Plans for the new season

Slowly the temperatures are creeping up again, onto the plus side of the Celsius scale, the bitter wind has finally blown itself out, the neighbours are poking their noses out of their doors again, with the help of them we have cleared out a ton of rubble from our doorstep which was still lying there since the earthquake, hopefully we have now survived the worst of winter and we'll remain catastrophe free for a while.  This has been the longest sub-zero spell we have known here, not so much snow, but a cold wind.  Most producing plants look rather sad on my land now.  Even the broad beans have suffered damage, I hope they will recover.  The only thing quite happy with the temperatures is this Japanese spinach.

Anyway, with the weather finally improving we have ventured out again taking a look at the land.  I've used the time being holed up indoors to work on this free permaculture course and as I said before I'm planning to turn our land into a food forest now.  So one of the things it tells you is to start your planning by making a map of your plot of land including all outside influences.  Now this is easier said then done.  I envy those people who have a flat square or rectangular plot of land where they can draw in everything neatly and show there crop rotations and all, neat beds etc.

My land is roughly triangular in shape, but that isn't the real problem it is also on a steep slop.  I have now worked it out: along our southeastern border where the landslides of 2010 have actually created a fairly even slope rather than being interupted by terraces, I have a 43% downward gradient.  In other words in the parts where I still have terraces I have almost as much vertical areas as I have horizontal ones.  Try drawing that onto a flat piece of paper!  I need to have some sophisticated computer software to make a 3d map, which needless to say I don't.

Anyway, here's my attempt of a 2d map.  I used my original ground survey map which we received when we purchased the plot and then drew around it a bit.  The first one shows a lot of the neighbouring land for a general impression of where water and wind come from.

Our plot is the little triangle in the centre, number 299 with a rough idea of the tree cover.  We are located in the southwestern corner of a kind of amphitheatre.  Our terraces face east with slight northern inclination.  The large plot to our southeast is badly overgrown and has suffered a lot worse from the landslides.  It shades  the area of our land that borders ours as it is a kind of a fold in the land.  This is where most of the water has come down too causing most of the devastation.  Much of it we haven't even attempted to fix yet, except that we have diverted water off the top to down along the road rather than down our land.

The plot to the north of us is a well tended vineyard facing the same way as us.  The plots to the north of that are also vineyards and some woodland facing south.  Water runs off in a seasonal gully in an easterly direction.  To our west is some woodland on a steep upwards slope, so we are sheltered from all prevailing winds.  The little purple circle incidentally represents our caravan.  The elevation of the plot is between 100 m (300 feet) at the eastern corner of our land to 130 metres (400 feet) at the western end.  For scale, the line representing our southeastern border is about 70 metres in length.

Now we zoom in a bit and show what trees currently grow where:

You may have to click on the image to enlarge it a bit.  I've named some of the trees, not that all have a name, but I didn't have room to give each their name.  The incline is sharper at the top end, so the terraces at the bottom are lower and wider.  At the top they are only about a metre (3 feet) wide in places.  However the top end, especially the northern half, gets the most sunshine, whilst the bottom, especially the southern side, is colder, damper and more likely to catch frost.

As you can see there are still plenty of white spots that can be filled in.  I am looking for biodiversity, including some species that don't imediately come to mind as edible species.  I have already bought a strawberry tree, a classic forest edge variety around here, and an eleagnus ebingii, which is good for stabilising soil, is a nitrogene fixer, attracts wildlife and produces edible and nutritious fruit.  All the kind of things I'm looking for.

If any of you out there have any other suggestions I'd be really grateful, especially combinations of plants benefitting each other.  Below the caravan we have built some sub-terraces to strengthen that particular terrace.  As posts to hold up the boards I have used freshly cut elder wood, some of them have now started sprouting.  The most vigorous one I have now named Pliny (the Elder...).  This should hopefully strengthen that area even more as well as giving us elderflowers and berries.

And finally a request to anybody likely to visit us anytime soon: instead of bringing us chocolate and wine, bring a tree :)  Thank you!

Navel Wort

I have let the wildfood of the month series lapse a bit, but as we are still holed up indoors due to the unusually cold weather I may as well do another one of them that I had originally planned for last year but kind of missed the window: Navel Wort (umbilicus rupestris), also known as penny-pies or wall pennywort.

