Four Seasons at Palomba

The biggest surprise

2011-11-27T18:18:00.000+01:00

The biggest surprise was that nasturtium leaves and stalks are really delicious when cooked. (No, really.) Steamed and then tossed in olive oil with garlic. So the free food's going well! On top of all the veggies and numerous ways of eating home-grown mushrooms, we had (well, the blokes had) wild boar sausages the other night, courtesy of Mario. He and his posse spent last weekend conducting a concerted campaign against the boar that are ravaging not only our veg patch but also the just-sown fields of the farmers round here. They ended up with three boar. In the case of wild boar my normally strongly anti-hunting ethic goes into reverse, as these are animals that have no natural predators here and the population has just gone crazy since they were reintroduced a while back. They do a huge amount of agricultural damage. My hopes that Mario's efforts would end the digging-up of our garden were dashed, however, as this week the beasties dug over the broad bean bed and trampled much of the broccoli and greens. Deeply upsetting. I'm setting up an electric fence round the veg patch now, and if that doesn't keep them off it'll be watchtowers, searchlights and landmines.

In these hard and gloomy times

2011-11-11T10:13:00.000+01:00

nasturtium salad

In these hard and gloomy times I'm thinking it will be fun to try for a while to eat as much as possible from our own production or even wild food. Fun, plus a relief for the bank balance. We've got a freezer packed with food from the summer, we have veggies coming along in the veg patch (if we can save them from the wild boar), and there are still a few (very few) edible wild plants to pick. In fact, if I remembered anything I learnt from the mushroom course I did a few years ago (to gather mushrooms in Italy you officially have to have a 'patentino' or licence, which you get by attending a course and then renewing it yearly) then I'd go mushrooming, but what I principally recall is how frighteningly similar the edible ones look to the deadly poisonous ones. Oh, and how one toxic mushroom tricks you before killing you, giving you immediate and severe symptoms of food-poisoning from which you quickly recover, only to be struck down a few weeks later, by which time you have multiple organ failure and you — die. Which celestial joker thought that one up?

But I digress. For we do have mushrooms — home-grown ones, real beauties. I bought a kit, basically a sort of spore-impregnated bale, and it sits in the cantina putting out amazing growths of pleurotus (oyster mushrooms). Far too many, in fact, as we can't get through them all (the Boy doesn't even like them) and I don't know how to preserve mushrooms. For now I've decided to head back to the 1970s and make cream of mushroom soup, and if it's nice then I'll make a load and freeze it.

And speaking of soup, the warm autumn has given us a good crop of nettles in the hedgerows, and as everyone knows, nettle soup is The Best. Tasty, health-giving and absolutely free. Some people may mock (and you know who you are) but they obviously need a little help in appreciating the finer things in life. I can give that help. Nettle risotto, anyone?

The duck is sad

2011-10-27T09:45:00.000+02:00

The duck is sad. Since the male duck died during the night last week, cause of death unknown but at least it wasn't the usual violent fox event, the female has been all alone and lonely. I hoped she'd make friends with the new hens, but although they seem to cohabit quite peacefully they don't hang out together outside the run. Last time we had a single duck, she became an inseparable companion to the dogs, but this duck doesn't seem keen on doing that either. She and Mr Duck were such a funny and definite couple that although I know it's wrong to attribute human emotions to critters, it's hard not to imagine Mrs as suffering a little now, in her own inscrutable duck way.

Meanwhile the chickens are thriving but are not laying yet. They're very beautiful, and fairly tame. Quite often we find them sitting halfway up the steps to the front door and I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they venture into the house...

I found a tortoise

2011-09-20T17:18:00.003+02:00

I found a tortoise whilst out riding the other day. The tortoise was just wandering across the field, headed for the woods. I took it home and phoned the vet to ask about tortoise-keeping, who reacted as if it was a normal occurrence to find a tortoise in the fields, and told me tortoise-keeping was easy, just don't feed it too much lettuce. We left it overnight in the duck house and spent half the next, very hot, day constructing it a state-of-the-art compound with a low wall built of rocks. Apparently tortoises can dig, so we had to bury the base of the rocks so that it couldn't dig its way out. This was hard labour, and I have to admit it was principally carried out by John. I personally made the tortoise a stylish shelter out of an upturned plastic fruit crate though. When we put the tortoise in its new home, it crawled under the shelter and started digging. Feeling smug — no way out there, matey! — I left it some lettuce and various other tempting morsels, and turned to that day's other main project...

... the chickens. The hen house is finally ready and we now have three gorgeous black, ginger-speckled hens. They seem remarkably well adjusted compared to the rest of our animals and, after spending their first day inside the hen house (perhaps just because it's so nice), they now come out and peck around in the run in a satisfyingly chicken-like way. The run is actually the duck run, and we weren't sure how the ducks would react, but in fact they all managed to co-exist quite happily together the first night, so I was confident that all would be well. My main worry remained the tortoise, who didn't want to eat anything but lettuce and alternated between digging in the far corner of its shelter and then sitting there half-buried and catatonic for hours, or roaming round its walled compound like a caged tiger, only slower. But then...

... the ducks failed to come home the second night, and nor did they show up the following morning. We decided that either a fox had got them or they had run away, believing we were replacing them with updated fowl. I felt very sad and guilty, though who'd have thought ducks were capable of such sensitivity? Anyway, yesterday morning the ducks turned up again — on the pond, hidden among the bulrushes. The male came up from the pond to get his feed and basically started behaving normally — and living with the hens — while the female remained in the middle of the pond and refused to come off, even when we brandished a broom at her. That was yesterday. She's still there today. The male calls to her and she replies: but she's not coming off that pond. Isn't she hungry? She's been floating there for at least 24 hours and maybe a lot more. At least she's safe from the fox. Meanwhile...

... the tortoise has escaped. Who knew tortoises were so good at rock-climbing? Inscrutable though it was, it didn't seem happy in captivity and I only hope that this time it makes it all the way to the far side of the field and into the woods, where it can hibernate in peace.

The Canadair flew over

2011-09-14T21:41:00.000+02:00

The Canadair flew over four times yesterday afternoon, four times the day before, carrying the huge tanks of water that it would empty out above Fiuminata, in the hills to the west of us, to try to quench the wildfire started by an arsonist. The helicopter was getting the water from the lake at Fiastra, where on Sunday we whiled away the afternoon in the hottest of hot sun; fire and panic far from our minds. On each run it flew low over our house, so low that you looked up and wanted to wave to the pilot, before realizing how stupid an impulse that was, and, squinting against the sun, watched it clatter into the distance leaving behind the renewed silence of the day and a feeling of unfocused agitation.

I haven't written my blog for ages, so a summary (summery?) will have to do to bring us up to date. The summer was up and down until July, downright cold with rain for ten days or so then, and since has been hot. Heatwave hot. Two months with temperatures in the 30s and no rain have left the countryside crisped-up and gasping. We managed to keep the veg patch watered with a drip-feed system, and some of the harvest has been good – tomatoes, beans of various types, cucumbers; but the courgettes and autumn squashes were destroyed right at the beginning of the summer by marauding porcupines, and what remained was severely damaged by an enormous hailstorm in July. So this has been our first summer without being courgetted to death, which is actually a bit sad. Two big butternut squashes sit down there now, ripening, and will be ready to pick in just a few days...terrifying to think what destruction a porcupine or a baby wild boar can wreak in just one hour overnight...I don't know how long I can hold out in the battle of nerves and may end up picking them tomorrow.

The indian summer has been gorgeous despite the parching. Extra days at the beach and the lake are like a gift. And at this time of year the nights are cool and you can sleep. The mornings are cool to cold and going out at 7am to feed the critters I shiver a little, but I'm still only in a t-shirt and that's pretty amazing for the middle of September. On Monday the forecast is for the weather to break definitively and drop 10 degrees, which will be the start of autumn and, however correct for the time of year, will send me into an immediate slough of despond. All of the winter stretches ahead, and the fact that autumn precedes it, with its mists and mellow fruitfulness, is no consolation.

The sun broke through for, oh,

2011-03-20T15:45:00.000+01:00

The sun broke through for, oh, several whole hours yesterday but we're back to cold grey skies again today. In the past two or three weeks we've had torrential rainfall followed by a massive snowfall which prompted the Region to declare a state of emergency. Floods, landslips, trees down, the works. We were snowed in for several days, two of them without electricity thanks to a burnt-out cable. We actually saw the cable in flames, which was pretty frightening, and the two days it took for the electricity company to get a team out to us made me wonder how long we'd have been without power in a non-emergency... Anyway, the snow has finally gone and I noticed tiny broad-bean shoots starting to poke through in the veg patch, so that's cheering at least.

John managed to catch and summarily despatch two of our huge overpopulation of pigeons yesterday and rather than just chuck the bodies into the woods I said why don't we eat them? (These pigeons are the ones the locals breed specifically to eat.) He replied, not unreasonably: "But you are vegetarian." Nonetheless, I was on a sustainable-eating roll, and so we (well, he) plucked the pigeons (easy) while I watched a little film on YouTube of a frigheningly competent hunter/chef chopping the limbs and other identifying bodily parts off a recently shot wood-pigeon and then frying it up for dinner. It's important, apparently, to finish it off in a barely warm oven for 10 minutes to "relax" the meat.

Having studied the video assiduously, later that afternoon we performed the same depersonalizing operation on our naked pigeon corpses, with Alessio watching in admiration at the blood on the chopping board (not that there was much blood, despite what he later put in his Facebook entry) and me going all farmhouse-wife and picking out the last of the quills from the legs. We pan-fried them, relaxed them nicely in the oven, and ate them for supper with black rice and home-grown cavolo nero. The meat looked like beef, was fairly tender, and tasted strong and gamy. I had been hugely looking forward to eating it, but in the event I didn't really like it – too strong and too, well, meaty. Luckily for dessert I'd made fantastic melting-chocolate-puddings, which made up for my disappointment at not being able to throw myself fully into pigeon fancying. Will probably stay properly vegetarian for a while again now.

After a few balmy weeks

2011-02-28T12:05:00.000+01:00

After several balmy weeks that were so blissfully springlike for there to be no question that it was a cosmic trick, we were reliably plunged into subzero temps and had quite a bit of snow dumped on us on Saturday. Luckily the 4x4 Panda came into its own so that we were not marooned. All gone now, and we're just festering in an English kind of cold, damp, grim fogginess and longing for summer.

Maxim is living chained up again after his homicidal rampage through the village a few weeks ago during which he and Mario's horrid terrier indulged in at least one known rabbit-massacre and maybe more. Walking him yesterday evening it was late and dark, and although I took a torch with me I kept it switched off to see how dark-adapted my sight would get, and also as a test of character to see how long I could remain without light in the scary nighttime countryside. Because the countryside at night is scary, full of monsters and potential axe-murderers lurking in the shadows. I walked up through the grass field where the spring is, which sounds nice but actually at the place where the spring comes out Mario has built a sort of brick and cement construction, marked with some sticking-up poles. I could just make out the tractor tracks in the grass so I followed these ("Keep to the path!!"), which led directly towards the spring. In the near-dark this looked like the mouth of a hell devised for Harry Potter and I tensed myself for an enormous raging batwinged creature with evil red eyes to leap out, fang-laden mouth dripping with gore from its last unfinished meal of sheep, dog or human... I was prepared to sacrifice Maxim to the vile creature and in fact that would have solved quite a number of problems for us, but in fact the well of hideous darkness remained resoundingly silent as we slunk past, so I guess I'll have to think of some other way to sort out the dog.

I made it all the way home without switching on the torch.

We took the donkey

2011-02-07T12:29:00.001+01:00

We took the donkey out for a walk yesterday. Mario had all his family round for lunch (turned out to be his birthday), so they all gathered round to watch the crazy English woman provide some entertainment. Which I duly provided, as the donkey didn't want to be caught and I had to spent 15 minutes stalking it round the field holding out a handful of carrot pieces. When I finally got the headcollar on it, it dug in its feet and refused to move. This all went down very well with the crowd. Finally Mario stomped over and waved a stick behind the donkey, so it shot forward a few paces, dragging me with it before stopping dead again, and in this manner we gradually got it out of the field.

Once it was up in Mario's yard it was more tractable (is that a word?) and allowed the official photographer to take its photo with the entire family, though it turned its back at the crucial moment. You could see it must have been mistreated in its former life as it was incredibly nervous and you only had to raise an arm for it to back away with its ears flattened. It's also really not used to being handled, and wasn't at all keen on being led. Once Mario's family had all dispersed we were left (me, Alessio and a friend, and John) to lead it down the road to our house, and this was accomplished in a series of stops and starts with the donkey alternately shooting ahead or grinding to a halt. He's a tiny donkey and it's like leading a very large dog, but he's pretty strong and if he'd tried to run off I don't think I'd have been able to hold him. When we got him down to our yard, the kids brushed him for a bit and then got bored and went off to play with something more interesting (guns, I think). We led him around for a while and eventually took him back to his field. He liked being out a lot and really didn't want to go back in — re-entry was achieved with me tugging on the rope at the front and John at the back end brandishing a broom.

So this was step 1 of the donkey project. Who knows where it will lead?

In a list of the scariest creatures

2011-01-09T15:23:00.000+01:00

In a list of the scariest creatures in the known universe, I wouldn't have fingered sheep and kittens as high-up contenders, or even put them on the list at all, actually; but Cassie's list is all her own work and sheep and kittens are up there fighting it out for first place (closely followed by the monster that lives in piles of wood, which even if it has never been seen, doesn't necessarily not exist and is therefore really, really scary). The sheep are back in the field again and Cassie can glimpse them through the trees, or see them properly when they come round the other side and right next to her paddock. She's in a permanent state of high alert, so much so that yesterday I decided not to take her out because she was so jittery. Today I was feeling braver and led her up to the yard and tried to get her circling on the long rein. No waaay. She was constantly trying to see what the sheep were up to, in case they were creeping up on her I guess, and leaping out of her skin at the smallest noise; and when they unexpectedly turned up practically in our garden I just gave up. I decided to change the schooling lesson into sheep habituation practice. I led her towards the sheep and she blew and snorted and pranced, but she did get there and managed not to shoot off in the opposite direction. I led her up and down the lane with the sheep very close on one side till she felt a little less like an unexploded bomb. Then, lulled into a false sense of security, I tried a bit more circling, which is where the kittens came in. The kittens tiptoed up to Cassie with big, you-look-interesting-please-don't-hurt-me eyes, and she put her head down to sniff them, and they ran away. This was fine and Cass liked the kittens when they did this. The problem was the kittens getting bored with being chased by a horse, and going off to play by the corner of the barn in amongst a tarpaulin, a post and a pile of bricks. And that was very very scary indeed.

