Hungerford allotment blog - grow your own, harvesting and vegetarian cooking. Enjoying allotment wildlife, weather and other things that catch my attention.
Enjoying time on the Marsh Lane Allotment site in Hungerford, Berkshire.
A record of successes, failures and a handy reminder for me.
From 2017 each post title brings a song to add a little extra music to the world - enjoy!
The huge amounts of rain that the island experienced in Spring - as did we - has clearly been appreciated by the plants. Here are just a few of the lovely, unusual and colourful plants we came across - some along pathways, some in the Puerto de la Cruz Botanic Garden and others in the Sitio Litre Orchid Garden.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen flowers this amazing turquoise colour before. It was a really impressive plant and so tall that I couldn’t get a close-up.
Turquoise Puya flowers
These dazzling rubbery flowers were growing as ground cover between the trees in the botanic garden.
Billbergia pyramidalis
This beautiful shrub was scrambling over the wall from a private garden but the large shrubs are planted in communal parks too. Covered in multi-coloured blooms.
Lantana Camara
This spike was over 6 feet tall growing from the centre of some sort of bromeliad that we're more used to seeing as houseplants in Britain. The Botanic Garden really is like a land of the giants!
There was a whole forest of them surrounding the impossibly huge alien of a tree - a type of fig, but it looks like a monstrous rubber plant.
Ficus Macrophylla
This is such a beautiful colour, creeping over fences and walls around the town.
Thunbergia
And this is another stunner in the Botanic Gardens.
Mexican Butterfly Weed
The Orchid Garden is a peaceful little garden near our apartments. It’s the garden of a beautiful colonial style house where Agatha Christie stayed whilst in Puerto de la Cruz. The orchid displays are very pretty and the general gardens are lovely to stroll or sit.
Plus there’s a nice little cafe, koi pond and two friendly cats 😊
We arrived in Tenerife for the Canarias Day celebrations - a fun evening listening to a Canarian folk band and seeing the locals in their traditional dress. Then walking back to the apartment through the lively night-time streets.
After so many years we finally visited Loro Parque, where we spent the day for Jamie's birthday.
Tourists
It was a good day though the areas for the larger animals (especially the gorillas) were a bit sad. We didn't attend any of the animal 'shows' but enjoyed seeing the penguins, fish, coral and giant tortoises as well as the cute golden tamarins.
When we returned to the apartment we enjoyed a free birthday bottle of Cava at the bar.
Cheers!
Our lovely holiday is almost over and we're leaving the day the Pope arrives - he’s not having our apartment 🤭 he’s visiting La Laguna which is a nearby town before going to the capital.
We bought this interesting tea - it's very nice; haven't found a bindweed tea yet though! We’re looking forward to seeing what else is growing on the allotment - wondering if our sweetcorn and sunflowers have emerged yet. It seems there has been a lot of rain at home but looks like the weather may cheer up for our return - yay!
We left rainy England in February and flew off to Tenerife - yay! Our first visit since February 2020 (immediately prior to Covid lockdown).
Look at Mount Teide rising above the clouds to greet us
We had a 5th floor apartment this time which gave us a great view for nosing over the apartments, pool and bar …
and over the rooftops to the sea and a big sky. We saw a couple of fabulous rainbows and a few starry nights, but missed the lunar eclipse.
When the clouds dispersed the temperature rose by about 5 degrees to the low 20s. We even went in the pool, though it turns out post-stroke swimming was a more traumatic experience than we’d expected - luckily post-stroke lounging is fine. There were quite a few rainy days, more than expected but some of the downpours were spectacular.
The plants were loving it. This bush was so beautiful in one of the parks with the Sun on it - Croton apparently.
And these yellow delights along the sea front - some sort of day lillies.
There are several flowered trees which stand out as they’re so stunning but the jacarandamimosiflora is one of my favourites even before the most beautiful lilac flowers appear in the Summer. The foliage and huge seed pods create such a decorative canopy.
The nearby barranco actually had water pouring through like a river on a couple of days and the plant growth there is fabulous, with tree versions of what we consider houseplants - palms, umbrella plant and rubber trees. And the ever-present bougainvillea, such a gorgeous splash of colour.
The weather produced some huge waves which we could hear crashing against the rocks from our apartment. The red flags were out and even the surfers didn’t risk it. The little red crabs were clinging to the rocks for dear life.
We even saw a few land snails, a bit different from our common snails. I don’t think we’ve seen them in Tenerife before but perhaps they felt safe to roam because the only lizards we saw were tiny ones.
We saw and heard a lot of local birds including the African blue tit, Island Canary and parakeets. And we saw the swifts arrive - these are likely making their way up past Africa to Northern Europe, so maybe they’ll appear over the allotment soon! All too fast to photograph so here’s a pigeon showing off fancy feet with painted nails 😃
It was a different holiday from our usual - no bus rides to visit other towns and no long hikes but we walked into Puerto de la Cruz most days to shop, people-watch and enjoy coffee and cakes. We also ate ant our favourite vegetarian cafe, El Limon, so pleased to see they’re still open.
