I know that the above heading may confuse you and get you wondering what all this has to do with gardening, but bear with me. Cruella (my wife) is coming back soon from her visit to our idiot son – I only know this as the chickens won’t go to bed at night and spend all day looking up to the sky. Anyway, every time she comes back she always asks me what I have been doing whilst she has been away. My normal reply is “gardening” at which point she berates me with all the things I should have been doing “instead of wasting my time”. So, my big idea is that I will distract her by telling her that I have spent my time forming her chickens into a football team! But, more of this later, on with the gardening.
20th June 2023. Things I have been doing lately:
Dealing with all things Marigolds. Marigolds are a wonderful plant to grow in Spain. They germinate very easily from seed, and they fill the summer border with lovely flowers right through till Autumn. I save the best seeds from last years flowers, germinate them in trays and then plant them out in mid May in all my borders. To get the best from Marigolds you need to nip out the early flowers to encourage a profusely flowering well rounded plant.
When your plants start to show their first bud you need to nip this out ideally between your thumb and forefinger, if you leave this bud then you will get just a single flower. After a few days the plant will then throw out two side buds. Again you need to nip these out. You can then leave the plant to get on with it as it will begin to throw a huge number of buds as it will believe it is under attack from a grazing animal. The first photo below shows the first bud, followed by the two side buds and then my world famous nipping out technique. Note my specially grown long thumbnails for this task. Click on each photo for a larger view.
Cuttings back lower Sunflower leaves. If you are growing Sunflowers in your borders, then you have to be careful that they do not shade out other plants growing beneath them. This is only important in the early stages of growth as they will soon outpace the lower growth. But in the early stages they can setback other plants quite significantly. To overcome this you have to be brave. When Sunflowers get to about half a metre high you can safely remove some of their lower growth to let light into the area beneath them. The first photo below shows one of my Sunflowers shading out the underplanted Marigolds. The second shows the Sunflower with just the right amount of lower leaves removed. Click on each photo for a larger view.
If you are taking part in our Campoverde Sunflower Challenge, then I don’t want you to panic if your Sunflower doesn’t look like this. This is a different type of seed from this year’s challenge seed. The photo below shows four of this years Sunflowers that I am growing as trial plants to catch any cheats.
Reaping the benefits of early spraying for greenflies. Last year I failed to see the plague of greenfly that blighted some of my favourite plants. The main cause of this was not wearing my glasses caused by not remembering where I had left them. I remedied that this year by buying one of those cord things that attach to your glasses, now I wander round gardening with my glasses dangling on my cord catching early signs of Greenfly. Cruella (my wife) thinks it makes me look ridiculous and old, but I don’t care, the photos below show the benefits to my lovely plants. The Solanum, Oleander and Dame de Noche were severely hit by Greenflies last year, but early spraying allowed them to reach their full potential this year. Click on each photo for a larger view.
Some things you should be doing now. Before I get on to the excitement of my chicken football team, Here are some things you should be doing now in your Spanish garden:
- Take suckers off your fruit trees. This is the bright green little shoots that you will see sprouting from your tree trunks. Pull these off by gently tugging downwards, they will suck the energy from your trees.
- Feed your lawn. I know not many of you have lawns (which is sensible). But, if you are an idiot like me, now is the time for the second feed of your grass.
- Feed your plants. You need to start feeding all your plants regularly every week. This is especially important if you mainly have pots as the plants in pots can’t send their roots down to look for food. Click on each photo for a larger view.
Starting a chicken football team. The village I live in has a champion walking football team. It is so good it is not only top of the league and champions, but it also now has a women’s team and some of our men’s team have been picked to play for Spain. So you can see where I got the idea from. If I started a chicken team, this would not only ingratiate me with Cruella, but I would be surfing the zeitgeist of my village.
The idea was one thing, but putting it into practice was another. And you have to remember what I am working with. Firstly, Cruella’s chickens are unruly bolsheviks who won’t follow orders. Secondly, they are fat! She feeds them exotic foods and when I complain she says I am body shaming her girls. Things are so bad one of them declared the other day that she was trans and identified as a Turkey!
I started my team development by buying a plastic football that comes in two parts. I also purchased some freeze dried crickets to put into the ball. The idea is that you fill the ball with crickets, roll it towards the chickens they see it and begin to peck the ball and move it around. The photo below shows my training equipment and in case you wanted to see them some carcasses of dried crickets. Click on each photo for a larger view.
That was the theory, the reality was me running round and round the lawn throwing dried crickets behind me, whilst the fat chickens looked on bemused. The photo below shows an early training session. The chickens just sat in the middle of the lawn and watched me running round and round and then when I collapsed with exhaustion they just ambled over and gobbled up all the dried crickets on the lawn.
Things got better when I involved Tango the lonely blind Labrador as the team goalkeeper. I recognise there is a problem having a blind goalkeeper but I didn’t want to be ableist and also I wanted to build up the teams confidence. Well from then on we began to come together as a team. The photos below can only convey some of the excitement; I can’t wait to show Cruella. Click on each photo for a larger view.
Spanish Garden 
You must be logged in to post a comment.