Blog
Gardening explained for the climate here
Most of what you read about gardening is written for a climate that isn’t ours. Here it hardly ever freezes, summer lasts four months and the air carries salt. That changes the dates, the plants and the watering.
Mediterranean garden
Strelitzia nicolai in the garden: what the houseplant guides don’t tell you
Guides treat it as a living-room plant. In a coastal garden, with 0.2 days of frost a year, it becomes a clump of trunks 6 to 8 metres tall.
6 min read
Pruning calendar
When to prune roses on the Costa del Sol: in January, not March
Guides say February or March because you have to wait for the frosts to pass. Granada gets 48 days of frost a year; Málaga, 0.2. Here roses are pruned in January.
6 min read
Natural lawns and turf
When to sow grass seed on the Costa del Sol: October for winter grass, May for Bermuda grass
Guides say spring or autumn. Here, winter grass is sown in October: 269 mm of rain follow in three months. Seed sown in April gets 26 until July.
6 min read
Mediterranean garden design
Xeriscaping: a garden that loses little if one year you can’t water it
It isn’t a garden of stones and cacti: it’s one that lives almost on the rain alone and keeps watering for a small patch. Here it showed in 2023, when watering gardens with drinking water was banned.
5 min read
Artificial grass: buying decisions
Artificial grass on a terrace: what’s underneath that you can’t see
You can, and on this coast it’s where a good share of it goes. But the waterproofing is underneath, it isn’t drilled, and on a penthouse the water, heat, wind and salt matter too.
6 min read
Palms and plant health
The palm borer moth: the palm pest that isn’t the red palm weevil
A large moth with orange hindwings whose larva bores into the palmito, the Chusan palm and the Canary palm. It leaves arcs of holes in the leaves and fibre plugging the trunk, and it isn’t the weevil.
6 min read
Lawn care
Scarifying a lawn: when it’s due here, and when it isn’t needed
Only if the thatch is more than about a centimetre thick, and while the grass is growing: on this coast, winter grass now, in October, and summer grass in late spring.
6 min read
Pruning calendar
When to prune a fig tree, and how not to lose the brebas
In winter and bare, yes. But on a breba fig, next summer’s breba is already on last year’s branches, and tipping them, as is often done, loses it.
6 min read
Olive and fruit trees
When to prune a lemon tree, and what comes off in any month
Pruned lightly, from February to April, and not in summer. What does come off in any month is suckers: the ones below the graft are another plant.
6 min read
Mediterranean garden
When to plant tulips on the Costa del Sol, and why they go in the fridge first
Planted in October, as inland, they give leaves and a low flower or none. Here you buy them now, give them weeks in the fridge and plant them in December.
6 min read
Olive and fruit trees
When to pick avocados from the garden, and why they don’t ripen on the tree
On the tree it doesn’t soften: you pick it hard and it ripens in the kitchen. When Bacon, Fuerte and Hass are due, and the fruit test to tell whether yours is ready.
6 min read
Pruning calendar
How to prune lavender: when, depending on which you have, and where to cut
Fringed, Spanish and English lavender flower at different times and are pruned in their own. The cut always goes in the leafy part: from bare wood it barely regrows.
6 min read
Palms and plant health
Geranium bronze butterfly: why it stays on the coast and what to do
A South African butterfly whose caterpillar eats geraniums from the inside. On the coast it can last the winter, and spraying the outside doesn’t reach it: it’s removed by cutting.
6 min read
Efficient irrigation
Pressure-compensating drippers: when you need them and when you don’t
On a slope, the same programme overwaters the bottom plant and underwaters the top one. What a pressure-compensating dripper fixes, what it doesn’t, and the cup test to tell.
6 min read
What it costs
Land clearing cost: what weighs more than the square metres
The square metres say little about the price of a clearance. What decides it is what grows, the slope, the access and what happens to the cuttings, the half that gets forgotten.
6 min read
Lawn care
Lawn fungus in autumn: why it appears now and what to change in the watering
Overnight mushrooms and patches that spread in a circle are two different things. The one that harms the lawn appears in October because of how it’s watered.
7 min read
Artificial grass: buying decisions
Artificial grass for dogs: why it smells in summer and what to check before you buy
With a dog, artificial grass ends the mud and the yellow patches. What it brings instead is the August smell, and that’s decided before you buy, by what goes underneath.
6 min read
Pruning calendar
When to prune on the Costa del Sol: a month-by-month calendar
The pruning calendars going round the internet are made for a climate that isn’t ours. Here it almost never freezes and summer lasts from June to September, and that changes the dates of almost everything.
7 min read
Efficient irrigation
How much to water the garden in summer on the Costa del Sol
“How many days between waterings?” is the wrong question. What decides it is how much water your soil holds and how much it’s losing, and you check that with a screwdriver.
8 min read
Palms and plant health
Red palm weevil: how to tell if your palm is affected
By the time the palm looks bad, the pest has been inside for months. The signs that do arrive in time are different ones, and you see them by looking at the crown for two minutes every fortnight.
