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."

Going native II

We, no let's be honest, Maggie has just had the patio around our house extended. It looks good and it means less ground for me to keep clear of weeds.

Maggie is a bit of a comlpletist. I was impressed enough with the slabs of marble laid crazy paving style but, for Maggie, they are not enough. She sees plants in pots and garden furniture. She can taste the summer drinks. She mentioned fountains. She's already decided what sort of garden furniture. Not the sort of stuff you get from B&Q or Homebase with wooden slats and nice green brushed cotton cushions. No, Maggie knows that the beating Spanish sun of summer and the 20ºC daily tmperature changes of winter destroy the stitching on nylon chair webbing and anything made of wood. Plastic goes hard and brittle whilst metal colours are doomed to fade except for the reworking of the colour scheme by various layers of rust. Stone, concrete and ceramics are the answer.

She didn't really mention this to me until we were in a local garden centre staring at the stone tables with matching benches. Some were shaped like toadstools. Some were covered in Andalucian style painted ceramic tiles.

"I think I'm turning Spanish," she said, "I think these look nice."

When we first arrived she thought the style of furniture was too hideous to contemplate.

Strong Murciano accents, computers, the naming of parts and the solution close to home

Now I've told you about our palm tree several times. When the tree man failed to turn up last time I did the beetle slaughtering patrol myself. It was hard graft. Nonetheless, the basis for my doing the job every six weeks was there. I had the spray gear it's just that the tree is taller than me even with the spray gun wand in hand - I simply needed a longer reach. With a bit of extra kit I could avoid either having to climb a ladder with 16 litres of insecticide on my back or to coax the tree man into coming to the house.

An internet search had revealed an agricultural supplier in La Palma which seemed to have the tubes, connectors and paraphernalia I needed to gain the necessary height.  I wasn't looking forward to explaining what I needed so when I was able to sneak into the big, empty store I was well pleased. I found the section I was looking for and started to connect this to that like some fetishistic horticultural version of Meccano. I would have soon had a solution without the need to explain myself but someone noticed me and sent a sales assistant to help.

The man had a strong, strong Murciano accent. We had a communication problem. He seemed to be a bit clumsy. He snapped at least one of the connectors as he attempted to engineer a solution. Eventually he thought we had it right. I wasn't so sure mainly because his idea of a three metre extension and mine varied by about one and a half metres. I was in no position to argue and we moved to the cash desk. He couldn't get the computer to work out the bill until someone showed him how to do it.

I went to buy petrol in the same town, in La Palma. I needed a receipt. The man in the petrol station had a strong, strong Murciano accent and he couldn't get the computer to work out the bill either until someone showed him how to do it. Sherlock Holmes like I noticed the pattern.

Back in Culebrón I fastened the whole kit and caboodle together and it nearly reached, it nearly worked but it needed fine tuning. A couple of extra bits. Today I went to one of the farm shops in Pinoso. There I found a specially designed 3.2 metre telescopic spray gun extender. It wasn't cheap but it works perfectly. Excellent I thought. Elementary.

Sounds

Sitting in the garden, reading. There's a breeze, hair dryer warm. The air sort of crackles. Things crack and jump with the heat. The traffic on the main road makes a whooshing sound. Bare metal burns. The principal colour is bright. The principal sound is the song of the cicadas. The air is alive with the sound. It's been like that for weeks

And then the Spanish neighbours came; with friends. Maybe for the weekend, maybe for the August fortnight and now the cicadas have competition. The difference is that the Spaniards never stop.

Spontaneous combustion

During the week our mate Geoff sent me a message asking if I knew why our grey plastic compost bin was melted and smouldering. He was in Culebrón and we were in Cartagena. I didn't.

All I could presume was that the rotting vegetable matter had heated up inside the composter and produced some flamable gas. Hey bingo!, spontaneous combustion.

There wasn't much left to look at when we got back. It must have produced a good deal of heat though as there is damage to the nearby fig, apple and plum trees.

Another trim

I mentioned last week that I go for a haircut when the hair starts menacing my ears. It's much the same with the palm tree in our garden. Not that the palm has ears, at least I don't think it has, though it is a grass apparently and lots of grasses do have ears. No, in the case of the palm tree the time for a trim has come when the fronds start to scrape the roof of the mini as I park up. And that's what happened as we came home this afternoon.

Not being a traditionalist I don't shimmy up the tree using a rope harness nor do I lop off the fronds with a billhook instead it's a pruning saw and a set of stepladders -  more Tunbridge Wells than Elche but, then again, there aren't that many palms in Kent.

