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Acers, Sprouts and Gardening Gloves

nariz

By nariz

10 comments


What a lovely day we’ve had in the garden today. We finally decided to bite the bullet and transplant into the ground the Acer Palmatum that we brought here from Britain in a large tub. Unfortunately this entailed my partner spending several hours digging a large hole in the compacted earth with a pick-axe while removing loads of rocks from the soil. We almost, after four hours’ digging, thought we’d have to abandon the hole and re-site the tree because he’d come across what appeared to be a floor! There’s a story there somewhere but we’re unlikely ever to find out whether a dwelling existed on the site before the building that we demolished in order to have our casa built. It will remain a mystery!

While the hole was being dug I set to with a garden fork and cleared the old potato patch of weeds, then harvested the final sprouts, giving the old plants to our Spanish neighbours for their chickens and goats. Not an entirely selfless act, as I know at some point in the not too distant future a plucked chicken will come our way, and it will be soooooo tasty, due to the unstressed life it has led in the open being fed on offcuts of sprouts, cabbages, beetroot leaves and selected weeds that our neighbours pointed out were caviar to a chicken.

Now to the question of gardening gloves ….. does anyone know of an enterprising company that sells packs of right-handed only gardening gloves? I buy at least three pairs of gloves during the growing season and always wear out the top of the fingers of the right hand glove, due to the amount of weeding that has to be done. As there is a meadow sloping down towards our garden we end up with daisies, speedwell, couch grass, nettles, great mullein, hopwort and a variety of other weeds (plants in the wrong places!) which all calls for industrial-strength weeding! Consequently I wear out the right gloves and now have a stash of left-handed gloves in pristine condition!

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Comments

 

I have a few left hand gloves too. what we need is to find left handed gardeners to swap with! any volunteers?
I hope your acer is nicely settled in. will you have to water it by hand or have you rigged up a watering system.?

23 Feb, 2009

 

Lol,have the same problem ..

23 Feb, 2009

 

Hi Seaburn. At the moment it's a watering can job to water the Acer but when we have all the veggie beds full to capacity my partner rigs up a system of hoses from the water tap with 'T' junctions, so I just trot along to the beds that need watering, attach my water 'gun' to the end of the hose section and stand and admire the view for a few minutes while everything gets watered. The only downside being .... I was slightly thinner when I watered with the watering can due to all the exercise!

24 Feb, 2009

 

You could turn the left ones inside out and use them as right ones :o) Or find someone left handed to give them to. lol. I can use both left and righ hands so my gloves ( when I do wear them ) get worn out together.

How interesting to find the foundation of an old building in your garden. Pity you couldn't find out more about it.

24 Feb, 2009

 

Good idea in part, Hywel, but the gloves I like are the ones with rubbery "dots" on, and I think they may be a little uncomfortable inside-out. :o)
We did wonder about returning to our architect to ask if further investigations could be made about possible older dwellings on our land but it would be pointless because of the strange system - or rather non-system - of registering land in this region. Our casa is unusual in that our land is attached to it. Most people in this region have strange little plots of land in odd shapes dotted about everywhere and, when our casa was registered with the government, it was the first time the land had been registered. So - unless I become bi-lingual (!!!!!!) and manage to talk to some very old local spaniards, I am most unlikely ever to know the story of the stone floor.

25 Feb, 2009

 

You'll have to learn Spanish. lol. Mind you I don't think I could learn a language either. I grew up to speak the two I know but learning one is different.
Pity they don't have a better system. Pitty about the gloves too.

25 Feb, 2009

 

We're learning Hywel! We go to school twice a week FREE (Britain please take note!!!!!) and have a great Spanish teacher who speaks little English, but we find having to concentrate on his explanations of the ferocious verb system makes us understand all the more - but it is soooooooo sloooooooooow! At my age taking in something so educational and academic is a hard task. My partner is doing a bit better, but then he's a 'bloke' and in this country blokes are the apparent Masters while the laydees quietly get on with things in the kitchen, but behind closed doors ..............!!!!!!!! I seem to have learnt more about gardening in Spanish than anything else. Wonder why? My Guillermo Dulce (Sweet Williams) are looking good as are the col de Brusselas seedlings. OK, I'm showing off now! Bye!

25 Feb, 2009

 

I sympathise with you Nariz. I lived in France for 6 years and it took a couple of years before I was thinking and dreaming in french! Mind you I was much younger then - not sure how I would fare now!
How long have you been living there?

4 Jun, 2009

 

Hi Janque! Thanks for reading such an old blog of mine! We've been here for nearly three years now, but I fear it will take quite a while longer for me to be thinking - let alone dreaming - in Spanish. I think they invented the verb system purely to confuse non-nationals!

4 Jun, 2009

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