Pruning, pruning and more pruning.

We started pruning one of the olive trees near the house around Christmas time but then didn't get it finished, not much left to cut off, but the biggest problem if that's the right word for it, is all the greenery that is left.  We obviously keep the wood for the fires,  even the smallest of sticks get cut up and used as starter wood, but olives are leafy and although we have a shredder,  the leaves seem to pass through intact and take ages - if not years - to compost down.  The best thing, and a good heat generator,  is to burn them,  but we don't have a bonfire permit even if such a thing is around this year.  But we do have two wood burners in the house, one upstairs in the lounge and the other downstairs in the dining room and when filled with the green trimmings they burn really well.  OK, so it burns fast,  but it's hot,  and as soon as it's down to embers we reload and away it goes again.   Currently stacked on our terrace are every bucket and crate that we have full of the trimmings and ready to burn.  We haven't used any real firewood for  about 5 or 6 days now. 

What we did notice though as we cut up the greenery into easy to manage bits,  we only found 6 olives.  Yes,  6.  Individual olives, not kilos or branch loads.  Just 6.  And we've had a lot of branches,  enough to heat the house for almost a week.  So not a good year for olive harvesting. 

The rest of this weeks pruning has been rose bushes, cutting back of overgrown flowers, geraniums,  sage,  and rosemary - sadly one bush has died but I put it with tonight's olive trimmings and it smelt wonderful as it burnt - then today was the real end of Christmas and I dismantled the tree and decorations.   It was 12th night last night,  Fiesta de los tres Reyes Mages,   Festival of the Three Kings,  fireworks and rockets from villages all around and again at lunchtime today.

We had another windy night on Saturday from lunchtime  till the early hours of Sunday morning but it came more from the south west so hit the back of our house and just swirled around.  The angel on the tree was safe this time,  the tree just shimmered - is that the right word? - shook gently maybe and nothing fell off.  But now everything is  back in its boxes and bags,  tucked away for another 50 or so weeks.

I do miss the lights in the garden,  they add an extra glow,  one year we left some outside  lights up  during the spring and summer,  they were a coloured rope light and were underneath the grape vine in a fairly shady area but by the end of the summer heat the outside had gone brown and sticky with very little light showing.  Not something we are going to do again.