confused! Then, instead of fields of purple clover, there are fields of something which has similar leaves called Bermudan Buttercup, or whatever its proper name is, and Giant Hogweed is replaced by Alexanders, or Black  Lovage. Then there are the orchids, The Naked Man orchid (don’t ask!) the Mirror orchid, the Bee orchid and a myriad others.

And I guess all this confusion is why I need to learn the proper names for things, although how I’ll remember them, I don’t know! I realise I have never really thought about how plants are classified, so after a bit of a Google session I discovered this:http://theseedsite.co.uk/class.html
Whoever thought it was so complicated? Plants have families, subfamilies and tribes!
And thirteen-barrelled names! And I have to remember to spell the name of the Genus with a capital letter! Gordonus Bennetius!

But for the sake of trying to at least sound like a real gardener, I am going to make a serious effort get to grips with calling things by their proper names, although it’s difficult identifying the plants I already have. I have found this tool from the RHS website https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/search-form ,which is quite useful and I’ve resolved to try to learn the proper names for one of the plants in my garden every day. I’ve posted some photos of plants I can’t identify throughout this post. If you know the proper names of any of them, it would be great of you could let me know. I’d love to be able to sail around the garden, with a glass of something cool in hand, reeling off the names of the plants we walk past, and although I don’t think I’ll ever manage it, I’m sure it will keep my ageing brain cells active for many years to come. To get us off to a good startI will tell you I bought a lovely Ballota pseudodictamnus at the Mediterranean Garden Fair this year. If only I could remember which of the twenty plants or so I bought was called that!

Gardening in Portugal – If you had three wishes!

 

The other day as I was snoozing under the carob tree, the Carob fairy, who lives in one of the boles of the old tree and has done for many years, flew down and whispered in my ear. “As you have worked so hard over the past year, I will grant you three wishes for your garden. What will they be?”

I was ecstatic. Three wishes? What  could I ask for? I had so many!

My first wish would be that my hippy shed, which I have been dreaming of for the last thirty years, but never had the room for, will appear at the wave of her magic carob pod. This one below is not the one, but a fisherman’s shed I spotted on Faro beach.

“But what kind of hippy shed do you want, really? ” said the fairy. I didn’t like her tone much. A bit up herself I thought.

I pondered. My hippy shed will be a place where I can relive my 60’s youth. In my mind, it will have mirrored Indian cushions, Moroccan lanterns and a comfortable chair for me to sit and read. It will smell wonderful and I will entertain my nieces and nephews and if I’m lucky, my grandchildren in it, and they will indulge me as I get old and listen to my silly stories.  It will be an anachronism and rather twee, but I don’t care. The trouble is though, I’m not really a hippy anymore. And the house and garden aren’t particularly hippyish, if you see what I mean. So the question is a difficult one as I want my glamorous  retreat to fit in with the rest of the garden. So I suppose I want a reasonably smart shed on the outside, which is a hippy haven on the inside.

I looked through the sheds on this wonderful site, which actually has a competition for The Shed of The Year. http://www.readersheds.co.uk/share.cfm Browsing through the hundreds of sheds, I found The One.
It’s a Caribbean  Moroccan retreat, built from a budget shed and transformed. The very jobbie! I hope it wins the competition.
http://www.readersheds.co.uk/share.cfm?SHARESHED=4789

The Carob Fairy humphed and said I might have to wait a bit longer as she had to order the shell from the DIY store and search Ebay for bits and bobs and she couldn’t get that exact colour paint right now,  but hopefully I will wake up one morning and there it will be.

So that was the first wish taken care of. The second wish was easy. I want the hard landscaping finished please. I am fed up with not having the bones of the garden completed yet. I can’t push a wheelbarrow all the way around the garden and I keep getting rye grass stuck in my sandalled feet. I also want some more gravelled areas as doing the last bit nearly killed us both.  So I asked the Carob fairy if she could just move a ton or so of rocks from the fields around, the more attractive ones if possible, and arrange them as a terraced rockery on the bank, bung in a few more calcada paths and sort out some terracing in my vegetable garden and just finish off the gravelling in the corner please.   She gave me a very hard look. “The  landscaping fairy has hurt her back at the moment,” she said “You will have to wait a little longer, I’m afraid!” .

“Fine fairy she is!” I thought!  “You’d think she could have at least made one of my wishes come true instantaneously”.