The thing about Casablanca Apartments is that they’re on a steep hill, so any direction we walk includes steps - soo many steps …
Or slopes - some very steep ones! We bought Jamie hiking sticks, which helped a lot, but we still had to resort to a taxi up the hill one day - it was worth it!
Most evenings we enjoyed on our balcony (I had to buy a jumper!), entertainment in the bar or in the games room.
Is it mean to say that Jamie’s stroke has levelled the playing field a bit for pool games? I lose a few less now🤭 And I won first place in the car racing game (just in case he’s reading this 🏆)
Suffice to say we had a lovely break from the monotony of February.
We returned home to fog but see more signs to encourage us to think of Spring and I seem to have brought quite a bit of food back home to keep the holiday dream alive. Mmm, cactus jam and Rooibos tea - yum!
Oh, and did I mention? We’re going back in June - well, as we’re both retired.. and hopefully see a bit more sunshine. Better get working on that allotment next week!
Ohhh, what a holiday we had! Such a lovely time to leave the UK and fly off to our favourite place - Puerto de la Cruz, Tenerife, of course.
We were lucky to get there; the severe calima (dust storm) had stopped flights two days before and the island is now in shutdown due to the coronavirus. The calima was the worst the island had seen in 30 years and the 100km winds caused a lot of damage with huge trees and branches felled. The big clear-up was happening while we were there.
The calima caused some of the carnival to be postponed, which actually worked out well for us (sorry to be selfish). We've never been to the famous Puerto de la Cruz carnival before but it was GREAT fun, with events running day and night (though we didn't stay to any that ended at 6am!).
The first event on Ash Wednesday was 'The burial of the sardine'. A huge crowd gathered and then we followed the giant papier mache fish through the town; up and down the hills dancing along to the fabulous drummers.
This was the 'funeral parade' and locals were dressed in funeral garb and swooning/crying dramatically along the way. It was very funny.
At the end of the parade, the giant fish was carried to the beach and burned on its funeral pyre while fireworks ended the evening.
We visited the capital, Santa Cruz, for a day.
It's a working port, with cruise ships as well as freight. I love this photo with the mountains in the background and the lido in the foreground as well as the auditorium.
This lovely Market (mercado municipal nuestra señora de Africa) was a nice place to stop for a drink and a snack. Look at all that lovely produce!
Look at all those potatoes! Looks like a Potato Day :-)
It was very hot walking about but we enjoyed the palmetum (an arboretum with different palms from around the world). It was planted up on a pile of waste in 1995!
We saw some hoopoes, but didn't manage to get a photo unfortunately, so this picture will have to do.
We had 'recovery day's between trips. I love these steps in Puerto de la Cruz - they're big on Agatha Christie as she stayed there a lot.
And there were plenty more carnival events back in Puerto, including hundreds of crazy men, in very high heels, running an obstacle course through the cobbled streets.
That event drew huge crowds - it seems the spanish really love drag! But remember, if you're ever attending anything in Spain... 8pm start means 10:30 :-D
Personally it was the drumming bands that I loved the most.
And the costumes, so imaginative and colourful.
The Carnival Queen float was beautiful.
But the runner up's wasn't bad either!
And so many in the crowd were dressed up, so we were glad we took our wigs with us :-)
We took a bus to La Oratova, up the mountain from Puerto, it was exhausting - so many hills - but plenty of plazas to just sit and watch the world go by.
The Botanic Garden was closed because of fallen trees, but we didn't see much damage in the town.
Tenerife towns are kept very tidy by street cleaners but they had their work cut out with all the palm branches which were down and piled up along the roads. And bougainvillia multi-coloured leaves were piled everywhere, but some flowers were left on the trees - so beautiful.
We visited our favourite beach (Playa de Bollullo).
A long walk from our apartments but worth it. Sad to see the damage that the calima had caused to the banana plantations though they should recover and there were plenty of bananas being harvested. The sea was too rough to swim - It gave me a good excuse because I can't stand the cold water anyway!
The evenings were a bit chilly for me, so I was glad I'd taken a jacket, but the days were generally about 23° with a couple hitting 29° <phew>
We had a final carnival parade, which was postponed from the calima weekend, so that people could make the best use of their costumes I suppose.
We spent a lot of time sitting by the sea, enjoying the heat, watching the big waves, surfers and
generally people-watching - love this old chap with his dog and his life in his case.
We do love Puerto de la Cruz.
I hope we can make it back there quite soon. There are so many more bus rides to take us to towns that we haven't visited yet. And we really need to get back up Mount Teide!
Sorry this post has gone on a bit but it was such a fabulous holiday! It felt like much longer than 2 weeks and we certainly did a lot of walking - much more than we do when we're not 'relaxing'!
Our thoughts are definitely with the poor people who are finding their flights cancelled and some flights turned away half way to their destination - how awful. Let's hope the virus moves on quickly and things can get back to normal quite soon. The blog title song is provided by Ed Sheeran.
