Today is a fiesta here, it still feels strange to take a bank holiday on a Tuesday but the Spanish take them on which ever day they fall. I have decided to start work on the garden at the ruin, yesterday I bought some serious tools and was I getting some strange looks as I paid for a combination of machetes, scythes etc at the check out of the FT in Tias.
Josh decided that he wanted to come up and make sure his mum didn’t hurt herself with these tools. I was also a bit stressed thinking that we could seriously harm ourselves with this kit, so we went armed with our first aid kit and mobile phone for any emergency.
We pulled up in the road outside which now has a white line on it so we’re not supposed to park there so our first job was to clear the old wall which had been knocked down by accident when they resurfaced the road, they have rebuilt a new wall but left the old wall in the garden. The rubble was in pieces too big to carry so we began by throwing smaller bricks at the wall to break it up and eventually we we were able to clear the drive to park the car in. Where the council have rebuilt the wall they have left the entrance too narrow to get the cars in and out properly so unfortunately we will have to take a metre or so of the wall down again so we can pull in in one go instead of a 3 point turn.
My next job to tackle was the huge rubber tree in the front garden, it was growing over the pathway to the front door, and so we got out the saws and cut off the lower branches so that you can walk underneath. This tree is lovely, it provides big green leaves and welcome shade, I can imagine sitting underneath it on a blanket on a hot summer’s day.
Whilst we were walking there was a steady trickle of local villagers walking past, they were all very friendly taking an interest in what we were doing and shouting ‘buenos dias’ as they passed. Josh was stopped by his friends from school a few times to see how he was and they tried hard to persuade him to join them but he stayed with me – still not convinced that his mum would be alright on her own.
After tackling the tree we decided to work on the camel sheds which we are converting to be our house, we had promised Jenny and Norman that we would leave the main house for them to clear when they were back on the island. There are two huge cacti in front of what will be our lounge that need clearing so we started with our machetes to cut down the prickly plants. The cutting of the new cactus is fairly easy, although the older part of the plant is harder like wood, we soon had a pile of cactus building up and then realised that we would need a wheel barrow to move it to another part of the garden. We took a break and drove down to the garage at Arrieta, as well as being a petrol station it is a large supermarket and DIY shop and is used frequently by all the residents in the area. They did have a wheel barrow so we loaded up the car and headed back to the ruin.
We chopped and barrowed the cacti for an hour or so and then our hands were hurting from gripping the tools, we stood back and looked at the cactus – it still looked as big and daunting as when we had started, it was only by looking at the growing pile of cuttings that we could see just how much work we had done. We decided we’d done enough for today and headed home for a well deserved lunch.