Lettuce Pray

You know I always thought that was the response in Mass when I was a child, and therefore assumed Salad to be a Holy meal - thought of it yesterday as we were weeding a little in preparation for our Vegetable garden at a nearby Finca here in Las Alpujarras, Andalucia.

Gardening in Spain is not all sunshine and Enormous Turnips - the hard baked 'soil' makes for an unforgiving place for plants to live, and then you have water cuts, torrential rain when it does decide to come down, and finally when the little juicy shoots appear the jabali - Wild Boar - decide a Midnight Feast is on their sleepover calendar. But, it's better to grow your own than sustain the nasty owners of the plastic greenhouses on the coast, and of course, it always tastes better when you know where it's from.

Well, we completed our days' real work yesterday and set to weeding, it was actually less work than previously thought as the patch was ploughed last year, and we had planted but gave up over a water shortage of several days. Raking weeding and levelling is made easier at the moment as we are having unseasonably cold weather for May, so we finished a good starting area of some 20 sq m. It's also made a good deal simpler by handing the hoe to Stan and watching him do it.

Bouyed by 'our' success, we decided on a trip into 'town' (a one horse village) and fetched some ready made plugs of Cauliflower, Cucumber, Peppers, Chard, Tomato and the aforementioned Divine Lettuce and came back and plonked them in with a good watering, .....hopefully when we drop by today we won't pass any Porky Porcines carrying salad dressing.....

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