Market Day!

Wednesday is market day in Kyrenia, and it’s a big one, well worth a visit.  It’s held on a sprawling site on the westerly edge of town, near the police station.  They sell huge amounts of fruit and vegetables very cheaply plus all manner of other farm produce like cheeses, honey, carob syrups, balsamic vinegars, olive oils, nuts, dried fruit.  There are also stalls for clothing and shoes, for all ages, babies upwards, carpet and rug sellers, books, music, cds, jewellery, bags…. You name it. 
Today I wanted to get some new container plants for the patios.  I have a few empty pots mostly due to plants grown so large they have had to go into the garden.  Most pot plants here need to be shaded unless they are very drought resistant.  If I lived here year round, I could grow anything in containers and have them all over the pool terrace as well as the shaded areas.  However, I learned quite early on that quite understandably holiday guests cannot be relied upon to water the pots and in the blistering dry heat of summer this is fatal. 
We have rigged up watering to some of the containers.  All of the a/c units now drain into plant containers so the condensate formed in cooling waters the plants.  Also I bought some nozzles that you put on water bottles that then invert into the pots and drip water to them.  There’s particularly nice blue glass water bottles out here that look very decorative.  Again, learned the hard way that plastic water bottles don’t survive: they implode in the summer heat. 
Anyway, managed to get a good haul.  2 types of evergreen jasmine, both strongly perfumed, 5 geranium/polygoniums, a basil, thyme, a pretty flower (?), and a mandevilla Alice du Pont which is a gorgeous pink flowered climbing vine.  The whole lot cost £25 which is a bargain considering the size of the plants.  In November Habibi and I are going to a garden centre to buy a number of trees and large shrubs for the garden.
We also bought a kilo of green beans which were about £1.50.   Quite expensive for here but they are just coming into season and not a particularly traditional vegetable.  The tomatoes were 30p a kg, oranges, apples and pomegranates were £2.25 for 3 kg.  You could go mad! 

We have some unexpected fruit and vegetables growing in the garden. We encourage guests to use the washing up water to water borders and pots rather than just go down the drain.  Anyway, apparently some melon or courgette seeds have gone into the tubs and started to sprout.  Too early to say yet what they are but regardless they are sprouting away almost visibly.

Spent a lot of the afternoon around and in the swimming pool.  The water was flowing into our tanks today, sounded like a lot.  Our swimming pool guy has to do another backflush of the system on Friday to finish off the new filter work and that will take several tonnes of pool water.  So rather than waste it, it will go into our gardening water tank.  That’s pretty full so this evening we turned on the irrigation system and let everything get a really good water to make space in the tank. 


We have some jobs around the villa that Bob can’t do as we haven’t got a tall enough ladder and even if we did, he doesn’t fancy going up it.  So we called two handymen from the local paper to come and give us a quote.  One was a Turkish Cypriot and one an ex-pat Brit.  The TC came one hour after I called him.  The Brit said he would come today and guess what?????  He hasn’t shown up!  Says it all really. 
Planted all the new plants out later in the day and will give them a good few weeks of watering in to set them off well.
Tonight we went to Ambience.  The weather could change soon and I wanted another dinner out on that deck over the sea before it all moves inside. It was fabulous as usual.