The Floridablanca garden in Murcia

When I did the piece on gardening in Spain a couple of days ago I had a root around on the Internet for information about Spanish gardens and gardeners. One bit of information that I turned up was that the oldest public garden in Spain is in Murcia City and, as that's very close to home, we went to have a look today.

Nowadays the garden is a traffic island so it's hardly peaceful but it was certainly shady and well used by a mixture of strollers, newspaper readers and bench sleepers. The parkie was having a fag as we passed.

Apparently the garden was designed and opened in 1786 on what had been the tree lined avenue, the Alameda del Carmen. It was designed to a Romantic style and when it was remodeled in 1848 it was given a new name in honour of one of the city's notable citizens, Jose Moñino Redondo, Count or Conde de Floridablanca.

We'd never heard of the fellow before but at our next stop, the Hydraulic Museum, his name turned up again as the promoter of the old water mill which had doubled as a flood defence system.

Gone to ground

I may have told this story before. I used to live in Cambridgeshire where agriculture is big business. A farmer friend had a visitor from Kenya. The farm visit over it was tea and scones time. As they went into the farmhouse the visitor asked if there was a problem with the land in the garden, was it not as fertile as the general farmland? My friend puzzled, said that it was good earth. "Then why are flowers growing on it, what a waste of good land, you can't eat flowers."

I think the Kenyan may be wrong, I'm sure I've eaten flowers in salads in expensive restaurants but the general principle is right enough.

I think Spaniards may have a similar appreciation of land - it's either good for crops or it is left to its own devices. True the Arabs built some splendid and fragrant gardens when they ruled Spain but I hear that is an attempt to recreate paradise as envisaged in the Koran. Those gardens were built around shaded patios and fountains.

A Spanish friend looking around our garden was being shown our various fruit trees. She commented, approvingly, that the earth between the trees was "clean" - bare soil in other words. Kept clear of weeds to help prevent fires.

We Brits of course like our flowers. Nearly everyone around here has land and all of our British chums set about landscaping the ground - belvederes, gravel here, plants there. Without constant watering nearly everything dies unless it is native to the area so palms and olives and figs and almonds and rosemary do well but lots of things you would expect to thrive in the sun simply curl up and die or are slaughtered by the first nippy evening.

I was reminded of this when Maggie asked me to escort her to the nearest garden centre. Garden centres are a reasonably new thing in Spain and none of them resemble the UK theme park type garden centres where ice cream vans vie for the business of the hordes of people who dress up and go there for a day out. Spanish garden centres have plants, compost, maybe a few tools and garden furniture but they are pretty basic affairs.

Gardening

It's the weekend so, of course, we've been gardening. I washed the car too. You see the excitement, the manifold differences, of living away from one's homeland is almost boundless.

It did cross my mind, as I grovelled on my hands and knees, following the lines of the irrigation pipes to check for leaks and to unblock the little outlets, that it wouldn't be the same sort of gardening as that going on in Harrogate or Dunstable.

Prior to ackling up the irrigation system I'd been up a step ladder sawing fronds from the palm tree because they'd got so low that they were scraping the rooves of the cars as we manoeuvred around the patio.

Maggie has painted the interior of the irrigation tank with that bright turquoise coloured paint to make it look like a pool and I'd been knocking down the weeds that were waist height again. It happens in Spring, the seeds of those naughty little weeds wait in the ground for the rain and warmer days and grow quicker than our gardener seems able to knock them down.

Exciting no but Spanish yes.

And in the hills

Down on the coast, near Cartagena, I mentioned that there are gangs working the fields to crop cabbages and similar green winter produce. I also tried my hand at picking oranges. We've just arrived back in Culebrón for the weekend and we stopped off to pickup 5 litres of the local wine (5€ well spent) ready for an evening in front of the telly. Our bodega is also an almazara, an oil mill, and people were queing to unload their crop. It's olive harvest time up here in the hills.

They weigh in the olives, get a chit and they can either swop the chit for cash or for the equivalent in fresh pressed oil. Roberto thinks it is quite amusing that we Britons always take the profit in oil whilst the Spaniards take the cash.

Was Barti wrong?

When we first moved to the countryside Maggie was still working at Newton College and she asked the gardener there, a bloke called Bartolomé, how to care for palm trees (we have one in the garden.) "Do nothing, just enjoy it," he said, "Palms, olives, pines and figs don't need any help, they belong here, they can cope."

We've been back in Culebrón from the beginning of July and, so far as I know, we've had two rain showers, one lasted a couple of hours and the other just a few minutes. It's been warm too, mid 30s for weeks and weeks. Splendid weather.

We just noticed that the small fig tree, the one that gives the green figs, was looking a bit sad. Maybe it's hosepipe time.