So we came to my last wish. I didn’t want to waste it.

I took a deep breath. I want more water please. “What?  she said, “More water than you had this winter? Surely not! You’d need an ark!”.
“No”, I said “I want more water right now, when I need it. And I dont want to have to use electricity to pump it anywhere”

“Oh, I see, you want a reservoir on the hill behind the house”, she said ” I think your neighbours would have something to say about that. Other than that I’d have to put solar panels all over your garden with huge batteries in the garage to pump the water up from a borehole and I don’t think you’d like that either. I know how fussy you are about the way things look . Anyway, this is supposed to be a waterwise garden. What do you need more water for?”

I sighed. “I suppose you’re right” I said, “Could I just have a few extra water butts then, up there by the vegetable garden?”

So she waved her carob wand and they appeared in a puff of smoke and fairy dust. Two enormous green butts. I was  rather taken aback.  So I went off to water the tomatoes. And that is the end of the story. Except, I want to know your story. What would your three wishes be for your garden right now?

 

 

 

 

I like the way you grow it!

I came across this on YouTube today and couldn’t resist posting it here to share with you. I am now dancing round the garden in my rubber slippers and a floppy hat singing “I like the way you grow it” and invite you all to do the same!

Come into the Garden, Moored!

We have had a busy period with lots of visitors and have had a few weeks of being tourists, both here on the Algarve and in Southern Spain, where we visited some  of the small white villages on the Costa de Sol, the Tabernas desert near Almeria and the Alhambra and Generalife Gardens in the Alhambra for some Moorish inspiration,

I took pictures along the way with an eye on inspiration for the garden, so here are a few thoughts.

I saw this lovely combination of tables and chairs and flowerpots outside a restaurant in the village of Mijas. Everwhere in Mijas, the white walls were lined with blue flowerpots containing the same bright red geraniums. It made me think about what accent colours I might use in my own garden.

I found this great swathe of bright colour a surprising choice outside the inner Palaces of the Alhambra, but cheerfully pleasing. I was wondering what other plants might have this range of colour, lilies, roses , geraniums perhaps? English gardens tend to be muted in colour, which I also find beautiful, but there is something very uplifting about these bright colours under a clear blue sky and the green of the box offsetting them.

 

This beautiful dry garden was found on Barril beach, close to Fuseta on the Algarve. It has no water at all and the broken bones of a discarded fisherman’s boat reminds me how lovely flotsam and jetsam can look in the right setting. I suppose my equivalent would be a carob stump or a piece of volcanic rock.

 A lesson in simplicity inside the Alhambra. Cool water, giant cypress trees forming natural pillars with their roots underplanted , long trails of ivy hanging down, the quiet benches. It reminds me to try and create a sense of peace and calm in my own garden where there are sitting spaces, even though I know I can never create anything as beautiful and stately as this.

A perfect frame and a beautiful perspective in the Generalife. Are there ways of framing things in my garden?

A dream for the future, outside the Alhambra palace. And an inspiration that such beauty can be made by human beings and nature together.

 

Small beginnings outside my front door, with some pink ivy leaf geraniums against a camellia in a pot! Enough dreaming, time to pick up the hoe and tackle the mayhem caused by our absence!

 

 

Oh-Oh, I’ve lost the plot!

 

Beautiful weeds

 

Help! My garden is out of control. In short, I have  lost the plot. About  six weeks ago it rained for a whole week nonstop. The weeds loved it. They looked very pretty dotted around the garden, in fact you can scarcely call them weeds, some of them, such as Chrysanthemum Coronium, Borage, Mallow or wild Delphinium, you would pay money for in a garden centre. Then we  had lots of lovely visitors for a few weeks, so we spent our days lazing around, commenting on how pretty the weeds were over a glass of Alentejo red. Then we went to Spain for a week, to admire Moorish gardens and exclaim at the Sierra Nevada. We came back to mayhem.

To some extent I like weeds, see my previous post here:

https://gardeninginthealgarve.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/weed-and-write/

But the weeds are unruly and unfettered. The dandelions blow fairies all over my vegetable garden; the rye grass, so pretty in the evening sunlight, has no respect for the needs of the fruit trees growing amongst it and greedily robs them of water and nutrients; the thistles tower above my newly planted shrubs and to top it all, Senor Faztudo has hay fever of the worst kind. So he is sneezing and coughing and spluttering and I am wringing my hands and wailing as the roses disappear amongst the triffids.

