Skip to main content

Everything in the garden is rosy

A bit more weedy than rosy, but lush and green none the less.
Peter has been busy with t he veg patch, mostly filling up mole holes when we water. The moles are a problem, our lawn is full of mole hills at the moment, I've tried sticks in the holes, filling the hole with water, putting lemon down the hole (local old wives remedy) but still they pop up. We need a killer cat!



The local cove cabbage grows in every garden, Jersey folk will call it a Long Jack. It's used in soups throughout the Winter and just keeps growing.




All his hard work is paying off as we've had courgettes-a-plenty, lots of radish, lettuce and spinach. The tomatoes are on there way, along with the corn, beans, onions, beetroot and peppers.

We've still got lots to do, the lower garden is a haven for weeds (some may call it a wild garden). We've cleared some space, but the weeds just keep on coming.

So, today Peter has been out there strimming the weeds away with our neighbours strimmer. We'll sill have to weed as we've read that 'one year seeding is 7 years of weeding' and all the grasses have already gone to seed.

What we are going to do with all the weeds is a slight concern, our compost heap is already out of all control, although it has given us a sunflower in apology!

Comments

  1. Came by your blog via Sam George's FB photos of a surf trip. I appreciate your self-sufficiency efforts, experimenting in much smaller ways up here in Estonia. Our neighbors have had lots of mole problems, and what works for them is to stick a meter or 2-meter long stick into the hole, and a beer or soda can upside down onto the end of the stick. Not sure but am guessing it's the slight noise that deters the mole. At one point they had probably ten or fifteen cans out there in the spring. None right now, and no moles. ~Denise

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Building our Barrel Vault Wood Fired Oven

This is a short description of my barrel vault build that I have done here in Central Portugal. The final internal size is a 1m squared floor with a arch height of 50cm. I hope you enjoy and get some ideas from it. I wish to thank ukwoodfiredovenforum  for their advice and support. • 1: First I dug out a hole in the flower bed, on top of the stone wall, where the oven was to be built • 2: Set up a form to pour in the concrete base • 3: Pour the concrete base, which was about 5-6 inches deep • 4: On top of the base I cast 4-5 inches of LECA (light weight expanded clay balls) mixed with cement to hold it's form • 5: Then I cast a 2-3 inch heat retaining base, to add to the thermal mass, using calcium aluminate cement with large grain sand, as a flat base for the hearth bricks to sit on • 6-8: I then dry laid the hearth bricks on a dry bed of fine sand and clay mixture, with th

Read the signs

In 2009/10 there was a brief outcry in the UK about the amount of unnecessary road signs on British roads.   The consumer group called Civic Choice submitted information that there were tens of thousands of excess road signs and that too many signs were confusing and distracting.    The AA results of a survey can be found here and the Campaign for Plain English also supported some of the findings. I think this problem has ‘gone global’, well at least ‘gone European’ OK maybe just ‘gone Portuguese’.   There is certainly a road sign disease spreading on the IC8, one of the major highways in Central Portugal.   This disease seems to have reached its peak in the area between the turn off for the IC3 and Castanheira de Pera.   The disease is spreading, the spores of signs scattering along the roadside and new signs growing all the time.   In this short distance, it takes just 10 mins to drive, it has been reported to me that there are a whopping 400 plus signs.   I tried

oh what a lovely bougainvillea

It was something I wanted to grow, a plant which would cover the wall, give shade, give colour and really stamp the fact we lived abroad.   Bougainvillea. We have the other Mediterranean type of plants growing; we have olives in abundance, we have the grapes thriving, we have the figs establishing, but alas no bougainvillea.    I looked up how to grow it and it says:   Bougainvillea thrives in full sun.   “At least 5 hours a day of direct sunlight is the minimal light required for good bloom. More hours of direct sun are better. Less than 5 hours and the plant may not bloom very well.”   5 hours of sun ‘check’, good light ‘check’, south facing ‘check’….but alas the Med we are not!   This little peak of Central Portugal has cold air in winter (snow even), a vigorous breeze at dusk and is prone to a late frost.   Our courtyard is just too exposed to the elements, there is no little ‘nook’ for a bougainvillea, there is no wall for it to climb up.   So, after a courageous start in