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.