Galician countryside - our ongoing project

I haven't been here for a while, one can probably guess...I was quite busy doing all sorts of things ;) But how engaging, adventurous and exciting! 

Starting from the beginning, we've settled quite well by now in our village in southern Galicia. We are on the brink of this particular region, very much adjacent to northern Portugal. Couto Mixto is just next to where we live and that's the area where not that long ago people could choose which nationality they wanted to have, at the time of getting married.

Anyway, just to get you guys through, I will better go for the pictures instead of writing too much. The garden area is what, apart from the house, was engaging us a lot and mostly these months, since we got here. We were planning ahead and designing the whole garden space, planting using different techniques like i.e. companion planting and bio-intensive gardening (not foot square though ;)), raised beds, hugelkultur (a bit flattened) and key-hole beds. We also planted on not cultivated land digging holes putting a seedling in and tapping all the surrounding area adjacent to the plants with cardboard, for instance - which happened to work just as well as any other, more backbreaking methods.

So that's how we started preparing one of the garden areas we have at our disposal here:

Spinach sprouting out

Hugel-like structure

Key-hole raised bed

That's all we did right after we'd arrived, so mostly in April, some - beginning of May. There was quite a lot of work, nevertheless, Carlos - our dear and v.helpful neighbor, kept fertilizing the area on the first pictures under his own crops probably over years. So that made the trick, partly at least. Yet, where we built Hugel and key-holes it was a pathway, nothing more, so we were quite concerned how will it all grow. Unnecessarily. Eventually, all shot perfectly, sometimes also to our own surprise :D  The only thing that didn't come out as expected was/is Hugelkultur mount (more about its design here), which didn't pick up many seeds, so I had to transplant some seedlings. They probably fell down inwards into the perforated and very porous structure of the freshly heaped up pile. It basically flattened itself with heavy rains, so probably we could have been better piling up more material on top of it until getting into the proper shape, instead of planting right away. Normally you prepare Hugel rather long time before planting, so it gets a right amount of time to settle and shape up. We wanted to have it set and ready as soon as possible though and because of the time constraints we just decided to give it a go. Didn't come out as bad as it could have, so all good :)

That's is how our garden has grown over further months. Quite a transformation indeed!

Green beans & courgettes

Potatoes, peas, salads/lettuces

Beans & more courgettes ;)

Tomatoes & lettuces & onions

Here are all kinds of things actually...among which: calendulas, beetroots, savoury, peppermint, marjoram, spinach, meadow flowers mix ;), cucumbers, courgettes, leeks, carrots, parsley and at the very end (which is probably hard to spot): tomatoes, green beans, and more carrots :) ->>

Pimientos de Padrón - indigenous
(Padrón peppers)

marigolds and beetroots + leeks & lettuces

3 kinds of tomatoes and lettuces + some mint & potatoes

 The above is a failure in design as they do not go well together (tomatoes and potatoes don't), but the land was not cultivated before, so still acceptable, as there is less risk of infestation)

Here, key-hole beds (more about their design here) which we made for the first time and with the material available, so we probably made them our own way a bit. Yet, they work perfectly fine or better! ;) What they consist of is a hole in the ground, decomposing straw, meadow cuttings and corn stalks from the adjacent field (the rest of the land we can use and plant on), all that covered with the soil dug out at the beginning. Using what we had locally, on the spot, and reusing available material gave great results really!

sunflowers, courgettes, peas, beetroots,
carrots & cucumbers (2 kinds)

Left: tomatoes, right: the keyhole I described above

Meadow flowers mix to attract bees and other pollinators

We also worked a bit in front of the house: herb spiral (for all interested on how to design it: click here) with 6 types of herbs, more sunflowers, cabbage-like indigenous species (berza), lemon balm, lettuces, carrots and a few onions + clinging nasturtium:

So this post was supposed to be only a recap of the gardening we've managed to accomplish so far. Nonetheless, it is not all..;) but I didn't have a chance to shoot any pictures from the old corn field. We made 2 more long raised beds and planted around 20-30 tomato plants with no-digging and mulched with corn half-decomposed leaves and stinging nettle. They grow just as fine as if we have dug, I guess ;) Much less work though!

Nettle is also what we used, as previously prepared fertilizer (read what is it and how to make it here),  for fighting off potato beetle (spraying it) and to water plants (some do not like it, though!) every 2 weeks.

Of course, there were some minor failures as well and things that we didn't foresee when designing the whole area eg. some plants shot up much quicker than others, shading the slower ones or some got too little space to grow fine and now are either crippled under the others (and I have to thin them out by hand) or seem to be growing away all over the place finding their way. To a certain degree, it's how the bio-intensive growing works, but I guess that I underestimated some of the plants... ;))

In the forthcoming weeks/months, we will have to brace ourselves in recipes for canning jars for winter... Moreover, I already started with freezing some excessive and very abundantly growing plants. Fingers crossed! ^^

...to be continued... stay tuned :) o/