INTO 2015 WITH A BANG!

Well, another year, HAPPY 2015 EVERYONE.  
It has been a bit of time since writing.  

This winter has been particularly cold (unlike last year).  We haven't had any snow down on the ground in Sa Pobla, although I know there has been some in other parts of the island.  The mountains had LOADS of snow dumped on them, and the chill winds blow freezing air off them down to our town! brrrrrrrrrrr!!

PUIG DE MASANELLA (Mallorca's second highest mountain)

Puig de Masanella (Puig means 'hill' in Catalan - although technically this is a mountain!)

Puig de Masanella

These photos were taken from near our finca in Sa Pobla.  A beautiful sight on a cold but glorious sunny day.  

On to the animals... The hens are all grown up and laying well.  Our cockerel is growing enormous but luckily is still friendly.  I haven't heard him crow very well yet, but I have heard him trying, which seems to be a strange mix of a gurgle/strangling sound and a yodle!  The dogs are fine except Ruffa Roo seems rather sick today - no food for him tonight and we will see how he is in the morning.

We still have no vegetables growing, we will see what the next few weeks brings.
  
Hope to post again very soon.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO DECEMBER 2014 - BRING ON THE NEW YEAR 2015.

December 2014 was a particularly AWFUL month.  After C being away from us for 10 months he arrived home just before J's birthday at the end of November.  C was very thin!  During December we had to cope with my aunt having a heart attack and surgery (which she is recovering well from - a positive thing), then C was diagnosed with cancer - such a shock!  To top off the month a close farming friend died (only 40 years old), he will be very sadly missed by us all.

The medical profession jumped into gear very quickly here and C has now completed the first chemo cycle! extremely nasty stuff.  Second round - 9th of January - HAPPY NEW YEAR!  We are fighting it and hope to bash the hell out of it, we are raising funds to keep us going day to day and medically - isn't life bizarre!

So, to the finca.   Finally the cold has come and the trees have lost their leaves, some of the vines and fig trees (and I dare say other plants) began growing new bright green leaves as November was particularly warm!  Snow covered the peak of Puig Major (the tallest mountain in Mallorca, standing at 1,445m in the Serra de Tramuntana mountain range) for the last couple of days but Sa Pobla hasn't had any so far.  It isn't usual for us to get any, we lie in the Pla (plains) which are flat and the damp often hangs upon us like a soggy blanket in the winter! it's heaven when the sun comes out, like today - bright, sunny and cold, but crisp not damp.

Sunrise over the fields

The hens are doing great.  We now have 7 whizzing about the coop with a young cockerel who is enormous already.  His wing feathers sick out at angles! I need to check them and make sure they aren't deformed! He has only one long tail feather, I am hoping he will grow more.  So far, he is a lot more tame than our last one!! Long may that last.  Eggs are plentiful, even in the colder weather which is wonderful.

The dogs are great, Rex is getting much older and seems rather like an old bloke, but then suddenly bursts into a run across the yard barking warnings to the cats to get out of the way of the car.  Ruffa (our boxer) always looks to Rex for guidance and often doesn't bark until he sees one of us or Rex says it's ok to do so. 

We still have no veggies in the vegetable plot.  It is more than ready to receive but unfortunately there is no time for the moment.  I would love some broccoli/carrots etc etc in there.  We will just have to wait.

All the cats that live outside seem to be fairing well.  Several of them have had colds, but have got over them quite quickly.  Puss (who lives indoors - much to the horror of C) also now has a cold, but he is snuggled up near the fire at the moment, so he'll probably recover quite quickly.  We have had to put him back on kitten food as his stomach is so sensitive, adult cat food seems to upset him horribly!! No details required!

