Rain at last

Sweet rain on and off all morning mostly gentle and steady with wisps of mist flowing through the trees.

Then the sun came out for the afternoon to see the cows home.

 Back to gentle rain late evening so I spent an hour planting marigolds and tomatoes, mixed salad, melons, squashes and a weeping willow, then I moved a few more box plants to thicken up a new hedge, ideally we need a few more days of heavier rain but the earth is starting to soak it up and seeds planted last week are starting to show.

More misty mornings

Something to bear in mind when looking for a new house anywhere in Galicia is the morning mist that often rolls across the landscape. We did not rent before we bought so we did not have the opportunity to spend time thinking about the local weather but were lucky our house is just above the mist. I don't think I would like to be a few hundred meters down the valley where every misty morning shrouds the houses in  veils of damp, lovely to look at in the distance but less so if you are sitting right in it.

The mist line seems to be about a field below where we are. It tends to clear as the sun rises but those first few hours of damp could be a tad depressing if you are not prepared for it.

Misty mornings

We have been living in Valdovino province for just over a year now, we have found that misty mornings usually mean a hot day ahead, we have had a couple of days of much needed rain but this morning there is a lovely misty dawn; in the pic above you should just about be able to see our local church peeping through the mist and below the last of our sunflowers are now bearing seeds for the local finches to breakfast on while the mist slowly slips through the valley below us.

Lat night the landscape was reminiscent of Chinese paintings of misty mountains, I can almost like the eucalyptus trees in the mist they really come into their own.

Some things grow well here especially the weeds - these sunflowers were dwarf ones that should have topped out at 1.2 meters according to the packet - either I have shrunk to Cornish Piskey size or something was not quite right with their test plants...perhaps they used an elastic tape measure. Tomatoes do not seem to do very well we had a lot of plants and most were blighted during the late Spring some are still struggling on but we have no tomatoes yet, no shortage of aubergines, peppers, chilies and squashes though.

This is the view from Valdovino school playground looking out over the lagoon and beach, electricity is still done via overhead cables here so it is hard to see past them in a little photo but if you view it full size the distance is clearer. Beaches here are wonderful and usually very tranquil apart from about 5 weeks late July - August where the bits near parking can be swamped but still many of them are nowhere near as crowded as Sennen used to be when we lived there.