Before and After: The Story of My Emerging Potager

Since we moved into the house three years ago and surveyed our weed-filled plot (below), I've had it in mind that I want to turn the garden into an 'informal potager' – or cottage garden – where vegetables and flowers are mixed together in the same beds to create a riotous display of colours and shapes, with bees humming and butterflies fluttering in and out amongst the blooms.


This year more than ever before– to the untrained eye at least – the garden is beginning to resemble what I saw in my mind but – as is inevitable when growing anything, regardless of horticultural philosophy or style – there have been some failures alongside the successes.


Amongst the failures are the broad beans, which though they began normally enough (as you can see in the photo) – and in previous years have been a resilient staple crop – this year fell prey to some mysterious disease which caused many of the pods to wither almost as soon as they began to form, the stems to bend over and the leaves to become brown and shrivelled. We've harvested a few beans but probably only a fifth of what we normally would have.


The other major concern – and who knows, perhaps not unrelated – is the plum tree. This tree is probably around a hundred years old. We used to have two but the younger one succumbed in the first year to another mysterious disease that attacked members of the prunus family in the area where we live, causing them to leach sap and dry up. We managed to save the other one by digging a trench round it and filling it with soaked cardboard, balled up newspaper and manure and then planting garlic and peas around it. Even so, it was still clearly not a very happy plum and despite a gardener friend's warning that it was too old to prosper, last year we gave it a severe prune and a good feed and were rewarded in early spring this year with the sight of its branches dripping in blossom.


Unfortunately, although there are now lots of small plums, the leaves have curled and shrivelled and the poor dear is looking very sickly once again.

Another normally dependable staple – the hollyhocks – which were growing up very nicely and just about to flower have, this very day, been devastated by severe winds which have caused them to bend in half. What the result of this will be I don't know but since its still a waning moon, if they look very sad, I'll prune them down to below the bend and see if they sprout up again.

Having depressed myself – and you fellow green-fingers – by talking about these failures, its time to cheer us all up again by showing you some of the marvels that have occurred.


Due to the intense rain this year, just about everything has doubled in size - particularly the mulberry, the snapdragons (which I wasn't even sure would over-winter, given we had a bit of snow), this purple shrub that I don't even know the name of but that was given to us by a fellow greenie (you know who you are!) and my other half has now divided into two plants and the little lemon and orange trees which after years of languishing (in another garden before here) are finally beginning to get up and at it!


The wild rocket, as usual, has gone mad and providing great ground cover and the mint is, predictably taking over everything and I've had to start pulling it up but we're really enjoying our regular cups of 'hierba buena' and are able to give it away as gifts as well. Apart from the fact that it smells divine when you walk amongst it.


Its been our policy so far to let anything run riot that will until we need the space because our experience of gardening in Spain so far has taught us that evaporation of water is generally the greatest enemy so we want as much ground-cover as possible. Its probably a dangerous policy to follow as I know that plants such as mint and wild rocket are impossible to stop I still prefer it to bare ground or rampant grasses and weeds which is what we had before and are gradually taming into submission. In other words, I'd rather have a weed I can eat or drink than one that just irritates me! The calendulas have also finally taken hold and are spreading themselves – with a little help from me – around the garden.


The other successes so far are the seed potatoes that another greenie friend gave (thank heavens for friends!). Previously we've only ever used ones that we bought to eat and have sprouted in our kitchen drawer and the difference is very noticeable.


As you can see, I've begun my experiment with growing tomatoes upside down in buckets. I read about it somewhere and this year seemed the perfect year to try it – partly because we are getting short on space and want to try and make more use of vertical space to compensate, and partly because last year the tomatoes were hit by a disease that hit all the tomatoes in the region and so we didn't want to plant them in the same place again and in a garden our size that doesn't leave so much choice!


I've also done my first, properly laid out companion bed – made a lot easier by purchasing the plantlets rather than growing them from seed: The lettuces are interspersed with Italian green peppers which grow very tall and bushy and will shade the lettuces from the fierce summer sun. They are surrounded by onions which I hope will provide a living fence to keep the cat – and her neighbour friends – off the bed (a perennial problem, temporarily solved, as you can see by the strategic placement of some very prickly rose prunings).