Well, as soon as I have any recent pictures to post I will put them up.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YOU ALL.  FELIZ AÑO NUEVO

NEW BIRDS IN THE FLOCK

Today we added to our dwindling flock of hens.  We went to Sa Pobla market, where there is always a chap named Rafael who sells hens, pigeons, cage birds, guinea fowl, turkeys, guinea pigs and rabbits.  His farm is in Ariany which is about a 20 minute drive from us here in Sa Pobla, but I usually wait till market day to buy from him.  I was only going to buy one hen today, as I was expecting them to be quite expensive (it's been a while since I bought any new ones).  It turned out they were much cheaper than I thought, so I bought two hens at point-of-lay and 3 pullets, 2 female and one male.  I'm not really sure how you tell whether they are male or female at such a young age but Rafael seemed to know.

So I quickly put the makeshift pen together for the pullets as they are still a bit small for the bigger hens - they could be damaged by pecking hierarchy! I call the makeshift pen our 'patchwork coop'!  I just used what I could find around our small farm.

Here are a few photos.

The new hens & pullets

Checking out the hen house!

Admiring her new surroundings!

The crazy, make-shift mini coop

Jess making sure I tidy up!

As I am writing this, even though during the day it is still like summer with temperatures topping 29 - 31 degrees C, I can see, looking out of my window, that the sun is already disappearing and it is only 18:10 in the afternoon/evening.  So Autumn is here, but you wouldn't guess it during the main part of the day - which is wonderful as it means extra beach days.  I will just leave you all with that thought.

AUTUMN IS ARRIVING

Another long gap since I wrote anything.  Life has been somewhat hectic of late and the uncharacteristic weather from this summer has contributed, along with work constraints and visits to the UK, to the craziness of life.  

I am sad to say that our final original hen has passed away.  I found her stiff as a board in the hen house on Friday afternoon. I've no idea what she died of, she was not showing any signs of obvious disease. Now I am left with 3 hens who only lay when they feel like it! so rather a shortage of eggs at the moment.  I will probably need to buy a few more hens to get the egg supply going again.  I loathe buying them from the supermarket.

A whole day of rain yesterday - which was good for the land, but dark and dismal for me - means that the earth is soft for planting.  However, I am not sure I have the time on my hands to plant anything this week - we shall see.  I could do with cauliflowers, broccoli and cabbage.

The pool turned emerald green the other week and I couldn't get it back to its wonderful blue colour, so we've emptied it and we'll start again.  

Puss-cat is sleeping in a little more, especially over the last couple of days, he isn't keen on rain!

Puss, having a snooze and chilling out

 As the Autumn is upon us, when it isn't overcast and grey, we are having chilly evening sunsets, some of them are beautiful but I haven't caught a great one yet.

When the skies aren't overcast we are having wonderful Autumn sunsets

 J and I went snorkelling up at La Victoria - there is always lots to see there.  Sea urchins, octopus, lots of different fish, crabs etc.  I don't think we'll be going again this year unless we have another hot spell, but that's doubtful.

A dead sea urchin collected on our final snorkelling trip of the season at La Victoria near Alcudia.

 The farmers are harvesting their corn at the moment and I watched as they gathered it up in the next door field.  Their corn is used for animal fodder.  After the harvest, the field lies bare with only the short stems remaining and we can see over to the poligono (industrial estate) across the fields.

Jess, keeping me company as I watch the harvesting of the corn next door.

Harvest time - this corn is used for animal fodder.

Ruffa Roo waiting for the huge combine to reap the corn

The cloud builds, on a walk with Ruffa in Sa Pobla

WHERE DID THOSE MONTHS GO?

It has been nearly 7 months since I wrote anything here and so much seems to have happened.

We are still here in Mallorca, for the time being at least.  Life just seems to have taken over and left me no time to concentrate on the blog, but I am hoping to take it up again and leave as many posts as I can.

Animal update: We still have two dogs here, Rex and Ruffa.  We now only have 1 of our original hens but we have another 3 girls as well, the cockerell, as you will know if you have read the blog, has gone - thankfully.  However, we now have a broody hen who will sit on the nest for hours incubating eggs that won't hatch!  I have to lift her off constantly.  Not sure what to do about her yet.  