Alessio and I stopped off

2011-01-08T15:30:00.001+01:00

Alessio and I stopped off at Maria's on the way back from walking Maxim yesterday afternoon to try the new olive oil from some trees they own down in the valley. Mario had been waxing lyrical about it and wanted to sell us a few litres. Maria decanted some into a serving bottle and cut up some white bread and laid out squares of kitchen towel for us to eat off. The oil was thick and viscous and greenish, opaque. We drizzled it on to the bread with a teaspoon and sprinkled a little salt on. We took tentative bites, expecting it to be strong and explosive and for it to strip the back of our throat. Instead it was fresh and mild, delicious. We drizzled and munched some more. Maria delved under the sink and brought out an old Coke bottle filled with their home-made wine, and I was in such a good mood from the nice oil that I willingly poured myself half a glass to wash it down with. She then brought out some bean-like things to snack on called lupini, which look a bit like yellow broad beans. Sprinkled with salt, they were tasty, and apparently are a traditional snack at fairs. I remember them from the south of Italy. A neighbour came round and produced from his pocket a small plastic bag containing five or six small black truffles, covered with mud, that he and his faithful truffle-hound had dug out. He presented them to Maria as he'd found them on their land. After he'd gone, she gave two to me.

At home I cleaned off the truffles and we ate one for supper, shaved into melted butter with nutmeg and parmesan and tossed into linguine. Well, it was nice enough but I don't totally see what all the fuss is with truffles.

Just emerging

2010-12-14T12:00:00.000+01:00

Just emerging from a few weeks of chaos. Alessio was off school for a week, which is the longest he's ever been ill for apart from chicken pox when he was little, and although he did nothing but lounge around all day keeping himself entertained on his PS3, for some reason just having him around was very time-consuming. At the same time, Cassie went badly lame. At the same, same time, the boiler started seriously malfunctioning, billowing out huge amounts of foul, acrid smoke, much of which got into the house via our bedroom (boiler room being under bedroom and apparently the floor isn't smoke-proof). At the same, same, same time our landline went down.

I got the vet out for Cassie because she was really limping in quite a frightening way and didn't want to put any weight on her foot. He said her front feet needed trimming and that the soles were bruised. He prescribed Bute (anti-inflammatory). This was a Friday evening. The farrier came out on the Sunday morning, trimmed her feet and put on a swanky pair of new shoes (normally she's barefoot). Alessio asked if they were made of silver and I said no, that's the wrong kind of metal and anyway it would be too expensive, and the vet said, titanium alloy, causing me to choke and wish they were silver. In the event he only charged €40 which considering it was a Sunday morning urgent callout I thought was jolly reasonable. Cassie carried on limping for another few days though, despite the Bute, and her leg started to swell up. The vet came out again and it turned out to be an abscess at the top of her hoof, and the swelling was the infection spreading up her leg. Nasty, but the abscess was a relief, because it's treatable. Since then I've been irrigating it with the hose and disinfecting with Betadine twice a day, and she's had five intramuscular injections of antibiotic administered bravely into the neck with a huge needle by John, who is needle-phobic despite being an insulin-injecting diabetic. Cass is much better now and hardly limping at all though the top of her hoof still hurts her when you press it. She's very sweet when I get the hose out and likes to suck water from it, but she hates it on her feet because it's so cold!

As for the boiler, I tracked down a chimney-sweep team and it turned out to be a hornets' nest blocking the chimney. Must have been in there since the summer, gradually getting more and more tarred up and eventually causing an almost total blockage. Boiler now working fine. Which is just as well, because it has now become very cold here, after weeks and weeks of mild, wet weather when the UK was under a foot of snow.

The problem with the landline was eventually solved after a week and was the fault of the kittens, who must have dislodged a wire in the phone socket. The Telecom engineer wasn't too pleased and we have yet to see if they send us a bill.

Luckily the kittens are unspeakably cute and so escaped all punishment.

Someone introduced me

2010-10-30T08:50:00.000+02:00

Someone introduced me the other day as his English friend who writes a "blog bellissimo" (thanks, Sandro!) which was very nice but also made me realize how I haven't been keeping up with writing it recently. No excuse other than being busy, but I must try harder.

So a brief catch-up. After my last post about the horse fair we had a couple of weeks of truly miserable weather: cold and foggy, with constant rain alternating between downpour and drizzle. We had our final lot of guests in the apartment, a German family, who were here for ten days and really got the worst of the weather. Of course the day they left the sun came out and the fog lifted. Now we need to be getting on with the veg patch — this weekend is Ognissanti (all saints day) which is traditionally the date for sowing broad beans. We have to weed and rotavate or hoe before we start the planting so that's a lot of work and I don't know that we'll manage it. Last year we planted garlic and onions in the autumn as well, which I want to do again. The garlic was a spectacular success and we're still eating our own; the onions less so but we still have a few left.

The sheep that come on to the opposite field every autumn were here last week and the shepherd not only failed to fence them off but failed to stay and watch them, with the result that the sheep marauded all over the veg patch and ate all the cicoria, swiss chard, broccoli and sorrel. They left the turnip tops, cabbage and fennel, but what they didn't eat they trampled. I was incredibly angry and upset and phoned the shepherd, who came hurtling down and stood looking at the damage almost as sorrowful as I was. He offered me some money (which I accepted, though just a token) but I said what I'd really like as compensation, rather than money, was some of the pecorino cheese that he makes. He promised he'd bring me some, though so far there's no sign of it turning up. We'll see. I think the trampled stuff will grow up again and maybe some of the nibbled plants too, so maybe the damage won't be as bad as I at first thought. I haven't felt like going back to look as it was too distressing, but I'll grit my teeth and go down there today.

We had a good crop of grapes this year — uva fragola, the amazing strawberry-flavoured grape. I made five jars of intense grape jelly and we're eating the rest as dessert grapes. I helped Mario with the vendemmia as usual, though this year in between showers of rain rather than the normal soft autumn sunshine. The harvest was poor, with a lot of spoilt grapes because of the poor summer and cold autumn; I'm not sure how that'll affect the commercial wineries. Managed to get out of the workers' lunch by saying I had to work for a deadline (which was true).

The farmers have been busy ploughing and this year they've ploughed up a whole load of fields that have previously been fallow. It's amazing how that changes the look of the landscape. It has also substantially affected where we can walk, as we used to walk on paths through various pretty fields that are now ploughed over. Things change.

It turned out to be the last fine day

2010-10-11T13:26:00.000+02:00

It turned out to be the last fine day of autumn yesterday, so I'm glad we spent it among horses (although other members of the family might disagree). We went up to Monte Catria, to the Cavallo del Catria horse fair, which we went to last year for the first time. The Cavallo del Catria is Cassie's breed and once again it was funny and delightful to see lots of Cassies all together. We watched a sort of obstacle-course competition, which was encouraging to me in the sense that although it was supposedly high level, many of the riders were having real problems in getting their horses to do things that I'm pretty sure I could get Cass to do fairly easily (walking over platforms etc). The immobility test would be a challenge for her though. The quality was notably lower than it would have been in the UK at a similar event, with very small jumps which despite their smallness a lot of the horses simply refused. I also watched a demonstration of people working with Parelli-trained horses and was hugely impressed and inspired by what these horses do and the relationship between them and their handlers. Cass only responds to me like that if she can actually smell the polo mints.

The country band with inscrutable line-dancing couple was an added bonus.

Mario's latest weapon

2010-09-16T16:29:00.000+02:00

Mario's latest weapon in his all-out war with the wild boar is a bright light attached to an apple tree and a badly tuned radio balanced on a fruit crate and turned up loud. He's hoping that this will keep the scavenging beasts away from his vineyard at night in these last few crucial days or weeks before the vendemmia. With my bedroom window open, all night long I can hear the tormented mix of Italian pop music and white noise just on the edge of my sound perception, and it stops me sleeping and drives me mad. In previous years Mario's boar-scaring methods have included miles and miles of white tape stretched along the edge of the wood, a gigantic stuffed-toy Tweetie-Pie, and a child's doll dangling at the edge of the vines, looking curiously terrifying and perverted, like something out of a David Lynch film. These things were all weird. But at least they were silent.

After a slow start

2010-07-21T16:57:00.000+02:00

After a slow start the veg patch has now gone crazy — I don't know why this still takes us by surprise, but it does, every year. We have a huge glut of courgettes and patty pan squashes, a goodly number of cucumbers, and lots of green beans — actually a rather spectacular dark purple green-bean, which sadly turns mud-coloured on cooking. The one thing that's not thriving is the tomatoes, rather oddly — they're just not growing well. This year we also have a good crop of soft fruit — gooseberries, raspberries and white currants.

Last week was unbearably hot — in the low 30s, and not much less at night, so it was hard to sleep. It was perfect weather for the splash pool but we were both working so hard that we didn't have time to set it up — it's far more complicated than I realized. But I managed to get to the pool-supply shop this week and we now have all the requisite chlorine tabs, pH testing kit and spare filters, so we're going to to set it up now. Our neighbours have just built a proper swimming pool and when the wind's in the right direction we can hear the happy cries of their kids having a great time in it. We're not jealous at all.

Right, I'm off to pickle some cucumbers now...

The donkey is in love

2010-06-22T23:04:00.000+02:00

The donkey is in love with Cassie and runs up and down the fence braying like crazy when we go past. She looks at him, gives a little neigh, and then strolls on. Tease.

We've had a miserable cold and rainy few days. The ducks have been happy, but no one else has. I'm off to England tomorrow with the boy and am looking forward to it, as apparently they've nicked our weather. Back next week, when I will have time to write a fuller update.

We've had a week of gorgeous weather

2010-05-31T09:37:00.000+02:00

We've had a week of gorgeous weather and have finally been able to get on with planting up the veg patch. Thirty tomato plants, three rows of green beans and two of borlotti, 20 lettuces, six courgettes, four patty-pan squashes, eight cucumbers, some aubergines and peppers, and more to come: we still need to plant out the autumn squashes. The broad beans are ready to crop and are doing really well, though only a single pea plant germinated in the two rows we sowed. The garlic and onions we planted at the same time as the broad beans are also doing well. We also have raspberry canes (given as cuttings two years ago by a friend), gooseberry bushes and a whitecurrant bush, all flourishing. It's all looking especially neat this year because John's been asked to take some photographs for a book on growing your own food, so he's been weeding it ferociously.

There's bad news on the ducks: just a day or two after my last post, four of them disappeared in broad daylight, and we later found some feathers and a bit of blood — a fox must have got them, though it's odd that there weren't more signs of an evident massacre. Unfortunately it managed to take four females, leaving us with two males and a female, not a sustainable threesome at all. After a few days of dithering we decided to get rid of the older male, so John summarily despatched it and cremated it on the bonfire! We're now left with a a male/female pair, which is fine and might lead to some ducklings later this summer. In the meantime for our egg supply we'll need to buy some point-of-lay chickens (you can't buy point-of-lay ducks here, as no one keeps ducks for eggs), which is okay by me as I'd wanted some hens anyway, to make a change from duck eggs.

Cassie has now finished moulting and looks lovely and sleek and elegant (as elegant as a stocky little mountain horse can look — but beautiful). I've walked her up a few times to look at Mario's donkey, who brays like crazy and gets very excited, running up and down the fence and practically scrambling over it in his eagerness to say hello; the first time she saw him Cass looked astonished and somewhat alarmed, but now she neighs back to him and then just puts her head down to eat. I don't think she's that impressed with him really. Yesterday I rode her for the first time in ages and apart from some jumpy behaviour because of the wind and a moment of recalcitrance in not wanting to leave the yard, she was pretty good.

The caterpillars are into their third instar but I'll post on that tomorrow.

The ducks are

2010-05-21T15:44:00.000+02:00

The ducks are about the only ones having fun in this weather. Yet another cold and rainy day, in one of the coldest and rainiest springs we can remember in all the time we've been here. This photo shows one of the ducks the other day just after she'd laid an egg outside the pen, in the yard. We have five female ducks at the moment and usually we get four or five eggs every morning. This morning I found six. Ducks' capacity for mystery grows ever more profound.

Wildlife report

2010-05-20T09:01:00.000+02:00

Wildlife report. Fifteen or so wild boar rootling about in the valley early in the morning — several big adults and a load of piglets. A large deer in the top field, grazing. A hare nibbling shoots in a ploughed field when I was bringing Alessio home from a friend's house. Four or five Little Owls (Athene noctua) on the road home at dusk the other evening. Hoopoes, a nesting pair of redstarts in the garden, kestrels, a cuckoo (heard all through the day but never seen), swallows everywhere and the usual pair nesting in John's workroom. Lots of different interesting caterpillars!

The caterpillars are starting

2010-05-18T17:28:00.000+02:00

The caterpillars are starting to evolve into their next stage (or instar, as we caterpillar scientists call it). It's been one week since they hatched. Three or four of them have shed their old skin and now look like this little guy, about 1cm long (its head is at the left). The others have gone very still, as if frozen, and I think will moult overnight or tomorrow. Hard to overestimate the excitement this is causing around the kitchen table.

The eggs have hatched

2010-05-11T09:47:00.001+02:00

The eggs have hatched! I now have eight tiny baby puss moth caterpillars. They look like something Doctor Who would be proud to defeat, though they're only about 7mm long. They have these whip-like forked tails that they thrash around if they get annoyed. At the moment they're living in a tupperware box munching through a pile of willow leaves and when they get bigger I'll transfer them to their deluxe accommodation.

Caterpillar season

2010-05-03T09:46:00.005+02:00

Caterpillar season is upon us! The puss moth chrysalis that was fixed to the bottom of a pallet next to the haybales evidently overwintered successfully, as when I checked it the other day there was a hole in it where the moth had broken through and crawled out – sadly no sign of the moth itself, which was a shame because I spent all winter protecting that chrysalis and had hoped to see the moth. Never mind: because...

... Even more excitingly, I then scoured the willow for signs of caterpillars and found some small, shiny, almost spherical dark-red eggs. These are definitely puss moth eggs. I broke the twig off and brought it indoors, and John is knocking up a deluxe caterpillar-rearing home so that we can rear them. There are seven or eight eggs. The puss moth caterpillar is that enormous one I found last June and posted a photo of on the blog (http://fourseasonsatpalomba.blogspot.com/2009/06/and-this-is-another.html), so it will be a lot of fun seeing how it goes from tiny egg to monstrous caterpillar over the space of a couple of weeks. And with any luck we'll get to see the puss moths themselves this time too.

The photo of the eggs was taken on 1 May, though I found them on 30 April. I'll post updates, as even the tiny caterpillars are pretty amazing looking.

