SALDI ORGANIC GARDEN IS BURSTING AT  THE SEAMS

All our hard work in the vegetable garden is beginning to bear fruit, literally and at last we have some organic vegetables for sale.
Throughout the winter we have able to supply some of the local bars and restaurants with organic spinach and Swiss chard and in February we built our rather rudimentary but effective green house for early tomatoes, cucumbers, courgettes and aubergines.  A couple of months ago we raised the plastic walls of the greenhouse so the plants could breathe in the unseasonal suffocating heat and this week we have got rid of the plastic altogether and stretched green cloth (sold on a roll) across the top to give the veg some shade.
As always seems to happen in a garden you wait forever and then everything seems to happen at once. A week ago we had a steady supply of cucumbers and courgettes; hundreds of tomatoes which refused to go green; lovely purple flowers all over the aubergine plants; and the occasional lettuce. Just about enough for our home consumption and a few bits and pieces for the bars and restaurants in town. However, almost overnight the purple flowers have turned into miniature aubergines, the tomatoes are turning red on mass, we still have a steady supply of cucumbers and courgettes (although the plants outside the greenhouse have also started producing now) and we are finding it difficult to eat all the lettuces before they go to seed.
Outside the greenhouse it is the same story. The spring this year has been kind to local gardeners and the rain/sun combination has helped the plants flourish early and grow strong enough to resist the onslaught of the summer sun. After months of coaxing, endless weeding and sweet talking the garden is full of salads, mouth watering marrows, sweet courgettes, plum tomatoes and big butch salad tomatoes, European and English type cucumbers, salad spring onions, beetroot, crisp white onions, new potatoes, and artichokes.
We also have a limited supply of English type parsley, bay leaves, mint, spearmint, basil, thyme and oregano.
Shortly we will offer aubergines, peppers, sweet corn and popcorn, French beans, pumpkins, melons, water melons and in a couple of months we will have haricots.
Some of the tomato plants, peppers and aubergines have been donated to us by an elderly Calasparrian gardener, organic as well, who specializes in traditional local varieties, partly because he likes them and partly because he wants to protect and maintain the “original Calasparra vegetables.” It will be interesting to see how they turn out.
We are keen to sell our vegetables in small quantities direct to our customers in order to keep the prices reasonable and we are planning to make up boxes of seasonal vegetables for sale. If you are interested give us a ring and we can tell you what vegetables we have and the prices.
 If there are enough orders from, for example,  one of the urbanizations, we may be able to deliver to a central point or we can arrange a central pick up point in Calasparra.
Some of the produce currently available is featured in the Products section of this webpage.
Call Diana 669 627 718 (English) or Salvador 616 308 588 (Spanish) for more information.

MARY, MARY QUITE CONTRARY: HOW DOES YOUR GARDEN GROW?

Not with silver bells and cockle shells and pretty maids all in a row that´s for sure: more like with ants, snails and stinging nettles. This does not mean I am up to my eyes in weeds in my organic garden but rather I have learned to appreciate the different qualities of a plant I used to hate.
Stinging nettles were the bain of my life from an early age: partly because my elder sister’s idea of fun was to chase me around the garden brandishing the horrid things and partly because in green, damp leafy Oxfordshire where I spent my early childhood you could hardly move without getting stung by the wretched things.  I didn´t find much relief in the famous dock leaf cure either and my tiny ankles were habitually covered by masses of irritating raised white spots.
So you can imagine my delight (not) at discovering that these torturous plants have magic qualities for the organic garden. Not only do they make a wonderful fertilizer capable of perking up the saddest seedlings but also act as an insecticide and help prevent a host of different garden malaise.
Maybe it is the climate in Calasparra which breeds bigger and badder bugs like the those armies of devastating ants which feed on and help propagate millions of tiny aphids which, in turn, twist the leaves of the vegetables like mad curling tongs or the regiments of vociferous snails which cling onto tall blades of grass during the heat turning them into weird sculptures but which, in the cool of the night, mount rampaging raids on everything that´s green. Probably better not to even mention the “enfermadades:” the leaf blotch, leaf curl, general rot and rack and ruin that run amok in a chemical free garden.
Every year we have picked the bugs and snails off by hand and washed the leaves of our plants with natural soap in a bid to beat the insects and plagues. We have cleared the weeds and the long grass so there are natural barriers metres wide and erected screens and covers to stop the unforgiving Calasparra sun literally burning the flowers before they bear fruit. We have planted hundreds of “healthy companions” in the form of marigolds, basil and mint interspersed strategically among their hosts and with all of this we have logged a degree of success. But none of this compares to the efficacy of the great enemy of my childhood, the humble stinging nettle.
We had heard rumblings about the qualities of stinging nettles but as they grow in cool, green damp, shady places we are not exactly overrun with them in dry arid Calasparra. Until this year when the rains came not only swelling the local reservoirs to 80% capacity but also bringing thousands of nasty sharp leaved nettles to every corner of our land. We didn´t even have to go looking for them, they simply sprouted up everywhere.
When they first began to appear we dug them up and carefully replanted them in front of the giant water containers we use for our homemade and rather rudimentary drop irrigation system and religiously watered them every day. However soon, as the rain persisted it became clear this wasn´t really necessary as the nasty little beasts flourished everywhere.
Unpleasant childhood memories were evoked as I managed to get stung through gloves, long trousers and sleeved shirts when I “harvested” them but I achieved some revenge and a certain amount of satisfaction from pounding them with a long stick in their bucket of murky water as I passed by. The recipe says they are ready for use when they start fermenting and smell like a public loo and in this climate that didn´t take very long.
One litre of concentrated fermented stinging nettles to 15 litres of water makes a fertilizer and a litre to 10 litres of water kills the bugs. The mixture smells absolutely disgusting but it works. Our plants perked up overnight and the bugs took a holiday. 
The hottest June in living memory has seen off most of the stinging nettles  by now  as the sun has dried up all their hiding places so we are forced to return to our old standby protection: concentrated  crushed garlic juice. Why does everything that helps protect an organic garden have to smell so foul?