A Tale of A Dumped Cactus .... See How They´ve Grown And A Stoned Wall I Made Myself For The Cactus Garden

We live in the upper hills of the pueblo called Torrox and it´s one of the towns of Andalucia in Southern Spain. If you had the chance to read my older blogs, I have mentioned that we have a second home here being used during the winter times to escape cold central Europe or to be exact escape from our homebase that is Vienna.

The whitewashed town of Torrox pueblo, the other half of the town is located along the coast and is called Torrox Costa

Life here is very quiet particularly during winter time as most of the tourists are not in sight. In summer, it´s almost crowded because Torrox has a 9 kilometer coastline that is divided into various beaches. It´s just amazing that tourists especially from Germany come back here year after year.. that we call the town coast Little Germany.

Nine kilometers of beaches ...Torrox Costa

THE STONE WALL

We´ve been here since 20 years but lived in another property , to be exact an avocado farm with 300 trees. But we gave it up after 8 years because we couldn´t cope with the maintenance costs. We only lived there during the winter months and so we gave it up and constructed a new house on not so far away hills. The house didn´t have a garden yet. Last year, I started gathering stones within the property to make a stone wall for the cactus garden.

The stone wall is still under construction and being made to prevent erosion of soil because the property is a bit hilly, I have started planting though at the end of our time a year ago . Some stones were heavy but I managed to do it alone since I wanted to make it all by myself, something to be proud of... My DIY motto is actually this : if the boys can do it, the girls can do it, too! ...Lol, I hope the lady readers would agree with me?!

THE DUMPED CACTUS

One day, while driving on the mountain road on my way home, I passed by the dumped area for construction materials and saw the huge cactus cut into parts. They were probably thrown-away to give way for a construction of a house. I stopped by and got them, but they were huge and very heavy and there was no one to help me. But, I managed to get them in the car and brought them home. They were planted without roots beside the gate, which was just a temporary area because we were about to leave Spain. I didn´t realize that after nine months of no care, no water and feed, they have grown into beautiful species.

the original status of the cut cactus when I got them

This is how they look now, we gave feed, install watering system and they´ve grown beautifully in the last 4 months since we are here this season.

THE CACTUS GARDEN

The soil in Andalucia is actually fertile despite being very rocky... this is also the reason why most of the hills have stone walled terraces that were made by spanish forefathers centuries ago. They just gathered the rocks from their fincas and used those for stoned terraces. Nowadays, the properties in Andalucia are almost fully planted with avocados, mango trees, olives as well as grapes.

And so... I set up the cactus garden last year with these images above and below weeks before we left for Vienna. You have to compare the last photos and see how green they become and they are growing beautifully now.

My german girlfriend´s garden is beautiful ... she has all kinds of mediterranean plants and hers is a matured garden. She used to be my neighbor in our previous house . Almost all of the cactii came from her, grown from the cuttings of her plants. I planted them without roots.

When we came back last September... I was astonished that most of the plants without roots survived and were very green despite no maintenance for nine months.

I still have a few cactii to be planted this weekend and hopefully they would grow nicely when we comeback.

All photos are properties of the author.

Thank you for reading.

@mers