I got back

2010-04-19T09:01:00.001+02:00

I got back from the UK last weekend, enjoyed a day of hot sunshine and woke up the next day to a heavy snowfall. Haven't had time to post pictures since then but the snow did a lot of damage because of the trees being in leaf – the branches were weighed down and a lot of them split or broke. Our beautiful willow in Cass's field is broken in several places and we'll have to take the top branches down, pretty much wrecking the tree. This is really sad. The elm outside the kitchen window split and the minor trunk broke off. And there was a lot of minor damage. Last week was wet and rainy but yesterday a bit brighter so John spent the day clearing the elm away from the path and sawing up branches.

Today is a lovely morning and I hope spring will stay now and not pull any more unpleasant tricks like that. We need to get the veg patch going. The broad beans (sown last autumn) are growing strongly, even after the snow, though the peas didn't germinate – I think we could sow some more now, it's probably not too late. Unfortunately I am chained to my desk at the moment.

Two nights ago a loud

2010-03-23T14:59:00.000+01:00

Two nights ago a loud, screeching, otherworldly noise rang out as I was getting ready to go to bed. It sounded like a donkey. We don't have donkeys near us, so I sent John out to see if anything weird was going on outside. He checked the animals and came back in: nothing. An hour later the noise came again, and an hour later again, and so on pretty much all through the night. John got up at one point and turned off any electronic device that might have been emitting eerie braying noises. To me it still sounded like a donkey.

In the morning after waving goodbye to Alessio on the schoolbus I squinted up towards Mario's house and through the trees, still leafless, I saw a little silhouette. It was a donkey.

I grabbed some carrots and took Maxim off in that direction for his walk. In the steep, scrubby field below Mario's house a very small donkey was standing looking forlorn. I climbed the bank, dragging Maxim (who doesn't like equines), and called to the donkey. It came timidly over and I poked a bit of carrot through the wire. Obviously it wasn't used to being fed carrot, as it took a while to register that this was a nice donkey treat — give Cass a carrot and she has your hand off looking for the next one. This donkey munched the carrot and then just stood there sadly.

In the afternoon I went up with Alessio and asked Mario what he was doing with a donkey — he used to keep goats and then sheep on that field and had talked of getting geese next, to keep the scrub down. Apparently a friend has dumped this donkey on him. We went down to talk to it in the field. It's not in very good condition and is a sad little thing, with its headcollar practically welded to its face and its coat all matted; and although it didn't actually look frightened of humans it certainly didn't look used to receiving love and affection. When I've got some time I'll take an old horse brush up and clean it up a bit and try to persuade Mario to take its headcollar off and see if we can perk it up a bit. Donkeys pine if they're kept alone, so somehow we need to get it and Cassie together.

Last night it brayed less and I got a bit more sleep. This morning I drove out at about 8am and the donkey came trotting down the slope to the fence, so I stopped the car and wound down the window and Alessio and I said nice things to it, and then as I drove off slowly it followed for as long as it could till the fence ended. Who knows what was going on in its little donkey head, but it looked like it wanted to be friends.

I'm finally starting to

2010-03-16T21:24:00.000+01:00

I'm finally starting to get a bit more energy after my long and (for me) unusual bout of illness and ailment. Today was sunny but cold, but in any case I was inside chained to my computer, looking somewhat longingly out at the fields. At 4.30 I went out to take Maxim for his walk before the sun disappeared behind the hills. First time I've been out for ages without my woolly hat! That felt good.

We went along above the vineyard and up the track, where we came upon a small wizened contadino halfway up a tree at the edge of the field. He was pruning, on a ladder in fact, not actually in the tree. I greeted him cautiously because he couldn't see me coming and I didn't want to make him fall off. He answered without mishap and we had a chat about dog-walking and dogs running away and dogs being chained, most of which I followed despite the thick dialect. No idea who this guy is, but he knew me.

Walking on, it was nice to see the signs of spring — primroses, daffodils, one huge purple crocus, and several other small wizened contadini doing their stuff up trees, in veg patches or with chainsaws. The air rings with the sound of flirting birds and diesel motors. And it still doesn't feel exactly warm, there's still snow in places, reminding us that we're only in the middle of March and it's early to count our chickens, springwise...

Talking of which, the ducks are laying three eggs a day now. Time to make lemon curd.

Up and down

2010-03-08T10:30:00.000+01:00

Up and down weather.

Photos taken one week apart.

When I walk

2010-02-25T09:08:00.000+01:00

When I walk Maxim in the mornings I've been seeing, as well as the usual wild boar diggings, a lot of deer tracks. This morning there were three little deer down in the field below Cassie, and Alessio said he sees a little group of them every morning from the school bus. A male and several females, he said, and informed me that he's waiting for the mating season.

The weather's mild now but wet. The first signs of spring are tentatively appearing. Primroses in the woods, and those strange green bell-like flowers, the name of which I can't remember. There's noticeably more birdsong in the mornings too, along with the wonderful feeling of the evenings getting lighter and the even more wonderful feeling of the morning not being absolutely pitch dark when I get up.

Collapsed barn roof

2010-02-15T14:25:00.001+01:00

Collapsed barn roof. Bad news. At least it didn't fall in on the hay, or hit Cassie with flying rocks, for that matter. Thinking of starting a fund for the barn repair (estimated last year at €20,000) or would that be very bad form? Yes. Okay. :)

Down on the ranch

2010-01-28T17:30:00.003+01:00

Down on the ranch things have been quiet recently. Wet and mild, until a couple of days ago, when we had about a foot of snow dumped on us. It's thawing now but our steep lane is still icy enough to mean that the school bus won't come down to fetch Alessio in the mornings so we have to ferry him up to the main road. The first day of snow, he had to walk up — at 7.00am when the sun wasn't even over the hill yet — he was NOT pleased, and I think would prefer the UK approach to snow — shut down and wait for spring.

Maxim has been in trouble for running off round the countryside in the company of Mario's two little terrier-type dogs, so we've been keeping him on the chain. Which means we have to walk him regularly, something we're not used to doing but I quite like it (as it seems to be me that's principally walking him, so far). I take him for half an hour in the morning after feeding the animals and before my own breakfast. This morning I went round the huge field below the veg patch, still deep in snow, and watched the sun come over the hill and light up the icy trees and fields from the top down. Very pretty. There's a lot of evidence of wild boar activity — the photo shows where they've been digging under an oak tree to get at the acorns. They've been up very near the house, too: under the enormous oak they've snaffled most of the acorns (poor Cass! she likes acorns) and have cleared part of the bank of brambles — I was going to take a picture but it's covered in snow now. Alessio wants to install a webcam to try to catch the wild boar on film!

We've been enjoying the spectacle

2010-01-07T16:21:00.004+01:00

We've been enjoying the spectacle of the UK grinding to a halt in the big freeze — a fate that befalls us more usually than them, although things don't grind to a halt here, it's just that life becomes more difficult, and unpleasantly cold. Here by contrast it's been bizarrely warm (relatively speaking), though very wet. Lots of flooding and the ground is saturated and swampy. Today it seems almost springlike, with a soft sun and long shadows, but the forecast is for snow at the weekend and then pretty much the foreseeable future.

We realized our sansa (the residue of crushed olive stones that we use for fuel) wasn't going to last out much longer, and if the road freezes up next week the lorry won't be able to make a delivery, so I called the driver early this morning and he heroically rushed off to fetch a few tonnes for us and arrived after lunch. It's a big job getting it loaded into the storage container — the lorry dumps the sansa on on to a huge archimedes screw, which takes it up and in and then drops it in the storage room — like a grain elevator. It's such a slow process that John and Luigi help it along manually, using buckets; the original idea was to let the machinery do the work, but Luigi is impatient. We get about 60 quintali, a quintale being 100 kg, so that's, er, 6 tonnes. A couple of years ago the archimedes screw was broken and John and I loaded it all in manually. Now that was hard work.

Very, very, very cold

2009-12-20T16:11:00.001+01:00

Very, very, very cold. Minus 9 last night and hasn't gone above –2.5 all day despite bright sun. There has been a heavy snowfall. Mario came down with the caterpillar tractor and cleared our road but it's so icy that it's still not really driveable. Highlight of yesterday was a car coming down the lane at 10pm and getting stuck trying to go back – they'd taken a wrong turn. Eventually they got their chains on and made it back up to the top but for the 20 minutes it took it was fun to see someone else in trouble for once...

Lovely autumn morning

2009-12-02T08:48:00.000+01:00

Lovely autumn morning and I'm just packing to go to London. Sad leaving on a day like this; I do want to go, but I'm already looking forward to coming back! Just about to take Cass out for a last frolic before she's confined to her paddock for two weeks. The weather is starting to turn wintry, at last, with a light dusting of snow on the hills, very pretty. Must dash now.

We sowed the broad beans

2009-11-20T08:06:00.003+01:00

We sowed the broad beans, peas, garlic and onions at the beginning of the month. We have a fine crop of fennel, leeks and self-seeded swiss chard, with the broccoli just beginning to develop its florets. Also eating the odd helping of nettles, and wondering what to do with this year's bumper crop of acorns. Cassie loves them but it turns out they can be poisonous to horses (they contain tannins), so I'm letting her snuffle them off the ground when we're out walking, but I've changed my mind about adding buckets of them to her feed. Didn't they make acorn coffee during the war or something? I'll have to get googling.

Hatched!

2009-11-13T11:05:00.003+01:00

Hatched! Ken the caterpillar has turned into a lovely swallowail butterfly. Sadly at the wrong time of year, so the chances of survival are low. I'd hoped he'd overwinter.

And Egbert, whom I raised from tiny tiny tiny, has just pupated, but I will spare you the photos of yet another swallowtail chrysalis.

The itinerant sheep

2009-11-12T14:46:00.005+01:00

The itinerant sheep have arrived from the other side of the valley to spend their annual autumn fortnight's holiday on the fields across from our house. Cassie is in a state of high alert. She can hear them on the other side of the wood, their baa-ing and their bells, but she can't see them. Sheep really freak her out.

Yesterday afternoon I took her out in the rope halter and she jumped and frisked around and totally failed to achieve anything like relaxation, but at least she didn't run away, and she managed to let her desire for grass overcome her fear. The sheep were miles away at the top of the far field, but every so often they would course in a sort of great wave from one side of the field to the other, very noisily, and every time they did this Cassie became very agitated. My plan is to take her out when they come into the near field and see how close we can get. Being afraid of sheep when you live round here is just not practical.

I like the way things go

2009-11-11T16:40:00.004+01:00

I like the way things go with the seasons here. It's a month after the vendemmia and so we get biscuits and buns made with mosto (must, or slightly fermented grape juice) in the bakers, cafés and bars. Yesterday I had a couple of biscuits that had aniseeds in them too, with my cappuccino, and they were so delicious that I bought some to take home. I bought four, and the bargirl threw an extra one in for free. Which is another nice thing they do here.

Three eggs

2009-11-05T15:12:00.005+01:00

Three eggs from the ducks this morning — nice, but moving us ever closer to serious egg glut crisis. The two ducklings are fully grown but we still can't tell whether they're male or female. If their tail gets a little curl, that's a sign they're male, but as yet their tails are resolutely straight. Perhaps they're both girls. Six eggs a day would be too many, way too many.

It was a dramatic autumnal morning with the sun breaking through very dark stormclouds and a rain shower falling lightly. In the western sky the full moon was sinking towards the hills and a rainbow hovered over the woods. Everything looked shiny and the colours very intense. I didn't want to come inside.

Maria called me

2009-10-30T16:15:00.004+01:00

Maria called me to see if I could give her a lift up to the cemetery. This is the big weekend for ancestor-honouring and she always takes flowers up to her parents' graves. This year, she confided to me in the car, she decided to get in a day early to avoid the crowds.

A cold front is coming in on a north-east wind and the clouds are gathering behind the mountains but at 3.30 there was still enough sunlight slanting across the fields to make it look pretty. I've never been inside an Italian cemetery before. This is a tiny one on the edge of the village. It consists of a walled, well-kempt, grassy space with at one end of it a high wall of — tombs? Gravestones set into the wall, essentially — but what's behind them? A space containing the ashes of the deceased, or are they just name-stones? I didn't like to ask Maria because she was busily refreshing the flowers and grappling with the on/off switch of battery-operated Padre Pio votive light (luckily I was able to help her with that).

Down one side of the cemetery were several little mausoleum-type buildings each containing six or eight tombs (or whatever they are) of what must be the richer families. And there were four English-style graves in the ground, relatively recent, in swanky polished black granite, which got Maria all emotional as she explained to me who they were. (Three were two brothers and their mother who all died within 17 months of one another.) And then the Sunday-best photographs, one affixed to each stone — all those strong, staunch Italian peasant faces from years ago, staring out from the past.

Herbie has a small fracture

2009-10-28T10:58:00.003+01:00

Herbie has a small fracture in his left back leg, which seems to be healing nicely despite his failure to obey doctor's orders to rest and not run about. In fact he shows no signs at all of developing mentally beyond the kitten stage and is driving Orsetta crazy in his attempts to get her to play with him. He's very funny.

After last week's grim and dismal weather it's now fantastically sunny and beautiful again, with misty mornings and soft autumn colours. Cassie's field is still very muddy, and so is she, although I cleaned her up the other day and took her out. I also closed off the bottom half of the paddock, raked it and sowed grass seed, feeling like someone in an illustration from a medieval book of hours.

We're still getting ripe tomatoes from the veg patch, which is pretty amazing, though obviously not of the same quality as the ones we get in the summer. Sadly we need to pull up the plants now, as this weekend is the time to sow broad beans and sow onions and garlic for cropping next year, and in our crop rotation plan we've got the beans going on this year's tomato beds. They traditionally sow broad beans on November 1st and 2nd here — All Saints Day and All Souls Day respectively. No idea what the connection is but we go along with it.

This is the last

2009-10-19T09:04:00.004+02:00

This is the last swallowtail chrysalis. I now have three, plus one very tiny caterpillar that I'm not sure will make it. This is a very beautiful green colour with yellow points — the others started off like this too, and gradually turned a leafy brown colour, so I guess that's what will happen with this one as well. They will overwinter and come out as butterflies in the spring. My naturalist friend Andrea has told me to keep them in the light (not to put them out of the way in a wardrobe), as the cycle of day and night is essential to their circadian rhythms and is what will let them know when it's time to emerge. So the next time I post about them it will be springtime.

It's Blog Action Day 2009

2009-10-15T14:30:00.006+02:00

It's Blog Action Day 2009, and these are the latest pictures of my swallowtail butterfly caterpillars Basil and Bob — now preparing to pupate. Very exciting. This year Blog Action Day is about climate change, and I'm proud to have Basil and Bob helping me on this.