Cat update: some have gone, some are still very much here, and there are many new additions.  Samuel Sprat comes and goes, and he turned up tonight with loud meows and is currently asleep on one of the kitchen chairs.  He'd been gone for about two weeks and I did miss him.  The lovely Jess has had babies (3) and Pipla, her daughter, has had two, one of which is not right (just like her last ones), we will have to wait and see what happens to that one.  Another girl has had 4 kittens and is keeping them nestled under the log pile in a small nook.  Her name is Mittens, but she is not very trusting of humans and quite feral.  Total number of cats (including kittens) around here at the moment is about 16.  The good thing is that I haven't seen any rats or mice for ages!

The vegetable plot is suffering.  It is full of weeds, which we are tackling next week, and there is nothing growing in it at the moment.  We are going to deal with it and put some chicken manure down, dig it in and plant again.

The pool is still covered because although the sun is warm during the day, the nights and mornings are quite chilly still.  The weather should start hotting up pretty soon.  We had a very mild winter, I didn't even put the rugs down this year, which was probably due to laziness, tiles are so much easier to clean!

Well, I hope I can keep this up again, feel free to nudge me if I don't.

Here are a few pictures of the past 5 months!!

AN OSTRICH AT NATURA PARC - ZOOLOGICAL PARK.

EARLY MORNING SUNRISE

MASSIVE RAIN STORM.  ONE OF THE HENS IS STANDING OUT IN IT - CAN YOU SPOT HER?

JESS WITH HER BRAND NEW KITS

PIPLA IN THE FOOD BOWL, SOAKING UP THE SUN AND HAVING A SNOOZE

POSSIBLY THE WORLDS SMALLEST MANDARIN, GROWN ON OUR TREE.

STREET BONFIRE BUILT AND READY TO BURN.  SANT ANTONI JAN 2014

THE STORM IS COMING.  (AND IT WAS A HUGE ONE).

SA POBLA WINDMILL

SANT ANTONI MAYHEM, ALL THE CHILDREN CHASE THE DEVILS AROUND THE TOWN, THE DEVILS GO INTO EVERY BAR!

And finally.....

OUR 4 GIRLS, PECKING HAPPILY IN THE 'NO VEGGIES, VEGGIE PLOT'.

AND MAY BEGINS..

All has been rather hectic of late, with the arrival of new kittens came some rather horrid weather and more illness and creaky backs!  So all gardening was put on hold and concentrating on getting well again became the order of the last couple of weeks.

The kittens are doing great.  They are twice the size they were, at least, and are now showing distinct patterned markings, lovely.  They all have their eyes open and are crawling about all over the place.  As the weather warms they will all be moved outside and hopefully this time they will thrive better.

The cockerel is still in the coop! He is still enjoying attacking us as we go in and so his days are definitely numbered.  We have no more animals at the moment apart from the two dogs.

So the veggies are all coming along well now that the rains have stopped for a moment.  We covered all the young plants with 5 litre plastic water bottles (we don't have a greenhouse here) and they have fared better than the last lot.  I have also managed to find, after enormous searching, some special pepper plants native to Mallorca called Tap de Corti.  Here is a link with a little info on them:

Slow Food Foundation - Tap de Corti Pebre bord.


I bought half a tray of about 50 plants and C planted them in this morning.

51 Tap de Corti pepper plants now in

So May brings us to a lush green garden.  The fig trees are in leaf again as are all the trees and bushes.  The winter jasmine is dying back  and the blossoms have dropped off the citrus trees.  The bougainvillea is in bloom with bright magenta flowers and the fruits are beginning to grow.  The Mallorquin Apricots are coming along as well as the nispera.  I am hoping the pear trees will fruit ok, as I did prune them hard during the winter, they were such a mess!

Of course, with the wonderful green lushness around the island, everyone is battling with weeds. Many people spray them but we do it all by hand if we can! It's a mammoth task but we prefer not to use chemicals if we can help it.

