The tremendous heat

The tremendous heat continues. Temperatures are in the mid- to high 30s, with not much respite at night. The cats lie around in shady corners barely breathing and Maxim has dug himself a cool pit in the bank. In the hottest hours after lunch the whole countryside has a stunned air. It's almost impossible to work in such heat but here I am, chained to my computer and attempting to edit a book on design. Not getting very far.

The drought has reached emergency levels and the Comune are cutting off the town's water supply from 5pm to 9am every day. Our own mains water cuts off during the morning, when the main tank that serves our area has run out, and starts again sometime in the middle of the night, when the main tank has filled up again. This is enough time to fill up our holding tank — 1,000 litres of water, enough for a day if we (and the rental guests) aren't bothered, two days if we're careful. Today the water never came back and we were down to our last couple of hundred litres, so I phoned the Comune, who said the main tank must be empty. They fiddled around diverting some pipes or something and later told me that our water was back on. It wasn't, and we were starting to get alarmed about how much longer we could feasibly go without flushing the loo or washing. So they sent a very charming man from the Protezione Civile with a just-big-enough tank in the back of a pickup!

Luckily for the veg patch we have access to the spring water that collects in Mario's troughs, though there's less of it this year and Mario uses most of it on his own veg patch via a Heath Robinson system of pumps, cables and hoses plus extensive use of duct tape. Whereas I lug watering cans about and manage to be the only person to have muddy feet in a drought.

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!

The Canadair flew over

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.

After a few balmy weeks

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.

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.

Someone introduced me

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.

After a slow start

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 ducks are

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.

I got back

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.

I'm finally starting to

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

Up and down weather.

Photos taken one week apart.

Down on the ranch

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

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

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

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.

Glorious sunshine

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.

It's been a whole month

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.

And this is another

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?

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!

Time has whizzed

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 . . .