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.

After the rain

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

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.

Every autumn a shepherd

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

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

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.