Category Archives: Plants

Information about growing stuff

Creating a Vineyard from Scratch

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Vine CuttingsIt is my plan to create a vineyard. We have a large price of land which has good soil and gets lots of light.

There are a lot of vineyards between our Cortijo and the next large town and the wine they sell is a pleasant Cabernet Sauvignon.

Rather than buy vines I have decided to plant cuttings. In December there were a lot of vine cuttings at the side of the road on the way to the nearest town and I threw a load of them into the back of the van. There was nobody around to ask so I don’t know exactly what sort of grapes they are.  It looks like they are being grown commercially so I just hope they will make good wine.

I looked at several websites to see how to make the cuttings. In the end I cut about 90 of the  vines into 30cm long pieces, dipped them in cutting hormones and then pushed them into pots of soil.  This happened on the 12th Jan 2012. Some of the pots have deeper soil than others. If they take I will transplant them into individual pots or plant them into the ground.  Most other websites say that you have to put them into a trench but I am using pots because we are down on the coast until March and they will be much warmer.

To be continued…….

Grafting

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Grafting is one of the projects that we both want to try one of these days and is on the list of possible projects. While walking in the Valle de Lecrin one day we spotted this most amazing tree which had had grapefruit, orange and lemon grafted onto the rootstock. When I took this photo, all three fruits were in season. Unfortunately citrus fruits would never survive up at the cortijo, but this would be my dream tree if they did.

30 December – Seed Planting

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Seed Pots

Seed Pots

This may seem a strange time to plant seeds. The reason why I can start seeds off now is because we have a place on the coast and one up in the mountains. The average temperature on the coast is about 14C and in the mountains it is 5C .The idea is to get the plants going and then transfer them to the mountains after March.

All the seeds here are plants that could cope with some low temperatures at the start.

I have planted several pots. If any of them germinate I will transplant them into pots or modules. Very tiny seeds are just sprinkled onto the surface. Bigger seeds are mixed into the soil with the ends of my fingers according to size. The soil is normal potting compost and at the top of the pots there is some finer seed compost which was bought at a garden centre.

Petunias (fire chief) wiki
Petunias are great flowers. They cope well with the hot sun and the don’t get too upset by an occasional lack of water and also they flower for ages.  Petunias normally only cost about 1.20 euros each for a potted one but it will be good if we can get loads of them to use in the summer. Petunia seeds are very small so they are just spread on the surface of the flowerpot.

Snapdragons - Antirrhinum

Snapdragons Antirrhinum wiki
These are the sort of hard as nails plants we like at the cortijo. There are some snap dragons alive and flowering  at the moment in the cortijo and the temperature has been down to -5C. A good quality about snaps is that they self-seed themselves and once there are a few growing they will establish a colony.

 

 

Tudela Lettuce (cogollos de Tudela in Spanish) wiki
Cogollos de Tudela are a really good Spanish lettuce that form very compact hearts. If you go to a Spanish restaurant you can order “cogollos” which is normally lettuce hearts drizzled with a sort of garlic oil. They are very healthy to eat and you can make a very quick almost 0 calorie snack by slicing  a cogollo lettuce heart into 4 laterally and drizzling on some extra virgin olive.

Capers (capparis Spinosa) (alcaparras in Spanish)  wiki
This is probably a waste of time because caper seeds are very difficult to germinate and require stratifying. They probably won’t germinate but you never know.

Parsnip (Pastinaca) (chirivía in Spanish)  wiki
These were some seeds that I has in an old packet. Let’s hope they germinate.

seed traysI have also planted lots of plants into seed trays. The trays cost about 2 euros. It is the best way of raising lots of small plants for later transplanting.

I normally buy my plants form a shop called Bolivar in Granada. (they cost about 8 cents each) This year I am going to try to grow some of them myself.

I have the following plants in the seed trays.
Cauliflowers  (coliflor in Spanish)  wiki
Cauliflowers do very well at the cortijo.

Spring onion  (cebolleta in Spanish)  wiki
The was a packet of White Lisbon which came free with Grow Your Own  magazine.

Kale (Black tuscany)  (col rizada in Spanish)  wiki
There were some seeds in the bottom of a packet. It is a type of Curly Kale with purple leaves.

Leek  (puero in Spanish)  wiki
I bought these seeds from Al Campo supermarket.

Brunswick Cabbage  (Col Repollo)  wiki

 

Propagating Geraniums

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Every year I have to buy more Geraniums because at some point the temperature gets down to about -10C and kills them.

This year I have decided to propagate some geraniums by planting  cuttings at the house on the coast which has a mild climate.

I simply cut off the main stems from the parent plants and then protected the originals with garden fleece so that they might survive the winter.  I made cuttings about 15cm long, making the cut just below a node.  I left one healthy leaf on each cutting. I didn’t use any cutting hormones. (because I had forgotten to buy any). I used a plastic tray module.I did  this on the 28th December 2011. They were left in the open air. The climate is mild and rarely goes below 10C.

Blog post continued on 6th March 2013.

The picture below shows the overwintering geraniums from last year and new ones being propagated. Last year’s ones were a big success.
Propagating geraniums is easy.  The most important thing to do is spray them every 3 weeks to stop the stem boring caterpillars.

Geraniums

Easy way to prepare olives

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Olives in Salt

I have had many attempts at preserving and preparing olives but none of them worked very well until I found this simple technique.

When olives are prepared by any method we are basically doing two things. 1. Stopping the olives rotting. 2. Getting rid of some of the bitterness from the olives.

My technique is very easy. Just pick some black olives (the later you pick them the more oil content they have) then put them in a container with sea salt. It is best if the container is totally open at the top and it is good if the sun shines on them to evaporate some of the liquid. Mix them around every few days with a stick or with your hands. At first a lot of liquid collects at the bottom of the container. You can pour this off.

The salt draws the liquid and most of the bitterness from the olives. Eventually after about 6 weeks the olives become totally dry.

Separate them from the salt with a garden riddle or any other type of sieve. After this you have dessicated olives which you can store for as long as you like.

Every couple of days put a handful of olives in a glass jar of water in the kitchen. It takes anything between 8 and 48 hours for them to re-hydrate.  Put a handful of the re-hydrated olives on salads, pizzas or anything you want. If you put them in a bowl and them put a few drops of olive oil over them they taste and look  like the Greek olives I used to buy when I lived in Finsbury Park London.