The hornets are continuing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.