7 min read
Mediterranean garden
Why here you plant in autumn, not in spring
Spring is a good time to plant where the enemy is the cold. Here the enemy is July, and that turns the whole calendar upside down.
7 min read
Lawn care
Reviving a lawn after summer: what to do in September
Before you buy a bag of seed there’s one question to answer: does your lawn look bad in summer or in winter? Depending on which, the September plan is the opposite.
8 min read
Hedges and topiary
Your hedge has gone bare at the bottom: why it happens and what can be done
A hedge that loses its base isn’t fixed by cutting it harder. And if it’s cypress or thuja, which is half the hedges on this coast, it can’t be fixed at all.
8 min read
Olive and fruit trees
The olive tree that’s loaded one year and gives nothing the next
It isn’t sick and it isn’t short of water. The year it loads up with olives it spends what it needed to prepare the next one, and enters a seesaw that feeds itself.
8 min read
Community green spaces
Your community’s gardening contract: what to check before you sign
Three quotes on the table and they all seem to say the same. What separates a good one from a cheap one isn’t the price: it’s what happens when something goes off script.
9 min read
Palms and plant health
A sago palm isn’t a palm, and treating it like one is what ruins it
It’s sold as a little palm, watered like any other plant and stripped bare every spring. Those three things explain why yours hasn’t moved in years.
8 min read
Mediterranean garden
What to plant here so you’re not watering all summer
August is ending, you look at the garden and the question asks itself. The answer has less to do with the list of plants than with where you put them and what you do in the first year.
9 min read
Palms and plant health
Palm tree pruning: when it’s done here, and why not now
The good window is the cold months, and not because of the plant: because of the weevil. Every fresh cut in summer is a sign put up for it to come.
8 min read
Hedges and topiary
Which hedge to plant here, and why cypress is hardly ever the answer
Garden centres sell the fastest grower, because it screens in the first year. The trouble comes when it passes the height you can keep up with and doesn’t stop.
8 min read
Community green spaces
Tree roots are lifting the paving: what can be done and what can’t
The first reaction at the AGM is always the same: cut that root. It’s the one that causes most trouble, and it comes from believing roots grow straight down.
9 min read
Efficient irrigation
The leaves are burning at the edges, and watering more makes it worse
The edge dries out and the centre stays green. It isn’t thirst: it’s the salt each watering leaves behind, and since May it hasn’t rained enough to wash it away.
8 min read
Pruning calendar
What not to prune in autumn if you want flowers in spring
You come back in September, the garden has run wild and you cut everything back. The wisteria, the mock orange and the hydrangea already have March’s flowers made, and they go in the bag with the rest.
8 min read
Natural lawns and turf
Should you sow a lawn or lay turf?
Yes, sowing is cheaper, in materials. What you buy with turf is the three weeks in which a sown lawn can be lost entirely through one slip.
8 min read
Natural lawns and turf
What’s under the lawn decides whether it lasts
Same lawn, same watering, same garden, and one strip that goes yellow every summer in the same place. The explanation isn’t in the grass: it’s thirty centimetres down.
9 min read
Mediterranean garden design
Group plants by what they drink, not by how they look together
If the same bed holds lavender and hydrangeas, there’s no right watering programme: whatever number you set leaves one of them out. It isn’t the watering, it’s where they were planted.
9 min read
Tree felling and work at height
The stump: remove it, leave it, and why palms are different
Felling is only half the job. What’s left in the ground decides whether that bit of garden is any use again, and with a palm the rules are turned upside down.
9 min read
Garden renovation
Before you pave the garden: where the water is going to go
The question people start with is usually which material to use. The one that decides the result is another: in the first October storm, where does the water that floor no longer soaks up end up?
9 min read
Lawn care
What height to cut the lawn, and why scalping it costs you in water
The cutting height is the cheapest adjustment there is in a garden and hardly anyone touches it. Here it decides how much water you’ll have to put down for the rest of the summer.
9 min read
Vertical gardens
Vertical garden with dead plants: where they die tells you why
By the end of summer almost every vertical garden has casualties, and they aren’t spread at random. The pattern they leave on the wall is the diagnosis, and it’s worth reading before you replace anything.
8 min read
Garden renovation
Building work at home: what breaks in the garden and doesn’t show until July
Here houses get renovated in autumn and winter, with nobody in them. The garden becomes the storeroom, and what really breaks doesn’t show itself until the first summer.
8 min read
Artificial grass: buying decisions
If artificial grass puddles, the problem isn’t the grass
It’s bought in spring and spends the summer seeing no water but the hose. The first autumn storm is its first real test, and what fails is almost never the grass.
7 min read
Olive and fruit trees
Olive leaf spot is decided now, with the first rains
The spot shows in spring, so everyone looks in spring. But olive leaf spot gets in with the first autumn rains, and the garden olive on this coast makes it easy.
7 min read
Palms and plant health
The processionary nest comes off in autumn, not when they come down
Almost everyone remembers the processionary caterpillar when they see the line on the ground. By then the easy part can no longer be done: the nest comes off in autumn, and here the caterpillars come down earlier than the inland calendar says.