We've also reclaimed the old water deposit for a rain collection point and we've got a new 'lean to' – which my other half and his brother built from left over materials from the bits of the house we had to rebuild. One of the side benefits of this, apart from the cat having an extra snooze spot is that we have somewhere dry to stand and watch the rain or to take cover from the baking summer sun as well as a much needed place to store all the usual garden paraphernalia.



With the idea of writing this blogpost, I went and took a new photo of the garden from more or less the same vantage point as the original, what a difference!

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The Shrunken Garden

“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles.”- Richard Diebenkorn (artist)

Going down from 12,000 sq m of wild mountainside to a 20sq m terrace (plus two balconies) has been a challenge to say the least (especially for the dog and cat).

Although its not what I would choose as a permanent habitat, I can certainly see some advantages in gardening in such a small space.

It combiness the benefits of defined parameters with the flexibility of everything being portable. Nothing gets neglected because I can see it all at a glance and its so easy to move something to a more suitable position if its scorching or freezing as the seasons change. No need for idle wondering about making a new lettuce bed in a different place…Just pick up the grow bag and move it and see if it works better where I put it than where I had it and if not, pick it up and put it back…It would have been an ideal way to learn about gardening instead of the school of hard knocks that was our former mountain home. Instead of learning by trial and error and having to wait until the waning moon or next year in order to transplant and/or try again, I could have really experimented and got to know the needs of my plants. (Actually, in the end, thats what I did do as water shortages and being left alone in charge of everything for a period of three of the hotter months along with a large dose of exasperation, led me to transplant a lot of my ailing veg to grow-bags and large pots on my terrace.)

Limitations in the garden allow us to fully focus on getting the best out of the plants we do have rather than wasting time idly dreaming about hypothetical plants that are still in the nursery or the seed packet on the shelf. One of the most flourishing ‘gardens’ I have ever seen is the patio-terrace of a city flat belonging to some friends of ours. Every corner flourishes with strawberries in tubs, tomatoes in hanging baskets, beans in bags…Bees alight on the flowers and birds on the trees in pots. And we humans spent many a happy summer afternoon at the large wooden table he had built out of discarded railway sleepers eating a large, healthy lunch.

Limitations in our lives, as in our garden - if treated as an opportunity rather than a constraint - can help us to learn to get the best out of every day and every circumstance.

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In Search of Balance

Its nearly the end of November and I realise I haven’t been paying the attention I should to my horticultural side.With the upheaval of moving it seemed enough just to manage to transport all the pot plants and try and find them a suitable habitat in our new location be that on the little patio-terrace, on the two balconies or an assortment of windowsills or inside. We did buy a few new plants in our first exploratory trip to the local garden centre of which the jasmine is doing substantially better on the terrace in its pot than the struggling one we left behind in the ground at our old mountain home (moral: never plant a jasmine with its roots in the sun). However, the herbs we bought (two sorts of thyme and a rosemary) are a disappointment as, although they are growing happily on the kitchen windowsill it is noticeable that they are in no way the equivalent to their fragrent wild cousins: They just don’t smell anything like as much! Fortunately two of the thymes and one of the rosemaries that we dug up from the hillside before we left have come through and are providing the kind of fragrant food complement that I’ve come to expect.

Anyway today I berated myself for not having even thought of planting anything new and I got out the calendar I made last year which is supposed to remind me what to plant each month (would be more useful on the wall as opposed to underneath a pile of unsorted papers). Now let me see…November…ah…’Plant out cabbage seedlings in last year’s bean bed’… As I have neither cabbage seedlings nor a bean-bed, somewhat irrelevant…Then there’s consecutive sowing of lettuces and rocket…Well, lettuces seem frankly impractical given the size of my growing space, and rocket…My partner and I LOVE rocket but can I get it to grow? The trials and tribulations of my rocket history is another blogstory. So that leaves, well, nothing…

So much for getting my life balanced by reintroducing currently absent elements…

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