At times like this it’s hard not to panic. It’s been bone dry for six weeks. The soil has turned to dust. My cabbages and kohl rabbi and broccoli have stopped growing  because it’s too hot. and Señor Faztudo is muttering about the cost of a turnip. He reckons they have cost us about five euros each in water. “Yes, but they’re organic”, I reason. He looks at me darkly.

I make a cup of tea, sit on my favourite piece of the wall and try to count my blessings. Which are many. For one, I have this beautiful garden and time to devote to it. Parts of it are looking good already after a year. Quite a few things are still alive and some are even thriving. The gravel mulch technique  works well, with little water.

The gravel mulch terrace

My herb garden is taking shape. We have eaten broad eans, peas, turnips and greens from the garden all Spring. And the chickens have laid an egg each every day. True,  the carrots were contorted into all kinds of twists and turns and for some strange reason and  beetroot, one of the easiest vegetables  in the world to grow, won’t form roots, but the Jerusalem artichokes my sister sent me from England are three feet high and the globe artichokes are doing well. We lost one of our mango trees and yet another Bougainvillea bit the dust, but we won’t let that get us down. Mostly.

Globe artichokes in Gravel mulch

 

Some days though, it’s hard in the garden. The sun beats down on your head and the dust gets up your nose. The ticks which inhabit the tall grass crawl up your trouser legs and your cherished seedlings, which you’ve nurtured through a long winter shrivel up. I am writing this blog in the hope that in years to come, I will be able to look back at the journey of making this garden and celebrate the the trials as well as the tribulations.

I have cheered myself up by visiting the local Chinese supermarket. They abound in the Algarve region and are similar to pound shops in the UK.  They have everything for sale and my intention was to buy some organza bags, the sort you put wedding favours in, to protect our fruit from mediterranean fruit fly.

Ceratitis capitata, the Mediterranean fruit fly, causes huge damage to a wide range of fruit crops. It is native to the Mediterranean area, but has spread to many parts of the world, including Australia and the Americas

Adult medflies lay their eggs under the skins of fruit and the eggs hatch within three days, the larvae developing inside the fruit. Last year, as soon as the peaches on our young trees became ripe, they were all ruined by the fruit fly. I am not prepared to use pesticides, so have bought the bags to tie around the fruit in the hope it will keep the fly out.

I must say that as I tied the pretty bags to the peach tree, I aroused considerable curiousity from passers by. Several of the Donnas walked back and forward a few times giving me sideways glances. I expect they think I am indulging in some sort of weird Welsh tree dressing custom, but the proof of the pudding will be in the perfect peaches. I have left a few unbagged as a control. It has recently come to light that bees are dying in the winter due to the use of pesticides, so I am hoping that by doing this and having such splendiforous weeds in my garden, Iam doing my bit for the bee populations in the area.

Fruit Fly protection

Around the garden, the area outside the front door is looking pretty, with some Malope “Trifida Vulcan” grown from Sarah Raven’s seeds given to me by a friend and many of the cuttings and succulents donated by a neighbour with a beautiful gardening have rooted. I hope I can nurture them through the fierce heat to come.

Maolpe “Trifida Vulcan”

 

I have very little shade in my garden yet and this is proving to be a problem for new plants. We have planted many young trees and shrubs and I can’t wait for them to grow to provide more shaded areas. It’s confusing to me to have to put succulents in the shade to help them grow faster in the hottest months, and certainly ivy leafed geraniums and true geraniums cant take full sun. and thrive. Someone described July and August as a fifth season, when everything goes to sleep and this notion has been helpful to me.

So, back to the grindstone. I think it was Rudyard Kipling who said “Gardens are not made by singing ‘Oh, how beautiful!’ and sitting in the shade.” But Gwynnie doesn’t seem to know that.

 

Gwynnie the cat.

