Summer 2015

The huerto in July.  Tall plant is Kerala red amaranth, self-seeded.  I love it's appearance but the kangkung growing at its feet is far more appetising.   

As with spring, summer continued warmer than average.  No real heatwaves, but temperatures were, until mid-August, consistently two or three degrees above average.  In the vegetable garden the only thing I suspect is correlated with these higher temperatures is a poor yield of beans.  Of the three varieties seeded, only one, blue lake, was any good.  Cobra, which has been very good in other years, was a flop, as was argus (bush).  Of the latter, the photo below shows the crop of plants in half shade on the right, and in full sun, on the left.  Soil could well be a factor here though, as the shadier spot is also partly under a very productive olive tree, and much of the crop falls onto the ground.  On the other hand, it's not that common for a bean variety to give such a skimpy yield, so I think it's quite possible that twelve hours of full sun with the afternoon temp in the low thirties stresses the plants.

I did not put in any snake beans, as in the past I've found the harvest to be very short, while the French pole beans produced much more evenly.  With the heat I suspect they would have done better than the French beans.  Apparently, snake beans are the traditional summer bean in Mallorca, particularly in Soller, though I have never seen them either in the market or in gardens.

For the tomatoes, I tried using a cage rather than stakes, so the plants can grow more naturally and branch.  This seems a good system, involving less work than the traditional staking, as you don´t have to tie any of the plants.  Also put in a dozen roma bush tomatoes, which produced quite well, with a peak in July.

Tomato cage in June

A warm spring and a hot summer should have meant masses of aubergines.  They started really well then, one by one, their leaves shrivelled and dropped off.  I have a nasty feeling it was verticillium wilt, no idea where it came from.  Next year I will try grafted aubergines.

Some of the fruit trees are starting to produce a nice little crop.  This is the prune fresa, an autochthonous plum which fruits late June to early July.

And this is a non-autochthonous nectarine of unknown identity, which is the only peach which is staying in the ground - the others are not doing so well and I plan to replace them with other Mallorca plum varieties.

Maybe this two-tailed pasha was a bit drunk on fermented fruit; I managed to get unusually close to it to take this photo.  This species has been around more than I remember in past decades, and it's not like it's hard to notice, with its large size and powerful flight, unlike any other butterfly seen here.  The larva is pretty striking too, but I have yet to see one. It feeds, among other plants, on Arbutus, but I have seen little evidence of larvae of any sort feeding on its leathery leaves.  

Spring 2015

Spring got off to a good start with abundant rain in March, which gave way to warm, sunny weather in April.  Then it got weird.  At the beginning of May the temperature reached into the thirties, breaking the all-time May temperature record for Europe in Sicily.  Barely two weeks later, on 14 May, a mass of hot, dust laden air from the Sahel, blown round the bulge of Africa, came blasting across the Iberian peninsula.  That all-time May record was broken again, with 44C recorded near Valencia.  Here in Mallorca, Alcudia topped 40C, pretty crazy given that the sea is still below 20C at that time.  At Alconasser it reached 36C, with a strong wind making for conditions in which you hope not to see a fire starting.  Fortunately the whole event was short, over in a day, without the damage to olive flower that can occur with prolonged spring heat.

That unsettling foretaste of climate change notwithstanding, spring produced its usual floral glory. Here is Cistus albidus, a plant which has re-colonised an area which had been completely covered by rubble a few years ago.  It flowers over a long period, from March into June, with the peak around May.

The iris has got to be one of the greatest garden plants for this climate, producing a magnificent display around the same time, and requiring absolutely no care at all.  What I haven´t established is if it has any use; I have read some claims of medicinal properties, but remain sceptical of their scientific basis.  It is widely grown in gardens in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, where folk do not normally go in for suburban fripperies, but I did not have the persistance at the time to find out what it was grown for.  It forms a dense mass of rhizomes which may be effective at preventing grass cover but, unlike Chasmanthe, it does not die back in summer.  Here it's growing around vines, which do not appear to be bothered by it.

And of course at this time of year we're looking forward to lots of lovely fruit.  Well, lots of is still a bit optimistic, but trees in their fourth and fifth years are producing a nice little crop. This blossom is on one of the Menorca apple varieties planted four years ago, which have been slower growing than the stone fruit, but seem to be doing well. 

The citrus which I have dug up and potted are thriving, while those still in the ground are barely growing.  I think think the cypress trees along the edge of their terrace are to blame, their roots coming up below the irrigated citrus trees.  The pots are in the same location, so it can't just be the spot that doesn't suit them.  I have a few gigantic containers, but the effort required to fill them is considerable and not particularly back friendly, so I´ve only done one so far.  I filled the bottom with half rotten pine wood, partly to fill the space, partly as an experiment in container hugelkultur.

Pigeon pea and Tagasaste - take two

Beginning of June, and after las year´s failure using excessively fertile potting mix, another attempt with these two this year using a mixture of sieved soil and leaf compost, from under a pile of cut brush. Both germinated fairly readily, the pigeon pea quicker and with a much higher rate.  Here's what it looked like after 18 days.

The tagasaste germinated much more erratically, but started off looking healthy.   The differences really happened after planting out in July.  The pigeon pea, mostly planted around the outer drip-lines of fruit trees, grew and thrived, reaching head-height by teh end of summer.  The tagasaste, well, it just didn´t grow much.  By the end of September the tallest had gained a height of, cue drum-roll, 25cm.  Maybe it simply does not like this calcareous soil.