Let's think of caterpillars as among the forgotten victims of climate change. It goes like this: as the world warms, the characteristics of habitats change. Spring comes earlier perhaps; the patterns of the rains change; winter comes later and is milder, or the cold snaps are fiercer and at the wrong time. All this plays havoc with the butterfly's (caterpillar's) life cycle. Butterflies lay their eggs on a specific food plant, so that when the caterpillars hatch they can begin to eat immediately. They need to eat and eat and eat for weeks on end — and they need to eat that specific plant. (Basil and Bob ate a lot of my fennel patch.) If the plant's life cycle is altered because the climate is warmer, say, or wetter — well, the caterpillar loses its source of food, and can't survive. Butterflies can expand or move their habitats and colonize where the climate is more favourable relatively quickly, but plants take years or decades to move any significant distance, for deeply obvious reasons. (Ok: no feet.) Plants will lag behind animals in moving as the climate warms; animals will lose food sources and plants will lose pollinators and seed distributors. Whole food chains will be disrupted in subtle but far-reaching ways.

I'm not much of a scientist, but it hardly needs saying that if caterpillars disappear, then so do the creatures that feed on them, and so on down the line. On this green planet we're all linked together. Nothing, really, is too small to be left unconsidered. So, save the caterpillars: if they go, we go — only more noisily, and with a whole lot more pain.

Here is Ken

2009-10-14T12:24:00.003+02:00

Here is Ken in his new incarnation as a chrysalis! A beautiful pale green one with gold flecks. (Hard to get a good photo through the glass jar.) When he comes out as a swallowtail butterfly, will he still be Ken?

Grim sleety day today. Yesterday, which was cold but bright and clear, we saw that the first snow had fallen on the high mountains.

Hot news

2009-10-13T09:11:00.007+02:00

Hot news on the caterpillar front. Ken is definitely in chrysalis-making position: he's curled himself onto a sturdy bit of fennel stem and has lashed the stem to the glass and himself to the stem using strands of silky cobweb-like stuff. He is fastened there by his mouth (?) and his bottom, as well as having a sort of sling around his midriff. Every now and again he twists and wriggles a couple of times in a very slightly alarming manner, so something is going on inside him. I've seen this happen on an incredible video on YouTube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2cE86AA1q0 ), where the caterpillar shucks off its caterpillar skin to reveal inside, already formed, the chrysalis. I think that's what will happen with Ken. The other big green one, Boris, has been motionless for a day as well but is looking less deliberately placed and more like he just stopped where he was for a rest. The other two are now huge — just as big as Boris and Ken — but their coloration is still predominantly black rather than green. I don't know why they haven't turned green, but they look healthy enough and are eating huge quantities of fennel. Tiny tiny Egbert has reached the heady length of 1cm and is really fairly visible without having to squint.

In other news: the weather has turned, dramatically, and we're now in the full depths of autumn. Big storms yesterday with torrential rain and horizontal winds; lots of branches down all over the roads and the fields running with water. It was 25 degrees on Sunday; today it's 9. Something of a shock to the system. When I went out to feed the animals at 7.15 this morning I put on my new, bargain, fake-sheepskin-lined wellies from Lidl for the first time, to find that the lovely warm lining goes down only as far as the ankle and that the whole of the foot part is completely unlined. What the hell is the point of that? But the air smelt amazing as I hunted about for wild fennel in the meadow — the fennel itself (smelling of curry), wild mint, hay and all sorts of other grassy, herby smells mixed in — brought out by the rain. If only my feet had been warmer I'd have been pretty damn happy.

The butterfly emerged

2009-10-12T14:04:00.003+02:00

The butterfly emerged from the chrysalis on Saturday morning and it's a beautiful red admiral. It took a whole day for its wings to dry. It moved around in the mixing-bowl and also sucked up some juice from a slice of orange that I put in there for it, but it didn't really flex its wings out wide till the following day. So on Sunday morning Alessio and I took it out to the barn and released it right where we found the original chryalis, and when I went to check in the evening it had gone. Hopefully to find a mate, rather than snapped up by a passing pigeon.

Really lovely day at a horse fair

2009-10-11T22:03:00.007+02:00

Really lovely day at a horse fair at a place called Cantiano, about one and a half hours' drive away up towards Urbino. The area is where Cassie's breed comes from — Monte Catria (she is a Cavallo del Catria) — and this fair celebrates the breed. And it was full of Cassies! Most of them behaving themselves really well. Lots of mares tied up with their foals, loose, in tow. It's a selling fair and they were auctioning off the horses (tempting) as well as holding competitions for best of breed and so on. Alessio fell in love with a donkey and John was drawn to a classy-looking black foal.

I spent a long time watching a chap in the indoor arena who was working his horse first on the ground and then mounted, with only a halter, a long rein and a lunge whip — the horse knew exactly what he wanted and responded immediately. It was incredible to watch and I felt like I'd never seen such harmony and understanding between horse and human. He was doing a lot of the natural horsemanship stuff that I've been trying to aspire towards with Cass. I lay in wait and collared the man as he came out of the barn and we had a long chat. He uses the Parelli method and said that when he first got his horse, a couple of years ago, it was a monster — a dominant stallion that would bite you if you got within a metre. Now after Parelli training the creature is a gorgeous, calm (castrated) angel. It was very, very inspiring to see. There's a Parelli trainer there and they run courses, but it's a bit far for me to go and expensive (plus I don't have a trailer, and who knows if Cass would deign to go in it even if I did). But I'll see if I can maybe go and watch again, or something. It's good to know there's a natural horsemanship contingent in the area, at least. His horse was barefoot, too, like Cass.

Did I mention the egg

2009-10-09T16:21:00.005+02:00

Did I mention the egg? I found it a few days ago attached to a strand of fennel and brought it in to see if it would hatch (yet another jar). It was tiny — about 0.5mm diameter — and yellow. Yesterday morning it had turned a dark bluish-black colour. This morning it had disappeared, and there was a tiny, tiny caterpillar in the jar. It's about 2mm long. I've given it some more fennel and it's munching through it. The other caterpillars are growing. I had to separate the two big ones (Boris and Ken) as they had a fight!

Also have what's either a painted lady or a red admiral chrysalis sojourning in a mixing-bowl in the kitchen — if it's the red admiral it may well overwinter in this state, whereas if it's the painted lady the butterfly should emerge in the next day or so. Either way, I need my mixing-bowl back.

Finished the vendemmia

2009-10-08T12:31:00.004+02:00

Finished the vendemmia at lunchtime yesterday. It was fun, except I got stung by a wasp. Lunch was good — Maria had remembered about the meat and had cooked me a special tunafish sauce for the pasta (I don't eat tuna, but I did this time) and while everyone else then had huge plates of rabbit and chicken, I was treated to a whole trout. So it wasn't exactly vegetarian, but she'd made a big effort and was very keen that I be happy. Because we had such a wet early summer and then two months of sun, the grapes are fabulous this year. Mario's going to give me some juice to make grape jelly with, and hopefully his wine might be better this year as well!

Glorious sunshine

2009-10-06T14:59:00.003+02:00

Glorious sunshine is what we're enjoying right now — the rain of a couple of weeks ago didn't last long and we're having a fantastic indian summer. The temperatures have been in the low 20s (that's the 70s for those of you who still think in old money: you know who you are) and we've been eating lunch outside every day. The house is cool and it's hard to come inside after that — I like to sit there in my shorts and t-shirt and close my eyes and imagine I'm on my private tropical beach ... then the ducks start quacking or a tractor starts up and that idyll goes up in a puff of smoke. Still, a girl can dream.

On the land, the farmers are ploughing, the last bales are being taken off the fields and the vendemmia (grape harvest) is starting. Mario is doing his tomorrow and we'll be helping, along with one of his daughters and an assortment of sun-ripened contadini. Maria provides lunch, which when I helped a couple of years ago was very funny — she forgot I was vegetarian so she failed to keep any pasta aside for me and just poured the meat ragù over everything. When she realized, she and the daughter then attempted to wash off the sauce under the tap. I was so embarrassed that I even ate it. Worse than the lunch (which hopefully will go better tomorrow) is the fact that Mario thanks us for helping by giving us some of his wine. It's as impossible to refuse as it is to drink, but we still can't help feeling guilty when we pour it down the sink.

The caterpillars are doing fine.

Haha, those two were just babies

2009-10-05T10:23:00.007+02:00

Haha, those two were just babies. Look at their big brother that I found this morning! I went to pick some leaves for the littl'uns to eat and there he was. So this one I found on a stand of wild fennel at the edge of the field, but as the leaves were a bit sparse I then went down to the veg patch to get some leaves from our cultivated fennel (doing very well this year, by the way), and as I inspected the row, I found it pretty much crawling with caterpillars, in all stages of their development. They're veeeery pretty but they are eating a lot. John wants to disinfest the crop but I feel rather attached to them now and no way can we just squish 'em. That would be murder. A re-homing project looms.

Found these little beasties

2009-10-04T21:20:00.005+02:00

Found these little beasties in the fennel as I was weeding amongst it. After much research on the Net I reckon they're going to turn into a kind of swallowtail butterfly (Papilio machaon, if anyone's interested). They're in a relatively early stage of their caterpillar childhood and should go through two or three more stages before they turn into a chrysalis. I hope to nurture them up to that point and then overwinter them in an attractive home made of a former Nutella jar, and then give them lots of fresh fennel leaves to wake up to next spring, when they should hatch out as lovely swallowtail butterflies.

Here's hoping.

We're busy cooking up

2009-09-30T09:07:00.008+02:00

We're busy cooking up or preserving all the autumn produce. Tomato sauce, green beans, pesto, quince cheese, grape jelly . . . We have lots of squash (jack-be-little, sunburst and a large self-seeded unidentified one that grew among the beans), walnuts from our own trees and almonds from a couple of trees left to go wild that we found by a nearby abandoned farmhouse. And it's a great year for sloes - we have 2 litres of sloe gin on the go, gradually turning electric pink.

It's been a whole month

2009-09-25T10:14:00.004+02:00

It's been a whole month since I wrote in here, very busy over the summer but things have calmed down a bit now. Alessio is back at school and we're eating the last of the stuff from the veg patch – tomatoes and peppers mainly, and a few green beans. No indian summer this year – autumn hit us suddenly and brutally a couple of weeks ago with cold and rain and storms. It's warm again now but not with that intense heat that would enable us to go to the beach, say. Mornings are misty and very pretty and evenings are cool. Cassie is wearing her winter coat of mud. Herbie the kitten is growing up physically but not mentally and is still in full-on naughty mode. We tragically lost Blackie last week, somehow he ate some poison and the vet couldn't save him; it was a horrible death and a horrible experience. Mourning a pet is a strange process and I keep thinking I see him just darting round a corner.

Ducklings

2009-08-24T22:21:00.001+02:00

Ducklings! Three babies. I'm a very proud mamma, and so is the duck.

The mamma duck is still

2009-08-16T12:26:00.004+02:00

The mamma duck is still sitting on the eggs as her full-time job, and comes out every morning to quack very loudly until I go out and feed her. No sign of any ducklings yet. I went to look at the nest this morning because Maria told me that if you hold an egg up to the light you can see if it has an embryo inside it and I wanted to try that. Unfortunately the guard-spiders were too much for me and I couldn't steel myself to get close enough to pick up an egg. So we'll just have to wait and see . . .

We have bats

2009-08-07T17:58:00.004+02:00

We have bats. We have three or four bats hanging sweetly in the room we're in the process of converting. One has a baby on its back (or possibly front). They hang as from invisible threads from the beams, and there are possibly some in the chimney as well. Not sure how they're going to like the room being turned into a studio. . .

The other night I'd just finished watching The Sopranos when I became aware of a very large moth in the room. Only it wasn't a moth. It was a bat. The front door was open because of the heat and it must have flown in that way. It swooped around a bit, and then flew out.

I hope it comes back. Bats are very nice.

The duck mysteriously disappeared

2009-08-05T21:58:00.004+02:00

The duck mysteriously disappeared overnight and we feared the worst. But it turns out she is broody! She's made a nest at the back of the haybarn and is sitting on six eggs. She staggers out once or twice a day for water and food, and then goes back to sit again. If you go close (which is scary because she has a lot of very large guard-spiders) she starts to get distressed and open her beak and pant, which is a sad spectacle so we leave her alone. Apparently duck eggs take about four weeks to hatch, so we'll see what happens. She's stopped laying now so the meantime we have no eggs ourselves, which is a bit annoying. The young ducks and the male have come to a sort of accommodation and co-exist in relative peace, although when the big duck comes back he rushes over to her and chases the others off.

The veg patch is acting strangely. We have a lot of tomatoes ripening now but not many new ones developing. Loads of cucumbers, which we are attempting to pickle. The courgettes have gone from glut to dearth in just this past week or so and the patty pan squashes aren't producing at all, whereas in previous years by now the sight of another patty pan was enough to make us almost lose the will to live. The green beans are thriving though, and the various lettuces. And it's time to rotovate a new bit and plant up for the autumn – leeks, broccoli, fennel, cabbage.

Still, before doing that I aim to spend at least one day at the lake. Haven't been up there yet this year and feel in need of some time doing nothing except reading, chatting and occasionally turning over so that I tan with perfect evenness.

The new car has finally arrived

2009-07-30T11:22:00.004+02:00

The new car has finally arrived! It's a Fiat Panda, all shiny and new and beautiful. (That'll last about a week.) The big deal is it runs on methane, though with an extra tank for petrol in case you run out of methane miles away from a filling station. As well as being relatively eco-friendly, it's very, very economical to run — I filled it up for €7.50 and it's supposed to do 200–250km on that. We're keeping the old 4x4 Panda to get us up the hill in winter!

The figs

2009-07-21T14:34:00.003+02:00

The figs are finally ripening and they're gorgeous this year — huge, golden, sweet and juicy. I picked one and ate it off the tree and it tasted exactly of summer.

The veg patch is rampant now and we're back on the courgettes-with-everything regime. Lots of cucumbers too and we're learning how to pickle them (have I already mentioned that in a previous post? Oh well. It's very exciting). Our wild sour-cherry tree yielded up a puny 400 grams of cherries, which made one tiny jar of intensely flavoured, sublime jam.

Cass stomped on my foot last week whilst I was taking her an apple one evening and rather stupidly wearing only flip-flops. Owwwww.

So life goes on, only with a bit more hopping in it.

Just back

2009-07-12T10:17:00.004+02:00

Just back from a trip to England, where it was hotter than it was here, apparently. But we seem to have had enough heat combined with rain to allow the veg patch to flourish and the land to be more jungly — and greener — than usual at this time of year. Herbie the new kitten is gradually but systematically wrecking the house, with a brief calm, and in retrospect blissful, interlude while he recovered from being bitten by one of Mario's small dogs.

The baby ducks are about a month old now — not so baby any more — and are being severely harassed by the big male duck. He’s violently aggressive towards them, though it’s clearly a hormonal aggressivity and what he's after is sex, not murder — but the poor things dash about going “peep peep” at the top of their little voices, flapping about and desperately trying to get away from him while he pursues them with single-minded determination. The grown-up female, showing no sisterly solidarity, ignores the whole performance — actually, she’s probably relieved.

