Dia de Todos los Santos

Today is the day when people remember their loved ones  and visit the graves in  the cemetery to decorate them with fresh flowers and maybe photos or mementos.   Many people have left Yator so when they come back for this weekend they replace with artificial arrangements so they remain colourful until this day next year.

For the past week or so the bazaars and florists have been awash with flowers,  from single blooms to complete arrangements.  Apparently sales are double this week compared to any other week in the year.  Good for some people, then.

So today has been a public holiday and in keeping with Spanish  tradition, tomorrow is a 'bridge day' -  día del puente  - as what's the point in going  back to work just for a Friday?

I went to the cemetery this afternoon on the way back from Yátor,   walked up with Lola who was going to put candles at her husbands grave, his parents and her parents.   I asked if I could take photos as I didn't want to offend her but she said she knew that the cemeteries here were different to English ones -   'ours are like steps'  she said   'but yours are flat'.

2 months early.

Normally at the end of October I am picking the large black olives that we brine and bottle in oil for the coming year.   We have some small trees with big fat olives that are always ready now - a totally different variety to the large trees with small olives that are still ripening and don't get really black till end of December for the January harvest.

Until this year that is.......the small tree big olive variety have about a dozen olives between them,  the 2 trees closest to us that is,  the rest of them have nothing on at all.  

Then the big tree small olive for harvesting variety are already ripening.  We have branches of black olives and they're starting to drop.   

Out by the pool - 2 months early.

The mill doesn't open till January 1st ever, maybe this year they'll have to open early as by January  there might not be much left!











Luckily we don't need to brine any as we still have about 15 jars from last year,  but we can't understand why there aren't any eating olives and why these are so early?  

In the front garden .

Maybe the extra long hot weather this summer has put the trees under too much stress?   Perhaps we should give them a nice long iced vodka tonic - it works for me!

Woodsmoke.

Luckily the replanted plants didn't wilt or look at all unhappy by Sunday night,  lucky because overnight the temperature dropped and there was some frost!!  It only dropped to 7° on the terrace but obviously lower in the open.  I checked them Monday morning and they were fine but I have made fleecey bags for them for when it gets colder.

I saw some frosty patches on the open grassy land the far side of Montenegro where the footpath branches off to El Golco or up to Yegen but thought maybe it was just the sun glinting on the wet dewy grass.  But then a bit later John saw some frosty patches on the damp shed roof.

The house temperature seems to have dropped as well and when we came in last night at 6pm ish after tidying up from the days work,  it seemed chilly, hence this....

There has been the smell of woodsmoke drifting up from Yator for a few days now but this was our first fire of the winter.

Sunday morning.

Do you ever have one of those moments when you decide that today's the day  to dig out a flower bed and replant everything?  Today was such a day,  although the forecast had said sunshine and showers,  the sky above us was blue although cloudy to the south and north.

For some time now I've been looking despairingly at one of the beds in the side garden,  it's too close to the rotary drier,  the geraniums are enormous and usually that means they get damaged in the winter winds and rains,  and it's too close to the stuff John has accumulated outside the shed.  The gazania's are overshadowed by the geraniums and don't bloom so well without full sun.....there had to be a better place for everything.

The iris were easy to get out and find a new home for,  also the euonymus which has gone up near the pool edge where I've started a new mixed border.  A big clump of dwarf pinks - except they're red not pink - has also moved up there along with the gazanias,  a sage cutting, an offshoot from the bay tree,  something that looks like a durillo,   part of the viburnum family - viburnum tinus - and a real durillo.  The durillo looks a bit privet-ish but has very dark green small leaves.

If the bay cutting grows we'll have to keep it trimmed as it's parent is about 20 foot tall - I'm hoping for a bush not a tree! 

The biggest of the geraniums was a real awkward monster to get out.  It had rooted under the edge of supporting brickwork of the bed,  in the end I got it loose enough  to just pull  until the main taproot snapped.  It's  an old plant - it's been frozen in the past then thawed out and has regrown,  it's collapsed under the weight of snow in past years,  been cut down to a stump and regrown from that so I'm sure it'll recover from the ground wrenching removal of today.   It eventually got cut up into 3 big clumps, 2 planted out by the olive tree on the pool terrace and one has gone into a big pot.  

The ground is nice and damp from the recent rain and still quite warm from the summer sun so hopefully everything will be happy.....

The lettuce seeds certainly seem to be happy as they're all up, as are the kohlrabi which went in on the 16th,  all the peas are up and the broad beans and the potatoes.  Not many of them,  just some that had sprouted indoors.  The reseeded borlotto beans are beaning, nearly enough to start picking again and the kohlrabi from the spring sowing are still producing a couple a week.  They should have finished by now but I didn't thin them out enough and I think they've been slow to swell because of the overcrowding. 

I've started planting onion bases again -  that is when we remember to cut the bottom off  the onion before halving it!   They have started to put out shoots now,  I wrote about free onions a couple of years ago  and they started off well then and each base grew into 3 or 4 sections.   But when I divided them up they died.  So this time I'm leaving them,   better to have small onions than none at all. 

Sunrise over Sierra Gador.

9 times out of 10 I take the camera out when I go dog-walking but yesterday I forgot.  As we went up through Montenegro and got to the chapel the sun was rising and it was the most spectacular sunrise I'd seen for ages.  But no camera and my phone is just a phone, it doesn't do fancy things like photos.


This morning I made sure I had the camera although it didn't look like it was going to be a good sunrise, not as many streaky clouds today.  But I took a couple of pics just in case, the first at 8am, the second at 8.03 a little further up the hill and wow!