7 min read
Hedges and topiary
A hedge gone brown after the summer: the pattern tells you what happened
At the end of summer many hedges come out with brown patches and the first thought is a pest. It hardly ever is: where it has dried out tells you what happened, and each pattern has a different fix, or none.
7 min read
What it costs
How much it costs to prune a tree: it’s not the tree that pushes the price up
Two identical trees can get quotes that look nothing alike, and it isn’t a rip-off: what you pay for is what’s under the tree, how it’s reached and what comes down. What to ask so you can compare.
7 min read
Mediterranean garden
Winter-flowering plants: here it’s the other flowering season
Here winter isn’t the garden’s dead season: a group of plants flowers just as the rest stops. Which they are, where they don’t work, and the light that keeps a poinsettia green.
7 min read
Pruning calendar
When to prune oleander, and how to rejuvenate one that’s grown huge
Here oleander never stops growing and ends up as a wall that’s bare at the bottom with the flowers on top. When it’s pruned, how to renew it without going a year without a hedge, and why its cuttings aren’t burnt.
7 min read
Natural lawns and turf
Which grass to plant on the Costa del Sol: here you choose which season it’s green
The garden-centre bag promises green all year, and here that doesn’t exist. There’s a grass that looks good in summer and another in winter, and you choose by when you live in the house, the shade, the salt and the wear.
7 min read
Mediterranean garden design
A garden without a lawn: what to put in its place and how it copes in August
Taking out the lawn is the change that saves the most work in a garden here, but you can swap it for something worse in July. Where to keep it, what to put in the rest, and what heats up, floods or grows back.
7 min read
Olive and fruit trees
When to pick the olives on your garden olive tree (and why by hand)
There’s no single date: it depends on what you want them for. Green, turning or black, how to tell from the tree, why by hand and not with a pole, and what to do if the olive is only ornamental.
6 min read
Pruning calendar
Pruning a pine tree: when it’s done here, and why it’s never topped
The pine is the tree of half this coast and the one that takes a bad cut worst: it won’t regrow from wood without needles. What it’s pruned for, what you can’t ask of it and when to do it here.
7 min read
Mediterranean garden design
Where to plant the tree that’s going to give you shade
Almost everyone picks the spot at midday, the one time when every position looks equally good. At five o’clock only one of them works.
8 min read
Artificial grass: buying decisions
Artificial grass gets hot: where to put it and where not to
You laid it in May and by August you couldn’t walk on it. It isn’t the colour or the brand: a plant cools itself by evaporating water, and plastic has no water to evaporate.
8 min read
Tree felling and work at height
How to tell if a tree is dangerous before the first storm
The first storm hits and people always say the same thing: “but it looked perfect”. It looked green, which isn’t the same, and the signs had been there for months.
9 min read
Olive and fruit trees
The lemon tree’s leaves turn yellow and the veins stay green
The iron is already in your soil. The problem is that in chalky soil the roots can’t take it up, and that’s why the bag of iron sulphate did nothing.
8 min read
Mediterranean garden
Bougainvillea not flowering: it’s too well looked after
It’s huge, green and lovely, and won’t produce a single flower. It’s almost never lacking anything: it lacks nothing, and for this plant that takes away the urge to flower.
8 min read
Community green spaces
The urbanisation’s drains, before the first storm
The water that doesn’t go in through the grate doesn’t wait: it runs down until it finds the next low point, and on a terraced urbanisation that point usually has a door.
8 min read
What it costs
A garden tidy-up and garden maintenance aren’t the same job, or paid for the same way
In September almost everyone asks for maintenance when what they need is a tidy-up. They’re two different jobs, and putting them into the same monthly fee costs you dearly twelve months running.
8 min read
Vertical gardens
Before the vertical garden: whose wall it is and how much it weighs wet
Everyone starts with the plants. In a block of flats there are two things that come first, and both are settled with a phone call, not a catalogue.
8 min read
Artificial grass: buying decisions
Artificial grass isn’t zero maintenance: it’s different maintenance
It’s sold as needing nothing doing to it. What actually happens is that the work changes shape: the watering and mowing go, and something else comes in that nobody mentions before you sign.
8 min read
Pruning calendar
Opening up a tree all at once here scorches its bark
A tree’s crown is also its sunshade. When it’s opened up all at once, the sun reaches bark that hasn’t been exposed in thirty years, and here that isn’t a metaphor.
8 min read
Olive and fruit trees
Your oranges and lemons are splitting: it’s the watering, but not the way you think
They appear split overnight, almost always after the first storm. The cause isn’t a lack of water: it’s getting all of it at once.
8 min read
Mediterranean garden
Brown in September doesn’t always mean dead
Half a dozen brown plants and the temptation to pull them all out before replanting. Here that’s done in October, not now: several of them aren’t dead, they’re dormant.
8 min read
What it costs
Fixed price or hourly rate: which suits you, and why
Paying by the hour seems the fairest option: you pay for the work done. And it’s exactly the opposite of what suits someone who won’t be there watching.
8 min read