Gardening in Portugal – Time to stand and stare

 

Gardening is a solitary business and on the whole, most of us gardeners like it that way. There is a solace in walking up and down, bending and stretching, stopping to listen to the birds, to admire the view or to gaze at an emerging plant. When I was young, for homework once, I had to learn this poem by W.H. Davies (I have left some verses out, for the sake of brevity)

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?—

No time to stand beneath the boughs,
And stare as long as sheep and cows:

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance:

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

It’s a trifle twee as poetry goes, but as I work on my garden tasks, I often remind myself of the lines, and take the time to stop and look around me. Mostly I am pleased with the way the garden is developing and feel happy and at peace with the surroundings. But some mornings, I stand and stare and feel desperate. Will we ever turn this side of the hill into a beautiful garden? Can it really be done? When I’m in this mood, I mooch around from one job to the next, never feeling I’ve achieved anything. In the end, I sit down, have a cup of tea and feel very discouraged. The problem for me is the fact that it is such early days. The fruit trees are tiny, the flowers aren’t flowering yet, not all the hard landscaping has been done, I can’t afford the things I need. In short, I have days where I find it hard to count my blessings.

However, recently help has been at hand. I have had a very encouraging weekend and feel renewed and refreshed. I have said before, I miss my gardening community from the allotment in South London. Chats over the fence about gardening have always sustained me and encouraged me. I started to write this blog as a way of recording the progress in the garden. I could have made it private, but then, reading about permaculture led me to one of its principles that I readily agree with. Share your garden. Share what you produce and share what you learn. It’s a simple idea and an easy way of doing something positive for the world. When I was young, I thought the way to make things better which were wrong had to be big things. Now I realise it is the little things around us that make a difference. I have found, to my amazement that there are hundreds if not thousands of gardeners out there on the internet, sharing their gardening experiences. And they are all prepared to chat to you over the virtual fence. How wonderful is that? Gardeners have begun supporting me by adding comments to my blog and I have been reading theirs and learning all sorts of new things.
In the real world (and I’m not saying the Internet isn’t real, just distinguishing between this and the other) we visited a book launch hosted by the Algarve branch of the Mediterranean Garden Society of a new Field guide to the Wild Flowers of the Algarve, published by Kew Gardens. The distinguished authors of the book spoke to us about their long research and how lucky we were to be living in an area which is very special for its floral diversity. Indeed, there are so many wild orchids yards from my front gate, you can’t avoid treading on them as you walk. There is a new association for the MGS in Portugal and they held their first AGM at the same time.

http://www.gardeninginportugal.com/

The book launch was held at Quinta de Figuerinha, near Silves, a guest house and ecology centre, nestled on the side of one of those magic hidden valleys you come upon, here in the countryside inland. Before the talk we wandered through the gardens, marvelling at the avocado trees in full fruit and a large Indian Neem tree, orchards of organic citrus and many other trees all of which weren’t there 25 years ago.

 http://www.qdf.pt/en/Agriculture/

I doubt if I have twenty five years left to live, but it’s still inspiring to think that the trees that you are planting now, may be such a beautiful legacy for the next generation. I think this is why the farmers here on this hill and in the valley below treat their trees with such reverence. Many were planted by their fathers, grandfathers or even great great great grandfathers. They produce all their wealth in some cases and many an hour is spent under their branches picking carobs or knocking almonds or olives from them. There is an intimate relationship with every tree.

The next day, a new gardening friend and I swopped gardening visits for the first time. She has a large garden in a beautiful setting and has been working at it for a long time, albeit intermittently as time allowed her. Her artist’s eye had created a tapestry of different colours and shapes which blended beautifully into the vistas surrounding her house. Daisies threaded throughout prostate rosemaries, swan’s neck agaves beaming their antennae-like central spike up towards the sky. She gave me a young pomegranate tree. If we live long enough, I hope we will one day sit under its shade and my garden will look half as beautiful as hers. She said to me as we walked around her creation “What would I do if it was finished?” as though the thought frightened her. This gave me a new perspective. Of course, it’s the journey, not the destination that matters.

So, I return to the garden replenished and try to enjoy the journey, learn to love the weeds as my friend, attempt patience with the slow growth of plants and my losses and failures and believe that it all is moving on as it should. I have punctuated this blog with pictures of flowers taken in the surrounding area to remind me to stand and stare more often.

