Now

Now that we've had the barn fixed up, Cassie has her feed in there and from my studio with the window open I can hear her munching her hay. A comforting sound, if surprisingly loud. The other side of the barn is now the games room, with ping pong table and darts board, not nearly so interesting to me as the dirt floor and profumo di cavallo of the horse's side, but that's probably just me.

We're in the middle of the hottest summer for about a thousand years, hot on the heels of the coldest winter. I haven't blogged for months and months for a variety of reasons but mainly because I've been busy and because the longer I left it the harder it was to recommence, but here I am now. I'll keep it short and sweet. More tomorrow!

In a list of the scariest creatures

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.

Just emerging

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.

It turned out to be the last fine day

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.

We've had a week of gorgeous weather

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.

Lovely autumn morning

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

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.

The itinerant sheep

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.

Herbie has a small fracture

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.

Really lovely day at a horse fair

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.

The mornings are cool

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!

It’s still quite warm

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.

Gorgeous sunny crispy day

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

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.

It’s 5.30 and I’ve just come in

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.

The coldest temperature

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.

For two whole days

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

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.