We were afraid he was going to harm them if they were shut in together so we’ve been keeping them separate at night, while letting them loose together during the day so they can get used to each other; but the other day Alessio and I were at the market where I bought the ducklings originally, and he persuaded me to stop and ask the guy “what to do about the boy duck”. So I did. And that provided another of those female-English-city-slicker humiliations which are a fundamental part of life here.

“The male,” I explained carefully (bearing in mind there was a child present), “is very aggressive towards the female ducklings.”

Pitying looks and smirks exchanged between duck man and gap-toothed old farmer client hanging round for a chat. Patronizing comments such as “It’s just nature, love” and so on helpfully furnished.

“Yes, I know, but he’s so aggressive, I wasn’t sure if it was, er, normal.”

Overt grins and more patronizing comments along the lines of “Oh, it’s normal all right darlin’.”

“Yes, I know, but I’m afraid he’s going to hurt them.”

Outright laughter and more patronizing comments of the “well, they’ll get used to it, fnaar fnaar” variety, followed, at last, by some advice — to just put them all together and let them get on with it. And by the information that breeders usually keep one male to every eight females, so if we only have four females . . .

I scuttled off, feeling like a willing party to duck rape. Still, it’s a relief to know it’s all only natural.

The old cherry tree

2009-06-21T12:18:00.002+02:00

The old cherry tree just below Cassie’s paddock has a fantastic crop this year. I noticed it as I was clearing the long grass away from the electric fence yesterday, and hopped outside the fence to pick some. Unfortunately the tree’s on a part of the slope where the ground drops away steeply and not only that but even the lowest branches are so high that I had to stretch to reach them. Using a stick, I managed to pull down a couple of branches so that I could pick the cherries, but I couldn’t reach any more after that (and fat stripy green caterpillars were falling on me too). Very frustrating. I ended up with half a kilo, even so. And they’re incredibly delicious — perfectly ripe, big, dark, juicy, sweet, full of flavour. Maybe the best cherries I’ve ever eaten. The birds will get the rest and I don’t begrudge them, but I think I would enjoy them more . . .

And this is another

2009-06-17T19:40:00.003+02:00

And this is another new pet. Okay, no, it’s not. It’s a monstrous caterpillar-type thing that I found this evening crawling on the tarpaulin covering the hay. At first I thought its head end was where the antennae are and that the headlike end with the eyelike spots and mouthlike parts was the tail end, serving as a cunning caterpillar bluff to fool predators. But after some close observation I think the mouthlike parts were in fact mouth-parts and the headlike end was in fact the head. Not sure if the spots are the eyes though. Those leglike bits had a tenacious grip — I couldn't shake it off that twig. The photo with my finger in it gives some idea of scale. Am going to send the photos to a naturalist friend and see if he can shed any light. Can’t type any more now, the damn kitten is climbing all over the keyboard.

Last passing thought: if this is a caterpillar, what the hell kind of monster butterfly is it going to turn into?

It's a while

2009-06-17T06:41:00.002+02:00

It’s a while since we had a baby animal, so this is our new kitten. Arguments as to his name are still ongoing. He’s about eight weeks old and has been hand-reared as his mother was killed while the kittens were two days old. He’s very friendly and purrs as soon as you go into the room.

Making daisy chains is not as easy

2009-06-12T17:19:00.004+02:00

Making daisy chains is not as easy as I remembered it to be. We were up in the mountains today doing some research for a website John’s designing, and went to look at the source of the little river Nera. A beautiful, peaceful spot a little way beyond a very pretty mountain village (Castelsantangelo sul Nera), with a grassy lawn and benches — sounds horribly like a tourist trap but there was just one elderly couple there apart from us. Someone had laid a daisy garland on a big stone in the stream and I told Alessio it was an offering to the god of the spring, so he promptly went and pulled up the nearest buttercup to chuck down into the water. We stopped him and told him to make a proper offering if he wanted to do that. Which led to the effortful daisy chain attempt. We managed to string five or six of them together, but it was a far cry from the substantial and carefully woven garland that the previous offerer (offerant?) had left. Alessio left his there anyway and I told him to make a wish. “What shall I wish for?” “I don’t know — wish for something simple, like a nice summer.” “I wish for a beanbag chair. I really want a beanbag chair, mum.”

Right. Think I'll leave that in the hands of the river god.

Last night we went

2009-06-06T22:08:00.001+02:00

Last night we went out for the end of year meal with Alessio’s school class. This is a good class, a friendly, outgoing group, so we’ve been lucky – the other classes don’t do a lot of socializing together, whereas our class is always having get-togethers and meals and trips, which is obviously good for us as incomers. Last night’s meal surpassed all others, I’d say. It was a cena a base di pesce (fish dinner) and we hired a little chalet-type social centre in one of the tiny outlying villages, with space outside for the kids to play and a barbecue grill. Arrived around 7.30pm and finally departed at 1.00am, having eaten a stupendous multi-course fish meal of professional quality and sung and danced and even cleared up afterwards.

And I woke up at 6.00 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep, with the consquence that I’m so tired now I can hardly focus to write this. Wanted to write a lot more but it’ll have to wait.

Good night.

Few things are as much fun

2009-05-28T16:27:00.008+02:00

Few things are as much fun as watching a cat stuck up a tree. This is Orsetta in the higher reaches of the big walnut, which caused much merriment.

I can't make the layout work how I want it to, but never mind. Other than cat diversions, it's been haymaking time. Very, very hot and for once none of the looking anxiously at the sky and calculating the odds of it raining before the bales are in. Mario spent a morning making around 50 small bales for me (well, for Cass) and then got bored with the time it was taking and lugged out his other baler that makes huge round bales and finished off the job in less than an hour. Meaning we have these huge rotoli this year, which is ok as they're cheaper but not so ok as they're less easy to store (won't fit in our barn because of access difficulties) and for the fact that they're impossible to shift without a tractor. Mario has deposited five of them along the edge of her paddock and says he'll bring more as and when I need them.

Cass was not at all happy at the rotoli suddenly appearing, and when she came up to look at them she got too close to the electric fence and got a hefty electric shock, which sent her squealing away across the field. Then she came back and stared at the rotoli in horror, snorting and tossing her head, and you could practically see her thinking: That fence was fine till they came, they must be really, really bad. It was very funny, actually, except that when I took her out the following day she was very, very wound up and jumped about all over the place as if things were about to leap out at her from behind every tree. Even letting her tiptoe up to one of the bales and take a bite out of it hasn't helped much. Sigh.

The mornings are cool

2009-05-20T15:31:00.002+02:00

The mornings are cool and fresh now with a hint of the hot day that’s to come. Mist in the valley when I go down to feed the horse, quickly burning off. I love this time of year. We have our own strawberries! (OK, just a few, but fab all the same.) The land went from being a mud patch to a lush jungle in about a week, and the long grasses are all going to seed already. The farmers have started to cut the hay and everyone’s planting up their veg patches like mad – late start after the rainy spring, but the ground is now so warm that whatever you put in grows very fast. We’ve rotovated and dug in a lot of manure, and the earth is finer this year though still very heavy. We’ve put in 40 tomatoes and a load of cucumbers, courgettes (green ones and yellow ones), patty pans and various winter squash. Still need to plant peppers, aubergines and salad. Currently eating lollo rosso and swiss chard which have made it through the winter, and waiting for the broad beans to be ready – couple more days should do it. John has created an asparagus bed but you have to wait at least two years before you can eat the crop!

It’s been too hot to do much during the day but I’ve been taking Cassie out to the riding ring, partly to let her munch down the grass in it (otherwise she just eats while she's meant to be working) and partly to actually work her. I’ve been trying some loose schooling with her, making her go round the ring without being attached to a rope, and it’s a lot of fun. I've got her doing walk, trot and canter on command. She seems to like it and it’s making her more responsive. I’ve been looking at a lot of riding chat forums on the web and people talk about playing with exercise balls with their horses – now that would really freak Cass out, but if I can get hold of one I fancy trying it!

Time has whizzed

2009-05-06T12:29:00.003+02:00

Time has whizzed by as usual, I seem to have been busy doing who knows what, and I haven't written for ages. Easter was good, with fine weather and our first apartment guests of the year. Alessio got a week off school and we had various English friends around to have some fun with. In fact we had two or three weeks of sunshine and got quite used to it, and then it suddenly turned cold again and rained solidly for a week – last week, which was unfortunately the very week that my parents were staying.

Because of the grim weather we've been unable to progress with the veg patch and it's still bare earth. John has rotovated it once but needs to go over it another time before we can plant. We dumped quantities of horse manure on it to try to improve the soil quality – it's heavy clay, which forms impossible-to-work clods when wet and dries very fast to a concrete-like consistency. Hopefully a few seasons of manure will make it less clay-ey and more amenable to growing tender veggies. We've sown our courgettes and squash seeds in pots but will buy all the rest as seedlings.

We're thinking about getting some chickens to mix in with the remaining ducks, as it seems to be impossible to buy point-of-lay ducks to replace those that were lost over the winter. You can keep chickens and ducks together and it would be nice to have a mix of ducks' and hens' eggs. Ducks are a lot more amusing to watch so we wouldn't want to just have chickens though. Maybe we'll get a couple of ducklings now as well, and hope we can actually get them through next winter alive and in one piece . . .

Speedwell, chickweed, goosegrass

2009-04-09T21:31:00.004+02:00

Speedwell, chickweed, goosegrass, deadnettle . . . I spent hours, or what seemed like hours, this afternoon weeding and hoeing the veg patch and seemed to get nowhere. I excavated the two very small gooseberry bushes and the two very small currant bushes, which were almost drowned in chickweed, and I salvaged what I could of the raspberry canes, ditto, and I attempted to hoe amongst the broad beans, but it’s a somewhat dispiriting task with the ground so hard (despite the rain) and the weeds so tenacious. And my tennis elbow so sore. And my back. And the little toe of my right foot, where Cass trod on me again last week.

. . . As I write, the house has just shaken again with another big earthquake. The death toll in Abruzzo has reached 280. The original big quake woke us up in the middle of the night, though we couldn’t tell how bad it was till the next morning when I turned on the news. Since then we’ve felt all the large aftershocks — 5.5, 5.3, 5.2 on the Richter scale — big, scary earthquakes in their own right, although our house is strong and we don't worry that it'll actually collapse. There’s no structural damage round here and certainly no lives lost, but everyone remembers the Assisi quake of 1997 and all the damage it did in this area — for the first few years we were here, the skyline of Camerino was defined by cranes rather than medieval towers, the town council was housed in the bus depot, and people were still living in containers. Now L’Aquila and the little surrounding villages will have to go through it all — all the reckoning with the fear and the pain, the years of rebuilding and recovery. But first the burials and the mourning. And meanwhile the speedwell and the chickweed grow apace across the trembling earth.

On Saturday night

2009-04-02T10:12:00.009+02:00

On Saturday night we took part in Earth Hour, WWF’s turn-your-lights-off-for-the-planet worldwide symbolic gesture, at 8.30, eating supper by candle-light and playing Scrabble in the dark (candle-light is dark!). Watching Alessio light the tealights was terrifying. Who’d have thought it could be so hard to get the hang of matches?

That was also the night the clocks changed, and the evenings are now light till about 7.30, which is great. (The adverse effect of course is that it’s now back to being almost dark when we get up at 6.30a.m., which is not so nice.) With all the blossom and the wildflowers there’s a proper sense of spring now – or there was till a couple of days ago, when a cold depression blew in, and a cloud has been sitting on top of us ever since, and we're back to mist, rain and mud. We’ve turned most of the radiators off but I’m still wearing two pairs of socks.

Not so many cuckoos here, but we’ve spotted the First Hoopoe of Spring. Hoopoes migrate here for the summer and are stunning pink birds with black-and-white striped wings and a crest. They tend to return each year to nest in the same place, like swallows; no sign of them yet, but our resident pigeons are nesting in their holes in the outside walls of the house, and there's a great deal of small-bird activity, blue tits and finches flying about with twigs and moss in their beaks. The sun has to come out soon. . .

The ducks played a little duck joke

2009-03-17T15:51:00.003+01:00

The ducks played a little duck joke on us last night. We couldn’t find them at dusk to put them away: they’d just disappeared into thin air. For a fox to have come and taken both of them in broad daylight without leaving any trace seemed almost impossible, especially as both the dogs were around and would surely have barked. We looked all round the garden and in the woods, in the barns and outhouses and all sorts of nooks and crannies but no sign of them.

This morning I looked out of the window hopefully, in case they’d arrived back during the night and were pecking away in their run, but no. Thinking sadly how much we really are the kiss of death for ducks, I went out to feed the rest of the animals. When I was getting Cassie’s hay from the barn I heard a little quacky noise, and then the male duck popped up chirpily from behind a bale of hay. He looked at me with a kind of “Yeah? So what?” look. He and the girl duck must have spent the night in a cosy corridor squeezed between the bales and the wall of the barn.

Very funny, ducks.

In reality, they were being very clever: right at the back of where they’d slept, I found an egg. Her first egg since they stopped laying in December, and proof that she has recovered from her recent near-death experience with the fox.

It was a gorgeous, starlit, warmish evening

2009-03-16T16:30:00.002+01:00

It was a gorgeous, starlit, warmish evening, and I was out looking for the dogs when I had this really bizarre, Harry-Potter-like experience: my torch picked out a pair of bright green, glowing, apparently disembodied eyes gazing at me from the walnut tree. I had Maxim on the lead and he wasn’t bothered by it at all so I figured it couldn’t really be an evil witch from the land of the dead come to suck my blood . . . so I continued to stare into the branches of the tree and the eyes stared back, occasionally blinking. It wasn’t scary but it was totally, totally freaky. My first thought was that it was an owl; but an owl would have flown away pretty quickly. What was so odd was that I couldn’t see any form or body around the eyes at all, even when I moved the torch beam. Just the eyes and the tree branches.

I gradually circled down and closer to the tree and the eyes followed me . . . And of course it turned out to be a damn cat — not one of ours — when I got beyond its comfort zone it leapt down and ran away into the night. Ok, that doesn’t sound like much but it was a very weird experience.

Alessio did the illustration for me and it's pretty accurate.

It’s still quite warm

2009-03-02T10:47:00.004+01:00

It’s still quite warm and we’ve been able to do some work outside. John has started digging out a space for the big tanks we bought to collect the rainwater from the roof to supplement the tank we already have. The new ones hold 1,000 litres each. We need to line all three tanks up in a row at the same level and connect them all together so that the water only needs to enter the first thank but all the tanks fill up. We should get Filippo with his digger to do it, but John seems to be quite enjoying the challenge. Alessio helped him when we got back on Saturday from what turned out to be an ill-fated chess tournament (his team came seventh out of nine), and he dissipated some of his chess rage via hard physical labour.