 

Gardening in Portugal-Spring Update

Spring pots planted up

It’s Spring and I’ve  been feeling a bit desperate. Spring should be the time when everything is busting out all over, but unfortunately there isn’t a great deal of planting to bust out in my garden yet. We have done a lot of work, enough to make us ache all over. I have an additional blog to support new arrivals to The Algarve here which explains what we’ve been up to, making a gravel bed.

http://blogs.angloinfo.com/a-new-gardener-let-loose-in-the-algarve/2014/03/23/stone-the-grows/

So, it was some pleasure that I stumbled upon a wonderful blog, part of which I reblogged in two earlier  posts, describing the process of creating a garden in Lazio, Italy. The writer is a very experienced gardener and designer and gives me inspiration and strength to believe in the  possibilities, even though sometimes it feels very difficult to garden on this windswept hillside with little water. Onwards and Upwards!

http://myhesperidesgarden.wordpress.com/

So come with me on a little walk around the garden, what there is of it. There HAS been progress, of course there has. It was a building site under two years ago, I remind myself frequently. Here is what it looked like then.

Before there was a Garden

I have tried to see the garden in sections. It’s the only way I can stop myself feeling engulfed. This is not a huge garden, but for us, who have been used to a backyard terraced garden in South london, cheek by jowl with others, it is daunting enough! And I am in my third and final age, so five years is a long time for me. But I can’t go faster than the plants grow.  I have to take a step at a time.

Small triumphs are that we have nearly completed the gravel terraced area on top of the bank, mentioned above.  It has been really hard labour, hauling gravel up the hill. I haven’t been able to plant the whole area because of shortage of funds, but have several grasses, pennisetums and iris sibirica which I am growing from seed and hope to plant in the Autumn, along with lavender cuttings. This side of the terrace  was planted last Autumn. The lavender hedge was grown from cuttings, so I am hopeful that I can replicate it fairly cheaply in other areas of the garden. The clay soil here is good for striking cuttings, if you get it at the right time when it is wet and warm enough, but it can be a bit hit and miss, so I have also done some in pots.

The gravelled area and lavender hedge, grown from cuttings

I

The side of the gravelled area that was planted a year ago

There is at least bit of Spring going on here. I have planted grasses at the top of the bank, which I have cut back, so it’s somehwat bare. I also buried  some dutch irises I bought at the MGS fair in between other plants . I haven’t a clue what they are all called, either common names or Latin ones, but I must sort this out. I am always muddling up plant labels and forgetting what I’ve planted where.  There are so many different irises, bearded iris, dutch irises, flags etc. I sometimes wonder where they are all growing together, if one sees itself as more superior to the other. I imagine the bearded irises (I think they are Iris germanicus) mocking the slightly more gentile dutch variety.  (Reading this back, I think I have spent too long on my own with the plants!)

In the vegetable garden, my sister sent me some Jerusalem Artichokes from her garden in Wales  (or Fartichokes, as she calls them) I think they should do very well here and indeed they are popping up their little shoots already, bless them. I had them on my allotment in Dulwich and enjoyed growing them and eating them. I even had them in a tiny back garden in Crystal palace, where they were a talking point for the neighbours.

Jerusalem Artichokes

Señor  Faztudo has made me a glory hole. We have created a fenced off and gravelled area below the shed where I can potter and plant to my heart’s content. We are very different, in that he is obsessively tidy and  I am pathologically messy. We usually work it out somehow!

The Glory Hole

I have planted a Lidl’s rose of unnamed variety to grow up the fence, which is supposed to climb and cover everything with pink roses, along with some ivy. It was  one euro 49 cents in a sale.(I can’t afford David Austin at the moment!)  In the meantime, I have some horrible green screening to hide the mess and I have planted some succulents in old cat food tins and hung them from the fence. It’s a kind of temporary joke and a nod to my hippy days and I like it.

Cat food tins recycled as planters for succulents

The camellia below is very pretty, but really a gardening mistake. I wanted something to plant in the flower trough near the front door, but then realised it was full of alkaline soil.  It likes acid soil. So I have put  it into a pot and I water it every day with coffee grinds which are a little acid. It seems happy. It looks good against the pigmented plaster, I think.

In the vegetable garden, we are cropping peas, mangetout and lettuce and Portugese kale. I have planted some courgette seeds in my newly created lasagna bed, but the blackbirds have dug them all up looking for worms, so I will have to plant them again. Some of my small tomato plants have been eaten by cutworms, but I have more plants  to replace them.

Pea plants in my garden

I haven’t got much room for potatoes, so I have planted some in a sack, as an experiment. Watch this space. Once they sprout you just put more soil in and they are supposed to keep putting tubers out.

