ty celebrated Dick’s 76th birthday and the launch of his latest Amazon Kindle booklet, “Your Personal Guide to making Authentic Valencian Paellas”.) Outdoor Cooking We love cooking and eating outdoors but stopped barbecuing many years ago, preferring to cook with a Mexican oven, tagines and, in recent years, a solar cooker constructed with a kit from www.alsol.com. Many dishes can be cooked slowly on the latter, with the advantage that they can be left for several hours without fear of burning while one gets on with other things. Put on a casserole mid-morning and it will be ready for lunch. Summer Salad Vegetables We mentioned growing vegetables earlier. Whether you have a large vegetable plot or just a spare couple of metres of terrace space it’s not too late to buy plantlets or sow seeds for growing summer salad crops. Recognising that the sun will soon be burning leaf vegetables, plant them in a semi-shaded spot or under a large umbrella or shade. Even fruit vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, aubergines and cucumbers don’t need to be in full sun all day long. The growing table now in a corner of the garden was originally part of our experimental “allotment in the sky”, in which we grew over 20 vegetables through two summers – indeed, all year round – on a north-facing, three-metre, first-floor terrace. This was to demonstrate what can be grown easily by apartment dwellers in order to illustrate our book “Apartment Gardening Mediterranean Style”.
Healthy Fruit A well-planted garden will also include a selection of fruit trees with a variety of harvest times all year round but including delicious early peaches and nectarines in June. Unfortunately, most pest problems in the garden are likely to be with fruit trees rather than with vegetables or flowering plants. We discuss this fully in “Growing Healthy Fruit in Spain”… our solution is a mixed monthly spray with a diluted ecological solution of neem oil and propolis in water. Many garden centres stock a neem oil product these days and propolis, a byproduct of bee hives, will be found in many honey and heath shops. From day one in Spain we have gardened ecologically to maintain an environment healthy to the family, visiting friends, pets and wild life. Naturally, to gain maximum benefit, one needs to persuade neighbours to do likewise. But why not? Most of us probably came to Spain for a healthy open-air lifestyle so why risk using chemical products and creating an atmosphere similar to that in some Almería greenhouses? If ants start to cause a problem just dust them with natural yellow sulphur powder and use the same inexpensive product to dust grape vines and tomato, pepper, cucumber, squash and courgette plants against mildew. So do enjoy the next couple of months of outdoor living. In the next edition we will discuss gardens in the hottest months of the year, July and August.
Holistic gardeners and authors who have lived in Spain for 25 years, Clodagh and Dick Handscombe’s practical books can be obtained from high street and internet bookshops including Bookworld, Carrefour, Santana Books and Amazon UK and Spain. More information at: www.gardenspain.com HOMEANDLIFESTYLE.ES
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