While all that was going on I raked the bottom half of Cassie’s paddock, which we’ve separated off, preparatory to sowing grass. It was a nice warm evening and felt quite springlike. Yesterday I sowed the grass seed while Cass looked on in astonishment from the other side of the fence (I had the seed in her feed bucket and she was incensed that I was apparently just chucking her feed away without even consulting her). Today it’s raining lightly which is just perfect.

Had two consecutive clear nights at the weekend without a moon, and I finally saw the comet I’ve been trying to locate for ages. It’s comet Lulin, recently discovered (2007), very faint but you can see it through binoculars. It’s a greyish greenish fuzzy smudge, powering along out there, heading past us and out of our solar system. It won’t come back, if at all, for another thousand years. On Friday night I located it just near the star called Regulus in the constellation of Leo, and the next night it had moved visibly 3cm or so up the sky (a long way in astronomical terms!). It’s an amazing thing and it blows my mind to see it. It’s moving really fast and away from Earth now, so it won’t be visible through binoculars for much longer, and the moon’s light will start to affect it shortly as well. So I might never see it again.

The constant sound

2009-02-23T21:24:00.003+01:00

The constant sound of trickling water has been today’s acoustic effect as the snow finally melts away, sloooowly. Not only is it still light(ish) at 6.00pm but it’s also still above freezing, both facts that perk me up considerably. Especially if I pretend I haven’t seen the weather forecast for the rest of the week.

It was so nice and almost-balmy (well, ok, I was still wearing three pairs of socks and my attractive woolly hat) today that I let the ducks out for the first time since the fox catastrophe. The injured female is still bent over and hunched but she’s eating and definitely on the mend; the male is fine. But they’re both still incredibly nervous. They tiptoed out of the pen and wandered about looking somewhat dazed for a few minutes, then seemed to remember what a duck’s life is all about, and went off grubbing in the mud, the female hanging close to the male and making little chirrupping noises which sounded very much like duck joy. When I looked for them ten minutes later, out of the kitchen window, they’d voyaged down to the pond and were splashing about in it like crazy, having a brilliant time. The female spent ages washing and preening – ever since the attack she has been dirty and muddy and rather motheaten-looking because she hasn’t been able to keep herself properly clean. I could see that in the pond today she was just in duck heaven.

When I went to fetch them to put them away she was a different creature – clean and sparkly and white – and she stretched her wings out wide and flapped them (one still trailing somewhat) and then fluffed up all her feathers and shook them. Who can say if a duck’s happy or not, really, but this is an amazing recovery.

Gorgeous sunny crispy day

2009-02-15T11:04:00.003+01:00

Gorgeous sunny crispy day yesterday, though with 10cm snow on the ground and –8º overnight. I took Cass out on the long rein into the big field to frolic and she frisked about like crazy, kicking up her heels and jumping about. Alessio went down on his hands and knees and started crawling along in the snow and Cass thought that was totally bizarre, stared at him with her eyes out on stalks and her nostrils flared, and then turned round and shot away, trampling on my foot in the process. I kept hold of her and got her calmed down, but I can see my spook-busting programme needs a teeny bit more work.

Latest disaster is our boiler has broken down, which we’re especially pleased about as not only is it a weekend, but it’s one of the coldest weekends of the winter so far. The Archimedes screw that delivers the fuel from the hopper to the firebed has broken in some way, so it’s a major problem. (Our boiler is a huge industrial-looking beast that lives in an external room, and runs on sansa, which is the dry, granular residue left over from crushing olives for oil – a waste-product eco-fuel.) John is trying to take apart the inner workings but it’s very heavy work and even once it’s all opened up I can’t imagine he’ll be able to fix it himself. It’ll need a fabbro (metalworker), I guess, and some bespoke steelwork with a hefty price-tag.

So we have no hot water or central heating and it’s very cold today (it’s 0º outside right now, midday). Luckily we planned for all eventualities when furnishing this house, so we have our fantastic woodburning stove now going full pelt. The living room, at least, is warm and toasty, and we have pans of water on it so that we have hot water whenever we need it for washing and so on. Later we’re going to try starting the boiler itself, as it’s meant to be able to run on wood, with a manual rather than automatic feed. We’ve never tried this but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work, and that would give us hot water for showers and radiators for as long as we could be bothered to keep the fire in the boiler stoked.

Life in the wilds sometimes feels harder than it should be.

Cass shows off this season’s

2009-02-09T18:59:00.004+01:00

Cass shows off this season’s must-have accessory, a stylish coat of dried mud.

Yesterday I spent half an hour of very hard work brushing it off her, took her out for a walk and as soon as she hit the grass – down she went. She rolled five times during an hour’s wander, and by the end of it looked as muddy as she had before I brushed her. Only wetter. She frisked about like crazy on the grass too – you could see she hadn’t been out for such a long time. I took her out again today but didn’t bother brushing her first (I’m not stupid), and she was a lot calmer, I even got her trotting circles in the yard. Yay!

Duck is still sad, with her head down, though she's drinking and maybe eating and seems a lot stronger – she walks about (well, staggers really) and stretches her poor damaged wings. But we think she might never be able to lift her head properly, so this will pose a dilemma – she wouldn’t be able to preen and it can’t be very comfortable either – and I don't know if it would be right to keep her like that. She doesn’t seem to be in active pain any more so we’ll continue to see how she goes over the next few days. Maybe as she gets stronger she’ll lift her head. Maybe not.

Lovely dawn sky

2009-02-06T10:36:00.004+01:00

Lovely dawn sky this morning, though by the time I’d run inside for my camera the most intense colours had faded. Almost makes it worth getting up before first light. (Almost.)

Yesterday evening I realized that the duck’s beak seemed to be pasted closed by gunk and dried blood, and I wondered if she was even able to drink, let alone eat. So we dipped it in warm salt water and cleaned it up, and that did seem to make a difference. When I gave her back the fresh water she took some sips, and then I put some food in front of her and she truffled into that in quite a starving manner. So that’s a good sign. Her head is still bowed right down though, in a really unnatural and disconcerting way. The male ate and drank yesterday and stretched his wings and tried to flap them, so you can see that although he’s still stiff and achey, he’s on the mend.

I went to the cinema last night (Revolutionary Road: a disappointment), and driving home late, I turned the radio on and caught a just-so-Italian discussion on how to make the perfect pesto.

You assemble your ingredients. Fresh basil. Two cheeses: Parmesan and seasoned pecorino, adjusting the relative quantities depending on how piccante you want your pesto to be. Garlic, which you mash slightly with the back of a spoon. Pine nuts. Oil (extra-virgin olive). Coarse sea salt. And a spoonful or two of the pasta cooking water, for starch.

Your mortar is of course made of marble, and your pestle of olive wood. And you simply mix everything together, crushing and mashing and pounding as required, until you have your pesto.

The two presenters spent a good ten minutes on this, talking with not only real enthusiasm but also deep-seated knowledge (where the best pine nuts come from, what kind of salt), even though I don’t think they were professional foodies. I couldn’t imagine such a discussion taking place on the radio in England, not without some degree of pretension.

Made me want to go and sow my basil seeds.

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in

2009-02-04T17:20:00.004+01:00

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in from feeding the animals – and it's still light outside. What a great feeling that is. The day has been warm with lots of heavy rain showers and the ground is waterlogged, with all the trees dripping, but this evening the sky is somewhat clearer and maybe it’ll be nice tomorrow. The poor horse is soaking wet and covered in mud but she seems happy enough, apart from being bored because I haven’t taken her out for days.

The two remaining ducks are still hanging in there. The male will be fine, I think – he spent yesterday outside (in the run) and today going in and out of the duckhouse, and he’s been drinking and preening and trying to stretch his wings, all of which must be good signs, though he hasn’t eaten anything. The female is still alive but is just sitting in the duckhouse in not very good shape. Her neck droops over so that her beak is pointing downwards and almost touches the ground; I think the fox must have damaged some muscles or tendons in the neck, or maybe she’s just too tired to hold her head up. I think she’s drunk a little water. I’d have thought that if she were going to die, she’d have died by now; yesterday, I saw her keel over on to her side and just lie there, which is really bizarre for a duck and I was certain she was dying, but she didn’t and next time I checked on her she was upright again. So we just keep on waiting.

I wandered down

2009-02-02T11:37:00.001+01:00

I wandered down the slope at 7.30 this morning to feed the animals, plate of food-scraps in hand, with the vague sensation that something was wrong but unable to pin it down. As I rounded the corner of the house all became clear. The ducks were silent – normally in the morning they hear me coming and start quacking and burbling excitedly – silence is sinister, and that’s what had stirred the feeling of unease in me.

It was a sight that made my blood run cold and I just stood there for several seconds taking it in. Something had got at the ducks. The roof of the pen had been knocked off and inwards. One of the white ducks, covered in a slick of mud, stood against the fence, her head looking upwards but her eyes blank. The male duck was huddled in a corner. The dark-feathered female was hunched in the middle of the run. They were all still, totally still, with an absolute lack of movement that was frightening. I thought they must all be dead – but the white one was standing up, so how could it be dead? As I moved slowly closer they started to move, the male scrambled in slow motion into the duckhouse, and the white one, too, managed to turn and stagger after him. The dark one was bowed over and I couldn’t see her head, but then she slowly lifted it out from beneath her, and then just as effortfully let it droop back onto the ground between her legs. The other white duck was missing; there was blood in patches on the ground and a few scattered white feathers.

I fetched John and he carried the injured duck away to put it out of its misery. We inspected the remaining two, and the white one had clearly been gripped in the fox’s jaws from behind, her shoulders were bitten and bloody and when we moved her blood dripped out of her beak. But we can’t tell how bad her internal injuries are and it’s possible she’ll survive. The male looks traumatized but physically ok. We’ve left them in the duckhouse to see whether the female gets better or worse during the day, and later we’ll decide whether we need to put her out of her suffering too. We moved the pen and I hosed down the mud and blood. The smell was sickening and is still in my nostrils.

I know they’re just ducks. And this was just a fox getting some ducks. How much more classic a country-life event can you have? But something about the aftermath of that unmalicious violence – the weird stillness of the ducks, the clarity of their trauma, the way the injured one bowed her head and shivered in fits – was really shocking. I’m not a sentimental person but this is horrible.

So I also

2009-01-21T08:54:00.004+01:00

So I also want to post this today before it completely loses topicality – a photo of Obama giving his inauguration speech, the way we saw it on our lovely new LCD screen. History! The Italian simultaneous translation was pretty poor but we managed to make out some of his actual words beneath the overlay. This in fact was one occasion when the new digital TV's unencrypted BBC World channel would have come into its own, but for some reason the signal quality has gone from dodgy-but-watchable to so-poor-we're-not-even-going-to-show-you-the-picture, so we had to watch what RAI deigned to give us, which was about an hour's worth. Which was just about enough, actually, especially as I had to skip in and out of the kitchen during the speech as I was in the middle of making a lentil shepherd's pie. I bet Michelle Obama doesn't have to do that.

Watching Obama was quite a strange experience. Everything is so right about him that it's almost unreal. He looks like a film star and we felt we were watching a film, especially after we spent last year intensively watching the entire seven seasons of The West Wing – Obama is so photogenic and wish-fulfilling that it was hard not to believe we were watching an unexpected Season 8. Hope Obama lives up to the hype and gives us a happy ending.

The shepherd's pie was good.

I haven’t written

2009-01-21T08:32:00.003+01:00

I haven’t written for a while because this is a quiet time of year and the only thing I ever seemed to want to write about has been the weather … So – to get the weather out of the way – in the past two or three weeks we’ve had ice, freezing fog, sleet, rain, fog, sunshine, showers, and yesterday a big windy storm. The snow took ages to melt and has finally done so, leaving our road a soggy, rutted cart-track that non-4WD vehicles have a problem getting up. At least it’s an improvement on the solid ice skid-slope that it was for a few weeks when the temperature hardly went above zero – coming down it was terrifying. It's now bizarrely warm and almost springlike, which as it's only January is one of those cruel tricks that means we shall almost certainly be submerged under a metre snow by the end of tomorrow.

Coming up from the veg patch the other day I noticed that the bird nesting-box that the hornets built their huge nest around seemed to have a large hole in the bottom of it. On closer inspection, I could see that inside the box is – well, a hornets’ nest. It’s full of cells, which I suppose are full of larvae. The hornets must have gnawed (do hornets have teeth?) their way through the wood – and this is proper, 0.5cm-thick wood – and then constructed the inner core of their nest inside the box, and then turned their attention to the outside when they covered it with the layers of beautiful paper. So it was only the outer part that was destroyed in the high winds before Christmas, and I guess we still have a hornet problem.

The coldest temperature

2009-01-07T12:32:00.003+01:00

The coldest temperature we’ve yet had this winter was —8ºC a few nights ago. The leftover snow has turned to a crunchy crust and our access road is an ice-slide. The valleys, though, are green (or brown) again. We had some bright, crisp days after New Year and went for a good walk with the dogs, but as I look out of the window I see it’s starting to snow again…

I took the horse out for a walk two or three times to see how she liked the snow – she stared at everything as if it all looked completely new and unexpected (as perhaps it did) but was fairly calm, considering. I took her into the big grass field and she pawed the snowy ground to uncover the grass just like wild ponies do. She also rolled several times in the snow, which made me laugh – it must be like some kind of therapeutic beauty treatment for her!

The ducks don’t mind the cold at all and continue their happy duck existence. They've finally discovered how to get in and out of the pond and have decided they like it: now they spend all day down there, scrabbling about on the edges, following the overflow stream down the side of the field, swimming about in the water, or just hanging out. It’s very nice to see them behaving like, well, ducks with a pond.

I hate to think what the veg patch will look like once we finally wrest it back from the elements. Frozen fennel, broken-stemmed greens, ice-scalded broccoli… Even the cabbages don't look very healthy. The other day we made nettle soup (from nettles we’d frozen in the autumn) and it was delicious. And free.

After the rain

2008-12-28T18:42:00.003+01:00

After the rain we had some days of beautiful, crisp, clear, bright, cold weather, which could almost make me like winter, or at least make it tolerable. The horse and I went out for some nice wanders and did some dreaming in the sun.

Sadly we lost another duck, right in the middle of the day, to a mystery predator – but we’re not ruling out Maxim. We have four ducks now, of which one is a male, and the other three are all laying, though not all on the same day. Generally we’re getting two or three eggs a day, sometimes only one. We have an egg glut.