The vines are in leaf now also but I need to do a little research on how to keep the fruit from being destroyed by wasps/flies and other horrid nasties, someone mentioned paper bags!! Must look into that.

The number of cyclists on the island has increased a gazzillion-fold! and the IronMan 70.3 is on the 11th May in Alcudia, so everyone is in training for that - except me!

Pink blossoms April 2013 Sa Pobla, near the Albufera

Mallorcan Apricots

THE FIG TREE IN FULL LEAF AGAIN..

TOO MANY WEEDS - ARRRGGHHH!

GRAPE VINE IN LEAF AND ALREADY PRODUCING SMALL NUBS OF GRAPES.

SHOCKING MAGENTA BOUGAINVILLEA

TWO VARIETIES OF TOMATOES FOR THE SUMMER, YUMMY.

CABBAGES, CAULIFLOWERS, SWISS CHARD AND AUBERGINES (OUT OF THE PIC)

ANYONE WANT TO SWAP HIM FOR A MORE DOCILE CHARACTER?? THE ATTACKER TRYING TO LOOK SUBMISSIVE! DON'T BE FOOLED.

THE ROSE BUSHES ARE IN BLOOM - WONDERFUL.

KITTENS AND THE ORANGE BLOSSOM

Well last night proved to be rather eventful, for me anyway.  Two days ago we noticed that our female mummy cat Jess, was really bulging - we have known she was pregnant for quite a while now.  She was also rummaging about outside to find a suitable nest site and being over friendly with us all, she definitely didn't want to be outside and seemed to want to be near us all the time.  We helped her a couple of years ago with her first lot of kittens, she trusts us which is lovely.

Jess beginning labour.

Last night at about 10pm she went into labour.  Her nest is a basket tied to the end of on of our beds with blankets in.  We decided to bring her in this time as there are always many more complications when kittens are born outside!  When the kittens are a bit stronger they'll all go out again.  So, I placed food and water on a chair near the bed and her litter box I put in the room also, so that she didn't have to go to far for it.

Basket nest for Jess.

At 12.58AM the first kitten appeared.  A little black one, I haven't seen any white on it yet.  25 minutes later a tabby and white appeared.  Jess is a brilliant mum but she really wanted me near, she kept wanting to hold my finger and rub her face on my hand.  At about 2AM I managed to doze off finally but awoke again around 3AM to another being born, by 4AM the final one came and I snuggled down to sleep before having to get up at 7.30 this morning!

4 little bundles of fluff.  There is a tabby & white, grey stripey, dark grey & white and a little black one

Not so easy to see them but they are all there with mum somewhere.  Jess is a small adult cat and is very delicate when she walks about, but is a great mum.

I woke exhausted - I don't function well on very little sleep, so today I've felt like my head had been wrapped in cotton wool!  We raced to get J ready for school only to realise that he really wasn't well, so as I had an appointment with physio, we took him to the doc! turns out J has a chest infection.  As I've mentioned before, chest infections are extremely commonplace here usually due to the damp conditions of the island, but by the time May/June come around everyone is fine again!

So, we raced into town, picked up a prescription and then decided he should stay off school for today.  We then drove over to a friends finca, the other side of Sa Pobla, just to check on a few things for them.  When we got back in the car to go off food shopping, the car wouldn't start.   Not a peak, NO SOUND, NOTHING, NADA....... PANIC ran through me! Oh NO, I thought, please not on a day when I have so much to do and my brain is like candyfloss!  A Mallorquin farmer, doing his irrigation in the field next door, came up to the fence to ask what the problem was, I told him and he immediately said 'aaaaahhhh, es la batería'.  He was telling me the battery was kaput!  I hoped and prayed that he was right.  He said he'd be 10 minutes finishing his watering and he'd be over with a spare!  Blimey, I couldn't believe our luck, then the thought dawned on me that perhaps it wasn't the battery and that it was something a lot more serious! The car is on it's way out anyway.  The farmer came round with the battery on his moped and between him and C, fixed it in place.  FANTASTICO! It worked, he was right.  I could have grabbed hold of him and spun him round with delight, but I thought better of it,  as it would have been highly inappropriate.  So I just thanked him enormously and said we'd get it sorted this week and drop the battery back to him as soon as possible.  Talk about trust, you wouldn't get that sort of help even from a neighbour in the UK!

