WHETHER you're green-fingered or can't keep a plastic cactus alive, moving to Spain is likely to change your long-held assumptions about your plant-growing abilities, and completely unsettle 50% of everything you knew about anything horticultural.
The other 50% will turn out to be exactly the same as in your native country, just when you'd resigned yourself to having to relearn it all.
But if you're only fair-to-middling in terms of the shrub-care skills ranking, you probably won't even be able to predict which bits are radically different and which bits are radically identical until you've been here for a year and seen how your greenery pans out in every season.
And then been here a second year, to check last year wasn't fluke.
Or perhaps a third year, to work out the majority pattern.
Easy greenery for the unskilled: Bury a tomato
If you're convinced you're a cretin in the cultivation department, bury some vegetables and pop them out in the sun, watering them whenever the soil feels dry and perhaps flinging some evergreen plant-feed on the roots (it costs about €3 in a Chinese bazaar). This sounds slapdash and over-simplified, but if you've only ever lived in apartments, it may be all you can handle – and you're probably good at lots of other things, so there's no shame in it.
Even if you don't get actual tomatoes and peppers, you should get a plant, they're typically low-maintenance other than constant watering, grow like weeds, and keep re-shooting after they appear to have died. Tomato plants thrive best in spring and early summer in a sunny environment, but high summer is too harsh for them and by September or October, any fruit you didn't get probably isn't going to happen until next year. Pepper plants may look as though they're not going to play until, suddenly, just as autumn unfolds, so do they, blooming with white flowers that become juicy green bulbs in days.
Many new residents in Spain, or holiday-home owners who know they will be away from their property for months at a time, opt for low-maintenance ornamental plants like cacti and aloe vera. These either shrivel up at the first sign of incompetent care or appear to be indestructible – if the former is the case, replacements are cheap to buy in every size from golf-ball to beach-ball, and on sale almost everywhere.
Read full article at thinkSPAIN.com