On Boxing Day it started to snow and has been snowing intermittently ever since – not very hard, so we’re not snowed in, but it’s not very pleasant out there. The vicious northeast wind that howled round the house for the first day has stopped, at least, but it’s still very cold. The ducks don’t seem to mind it and they hang out round the pond near the veg patch – grubbing around in the mud on the edge but for some reason failing to actually get in the water. It’s unbelievably frustrating to watch them. Give them a plastic washing-up bowl full of water and they leap in and sit there; give them a pond and it freaks them out. What is the matter with ducks?

For two whole days

2008-12-12T23:18:00.005+01:00

For two whole days it has been raining solidly, and the world is wet. The valley is a lake. Actual streams are flowing across the field below the veg patch where the sheep were grazing a few weeks ago. The pond has overflowed and the outflow from it has formed another stream running down the gully at the edge of the field. Narrow, fast-flowing torrents are everywhere. Water is everywhere. Within a few minutes of being outside I’m soaked, water runs down my supposedly waterproof trousers into my boots and water drips off my hood and into my eyes and down my neck inside my scarf. The air has turned to water, you breathe in water. The sound of water is everywhere too, the hiss of the rain coming down, the gurgle of the streams that have sprung up, the squelch and splash of my footsteps.

The horse is standing miserably in her field, getting wet. She’s been standing miserably in her field getting wet for 36 hours and she’s very cold now. At lunchtime when I took her hay down she was shivering, which made me worry. Now I take her hay right down and put it in her shelter, which she never goes in because it’s scary; but now this seems ridiculous. She’s freezing to death. I slog back up from the shelter (why did we build it halfway down the field?) and get the piece of rope that’s draped by the gate. Cassie sidles away from me warily but I get the rope round her neck and, surprisingly, she allows herself to be led down the field towards the shelter. We slip and slide together (steep slope) and I hold on to her mane and her neck to stop myself falling over – if she decided to take off now I’d be face down in the mud. But she’s ok and I lead her straight into the shelter, where she promptly wheels around and starts to get agitated. I point out the pile of hay. Mmm, hay, she goes, and starts to munch it, jumping only occasionally when something in the woods startles her. This is really good, actually, as normally she hates her shelter and won’t stand in it at all without getting all neurotic. Now she lets me rub her down with some handfuls of old straw and she does seem calmer.

I go up through the Somme-like field to deal with the rest of the animals. The ducks are in duck heaven and don’t want to go into their pen; I leave them rootling around ecstatically in the puddles. The cats are very unhappy indeed. The dogs come out from their hideaway and start bouncing all over the place. I feed them, then go back to the field to take Cass her feed and a whole load more hay. She’s still standing in her shelter, out of the rain. Who knows if she’ll be brave enough to stay there all night?

Last night down in the field

2008-12-03T10:53:00.004+01:00

Last night down in the field just after sunset I saw the current conjunction of Venus and Jupiter, together with the new moon, in the west. Not sure it really comes out well in the photo but it was very beautiful (you can just see Jupiter above Venus to the right, if you squint; well, trust me, it's there!). If we get a clear night I’ll take the telescope out and try to see Jupiter’s moons – the four Galilean moons should be visible. I’ve never seen them and Jupiter is currently so easy to find that it seems silly not to try, even though the telescope still hasn’t been properly aligned. Andromeda is right overhead at the moment so Alessio and I are going to look for the Andromeda Galaxy with binoculars – saw it last summer but the winter skies are better, less hazy. So here’s hoping the cloud clears.

So, weeks have gone by since I last posted and winter is here now. There’s snow on the mountains; down here in the foothills we’ve had a lot of rain, and the horse’s field is a swamp of mud. She loves rolling in it and is back to her winter Mudpuppy incarnation.

The hornets’ nest has been struck by tragedy: recent high winds have damaged it, I think beyond repair. The beautiful sculpted-paper outside was blown off in bits and now the internal cells (like honeycomb) are exposed and gradually being blown away. The hornets themselves seem to have disappeared. This solves our hornet problem, of course, but it’s hard not to feel sad for them. All that work and effort. Life is tough in the jungle!

The veg patch is doing okay but not loving the sub-zero temperatures we had last week (minus 4.5 one night) nor the gales – the cime di rapa (turnip tops) are all bent over and soggy. We sowed broad beans, onions and garlic at the beginning of November (traditionally round here they sow broad beans around the Day of the Dead and All Saints, Oct 31st and Nov 1st) so hopefully those will all just happily while away the winter doing whatever it is they do under the earth and then burst through next spring. The savoy cabbages are thriving, which is good I suppose, though I can’t help viewing all twenty of them with some trepidation. It’s a lot of cabbage.

Every autumn a shepherd

2008-10-23T08:08:00.003+02:00

Every autumn a shepherd from across the valley brings his flock over to our side to graze the fields that had hay on over the summer. It’s a nice custom and one of the ways in which traditional farming is still carried on here – the fields benefit from fresh fertilizer and the sheep get some good end-of-season grazing before the winter sets in. These sheep are a thin, black, rather goatlike local breed used for milking, and Misici, the shepherd, is well known round here for his superb pecorino cheese.

The sheep have been in the top field opposite our house for a week or so, being moved about by the shepherd on a daily basis, and attended by four or five of the usual enormous white Maremmano dogs. We hear the sheepbells tinkling as the flock pours from one field to another. When they’re on the move, Teo goes mad with barking and makes forays towards them, but not near enough to let the dogs get him. When they come into the field just below the house, the horse can hear them but not see them and she starts to fret, staring in horror in the direction of the scary noises and periodically setting off round her field at a frantic trot in, I suppose, an expression of the flight part of her fight or flight instinct. (The horse is definitely a flight animal. Especially this horse.)

Yesterday morning the shepherd brought the flock into the field below the house for a couple of hours and then took them away again, hidden up over the brow of the hill. Teo barked solidly for the two hours that they were visible. After lunch I happened to be gazing out of the kitchen window and spied a tiny black shape in the grass. It was a lamb, and through binoculars I could see that it was a very small lamb with two or three very big black crows hanging round it. As I watched, one of the crows hopped right up to the lamb and pecked around it threateningly; the lamb scrambled to its feet and the crow moved off, but not very far.

It took about five seconds to decide to rescue the lamb. By the time we got out into the field the crows were gone. The lamb was lying down but it got up as we approached and staggered about a bit in that funny, unsteady, sweet, lamblike way that’s part of what people like about very young lambs. I grabbed hold of it fairly easily and we carried it back to the house. We put some hay down in one of the old store-rooms and put it in there. It didn’t seem very distressed, and let itself be cuddled, but it did seem hungry – tried to suck the hay, but refused to suck water off my finger. Occasionally it said “baa”, in a heart-melting kind of way.

I went inside to track down the shepherd and reached him on only the third phonecall. “Have you found my dog?” he said. “No,” I told him, “but I’ve got one of your lambs.” He promised to come and get it. I promised to look for his dog. Alessio came home from school on the bus and fell in love with the lamb. I got into trouble for half-saying we could keep it if the shepherd thought the mother wouldn’t accept it back. Luckily when the shepherd turned up, he had no such worries and carted it off in his van. Alessio was devastated, and I was pretty sad too. There’s something about lambs.

Please, no one mention mint sauce.

We have a new duck

2008-10-22T08:44:00.004+02:00

We have a new duck. This duck is one of a pair that were won as ducklings at a fair by a schoolfriend of Alessio’s, whose family were able to keep both ducklings over the summer in their small apartment garden, but who don’t have the facilities to keep them over the winter. We agreed to take both ducks, but sadly one of them escaped and was run over on the road (few ducks come to a happy end round here), so in the end we’ve just got the one.

She’s the same age as our other four and is another dark-coloured one. We put her in the pen when she arrived, with the others outside, and after a few minutes of looking at one another through the wire and quacking excitedly, it became clear that they weren’t going to be able to work out how to actually get together, either by means of our ducks going into the pen or the new duck going out. Ducks can never cease to amaze by their sheer dimness. So we lifted her out and plonked her down among the resident ducks, and they made friends pretty much straight away. There was a bit of pecking of the new duck, but nothing major or really vicious. I knew they’d be all right when I checked on them after a couple of hours and they were all looking in the same direction, whereas initially our four would face one way and the new one would face them. They all survived overnight okay and now are inseparable, doing everything and going everywhere together in the way that we’ve come to know and love in ducks.

And with any luck they’ll start laying soon.

After an uncharacteristically cold and wet

2008-10-14T20:52:00.006+02:00

After an uncharacteristically cold and wet second half of September – the worst of which I was lucky enough to avoid because I was having a very lovely time in sunny London – the Italian autumn has reverted to type and we’re enjoying days of beautiful warm, balmy weather, soft sunshine and hazy mornings, temperatures in the high teens/low 20s and a general feeling of nature at its most benign and gentle. We will almost certainly pay for this later, but right now it feels good. The summer ended this year with such brutal suddenness – going from 30 degrees to 15 degrees within a matter of days – that it was difficult to feel positive about anything much. Amazing the difference some sunshine makes.

In my absence the veg patch has flourished, with John and Alessio planting up a whole load more green leafy things as well as fennel and (late) leeks. We now have an endless supply of cime di rapa (turnip tops) and swiss chard, and will have broccoli, savoy cabbage, cauliflower and green-leafed chicory. So we won’t go short of folic acid this winter; nor iron – the uptake of which by our bodies is greatly aided by eating your green leafy veg in the company of something containing vitamin C, otherwise known as a glass of red wine (oh yes, and lemons have it too). The red onions I planted too late are still not really ready but I guess we’ll have to pull them once the weather turns again; the tomatoes are still hanging in there, but are green and not really ripening now. Last year we ate fried green tomatoes once or twice, which were quite nice, but once or twice was probably enough. Sadly, not that keen on green tomato chutney or that would be the answer to the glut. Most of them we will throw away (in the new compost bin the council gave us for free, of course).

The September rain greened up the countryside almost overnight, but didn’t deflect the resident hornets from their purpose. The nest is now enormous and fantastic and resembles some kind of weird alien space pod, gradually taking over the host birdbox around which it is built. A friend whose husband is a naturalist told me that the hornets will be laying eggs now, for the larvae to overwinter in the nest and then hatch out next spring. Or perhaps it’s the eggs that overwinter and will hatch out into larvae next spring. The point being, the hornets are not crazy or indulging in unseasonal behaviour, the nest will not be abandoned in the winter, and we will have a huge live hornets’ nest very near our house next spring. Must find a way to deal with it that doesn’t involve wholesale destruction, either of us or of the nest.

The hornets are continuing

2008-09-06T18:05:00.003+02:00

The hornets are continuing industriously to build their nest around the birdbox. It’s fascinating and slightly scary to watch. They’re single-minded and driven, and when you stand under the nest (which is about 4 or 5 metres high up on the oak tree) there’s a sense of great intensity.

I’ve looked up the life cycle of the hornet and they’re meant to build their nests in spring, have summer frolicking and reproducing, and die out over the winter, so I don’t quite understand what’s going on here – building a nest in autumn? The websites warn you not to stand near their nest or get in their flight path, as a disturbed hornet will not only sting but also give off pheromones that alert the rest of the nest to the presence of danger, which is what causes hornets to attack en masse. So far they don’t seem bothered by our standing there though. They just fly round us.

I have an ethical problem with killing the whole nestful, but I’m not that happy with living with a nest of hornets as pets, especially with kids around. So I’m hoping they will die off as they’re meant to over the winter. And then we can preserve the nest too, which is a work of art.

The first day of September

2008-09-01T10:18:00.004+02:00

The first day of September: a cool, hazy morning. Summer is ending. The farmers are starting to plough and people’s veg patches are filling up with all the winter veg seedlings as the summer stuff gradually starts to fade. The swallows are still here, the babies from the nest in the workroom now fully grown. They sit on the power line outside the kitchen window and up until a few weeks ago we would watch the parents feeding them. Now the young ones are indistinguishable from the parents. Periodically huge numbers of swallows swoop and wheel in the valley after their insect feast and often now they alight on the electricity cables, presumably waiting for the invisible signal that will set them on their way south. I can never remember when they leave – perhaps I’ve never noticed – so I will try to make a note of it this year. For a summer lover such as me, it’s a melancholy sight.

Another bird we’ve seen a lot of recently has been the kestrel: far more usual here are the buzzards and peregrine falcons, but this summer there has been a kestrel family on the other side of the valley and suddenly they’ve become a common sight in the field below the kitchen – often six or seven at a time flying about, and coming incredibly close to the house. When they perch you see how small they are in fact – pigeon-sized – and when they fly you see the beautiful smooth terracotta colour of their backs and wings. We see them up on the top road as well, perching on the power lines and hovering over the stubble fields. And the buzzards are always around, floating in the blue air and riding the thermals in huge, high arcs over the valley, piercing the sky with their cry.

We have hornets too! A nest in the wall near the apartment, where the hornets have gone in and out all summer, bothering no one; and a new (or newly noticed) nest in an empty birdbox on the massive oak tree by the side of the path to the veg patch. The knee-jerk reaction to hornets is panic and terror – they are huge and mean-looking and have a terrible reputation – but we have recently learnt that hornets are less vicious and more docile than wasps. Unless riled. (Never rile a hornet.) So we're inclined to leave the nests and see what happens. The one in the birdbox is interesting because you can see that the hornets are constructing, over the circular entrance hole designed for cute blue-tits or sparrows, a sort of intricate porch-like shelter. They make a kind of strong papery material with which they build their nests, very strong and resistant and beautiful. To get rid of a hornets' nest you call the fire brigade and they come out and deal with it (we had to do this a couple of years ago, when we had a really big one we couldn't leave) – because destroying their nests is something that really riles hornets and is not recommended you try on your own.

In the veg garden we are getting ready for the new season and have rotovated a patch and planted winter veg seedlings: savoy cabbage, broccoli, green cauliflower, chicory (greens) and cime di rapa (turnip tops). Still room for fennel but we’ve left it too late for leeks, which is no great disaster as for the past two years our leeks have been useless (I think we always plant them too late). Cime di rapa are really tasty and when John’s mother stayed years ago she told us they used to be a staple vegetable in England too – now sadly unknown. You eat them like spinach but they’ve got a sort of nutty, buttery flavour and are far less muddy when you wash them. The cauliflower we’ve planted is a beautiful, sculptural thing, bright green in colour and shaped like some kind of weird organic ziggurat: a vegetable as work of art.

A fantastic harvest

2008-08-26T08:09:00.003+02:00

A fantastic harvest of tiny pumpkins! We picked them early this year to foil the porcupine, who last year ate half the crop; but even so, this year’s harvest has exceeded expectations – there are at least fifty. This tiny squash is called Jack Be Little and the big green one is Sunburst (I think). They’re autumn squash and should keep now at least until Christmas.