Potatoes planted in a sack

I have developed a love affair with succulents and cacti  and have been  potting them up in the Glory Hole. I found out recently from a fellow Algarve gardener  they are better grown on in light shade, so I’ll  be moving them to a shadier place when it gets hotter. The scallop shells, which are plentiful on the beach here, make a good shade protector and look pretty, I  think.

A good use of scallop shells

The succulent gravel garden is doing well. This was grown in the place where the builder’s mixed all the concrete to build the house and was really the only choice for a garden here. It’s difficult because the area by the wall is in deep shade, but I am pleased with its progress, albeit slow. I have put the pots as an edging, with a dogs skull I found on a walk. Poor dog. He had healed injuries on his skull which suggested a hard life. I wanted him to rest in peace, as a thing of beauty.

The succulents garden

Other jobs we have completed is to feed all the fruit trees with lovely sheep manure. Unfortunately the sheep manure came with rather a large number of ticks which we have been removing from the cats and even ourselves this week. Ah, the trials of gardening! But I’m sure it will be worth it when we bite into those succulent oranges…in about three or four years time! So that’s the update. Now let’s sit under the olive and have some tea. How is your garden getting on?

Gwynnie dreaming

Gardening in Portugal – A Bloom with a View

When I was a child we had a garden with a view of Wales. My bedroom looked over the Wye Valley from the English side and in those days you could look up and see a little steam train puffing along in the distance. It was part of my daily life and although it was breathtakingly beautiful, I suppose I took it for granted. It looked like this

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/wye-valley-river-and-steam-train-159388

I grew up and went to London and for the next thirty years I had tiny gardens in terraced houses. The view here over the fences separating one family from the next was interesting, to say the least, but I can’t say it was beautiful. It was fun watching what each family chose to grow. My Indian neighbour had an avocado tree, planted close to back walloff the  Victorian suitcase factory behind our garden and promised it would bear fruit one day. There was the odd large plant with serrated leaves that the student growers kept quiet about. But you had to crane your neck to see a star and the sun always set quite early over the factory wall

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/back-gardens-wandsworth-london-51886

We bought this house in the Algarve because we fell in love with the view. The house is built on the North side of what was probably an extinct volcano; a flat topped prominence with a rocky outcrop across a level bottomed valley. Curved hills frame the 180 degree view, and because they are different distances apart they show themselves in subtle degrees of colour, blues, dark purple, pinks. As I look at them at sunset or even at dawn my hand involuntarily wants to pick up a paintbrush. I want to capture this beauty for all time. But you never could. No camera could portray it, no painting perfect it.

Our house faces North. My father always counselled against buying a house facing North. Good advice in England, but not necessarily the case in The Algarve. There is only one house on the South face of our hill and Roman ruins have been found on this North side. Generations of Portugese can’t be wrong. We have the shade of the hilltop behind us in the Summer, but the view is always in the light. The sun rises beautifully on our right and sets beautifully on our left.

So I am a gardener with a view. I plant my seedlings on the flat wall top facing East. The blue jays squawk loudly as they pick over the last of the olives in the field next to me. The hills above Tavira, which we saw burning from our balcony in the terrible fire the year before last, are tranquil. As I plant sedums on top of the cisterna, the clouds scud across the rocky outcrop, lighting up a pair of buzzards circling in a thermal. My trowel poised, I cannot believe the good fortune that brought me here.

I can see the smoke coming from the woodburning chimneys in the little village where some friends of mine live and wonder how different the village would have been in the time of the Romans or the Moors. The almond blossom was there I know, because of the ancient legend of Ibn Afim, a Moorish prince with a wife from the a northern lands, who planted the almond trees so that the blossom would remind her of the snow and stop her feeling homesick.

The view cries out for sitting places in the garden and we intend to sit and stare a lot. I have put one under the ancient olive tree on my vegetable plot. I imagine a sort of covered seat right up at the highest point in the garden, but probably not covered with vines, as Señor Faztudo doesn’t  like the idea of geckos dropping down his neck. And I hope to build a hippy shed one day, facing Spain, where I can play Leonard Cohen and bring Señor Faztudo tea and oranges that come all the way from my garden.

Gardening in Portugal – Don’t pooh pooh poo!

