My Black Friday

Normally, I resolve not to buy anything on Black Friday, but this year I found a deal I couldn´t resist.

I now have 5 40-pound sacks of horse manure spread between the garden beds and the compost heap.  Going back for  more today.  At 1€ a sack, all you can fill, I can´t pass it up.

And I didn´t have to stand in line at midnght.

Hedges and Fences and Gates, oh my

Our pasture is rhombus shaped, closed in on the fourth side by the barn.  Three sides are hedges, trees and overgrown shrubs.  In some places there are scraps of fence, or someone has tried some rudimentary hedge-laying, in other places it´s just weedy tree tangles, like the thickets of bay laurel.

 west 

With an eye to keeping chickens and dogs in, and to keep out some very nervy neighbors from loosing their hounds through our place on their way to hunt rabbits, we´ve been turning over the idea of enclosing with fencing.  At the very minimum, we´ll need to shut off the driveway and alongside the house at the lane.  But the property is impossible to really secure, and I´m not really interested in creating a puppy penitentiary anyway.

north

flailed

Last week the guy who works the pasture next door whacked off the hedge to the south using some kind of flail, so anything planted will have to be inside that line.  I like the idea of productive hedges with nuts, fruits, flowers for the bees etc.  There will need to be some filling in of gaps, and pruning back.  There are a couple of small oaks I´m thinking of pollarding.  Another ongoing project for the list.

south, pretty closed

 Anyone know of a source for small, bareroot hedging plants in Spain?  Hazelnuts, crabapples, holly, willow, etc?

Otherwse, I´ve been out gathering leaves from around the lane.  They´ll be calling me the ¨loca de las hojas¨.  We fired up the wood cookstove for the first time over the weekend.  Not bad, no heating bills from Easter to almost Thanksgiving.  The fruits are soaking in brandy to make Christmas puddings next week.

And the autumn light is like no other.

 

La Lagoa de Sobrado

We went looking for an equestrian center rumored to have manure for sale, but took a wrong turn and ended up someplace else.

That someplace else is the Lagoa de Sobrado, close to the Monastery of Sobrado dos Monxes.  And for good reason, it was constructed by the Cistercian monks around 1500!  They used it for irrigation, powering water mills, and stocked it with trout for the monk´s table.

It was ceded to the Galician Society of Natural History in 1992 and is an important spot for flora and fauna, especially water birds.

There´s a little turn off area with a hut, a picnic table and a small dock of somewhat doubtful structural integrity and a path we didn´t have time to explore.

The Monastery itself is an imposing structure with an incredible façade.  We were there for a local festival once, but the deep fried trout didn´t look particularly appetizing and it was so packed with locals there was no place to sit.  Also, I should warn visitors that the visiting hours for the monastery were idiosyncratic and limited and we didn´t get the best impression of the cleanliness of the facilities or the welcome of the monk-in-charge on the day.  But, they raise Spanish mastiffs, so they can´t be all bad.

More on the Monastery here.
Video in gallego of the mastiffs on Galician TV here.  (Mastiffs 6:51, puppies 14:19)

La Feira dos Santos

On November 1 every year there´s a market in Monterroso, just down the road a piece. They´ve been holding it for 500 years so it´s popular this time of year.

It was an absolutely magnificent fall day, and V just got back from another business trip, so we decided to have a day out.  We really should get out more.

Monterroso is an attractive small town, with a big church, and lots of winding streets and little plazas where the vendors set up.

A central building was where a lot of the food was for sale, but lots of people were selling produce all over. I´ve never seen so many sacks of chestnuts in my life, I think this must be a bumper year. And garlic, oh so much garlic.

Also, artisan crafts and gear.  One of these would suit anyone´s homemade hooch needs.

And poultry.  There were chickens, ducks, geese, songbirds, pea hens, game birds, even a peacock. (and puppies!!) The roosters were giant! I had no idea.

Then we hiked over to the livestock area, about a mile down the road.  Again, a there was a little of everything.  Quite a few cattle, as you would expect from a dairy province, horses, ponies and donkeys.

Sales mostly seem to be run by middle men, who make a living buying and selling animals all around at fairs.  They all look to be between 50 and 70, very weathered, and stand around leaning on the fences smoking, looking canny and wielding big sticks.  Let´s just say I would never, never, ever dare buy a used car from one of them.

On the other side were pigs, goats and sheep.  No unusual breeds, though I can´t identify the black and white sheep.  Someone was getting out of the goat business - there was a big group on offer.  One little goat in particular was just stunning - long eared and long haired, slender like a gazelle and the color of a labrador retriever.  So pretty.  You´ll have to take my word for it since there doesn´t appear to be a picture.

And a huge sow - how anyone got her home, I don´t know.

By this time we were actually sweating, so we stopped for a beer in a terraza. We were planning to get the traditional boiled octopus and potatoes but despite the large areas under tents set up, there were long, long lines of people waiting to get in. So we made our purchases and headed back to Melide and had some local pulpo a feira and were tired but happy after our day out.

Now I really have to figure out our fencing.  Puppies!!  Chickens!!