The customary fig leaf

We were in Shropshire last week for a family wedding. We stayed in Shrewsbury for most of the time. I think the last time I was in Shrewsbury was 47 years ago when I went to hunt for trilobites on Wenlock Edge. Shrewsbury looked rather nice with lots of fashionable, at least for we Spanish country bumpkins, shops and eateries. Maggie pointed out an organic veg shop offering two figs for a pound, £1 that is. She noticed them because we have three fig trees in our garden. One is a small tree with green figs and the other two are larger trees that produce the earlier higos and the later brevas. Just as mares and stallions, geldings and fillies are all horses to me then all the things that grow on the three trees are figs.

Now I like figs alright. Often, when we lived in the UK, I'd eat as many as a dozen over the summer. Here, when the fruit is ripe, the birds feast on the ones at the top of the tree and leave us the rest. I think I've eaten three this year. Sometimes other people come and gather a couple of carrier bags full for jams and chutneys but, even then, most of them just fall to the ground. As I'm weeding around and underneath the fig trees the fallen fruit stick tenaciously to the soles of my boots until I have no option but to acknowledge their existence. That means raking them up and carting them away to dump. Maggie joins in this too as she finds the squished fruit on the paths annoying and often brushes them off. I've just been trying to work out how many individual fruits the trees produce. Google provided lots of different estimates of the size of wheelbarrows and the density of the loads they carry. Eventually, though, I decided that a standard load is about 60 kilos. Figs seem to weigh about 50g each so, if Miss Bushell's multiplication and division lessons haven't failed me, that's about 1,200 figs per full barrow. That just about fits with the estimates of fruit production per tree. Since they started to fall I reckon I've dumped about five barrow loads or around 6,000 figs. That's quite a lot of raking and carting.

It's been windy today in Culebrón. It often is. Several of the gusts have been well over 65km/h. When the wind blows it blows lots of the things off their perches but, more than anything, it sets up eddies and dumps seemingly never ending quantities of leaves at strategic points against the house and around the garden. The fig trees are one of the main producers of leaves though the pomegranates, olives, almonds, peaches, apples, quince, nisperos and everything else do their bit too. There were lots of fig leaves today.

As I brushed and raked and estimated how much painful pruning all the trees will need this year I thought vaguely of axes and chain saws but also of the value of the fig crop if I could just get it to Shrewsbury.

And finally the hoe

Maggie told me the other day that she hasn't read my blog for ages. I may be putting words into her mouth but I think the suggestion was that I'd really run out of material. Being pragmatic I wondered if I could start again - talk about the differences in bar or restaurant etiquette or why Spaniards think we're odd drinking coffee with a sandwich. So I started to look back at the early blog entries.

I see that, in February 2006, I brought a hoe from the UK to Spain. I took the handle off and just brought the blade part back. I remember I was surprised I didn't get more grief about the hoe head in my bag. On that very trip a jar of marmalade in Maggie's bag was dealt with much more harshly. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737 but the security staff at the airport seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve. On the other hand they did not pre-judge the innate violence in grubbing out weeds with a well honed hoe.

Our garden has a spectacular and never ending ability to grow weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster and stronger than the oleander or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because Dutch hoes are not on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something called an azada, more like a trenching tool, to grub out the unwanted greenery. Basically, with an azada, you have to bend, strike and pull whilst, with a Dutch hoe, it's a much more upright stance and more push than hack. I find the hoe easier to use.

Next time spade sized forks. No, not really. It took me a while to locate one but you can buy garden forks here even if they're not common.

In the Garden of Earthly Delights

El Jardin de la Seda. The Silk Garden, is an unremarkable public green space in Murcia. It has quite a lot of standard model ducks and some of those red faced Muscovy jobs. Joggers and walkers, some in track suits and others disguised in ordinary street clothes, do their stuff. Dog walkers with dogs large and small, some of them keen on battle. There's even the tall chimney left over from the silk factory that gives its name to the garden.

It had been raining. In fact half an hour before we got there it had been pelting down and we had been forced to seek shelter from the storm in a handy bar in the Plaza Circular. I'd even maintained a WhatsApp conversation with Victor, our potential guide, as to whether the walk would go ahead. It's been raining on and off for a couple of weeks now. Last week I posted a photo of a dismal beer festival spoiled by the rain. An old friend in Cambridge saw the photo and commented; "I have made friends with a Spanish woman who now lives in the UK and she says that sometimes in Spain, people don't take their children to school if its raining!" That's why I thought to check with Victor.

Simple idea. This bloke has a company and a doctorate in something botany related. He organises guided tours here and there to look at plants and trees and whatever else botanists are interested in. He's organised a series of walks around various of the green spaces in Murcia and we booked in for the one yesterday evening. It was very good; from ancient palm trees which lived alongside dinosaurs to how to spot sweet and bitter acorns from the shape of the small oak tree, called an encina, typical of large areas of Spain. Oh, and the next time we see a bougainvillea together you'll be amazed by my little known fact about their flowers. The price of the walk was novel too. The Reverse Ticket Office; pay what you think the walk is worth. A real shame that there were only three of us.

I couldn't give a

I quite like figs. Not that they are likely to replace plums or cherries in my affections but, from time to time, as something a bit different, they're nice. They were the sort of fruit that I would buy, every now and again, in a pack of three or four, when I was in Waitrose.

