Making a garden

16 - 24 Jan 2016

 There is very little top soil on our acre.  We need time to build soil fertility, and to clear areas for planting, but the first step, we decided, was to get some 'Kopria' - (Greek for manure) to help along the process.

We tracked down someone who keeps a goat farm on the mainland, and tried to buy 28 sacks for 100 euros, but he refused, and offered us 30 sacks for 90 euros - as the Greeks say with a shrug 'What can we do?'

The farmer turned up very promptly, and he and his daughter happily unloaded 30 kilo sacks like they were feather pillows.  He spoke only Greek, but had curly ginger hair and beard, and would have looked at home in Southern Ireland.  The Kopria was top quality, well rotted, lovely black gold.

 Thirty stuffed sacks, ready to be wheelbarrowed down the hill.

 The outcome of my surveying attempts last month - a 1 cm to 1 metre scale plan of the land.  The coloured circles are repositionable trees and shrubs as I attempt to work out where to fit everything we'd like to have into the space available.

 This is our bed for annual vegetables, it is the area we cleared for potatoes a few years ago, and have since mulched with straw.  Now we have a week of chilly weather, too cold for plaster to cure properly in, so we're setting it up again.  First Dave rotovated it, while I retrieved some old boards left behind when the Winnebago left, to construct a series of raised beds.  Incredibly, we had made the beds a random length which turned out to be 4.8m - the exact length of the boards.  It is weird when that happens.

 Here are some of the beds ready to be screwed together, and piles of mulch to go over the manure.  The land is alive with wild iris at the moment, and we had to take some care not to crush them.

One still, clear night, I caught this corona round the full moon

Some works are going on on our road down to Nidri.  One day we saw this decorated branch stuck into the sand heap - an unexpected quirk of whimsy from the road crew, it would seem.