I’ve been cheating!

This week: Sunday surprise; I am cheating – I bought plants; Ready steady plant;

As I write this on Saturday afternoon, I can see out of my study window the billowing clouds of building cumulonimbus clouds – a thunderstorm.

A line of storms is traversing the coast south from Zadar although at the moment they seem to be veering off towards Viz and the southern Adriatic.

Overnight we have had a very welcome 8mm of rain, but more, much, much more would be welcome.

Doing some weed removal this week with a fork, it was hard to get the tines into the ground. As always after rain, the sun bakes my clay loam into a rock hard surface.

Once you have been able to dig in, even slightly, there is no moisture there at all. My soil moisture meter is registering 35%, but that is just within the top 5 cm of the soil.

We are well into the start of our Autumn. for the past two weeks I have been noticing that both our avian and human visitiros have been leaving.

My Swallows have departed, as have all the Golden Oriol. One night this week there has been a single juvenile Scops owl calling. There have been several flocks of Bee Eaters flying. I counted more than 20 birds and I am guessing that they are a migrating group.

During the summer I have seen no more than 12 in group’s of local birds.

My home is on the 100 metre contour, albeit it is in a “thermal belt”, so an area which is warmer than sites with a similar elevation.

I was down in Jelsa on Wednesday at the local Garden Centre and I was surprised that their Swallows are still there and feeding their second brood of young. Clearly the elevation makes a difference because the garden centre is only 12 metres above sea level.

I still have a family of Common Swift (Mauersegler), Apus apus nesting in a hole in one of my buildings. Their racus calling when flying is in contrast to the melodic tweeting of Swallows. However they are most welcome guests.

Swifts have no “thumbs” in their feet, so they cannot grip and hang onto branches, wires or anything else. They are either airborne, clinging to a vertical surface with their claws or in their nesting site.

Once the young take their first flight, they will remain in the air, without landing anywhere for up to two years, until they pair up and nest for the first time.

No other bird spends so much of its life on the wing, eating, drinking, sleeping, resting and mating while airborne. They sleep using a process called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep, where one half of their brain sleeps, while the other half keeps flying. Then the sides reverse.

As soon as this year’s young have fledged, my Swifts will be on their way south too, returning in April or May next year.

Nights and mornings are getting darker by the day. Fortunately our Autumn is long and warm, often lasting to November…

Sunday surprise

Sunday morning dawned pleasantly cool (23°C) with 8/10 cloud cover.

I was out in the orchards looking at the moisture content of my soils to see if I needed to irrigate anything.

In the top orchard as I walked past my recently planted Pecan trees, I was pleasantly surprised to see that one of my three trees has a few green nuts.

I’ve not noticed these before, although I am not sure why because on Sunday they were clearly visible.

I have three tree varieties, one is a male tree, because the trees need a male to pollinate female trees and two are female, of different varieties.

The actual nuts are formed inside a green outer husk and I wonder if they have only recently started swelling which is why I have missed them.

As the nut ripens, the husk darkens and begins to split. Eventually when completely ripe, the nut falls to the ground. This does make harvesting easy because mature Pecan trees can reach 20 metres tall.

Nut fall happens from the end of September to November. It varies by both tree variety and the area where they are being grown.

This is my first experience with Pecans so I will be really interested to see when this happens.

Once fallen, the nuts beginb to “cure”, especially if there is some ground moisture. This process improves the texture and flavour of the edible kernel inside.

I am not going to have enough nuts for a Pecan Pie, however I am delighted that these trees which have suirvived without irrigation, seem to like my climate.

It is part of my ongoing efforts to find and plant species which are adapted to the new reality of climate breakdown.

I am cheating – I bought plants

This week I have been working hard on preparing the winter vegetable plot.

My early plantings of Broccoli and Brussel Sprouts has been an abject failure. My successional sowing of Broccoli has netted just a single plant.

It is a good job that the seed packet has a lot of seeds inside!

I decided to call in at the garden centre in Jelsa on my way to the supermarket to see what they had. There were no Broccoli but they did have Brussel Sprouts and Cauliflower. At €0,35c each, I bought enough plants to fill a couple of rows, 20 sprouts and 10 cauliflowers.

I was looking for Broccoli, however they didn’t have any.

My attempts to grow Broccoli from seed have failed. Out of the two batches I have sown in succession, just one plant is growing. All the rest have “bolted” just producing long thin stalks before dying.

They were in my unheated propagator, however the temperature inside has been above 28°C and when I read up on the causes of seeds bolting, it is heat.

Too much ambient warmth stimulates faster cell division, so although they have had the moisture and light, it is the temperature which has caused the problem.

I will look for Broccoli plants an the green market and try growing my own seedling for succession planting, later in the autumn.

Not everything I try is a success!

Ready, steady, plant

My small terrace vegetable plot was very successful last winter and a couple of weeks ago I started preparing for this year’s planting season.

I am very conscious of the weather and organise my work around both the forecast and actual weather conditions.

Seeing that there was going to be rain on Friday and Saturday, I was on the terrace early in the week to get ready for planting.

With a lot of clumps of grass, I dug them out, however the ground is compacted so I decided to use my “Mini Tiller”, a small and lightweight rotavator.

I have a large rotorvator however there is no wheeled access to thsi terrace, so I have to lift or pull everything I need. Moving a 30kg machine up a flight of 14 steps before I even get to the terrace, was not an option.

This was one of the reasons I bought the “Mini Tiller” because even with a 2 HP engine, it is light.

Bringing it out of the machinery store, I checked it over, mixed some 2 stroke fuel and tried to start it. I have not used it in over 12 months.

The engine fired, but I could not get the blades to rotate. So I spent a lot of Thursday dismantling the drive system to see what the problem was.

The clutch was not engaging, so I freed it and then I could rotate the blades by hand.

After reassembly, I started the engine again and this time the clutch would engage. However it was already after 16:00 so I just did a couple of runs across the vegetable plot to make sure everything worked. It did, but the soil was badly compacted in places.

I started again early on Friday morning, before the mosquitoes started biting and completely rotavated the plot.

The work was a probably too heavy for the little machine, however going slowly, I was able to break up the earth. I doubt that this terrace has ever had a machine on it.

The next job was to rake over the soil to even out the plot and to remove the stones. Like all of my soils, there are huge numbers of small stones, with probably ⅓ by volume made up of limestone. This makes for a high Ph content and plants which like or need acid soil conditions will simply not grow.

As I watched rain approaching on the weather radar, I planted my Brussel Sprouts and Cauliflowers in the prepared rows.

For good measure I also planted some Broad Bean seeds, which grew extremely well last year and I had some seed potatoes to put in as well.

By the time the first spots of rain were falling, I had everything I wanted planted and all my tools tidied away.

Now I just have to wait 90 days or so, for them to start producing. NCG