Although the garden is still full of flowers it is time to begin the long process of preparing for winter. Whilst winter on the Costa Blanca is nothing like as severe as in other parts of Europe, you still need to get on with it or before you know it winter will be here.
I have been hampered as usual by Cruella (my wife) and her chicken related problems, but I have persevered.
20th October 2026. Things I have been doing lately in the garden:
- Protecting plants for over wintering
- Harvesting the last of the summer fruit
- Overwintering my Chillis
- Admiring my hedges
- Dealing with chicken eating disorders
Protecting plants for overwintering. Although we don’t have the destruction of frosts on the Costa Blanca (or rarely), we do have strong winds and sometimes heavy rain, both of which can be very destructive to plants. Because I have a large garden I need to start this process quite early in the autumn. In particular I have been dealing with the following plants.
Succulents and Yuccas. At the back of my house I have a number of succulents which can be substantially damaged by winds. These need to be cut back and thinned. The easiest way to do this is don your gardening gloves and wear eye protection. Then just sit down by each plant and pull down on each frond consecutively around the plant till you are happy that it has an upright look and is suitably tidy. Photos below show my progress.
Cloud pruning my Olive tree. If you have a cloud pruned or just shaped Olive tree then now is a good time to give it a tidy up. I need to trim my Olive about three times a year but it only takes half an hour or so with electric hedge trimmers. Before and after photos below.
Stripping back Strelitzia. If your bird of paradise plant is looking a bit the worse for wear after our very hot summer, then now is the time to give it a trim to get it ready for the coming rains. Once the leaves of your plant have bowed over and are touching the ground, then they are not coming back to the perpendicular no matter how much water or feed they receive. Instead it is time to go round your plant taking out all the bowing, crossing or diseased stems. The photos below show my activities.
Harvesting the last of the summer fruit. Persimmon or “Kaka” as the Spanish so unromantically call them, are lovely sweet tasting fruits that taste heavenly. If you only have a little bit of space for just one tree, then I would recommend Persimmon. It is perfectly suited to the Spanish climate and its fruit is ready just as summer turns to Autumn, and before we start getting citrus.
I have just the one Persimmon tree and it gives me about 30-50 or so fruits each year, each of which is about the size of a small apple. To harvest Persimmon you need to net it when the fruit is hard and yellow otherwise the birds will beat you to it. As the fruit begins to ripen and turn yellow you need to begin daily harvesting before the fruits turn fully red. This simply involves wandering around the tree each day seeing which fruits are the reddest and then giving them a gentle little squeeze to see if they have started going soft.
Once you have decided which fruits are ready then use your secateurs to cut just above the fruit but making sure you leave the top attachment. Once off the tree then stand them on a mesh tray in your kitchen and they will happily ripen off the tree. If possible eat them in order of softness. Cruella and I enjoy two each day with our porridge (Cruella accompanies hers with centipedes and spider legs, I just have other fruits) The photos below tell the Persimmon story.
Overwintering my Chillis. Although this sounds like a Benny Hill innuendo, I am being serious. If you have successfully grown chilli plants this year then you do not need to discard the plants at the end of the summer. In my last post I showed you that I cut the foliage back on my Chillis by about half and placed them on my potting bench. After a summer of producing hundreds of lovely Chillis, their summer is over and I would only get little distorted fruits.
Now that they have rested for about a month I now cut them back drastically and repot them in fresh compost. The process is simple, just take them back close to the stem leaving one or two leaves. Then ease them from their pot and loosen all the old compost from between the roots (be gentle and don’t damage the roots). Sometimes you may need to trim the roots if they have become a bit excessive, but I didn’t need to this year.
Fill a clean pot with good high quality potting compost, ease your plant back into its new home and make sure the compost is firmed down around the plant. The final stage is to water it whilst it stands in a trug. Leave it in there for no more than five minutes, take it out and stand it on your potting bench. Water very sparingly over winter and wait for fresh leaves in the spring before moving it back into the sun. The photos below show all the stages.
Admiring my hedges. Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a big admirer of hedges in Spain. A diverse, closely planted hedge provides a lovely floriferous boundary to any property. Unlike fences or balustrades they offer privacy, security and a flowering wall that will provide sustenance to thousands of pollinators and provide homes for little birds.
I thought I would show you a photo of only part of my many hedges. They provide a beautiful backdrop to the garden. Sometimes it is just nice to stand back and enjoy them.
Helga’s modelling career is over and Cruella suspects she has anorexia. Those of you familiar with Cruella (my wife) and her girls. Will know that Helga is her favourite chicken and graduated top out of Cruella’s Chicken modelling class.
All of her chickens have been following strict diets to keep them thin (Cruella constantly harangues them by saying “nobody loves a fat chicken”) – I tend to disagree that but that’s another matter. This has been coupled with hours and hours spent balancing books on their heads as they sashayed up and down the garden, doing exaggerated twirls.
Well, I warned her, the end result is that Helga has become neurotic. She thinks she is fat, but she’s not, she pretends to be eating but really she just hides it away in dark corners of the coop. Worse than all this she is losing all her feathers and now looks a bit like a chicken made out of wicker.
Cruella is beside herself and keeps saying she has been a bad mother to her girls. It is now costing me a fortune in high calorie fancy chicken food that Helga still doesn’t eat. The outcome is that I now have flocks of fat sparrows who are eating all this expensive food and making a mess everywhere.
Cruella confronted me today and insisted that we pay for Helga to have therapy at the Chicken Priory. It appears she has to be there a month. I have now spent all the money I was saving for a battery chainsaw! The photos below tell their own story.