On the way back to the town to do the food shop, I felt calmer and less 'candyflossed' in the brain, the smell of orange blossoms around Sa Pobla is very strong at the moment.  Heaven.  At our finca, the scent is very heady but wonderful.  The vegetables are all growing, slowly but surely, and all is fine and dandy after a crazy day and night.

PLANTING BEGINS

So although it has been extremely windy over the last week, we have had some sun, which is great.  If it weren't for the wind it would feel very warm indeed.  I believe it got to about 21 here today, but with a chilly breeze.

Hoorahh, we have started planting finally.  C has toiled hard in the vegetable plot, preparing the beds, and we now have cabbages, cauliflowers, two different types of peppers (small and large - the farmer didn't know their names), swiss chard - we're giving this another go, it all got eaten and died last time.  We also have salad and cooking tomatoes in, Romaine and Iceburg lettuces and.......oh yes, aubergines and one watermelon plant.  Melon plants take up an enormous amount of space, so I said I only wanted one this year, it is like a giant triffid that crawls along the ground! AARRRGGHHH.  

The tomatoes.  We will make a proper frame for them when they get a little bigger.











Cabbages, Cauliflowers and two types of lettuces.

Two types of peppers.  We are waiting for a third type to plant, should be ready  next weekend!

Our parsley has got out of hand! There is loads of it.  I am going to have to try to dry it I think, otherwise it will go to waste!

The pear trees, I pruned fairly vigorously earlier in the winter, are blossoming, I am so pleased, I thought one of them was dead as it was choked by a giant climbing weed! But no, it has blossom, yipeee.

Pear blossom

The quince bush I pruned so heavily earlier in the winter, I seriously didn't think would come back, but it has leaves on it and has returned to the land of the living once more.

The nispera pears are growing and the orange blossom is out once more, the smell is so amazing, it's fantastic.  On a walk this afternoon with the dog, I could smell it on the wind, (the orange blossom, not the dog!) heavenly.

SUN, SEEDS & BLOSSOMS

The weather seems to be getting a little warmer now, which is great.  I think the clocks change this weekend and it's Easter.  Today we saw temperatures of around 22 here in Sa Pobla, a wind has got up now which is still a little chilly but really the weather is lovely.

We still haven't planted in any more plants but we are hoping to catch the farmer over the next few days so we can begin.  The plots are ready and the chickens have been out of their pen to pick at the insects for us.

The winter jasmine is blossoming and smells heavenly, the other blossoms out are the irises, hawthorn and the orange blossom is beginning again.

Winter Jasmine in bloom.  Very heady scent.

Iris in bloom

I have now planted a few seedlings.  Touch sensitive mimosa for kids to amuse themselves with, some Helichrysum (dried flowers) and some hollyhocks, we'll see what happens.  As we didn't have any suitable bags of soil we sieved some so I could plant the delicate seeds in it.  The soil here is generally very stony and rough.

J sieving soil

An old Mallorcan garden sieve

Helichrysum seeds planted.  Hope they take!

Touch sensitive Mimosa seeds - a couple have already begun to peep through!

The rooster is treading on very thin ice, and he was nearly dispatched with on Wednesday morning.  Unfortunately we were a little preoccupied with errands so he's been let off the hook briefly.  We cannot keep him now, he is attacking us too much, so he has to go.  He will make a good sunday roast or a good soup.

A couple of pictures below to show you the scenery on a stroll out today.