Now that the end of summer is approaching we’re harvesting a lot of other stuff from the veg patch as well and preparing it for storage over the winter. Kilos and kilos of tomatoes are going into making sugo, which we freeze in yoghurt pots and will give us tomato sauce for the whole year. Loads of green beans this year so I’m freezing them for the first time. We make batches of basil pesto and freeze it in meal-sized portions. Normally around this time we’d also have a glut of courgettes and patty pans, but this year the plants aren’t happy and we’ve barely got enough courgettes to eat, let alone worry what to do with. The red onions I planted so late have survived but are not very large yet; if the weather continues so hot I guess they’ll ripen ok, but otherwise maybe we’ll have to harvest them very small. I also wanted to try pickling cucumbers this year but again there are are only just enough cucumbers to eat on an ongoing basis, no extras.

But — melons! – yes, for the first time I have melons to be proud of! We ate the first one today and it was sweet and delicious. There are four more on the way. Every year we grow melons and this is the first year they’ve grown to a decent size and ripened. No idea why, but it’s very pleasing.

We got back late

2008-08-17T22:41:00.004+02:00

We got back late from the boy’s birthday party last night, around 9.00pm, when it was nearly dark. I went straight to feed the horse and close the ducks in. The ducks had put themselves to bed in their pen and I closed the door without looking at them very closely – just a group of ducks. It was a bright full moon and the horse was in the same agitated state she’d been in earlier in the afternoon, pacing round her field and snorting manically in the direction of the woods. She wouldn’t come up to the gate so I just left her bucket and put some hay down for her and left her to it.

This morning I got up very early and went down to do the feeding. The ducks were in their house but they tumbled out into their pen when they heard me and I chucked some feed in for them. Let the dogs out of the barn and went down to feed horse. She hadn’t come up to eat her feed or hay overnight, which is very unusual, perhaps unprecedented, so she must have spent the whole night fretting and pacing, poor girlie. I went into the field and she came halfway up to meet me – all covered in dried sweat and still all jumpy though not as bad as yesterday. I stayed around to keep her company, hoping she’d calm down. It was about 7.00 at this point and a cool, autumn-like morning; the sun came up from behind the hills and started to warm me up, and the horse finally gathered the courage to go and eat her hay, although she snorted in horror at the sight of the wheelbarrow, which I’d left by the gate. She definitely still thought there was some scary monster in the woods. And perhaps there was.

I spent a while tidying up the field and then went up to let the ducks out of their pen. Noticed that there was no egg in the duckhouse, but as Big Duck has been laying erratically recently (eggs in the herb bed) I didn’t think much of it. Then I noticed that there were only four ducks – the young ones. Big Duck sometimes shoots out first and whizzes up to the dogs’ area, so I went and checked up there, but she wasn’t in sight. I began to feel very uneasy. My parents had come out to join me by now, and we walked along the track below the house – and discovered a large quantity of giveaway white feathers scattered over the path. A fox must have got her yesterday evening, most likely while we were out – I didn’t count the ducks when I closed them in, just assumed they were all there.

So we have lost Big Duck, and it’s a sad day. It’s the boy’s birthday and we haven’t told him yet as he’ll be upset and it’s not news you want to hear on your birthday. We’re all upset: she was our duck with character (although “personality”, as my mother described it, might be taking it a bit far) and we had a lot of fun watching her hang out with the dogs, take a bath in their drinking bowl, and waddle along after them when they went off to bark at something.

Maybe the horse really did sense something scary in the woods. Ducks come and ducks go, but we will miss Big Duck.

We are connected

2008-07-25T19:09:00.003+02:00

We are connected! Our photovoltaic array has been installed for several weeks, but has been sitting there on our roof completely uselessly until the electricity company, ENEL, came to connect it all up. This they finally did last last week, a day of great excitement, and now we are our own little substation, generating electricity during daylight hours and feeding it into the national grid.

We continue to use electricity drawn from the grid – so when there’s a power cut, we still go dark, despite the high-tech array above our heads – which seems perverse but saves us having to set up an enormous quantity of batteries to store the electricity the panels generate, and is also the only way we get the government subsidy. The subsidy, or “incentives” as they call it, runs for twenty years and allows us to take out a loan to pay for the panels and to pay it back over ten years using the income from the incentives, meaning that the second period of ten years will be all profit (though we’re not talking huge sums here, and neither is it inflation-linked). The principal benefit to us will be that we’ll no longer have to pay an electricity bill, which will be a great relief as prices go up and up.

The greater and infinitely more significant benefit of course is that by not using fossil fuel-based electricity we are avoiding C02 emissions and thus helping a tiny bit in the fight against global warming. This feels good.

We're talking about the weather

2008-07-23T17:14:00.004+02:00

We're talking about the weather again, a far-away friend of mine said to me recently… Like that was something bad, or boring, or we couldn’t think of anything better to talk about (though we had lots to talk about in fact, and the weather was our subject of choice). And it’s true that the weather is a staple topic of conversation and it’s often what people talk about, well, when they haven’t got anything better to talk about. But it’s also true that – and I’ve noticed this especially since living in the country and having animals and growing vegetables – the weather is: interesting. Really, it is.

You seem to have a lot of weather out there, this same friend said, and I laughed. A lot of weather? But yes, it’s not the stable, hot, same-day-after-day Mediterranean summer climate that I thought it would be when we moved here. Maybe this is something to do with climate change, who knows? Two days ago it was baking hot and we couldn’t move for the heat; yesterday it was still very hot but there was a strong wind all day – the scirocco, the hot south-west wind that blows straight from Africa and dries all our plants to death. Murderous as it is, we hate the scirocco at this time of year. Overnight there was unexpectedly a huge, thundery rainstorm. (We’d left the skylights open and I’d hadn’t shut the car windows either.) This morning was grey and cloudy but the air was uncommonly still. I took the horse for a workout in the ring with one of our current guests, a 14-year-old girl, and we got caught in another rainstorm that blew up and passed over. The horse pranced about a lot in the wind and rain but managed not to totally lose it, and after 15 minutes or so the sun came out again and the breeze dropped (and the horse calmed down). And late this afternoon I was out in the ring cutting down the tall weeds with a sickle, and a strong persistent wind got up that was blowing from the east (that’s Siberia, pretty much) and was positively chilly. As I write this it’s barely 14 degrees, almost unheard of in July, even at 10pm.

So that is a lot of weather in a short few days.

And it’s a staple topic of conversation, especially in the country, because it’s a significant force, perhaps the most elemental of all. It affects everything you do and so much of what your life revolves around: no rain at all, you lose half your tomato crop; too much rain in May, you lose your hay; late frost, no cherries; strong wind, half your figs are blown off the tree (that happened today).

So. Weather. There’s a lot to talk about.

This is the season

2008-07-09T14:27:00.002+02:00

This is the season of Really Big Machinery. The farmers are getting in the second-crop hay with the tractor/mowers, and the corn and barley harvest is in full swing. For this they bring out the big guns – the combine harvesters.

Before I lived here I didn’t, for perhaps obvious reasons, think about combine harvesters much. In fact I still don’t think about them very much, but this is their season and it’s hard to avoid them. And they are incredible, amazing, really very, very large beasts indeed. They are itinerant and travel from farm to farm for the harvest, and meeting them on the tiny, narrow country roads is a scary business. They dwarf everything around them. They even dwarf the big tractors pulling the big trailers carrying various other big bits of combine-harvester supplementary equipment. They are wide and long and tall and bulky, an inelegant, awkward, asymmetrical shape, with a cab high up near the treetops, and surprisingly small wheels. Their sheer size inspires awe, especially in someone driving a Fiat Panda. You see them on the roads moving in a slow convoy, a tractor/trailer first and then the combi and then the lorry that the harvested grain is spewed into, the whole preceded by a jeep with someone waving a red flag to let oncoming traffic know there’s something to be taken seriously on the road ahead.

And yet in the fields they are almost nimble and so perfectly fit-for-purpose. They pass up and down the rows of corn with unrelenting straightness. On these steep cultivated hillsides, they are balanced in such a way that they can drive laterally along the slope, one set of wheels higher than the other, and yet the cab remains horizontal. This is amazing to someone like me with absolutely no concept of how such a feat could be achieved.

They are little worlds in themselves: some of the new ones have air conditioning, fridges and sound systems.

Round here we see two or three regulars every year: a slightly elderly, rickety red one, a grasshopper-green one, and a huge new, swanky, dark-green one. You can see them working in a field from miles off, by the cloud of dust that is raised around it as they work. Tractors, lorries and heavy-duty off-roaders wait in attendance by the side of the road. I read on the internet that it costs about £700 at the moment to fill up a combi with red diesel (the subsidized diesel that farmers use), and that this is enough for a single day’s work.

A rather fabulous thing about them is that they work at night, too. In the ferocious summer heat the farmers often save their tractor work till evening when it’s cooler and continue into the night, working by the light of their headlamps. Looking out over the valley you’ll see little sharp pools of light beetling their way across the slopes under the stars. They look lonely, but purposeful and industrious. Driving late at night I stop at the sight of a combine harvester working like this in a dark field, all lit up like some alien craft just touched down out of the sky. I watch the slow power of its progress for a while, and then drive home.

The ducklings are fine

2008-07-06T10:29:00.003+02:00

The ducklings are fine: growing apace and living quite happily in the pen. Overnight they go into the duck house with the big duck and they now seem to coexist together without any friction. Interestingly, a few days ago our current guests witnessed the big duck flapping about outside the pen to frighten off some predatory magpies that were chattering around too near the ducklings - so her maternal instinct has finally switched itself on!

The little ones are still very sweet to watch, with their fluffy downy feathers gradually shedding now as their adult feathers come in. They are very, very nervy and run away in their little group if you go too close, or when you change their water or feed them or adjust the sheet over the pen that shades them from the sun. Then they stand very still, listening, until they decide that they are safe, and one by one they sit down, which they do with a kind of folding, collapsing motion of their legs. I don't remember the first lot of ducks we had being this nervous, but maybe they were. We'll let them out into the big wide world soon, under supervision and with Maxim the duck-eater well out of the way.

Nothing more to report on ducks right now.

Finally decided to plant out the onion sets

2008-06-27T20:04:00.003+02:00

Finally decided to plant out the onion sets that I bought weeks ago, hoping they hadn’t died in the meantime. They looked brown and small but not completely dead. At 9.30 in the morning it was already very hot, in the high 20s, so I slathered up with sun protection and headed down before the full onslaught of the heat.

Hacked my way through the knee-high jungle of weeds that just a couple of weeks ago was a pristine area of fine tilth. With the luxury of the new rotovator (motozappa) we have made the veg patch very big this year, and it turns out to be too big – vast acreages of space in between individual plants or groups of plants, which has allowed the weeds to flourish. That and the weeks of rain in late May/early June, followed by this heat – it has all led to the growth of a sort of miniature tropical forest.

Anyway, back to the onions. I hoed three nice furrows in which to plant them, hauling out tonnes of weeds as I went. Couch-grass infestation is the worst, with endless tough roots that are practically impossible to pull out fully. I managed to put in the little onions, ten per row, and then had to hoe another row for the remainder, I seem to have about 40 in all. Watered them in. And I hope they will survive. They look very tiny and I think it’s too late in the season, really, to be planting out onions, but we’ll see.

The tomatoes meanwhile have also suffered neglect but have enjoyed it and flourished like crazy. Each main stem had put out three or four strongly growing side shoots; even the side shoots had side shoots. All these shoots should have been pinched out weeks ago as soon as they appeared but we failed dismally on that. Now the plants are so green and strong and healthy it seems a shame to take off the extra shoots, but that’s what has to be done so that they grow tall and put their energy into producing fruits now, and so I spent a bit of time doing that and enjoying breathing in the pungent greeny smell that tomato plants give off when you break them.

Finally and exhaustedly I did a bit more obsessive weeding and hoeing around the self-seeded dill that has sprung up all over the place, and by the end of this it was midday and I was hot as hell and drenched in sweat and dying for a drink of water. In this weather this kind of work needs to be done before 10 am and you definitely need a siesta after lunch. Some hope.

We found out recently that the local contadini (farmers) know how to tell the year’s weather using onions, by peeling off the layers of onions at the beginning of each year and somehow using them to forecast fairly generalized weather predictions for the whole year ahead. They got it right at Easter, when during a warm spell I was told that “next week it will snow – the onions say so”. How we scoffed; how right they were. And now they are saying that after a hot July the weather will break and the rest of the summer will be lousy – let’s hope the onions will be wrong on that one.

We have had the ducklings

2008-06-23T21:46:00.007+02:00

We have had the ducklings for ten days or so now and they’re about three weeks old. At night they live in a tub in the spare room lined with newspaper and straw, and in the mornings we put them out into the enclosed duck-pen. It’s incredible how smelly four little ducks can make a room in twelve hours. They’re eating chick starter feed and getting through not as much water as I’d have expected given the heat. During the day they huddle in their little group in the shade with occasional forays – all together – to their drinking water or their feed. They move as one. They rootle in the grass and I’ve seen them catching bugs and insects. Good ducklings. They are just about big enough now to poke their beaks over the edge of the washing-up bowl that serves as the big duck’s bath, and they’re trying to drink from that but without a great deal of success.

In all, they are very very cute indeed but I hope they can live outside soon as the moving them to and fro every morning and evening is a pain and so is the smell. This all depends on the big duck now – we have put her in the pen a few times together with the ducklings to try to get them used to each other, and she hasn’t actually attacked them, but she’s not very happy being with them and paces up and down along the wire like a caged, er, duck. I’d never have thought a duck could pace, but she is definitely pacing. This is a duck we’ve had for two years, one of our original four, the others having been lost through a process of natural attrition (otherwise known as the fox. And the puppy). Since Christmas, when the last two ducks were brutally torn from us, this duck has hung out with the dogs, Teo and Maxim, in a very sweet and strange little threesome. Teo is totally laid back about the situation (possibly he hasn’t even noticed) – the duck follows him everywhere and when he lies down, she does too, and when he goes off to bark at something in the distance, she goes too and stares off intently into the same distance, seemingly on the very point of barking. Maxim is somewhat more bothered, he being the one that killed the first duck and now living in fear of retribution; this duck tries to nick food from his bowl, and you can just see Maxim’s torment as he suppresses his natural canine instinct to rip her throat out and meekly backs away. The upshot of this is that the duck basically seems to think she’s a dog, which is why we’re not sure what her reaction to the ducklings is going to be. Apart from, so far, confusion – “What are these little things? They’re not puppies. Get them away from me.” I wouldn’t like to shut the ducklings in with her in the duckhouse overnight in case we opened the door in the morning to baby-duck carnage.

Later
So: tonight's the big night and we’re putting the ducklings in their tub and leaving it (covered) in the enclosure, with the big duck shut in the attached duckhouse. So the little ducks get a chance to experience night in the big wide world, and the big duck gets used to having them in her territory.

Come the morning, we will know all.