Engineer Jansen’s Ingenious Soil Sifting System™

To plant one lime tree in this rocky stony soil Engineer Jansen uses 100 grams dynamite, a hammar drill, shovels and Engineer Jansen’s Ingenious Soil Sifting System™. Yes, that is a pile of rocks at the arrow.

Endless Margaritas in 2, 3 years time.

Do notice Pili at the top of the picture.

Lime, pile of stones, Pili and mango

One of Engineer Jansen’s piles.

 eh..

Engineer Jansen’s Ingenious Soil Sifting System™

Mangos

The spot next to the water tunnel and the garage is where the 3 riego (irrigation) water pipes issue their water into the irrigation channels. They're not too careful with that, and the channels leak, so it's always quite wet there. And nice and green. Apparently mango trees use a lot of water, so that's the spot. Bought two, 16€, var "Sensacion". Well, that sounds promising.

Mango nr. 1 (var "Especiosa")

Mango nr. 2

Original planting hole of mango nr. 1

That is because I underestimated how big a mango can grow. They can, apparently, grow 10-12 m in size. Well, in the tropics. To be sure I dug up mango nr.1 again and replanted it a few meters further on.

Planting trees

2 variegated lemons, 2 blood orange, 2 grapfruit, 2 limes, 2 silk trees, 2 jacaranda, 1 poinciana. Lost count. But it already looks a lot greener!

Found two large lengths of 10-20 m water tubing, that I used earlier for watering the trees on the other bit of the garden, and installed them more or less permanently, with two taps. We also had a roll of bigger diameter garden hose, so now I can reach every bit of the orchard with quite a lot of water. No more carrying around watering cans!

Blood oranges. Ready in February!

The biggest hole remains unused. But we'll think of something.

Jacarandas and the Hollandsche Waterlinie

6 Jacaranda's and a Delonix Regia (Flamboyant, Poinciana), and 4 bougainvilleas need planting. The holes are basically already dug by machine (thanks Antonio). The soil dug out needs to go back into the holes, mixed with compost and fertilizer. After the rains that is hard work. (Again! Who's a pensioner then? Well?)

A bit of a challenge is to initially water 7 big holes, and not resort to watering cans. Well, we have two quite long hoses, but we need about 70 meters here. Lucky there are three lengths of black plastic irrigation tubing. They can be interconnected using bits of the bigger blue hoses, while the blue hose fits the regular Gardena. All in all I can just about reach the last planting hole. Which is rather funny, as that is about 10 meters from the balsa, where the water is actually from:

Last planting hole, with a view on the balsa.

Here is a movie of the Hollandsche Waterlinie, so you have an idea:

As we'll have a lot of wind coming days I extended the supporting bamboo sticks. Else the tops of the young trees are a meter above the end of their stick, and will possibly snap.