Spring

After being away for a month until mid-March, there was a bit of work to catch up on. Rainfall-wise things are still a bit dry, but the soil 20cm or so down is moist. The new trees are all sprouting except, lol, the two non-Mallorquin figs. The need for more mulch material is considerable, and I think the best recourse might be to buy a few bales of straw at 3 euros each. I noticed while preparing the veg beds that the soil which had been mulched with straw is looking darker than that mulched with leaf litter. It's also nice and easy to apply and stays on ridges rather than slipping off.

I had 30 odd asparagus plants, and only 17 would fit in the bed prepared the traditional way, dug deep, manured, pffff! So, to see how necessary all that effort really is, I put half a dozen in a hastily dug and manured bed between fruit trees, and left some in place where they were planted as seedlings. Now all we have to do is wait a few years and see which produces most.

It's been interesting to see what's happening with ground cover. The biggest enemy, I think, is a grass whose name I do not know but which looks very similar to what is known as chien dent in southern France. It's invasive, wiry, ugly and covered much of the property until two years ago. Actually, it still does cover quite a bit, but fortunately it's proving less hard to get rid of than I had feared. It doesn't seem to like disturbance, or perhaps disturbance favours the other plants that compete with it. In any case, quite a bit of the ground is now being covered with cuckoo pint and various small leguminous plants.

Also on the subject of ground cover, the lovely rock rose Cistus albidus has been appearing all over the place. I've tried to weed carefully around the little plants and mulch them, and have also clipped some of the bigger ones to make them grow more bushy. They are flowering nicely now. Along with cuttings of lavender, rosemary, Senecio, Euphorbia, and other drought tolerant herbaceous plants, I'm trying to get the ground between the trees covered so that the grass is kept in check. It should look a lot nicer too.

The little white flowers of Allium triquetrum are multiplying nicely on the shady side of the house. The leaves are not as palatable as those of garlic chive, but it should eventually form dense enough cover to supress grass.

Winter

A winter of extremes, at least for this island of generally moderate weather. Mostly mild and dry, except for November, when we had about half our average annual rainfall, and then February. While Northern and Eastern Europe froze, we were at the junction of air masses, with this result - the heaviest snowfall in 56 years. Snow lay for a couple of days at this altitude (160m), but there were several more falls on the mountains, and in mid-March there was still some snow on the highest peaks. All this did bring some much needed precipitation, and the water pressure is now strong.

The main work over the winter has been tree planting, preceeded by a certain amount of clearing. My neighbour Jaume helped out with his larger chainsaw to fell a couple of big pines, including one which had fallen into another tree and was lying at about 45 degrees, eek.

Just before Chistmas I got a message from slow food to say that my trees were ready, so headed out to Vivers Llabres in Manacor to collect them. A very impressive operation they are too http://www.viversllabres.net/ . Some of the figs were a bit diminutive, but all seem to be growing sprouting well now. For the stone and pip fruit I put in 3 apricots, 3 apples and a plum, and then 8 figs: five from Slow Food, one from the local nursery and two cheapies from another nursery. The latter two are not Mallorquin varieties, and they are showing no signs of life! The pip and stone are all Mallorquin except for two of the apples, from Menorca. I also put in a couple more citrus, a lemon and a Mallorquin mandarin, just before the snow, but it didn't seem to do them any harm. The main danger is breaking of branches, but all my trees were OK.