Environmental vandalism in Dol

This week: Environmental vandalism in Dol; The good news; One job leads to ten more!;

This has been a perfect week for weather.

The days have been warm but not hot, we had rain overnight on Wednesday into Thursday, but it had cleared by sun rise.

There was a reasonable quantity of the wet stuff too, 38mm so irrigation has been suspended for a few days.

The precipitation rate was huge, at more than 79 mm per hour or 79 litres/m², at the peak of the rain storm.

Everything continues to grow well and my cherries are ripening nicely.

A couple more weeks and they will be ready to pick.

It has been another week of odd jobs outside and problem solving inside.

My camera has been behaving oddly, not recording photographs on the memory card and not focussing on subjects. This required the camera to be turned off, then back on again to correct the fault.

So I’ve invested some time to reinstall the firmware and do a complete reset.

This is my primary camera, a Nikon P600 which I have been using since 2019 when my pocket camera stopped working.

Over the past five years, I have taken some 8,800 photographs so it is perhaps not surprising it needed a system reinstall and reboot.

Taking the came out afterwards, everything seems to working fine again.

I think I may just look at what is available on the second hand market, just in case though….

Environmental vandalism in Dol

Regular readers may remember that I’ve been out looking for orchids. After the rain early on Thursday, by the time dawn broke, the clouds had gone and the sky was clear.

Warm sunshine encouraged me to go wandering after lunch, looking for orchids.

For the past couple of weeks I have been along the old donkey track watching as the orchids have gown and developed their unique flower spikes.

After rain and warm sun, I expected that there would be some flowers to see. How wrong I was…

Walking along the old road to Borovik, there were fluorescent orange markers every 30 metres or so, which said “Trail Running” on them. Then as I turned off on one of the small paths to return home, I found some orchids in flower.

A little further along, when I rejoined the donkey track, there were more markers, but also all the grass on either side of the track had been cut back. They had even hung a marker on my gate, which I removed.

It would have been polite if they had asked! There is no organisers information on the highly visible markers, no website or means of contacting them.

As I explored further up the track, which is usually no more than 30cm wide, the grass and wild flowers on either side had been cut back to the stone walls.

The pleasant green lane had been turned into a 1.5 metre wide motorway for trail runners.

Every orchid and every wild flower had been cut down. The grasses were cut back to soil level and in places the strimmer the vandals used, had cut into the soil itself.

Where last week there were seed heads of the Violet Birds Nest orchid, there was nothing but drying grass clippings.

Over the 500 metres of path that I regularly survey and map for wild flowers, everything growing had been destroyed.

There was a single small patch of orchids which had survived because they were in rocks, whilst those on the outer edge had been sliced off. I was left feeling empty.

They are not my plants, they belong to everyone, locals, residents and visitors. I don’t look after them as such. Perhaps spreading seeds a little, protecting vulnerable plants with sticks, pulling grass over the smallest to hide them from prying eyes. But that is all.

I have been careful in this blog to remove GPS data on photographs and not specifying exactly where these beautiful plants can be found. This because I am not naïve and realise there are orchid collectors and some of our local plants are rare.

Here the 2024 and 2025 photographs

Here in Dol, we have a unique orchid, found nowhere else. So protection is not just in the physical space, but needs to be in the on-line space as well.

I eventually found the organisers, a company called “TourdeHvar” and have emailed them. They cannot be bothered to respond. Financial greed is more important than saving a fragile environment.

I have discovered that here the police do not get involved in the protection of wildlife. It was put to me by a professor from Zagreb University that “Orchids [all of them] are protected in Croatia, but only ‘on paper‘, like so many other things…”

I have taken the evidential photographs and sent “before and after” images to the government Nature Protection Inspectorate, dirh.hr and wait to see what, if anything happens.….

The good news

There is some good news. There are still a few orchids about on the lesser known paths which have not been mowed flat.

This is what all the paths looked like around my home. You can make out where the path is, but because of the cool damp spring, grasses, wild flowers and weeds have grown above waist height.

Can you see the orchid in this photo?

No? Well it is here.

And in close up.

I am no expert and these beautiful flowers are hard to spot in amongst the other plants and grasses, but they are there.

A little further along I found a few more. You have to be really careful where you put your feet because these orchids are in the middle of the path.

Orchids are highly specialised plants. Their seeds are the size of grains of dust because unlike other plant and vegetable seeds, they have no food store to boost germination.

Instead they need fungi in the soil or on the ground where they fall to help them germinate. There is then a symbiotic relationship between the orchid and the fungi, which the orchid uses to gather food to grow.

The Birds Nest orchids near my home live underground for eight years before sending up a single flower spike and then dying once they have flowered.

This means that when the orchids are cut off before setting seed, a whole generation of orchid seeds will be removed from the environment, never to mature.

Because everything has been cut, all wild flowers and grasses, there will be no food for bees and other pollinators. Then there are the insects which birds rely on

The thick layer of drying grass will stifle everything underneath. Our reptiles and small mammals will all suffer because they have nowhere to hunt.

I am certain that the people who have come to the island to enjoy our green lanes and byways would be appalled if they knew of the environmental vandalism that has been carried out in their name so they can enjoy a trail run!

One job leads to ten more!

Since the untimely end (after 40+ years) of my wooden seat, I don’t have anywhere to sit outside to cogitate on the meaning of life.

No, I have not found a supply of quality wood to make a new one yet, and yes I have some plastic garden chairs, but these I keep under cover and out of the UV light.

So at the start of the week, I began by clearing plants away from outside the kitchen window. I can quickly and easily build an outside seat here, but need the space first.

This led to me to discover that the rain water gulleys in the patio were full of soil and sand which has washed down from the orchards.

So I removed the grills and cleaned out the plastic gulleys, ready for the next big rain.

As I worked around the patio towards the dining room door, I realised that over time, I have “put things” here, because it was easy and I was being lazy. You know, the things you use, but maybe not every week, but it wastes time if every time you need “𝑥” you have to dive into a store to get it.

So much of the week has been spent in clearing up.

Some issues are yet to be resolved. I have some large 24v batteries which are dead, but having taken them to the recycling centre in Vrbanj, they wouldn’t accept them because I live in the wrong municipality!

So there are things I need to resolve.

My nice teak outside table needs treatment with Sadolin, which may, or may not get done next week. The weather looks good for a bit of painting…

Then there is my swinging seat. True, I have noticed some corrosion has appeared on the outside surface of the painted steel. But it has reached the point where I need to disassemble it and then rub it down. After rust removal I’ll treat with either Rustoleum or Hammerite.

I should probably replace the nuts and bolts with ENOX fittings too, but I will have to order them.

So as I tidied more empty plant pots up from underneath the table on Saturday, I wasn’t upset about having spent much of the week clearing up this area, more I was wondering how I let it get so bad in the first place!   NCG