Rain rain go away....

2009 will go down as a dry year in Candeleda. According to one of my favourite sites
http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=IAVILACA1
for the first 11 months of 2009 we only had 525mm of rainfall, normally we can expect 1200mm. Then along came December, especailly the last two weeks of December, while we have not managed to get to the 1200mm level we have at least filled our wells, which almost petered out this autumn. Normally we can expect about 100mm of rain in December, so far we have had 350mm.

In the old days when the fields surrounding our house where "productive" the local farmes used to irrigate their plots by flooding the land. This was facilitated by irrigation ditches which where constructed along the edges of the plots of land. These ditches are now generally dry I have only seen the one that bounds our land full of water on three occasions, the last time was in December 2006. Today the ditches are full the house is surrpunded by these little streams, as one of my neighours put it we live in the Candeledan version of Venice, a bit exagerated but nice anyway.

This photo shows the stream which appears after heavy persistant rain, the ditch is not visible but is where the stream disappears at the pottom of the photo. While December 2006 was not an especially wet month, 117mm, it followed on from a wet November, 376mm



The dam is also filling up. It's capacity is of 82 Hm3, by the third week of december it had 16Hm3 of water, this was well belowd the average, in just two weeks it has gone to 48Hm3, this is well above the average for the last 10 years. http://www.embalses.net/pantano-1085-rosarito.html

What is it with windows.

No don't worry this isn't an attack on a certain well know operating system, it's about the real thing, you know those things you look out of, or if you are so inclined, look into.

When we built El Sequero, we concionsuly choose to have large, very large, windows.

The problem is that more than one bird has come to an untimely end flying throught what it considered to be an empty space, only to come to a sudden stop, an much unexpected stop.

This weekend while I was enjoying a hard earned lying, another thump on the window announced that another bird had just discoverd, in this case to late that, what is not there is actually a window.

I managed to identify the bird as a Red-breasted Flycatcher (Ficedula parva)

140...... and counting
140 What you might ask.
140 trees ...

that I have so far planted in the bottom field. This field was, up until this summer, open to the local goat herder.

Now it's fenced off and with all the rains we've had the little trees are off to a good start, if we don't run them over with the lawn mower, or cut them to shreds with the whippersnipper then we should have a lovely forest, in about 30 years! I hope to show you photos...

It's finished!
Given the date you might be forgiven for believing that I'm referring the summer holidays. Well yes they are also, unfortunately, over, but I'm actually referring to a fundamentally deeper significant event.

On Tuesday the 25th of August I finished fencing the perimeter of the property. Loud applause please, or reverent awe if you are religiously inclined.

Ok, so this might not sound like such a big deal to those, less unfortunate mortals, who have never had to dig umteen holes, then lug posts and cement to fill in the holes and then finally drag 100 meter roles of mesh and tie it said posts, but believe me this is a momentous milestone.

It's taken me over two years to complete. Ok so I wasn't working on this full time, but even so it has been a long haul. In all I think I've hung approximately 600 meters of meshed wiring, some 300 posts and 150 wheelbarrows of cement (it seemed like and probably was more).

For a complete novice I was, initially, pleasantly surprised at the fact that I had managed to run a straight line and that the mesh wasn't sagging in places like geriatric cow's udder. As the project progressed I even permitted myself the luxury of criticizing those fences put up by the local "professionals".

Then I started to fence a stretch of about 200 hundred meters of, flat, completely unimpeded land, the rest of the fence actually meanders like a lost stream through oaks, ash, European hackberry, hawthorns and of course rocks of all shapes, sizes and dispositions.

A doddle, I hear you say, and so I thought to myself. When I finally finished that section a neighbor (the same one who actually inspired me to start this mad folly), kindly commented that strong winds makes it difficult to keep the posts straight. Winds had little to do with it. I'm still surprised that despite the fact that I had a nice straight rope to mark where the posts had to go and that I used a spirit level to make sure everything was "straightish", I don't believe I managed to get three posts in line, oh well I justified to myself, "I'm not a professional and even if it is crooked at least it will keep out the sheep, goats and cows out, which is the reason I put the damn thing up."

It's finished, the great fence of El Sequero.

I'll post some photos for you to admire and wonder over, when I get over the post fencing depression, that is surely to set in once I recover from the physical exertion.

I might even have more time now to post here more frequently, puns intended.

A weed by any-other name

El Sequero is relatively rich in plant life, and this despite the fact that numerous generations of goats, sheep, cows and well, or otherwise, meaning humans have tried their best to eat, cut or burn down everything within physical reach.

The other day I serendipitously identified one of the plants that grows on the property. The locals had mentioned it a numerous occasions, always in a surprised tones. Personally I had considered it a bit of a weed, tough as nails, unforgiving "leaves" (it turns out they are modified stems) with sharp spikes that reminded you of the advantages of wearing gloves when pottering about the garden and nothing except it's evergreen nature, in even those harshest moments of the year, to recommend it. I had half played around with the idea of planting it as a low growing hedge and half with pulling it out mercilessly whenever I came across it.



The discovery was made over breakfast while browsing through my copy of "Guide to trees and shrubs of the Iberian peninsula and the Baleares Islands". Eureka! The shrub is known as Butcher's broom (Ruscus aculeatus) and it has some very interesting medicinal properties, apart from being almost indestructible. Those who want to learn more about this shrub can follow this link http://www.botanical.com/botanical/mgmh/b/brobut71.html





I now see it in a different light and have started transplanting a few specimens to areas where it can grow unimpeded (ie where I won't run over by the lawn mower and where Maria Jose won't cut it down with the brush cutter, to form a low hedge.