In this post I am going to write quite a lot about poo. Chicken poo, horse poo, sheep and goat  poo and even bat poo, not to mention a little bit about pee. If you are of a nervous disposition, don’t read on.

I have found that the Portugese farmers hereabouts have largely stopped putting organic manure on their trees and vegetables.  They use the chemical fertilisers, which largely consist of blue pellets or white pellets, clean and easy to use and effective in their eyes. They sprinkIe a little in each hole as they plant their fava (broad) beans and peas. I understand this. I am not a farmer needing to make a living. But I do worry about this and all the other stuff which I see being sprayed all around, including the weed-killing that regularly goes on at this time of year. People believe the stuff they buy in the market is probably organic. Believe me, a lot of it is not.

I want to use organic fertilisers. But it’s very hard to find quality poo around here.

I have a friend who knows someone who runs a livery stable nearby. The owner shows her horses and feeds them on top quality feed, bedding them in good wheatstraw. He kindly brings me a load every now and then and it’s the best present anyone can give me. I get very excited about a present of good manure.

Last year, we found a source of well rotted manure, again from someone who kept horses. It was in a pile in the field. After a while of digging into it and bagging it up,  it seemed to have a load of big fat prawns buried in it. I just couldn’t figure it. How did they get there? On closer inspection  I realised that they weren’t prawns at all (I didn’t know whether to heave a sigh of relief or start screaming!) but huge fat grubs.  Identification later revealed them to be dung beetles, who apparently take years to mature. I did feel a little sad as I tossed them to the chickens, who gobbled them up greedily. But I guess they got recycled.

I added this lovely manure to my lasagna bed, along with coffee grounds from the local café and lots of newspaper. The results have yet to be revealed, but I hope to produce good pumpkins and courgettes form this bed this year as it has rotted down very well.

Despite Senor Faztudo threatening to behead the chickens for pooing on the patio, we have collected a bucket of their little presents  from around the garden and diluted it in water, which I will use as a root feed in the weeks to come. I won’t be putting it anywhere near my salad crops, for obvious reasons, but for our emerging fruit trees, and for the cabbages which won’t be ready for a few weeks to come and will be cooked, it is a useful  feed for the roots. I also clear out the chicken droppings from their coops every morning which are mixed with sawdust and put it on the compost heap. It’s a wonderful circular process. They eat the weeds and any vegetable peelings and turn it into fertiliser, which goes back on the vegetables.

Sheep poo can also be found, if you know where to look for it. (it always seems to be just out of your reach) It is left to rot into a lovely black crumbly mix over time and is black gold, if you can get it. I am not revealing my source. Great for the roses and the fruit trees.

The other source of fertiliser I have found that comes in useful, is guano. It is the old fashioned fertiliser and although some farmers still use it, it is no longer fashionable. This is either bat or seabird poo, collected from caves.   I have been able to buy this in powdered form until recently, in local supermarkets,  although I haven’t seen it lately. A quarter of a teaspoon around the bottom of a cabbage is like a real tonic. I have found it in huge sacks mixed with soil improver in an agricultural store near here. It is quite cheap and works well.  The smell is the worst thing imaginable and carrying it back in my little van is a torture. It smells like a cross between dead animals, sick and cat poo. It is indescribably awful and you need a mask and gloves when putting it into the soil. But the smell goes in a few days and if you apply it in the autumn, the soil will be ready for Spring plantings.

Unfortunately, comfrey doesn’t grow very well here. I used to grow oodles of it in the Uk and use it to make a comfrey tea. But it is too hot here for it and gets rust easily.  Again, the stink really bad, but it was a very good fertiliser. We have lots of borage and nettles going in the garden, however, so I have been using these, dunking the leaves in water and stirring the pot at intervals. After a month it becomes a real witches brew and need to be diluted in water before applying to the roots of plants.

Finally, I come onto pee. Obviously in a country with little water, weeing and pulling the chain all the time is not very good for the environment and water is also metered here. I have discovered that wee is a plentiful supply of nitrogen. And on tap all the time!  When you first do it, it is sterile. So I have started encouraging Senor Faztudo to wee on the compost heap, although being a city lad he is not too keen.  What I do, I will leave to your imaginations! Don’t worry, I draw the line at the use of human poo anywhere in my garden. That’s goes off down the drain. I am sure someone will try and sell me a composting toilet, but I think that may be a step too far!