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.

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.

Mario's latest weapon

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

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

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

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

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.