We have two black fig trees in our garden and one of the smaller trees that gives green figs. They produce thousands and thousands of fruits. Being a bit lazy I'd not raked up the fallen fruit this season and the smell of rotting figs was becoming quite pungent. So yesterday I spent the better part of two hours raking up all the fallen stuff. It's not a pleasant job because the sap from the leaves and what not is a skin irritant and in grovelling around under the fig trees I always bump my head or back against one of the sturdy branches a couple of times. And scraping squashed figs from the soles of your shoes afterwards is quite time consuming and sticky too.

Nonetheless, when I'd finished and wheeled away three barrow loads of fallen fruit it looked nice and tidy. There was a bit of a breeze yesterday afternoon and when I went to re-inspect my handiwork this morning there was quite a lot of fresh fallen fruit. It took about half an hour to rake them up.

You can't really tell from the photo but that capazo thing, the rubber bucket, is about 30cms tall and about 30cms across and it just about holds the fresh fall from the two black fig trees.

Tooling up

I have to admit that I was surprised they didn't give me more trouble about the hoe head in my bag. After all a jar of marmalade caused a full scale security alert. Being singularly unimaginative I was hard pressed to envisage the damage that a jar of marmalade, even Olde English thick cut, could do to a Boeing 737. The security staff at Gatwick on the other hand seemed to be well aware of the destructive potential of the orange preserve.

Our garden grows a good crop of weeds. Lots of other things grow too but weeds seem to grow much faster than the lilac or the figs. I brought the hoe head back because neither Dutch nor English hoes are on general sale in Spain. Spaniards use something more like a trenching tool to grub out the unwanted greenery. They seem to prefer to pull when we Brits, and those nice Dutch people, like to push.

Our burning certificate was for a month. I was not allowed to burn in Holy Week and we had a lot of rain in March which denied me opportunity after opportunity. I only just got in under the wire, on the last day of the certificate's validity, by burning most of the garden cuttings we had amassed. When I raked the ashes out (Spanish rakes look like British rakes) they left a big black stain which contrasted unpleasantly with our dun coloured soil. I needed to dig the ashes in. But, just like hoes, forks are in short supply in Spain. I checked five tool selling shops and a huge hypermarket without success. There were all sorts of tools, some very much like the ones you would find in Homebase, and some very different. As I searched in Carrefour I was captured by the Caritas food bank people which added an unexpected extra expense to the quest. Finally though, in a big DIY store on the outskirts of Petrer, I found one lonely garden fork. It was an odd looking, and very dusty, beast by UK standards but it was definitely a fork.

Strange to think that there are different tastes in garden tools between Spain and the UK.

Gardening

I don't really have much to tell you about gardening. The problem is that it's over a week since I blogged anything and, as I've spent a lot of those day in the garden doing the sort of damage that is usually reserved for logging companies in the Amazon, it was all I couuld think of to write about.

We have a garden that I think measures about 1,000 square metres. Small by Spanish country standards but big in British terms. We have a lot of fruit trees such as figs, peach, nispero, almonds, plums, apple, pomegranate, cherry and quince; lots of ivy, lots of pine trees, and plenty more. The trouble is that I'm not much of a gardener. I can tell a tulip from a daffodil from a rose but that's my sort of level. Nature, colourwise, always strikes me as a bit monotonous. When a rose blooms, or the almond trees are in blossom (like now) there's a touch of colour in the garden but I consider  the countryside to be lot of shades of green and brown - for most of the year at least. This monotonous colour scheme doesn't help me to decide which of the various green and brown growths are good, nice, desirable plants that I should leave in peace and which are the weeds that apparently deserve to die.

We've spent years living somewhere else as well as Culebrón. After coming back from Salamanca one summer to find the weeds in our garden so thick and high that the chap with the rotavator said he didn't think the machine would cope, we decided it was time to employ a gardener. We asked our friend Geoff to do it. Just a couple of hours each week - to keep the weeds down and the garden tidy.

Now Geoff is British, English in fact. He has a British sensibility about gardens. He likes to see things growing. Maybe some nice veg, something flowering, certainly some variety and things like ground cover to keep the weeds down. He planted things. We had were able to eat homegrown tomatoes and cabbage during the Geoffrey years.

Spanish people very seldom come into our garden. Our friend Pepa came soon after we'd bought the house. She commented on the garden being limpio which means clean. This was because, between the various and obvious plants, there was bare earth where the weeds were being held at bay. Pepa explained to us that this was the Mediterranean way. Bare earth to avoid fires taking hold or spreading.

So, now that we are back in residence, we had the choice. We could build on all the work that Geoff had put in to produce a varied garden or we could slash and burn our way back to cleanliness. I think it was more my decision than Maggie's that we would cut everything back. And basically that's what we started to do in September. At first the jobs were obvious. The Torrevieja weed, which is a groundcovering succulent, was the first to go, then lots of the ivy that was growing beneath the fig trees. Next all the yuccas had to be dug out. We thinned out some of the other plants like cactus and iris and the palm tree and ivy hedge got their regulation trims.

None of it was really gardening. More like navvy work; digging, chopping, ripping and tearing. With the brute force stuff generally out of the way the garden began to look Spanish again. Maggie actually added some new plants and did some gentle pruning - with the help of tutorials from YouTube videos. All I had to contribute was a bit of weeding. That pruning though inspired me. I thought Maggie was being a bit timid about it. I tore up the last patch of decorative ivy over the weekend and, this week, I've been chopping down lots of pine branches.

Vicente, our next door neighbour passed as I hacked the other day. The garden's looking nice he said - very clean. I sniggered. It may be time to put the shears and clippers away, let the compost heap settle a bit and maybe just keep the weeds down. After all, to paraphrase Ecclesiastes "there's a time to plant and a there's a time to prune."