The weekend has past however the good news is that I'm still at "El Sequero", the bad news is that Maria Jose and Nicol aren't here. One has gone to visit customers and the other is attending her end of course camp, I'll let you figure out who is doing what. So I'm home alone for the week, well actually not quite alone, Indy is with me.

So what's new on the farm?

Firstly a year after asking the local blacksmith, for a quote to but bars on the "windows" of the real sequero, they have finally come to the party. Now if anyone needs to poke arround they 'll need to jump the fence, this means only the more athletically inclined or the down right persistent will be able to get in and have a look around.

While on the subject of the real sequero, I've applied to the local council for a permit to have it re-roofed, the beams are rotting away and one day it will come down on someone, it's only taken them two months to send someone down to verify my claims. They arrived this morning, mumbled something about the paperwork being inaccurate but agreed that the roof was unsafe. Whether this is enough for me to get the permit or whether we have to go and speak directly with he mayor, which is how most things get done here, only time will tell. When Einstein said that time was relative, he had local municipal authorities in mind.

So why do I call it the "real sequero" and what am I actually referring to? If you take a look at the topographical map of the property, which I posted last week, you will see that there is a structure in the bottom left hand corner. This structure is a small building of about 90 square meters.
This building was used to dry tobacco leaves and in Spanish the word dry is secar which when converted to a noun becomes sequero. So when I mention the "real sequero" I'm referring to the building in the lower left hand corner of the property.

This photo was taken in 2006, the last and only time it has snowed in Candeleda for the past 40 years!



We have taken the name and use it to refer to the property in general and our house in particular. It is not I might add a particularly novel choice, the area around Candeleda is known for it's tobacco plantations and also for the paprika plantations. Both plants go through a drying out process which explains the plethora of sequeros peppered (I couldn't resist that one) throughout the countryside.


In fact the term sequero has such a close links to the area that the local council choose it for the name of the recently restored tourist information center, the fact it was an actual sequero probably had something to do with and not just a case of copy cats, as my daughter would have you believe. To be fair, our real sequero is a concrete structure, about 50 years old, the real thing is generally smaller and made of rock or mud bricks and much older.



So now you know why I distinguish between "el sequero" and the "real sequero".

We didn't go to El Sequero this weekend, so I thought I would take this opportunity to go over some background. I'll do this on a regular basis as there are a number of things that I want to document and we can't always go to El Sequero

Let's start by locating the house.


As you can see from this map Candeleda is about 200 Km south west of Madrid. The house itself is about 5 Km south of the town.






A closeup image of the property (outlined in black) shows, La Garganta de Santa Maria to the west, and just visible to the south is river El Tietar which feeds a small dam called El Rosarito.

The white material you can see are boulders, which make up the bed of La Garganta de Santa Maria (in geographical terms a "Garganta" is a gorge or a ravine (garganta literally means throat), although at this point it is actually quite flat, so neither term is all that appropriate. I'm sure there is a technical term for the flat end of a ravine, but I'll leave that up to the geologists among you to let me know what it is).

To give you an idea of size, our house is approximately 500m north of the river, there is a dirt road that leads to the junction between the river and the Garganta, we actually go swimming there in summer.



This is a topographical map of the property, it shows the house, the black object in the top center of the property and a real sequero (more on that in another issue) in the bottom left corner. As you can see the property is in the shape of a "B". The top half of the "B" is where we spend most of our time, we let a local goat herder use the lower half for his goats. Hopefully we will finish fencing this part soon and that will allow us to plan trees there.

This weekend was a long weekend, as was probably the case in most of Europe, May the 1st, May day, Labour day, call it what you will, it meant one more day to spend in El Sequero!

When we arrived we found, to our surprise, that one of the two rhododendrons that I planted last year was beginning to flower, a dark red. The pity is that we won't see it in full bloom as that will probably be sometime this week and we won't be there.

Maria Jose and I spent the better part of Friday mowing the grass. The "lawn" mower which I bought last month has really made an impact on the appearance of the meadow next to the house. Last year it was overgrown with wildflowers and tall grasses. Maria Jose, May and I took turns at cutting it down with the brush cutter. This generally took several days then the grass had to be raked and deposited somewhere out of the way, usually the job of my mother or anyone else who happens to be staying and is foolish enough to ask "Can I help?". Now the job is done in a day and a bit and the best thing is we only have to do this every other weekend.

Given the everything was so nice and trim, our "sandpit" had began to stand out like a sore thumb. It was originally put there over a year ago by the workmen for their use in building the entrance. We had expected to use it up with the odd jobs we do around the house, but one year later and the thing is still there, much to the amusement of the families younger members and Bilbo (May's dog), who sits there surveying his domains and keeping guard when May is not around. Maria Jose decided it was time to transfer the pile of sand to a more discrete location.



Now we just have wait for the grass to grow and hide the eyesore, where once there had been a sandcastle, of sorts.

I decided to start this blog, not so much with the idea of getting others to comment or share in my meanderings, please feel free to do so, but to chronicle the development of "El Sequero". In particular to document the daily events of life in the Spanish countryside. I say "life", but in fact it is not quite the right term. While I would love to be able to say that I live in El Sequero, the truth is that I only spend weekends, holidays and the occasional sojourn. So what follows will be fragmented snapshots of what happened/is happening or is being planned.

Paul

El Sequero

28th of April 2009