Christmas garden gift

If you are shopping for your best friends christmas present and are unable to decide how to follow last years gift of the Obama Caganer, then this could be the gift you are looking for!

An Elephant Poo Planter! Perhaps you could use it to plant your Elephants Ears ?

Stoking up the boiler

Alan Titchmarsh the television gardening presenter refers to the compost heap as the boiler house of the garden. Our particular boiler has in recent days been recharged with the shredded prunings from the Mulberry trees. 

Antonio down at the restaurant in Vilamala has been persuaded to supply me with the coffee grounds from the overworked machine in that establishment, they too have added into the heap.

 I thought I would ask Olga & Angel fellow restauranteurs, if they too would save their coffee grounds for our compost. Olga said she would but when I next visited the premises, she said that she had mentioned the arrangement to her father a fellow landowner, who had told Olga to forget about the coffee grounds as he would supply me with a sack of  ‘animal abono’ i.e. goat and horse manure. His gift was greatly appreciated, and he has promised that from time to time he will provide a sack of the same mix. The Manure provided a good heart for the heap and helped the composting process to fire up the heap.

 It was whilst on another trip to Banyoles to show the lake to our most recent visitors; that I saw another golden garden opportunity. On the edge of the lake, I saw glistening in the light of the setting sun a pile of recently deposited horse manure. I told my companions that if I had had a sack with me I would have claimed the heap as my own.

 After a walk along the shore of Lake Banyoles we returned to the car and again passed by the heap of ‘horse do’. Carol trying to be helpful said that if I really wanted the manure she would unpack the shopping and provide me with the carrier bags for that purpose. Using one bag as a glove I scooped up the manure and filled the second bag before returning to the car. As I reached the car my passengers all three, slammed their door shut to prevent me from asking them to hold the precious cargo on the return journey.

 On arrival at the Finca back at the pueblo I added the fuel to the ‘boiler house’ and considered it a job well done. That evening Carol and Joan stayed in to watch a television show. John and I visited Antonio’s bar and utilised the WiFi link on the premises to do a little route planning for their onward journey to Cadiz, and from there a ferry ride to the Canary Isles i.e. Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The journey having been planned I checked in to the Mediterranean Garden Spain web site.

John read a few pages from our blog and was surprised at the scale and distribution of garden blog readers around the world. 

John then said “I bet you daren’t tell your blog readers that you picked up horse crap, in the street”. 

I replied that, indeed I would dare to do so, and further more that if I did tell our readers about the dark and dreadful deed, I would be obliged to tell those same folk, that he John the builder from Castle Donnington shrieked like a young girl when I asked him to carry the bag. 

So John, ‘Me Duck’ consider the story told.

 

Comfortable with the comfrey

Our comfrey plants were sourced from eBay and arrived as five rather uninspiring small black coloured pieces of the sellers plant division. After a few weeks they have generated five young plants which give us hope for the future of our composting process which is in need of leafy nitrogenous material. The first year we will concentrate on building the plants up both in scale and in number.  In subsequent years comfrey will play an important role in the garden as we do battle with our poor aluvian soil. 

The snails and slugs seem to have nibbled at this specimen though not too much damage is visible in the photograph, considering the thousands of snails resident on our plot. The little though frequent rain we have had in recent weeks means that the birds are rather enjoying the spring with ample food supplies. Thrushes have helped out with the snail control as is evident by the empty shells we are finding. As far as is possible we like to rely on natural solutions it is just a case of finding the right balance.