This photo was taken in April last year, which really is already a little late in the season for this delicious herb  When they turn reddish like this they get a slightly unpleasant bitter taste.  They grow mainly on rough stone walls and are quite abundant around here even as early as January.  There were lots of them around before our current coldsnap, but now they have disappeared on most but the sunniest walls.

They are thick, succulent leaves about the size of a large coin and the shape of a human navel (hence the name)  Here a better idea of the size of them:

You pick them off the wall and just pop them in your mouth, just like that, and they have the most refreshing crunching juicyness to them.  If you've been walking for a bit and have run out of water, just a pop a few of these for an instant revitaliser.  If you find quite a few of them, and never graze them bare, take them home and pop them into a salad or I could imagine them added to an energising vegetable juice.

Not only are these things tasty, they are also good for you.  Culpeper used to call it 'kidneywort' because of it's beneficial influence on the waterworks in general and the kidney in particular.   The juice applied externally is said to combat acne if you have any teenagers suffering from that ailment.  It generally has a cooling effect on anything it is applied to, both internally and externally.  I imagine it would help relieve insect bites, but alas it's not available when insects are around...

I have no doubt there are other benefits, but best of all it's really tasty and free!

Snow!!!

Ok Mr. God, you've had your fun.  First you try to drown us, then you shake our house about and now you dump all that white stuff on us.  What is next?  Pestilence?  Locusts?  Ronny the Milkman and 5th rider of the acopolypse.. alocopyspse...?  We've had gail force winds and snow for the last 18 hours, just as we thought winter was going to be cancelled this year!  It is to last for about 10 days!

In the absence of a camera to record the event here some archive footage of last time it snowed.  Meet some of my crazy neighbours:

Should we decide to leave here, there are some people from this village I'm really going to miss.  The following is a concert held last Christmas involving Mauro on accordeon and pipes as well as Iacobo (an Italian who teaches Irish to the Irish) and Corrado.  Unfortunately we had missed the concert ourselves as we were in the mountains over Christmas.  Thank God for You Tube!

Right, enough of all that.  I'm going to hibernate now.  Someone wake me up in March... ;)

Another Natural Disaster!

Someone obviously wants to tell us something...  My camera has finally given up it's ghost, so no photos of the devastation this time.  Northern Italy was rocked by a 5.4 magnitude earthquake yesterday afternoon.  We were in Florence with a friend for the day and didn't notice anything, but Cousin Bart and Eddie the Beagle stayed at home and got one almighty fright.

Listening to the various accounts, many people have felt the tremors, but we appear to be the only ones who have actually sustained any damage.  Apparently it rained some 200 bricks off of our 3-storey high roof onto the little piazza outside our front door.  Half the roof, many of the stone gutters and possibly a chimney have collapsed on our 300 year old building.  The emergency services have sealed off our front door and the area in front of our house.  There is still a lot of loose debris up there.  Also many of the large stones the locals use for holding down there roof tiles, look precariously close to the edge all of a sudden.

Miraculously we have not been evacuated as the structure inside the building still appears sound.  We don't own the the top floor of the building, so are not directly beneath the roof.  Now we are just hoping there are no more shocks (it was the second in the 3 days) making the damage any worse and no heavy rains, which may pour through the damaged roof.

It's quite ironic this happening in the aftermath of the recent floods and us being in the process of considering to move on.  Somebody seems to be giving us rather large hints here...

Toadflax

I'm doing an online permaculture course at the moment and I'm reading Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway as part of that.  Both highly recommended and free.  If you want to try the course, just click on the link above and ignore the FBI copyright notice, it will go after a minute or so.

Anyway, the first rule of permaculture is to observe.  Observe nature and see how it works, so you can copy it and observe your plot of land to see what wants to grow there, what are your general conditions.  So, the other day I took a leisurely stroll through my terraces on a sunny spring-like day, taking note of what I saw.

I have already identified many edible and medicinal species on our land before and, as our land is to 50% vertical, I let most weeds grow on those parts.  I really only use half my land for planting, i.e. the horizontal parts.  Species of 'weeds' I picked up on this at this time of year included: dandelion, primroses, sorrel (loads and loads), borage, wild parsley, wild leek, goosegrass, oregano, yarrow, wood sorrrel, wild strawberries, mallow, corn cockle, fennel, wild beet to name but a few. 

But then there was this pretty yellow flower pictured above (in flower now!) which I couldn't immediately identify.  Always the intrepid explorer I picked some leaves and a flower, rubbed them together and had a sniff... Not much smell to it.  So I popped a flower in my mouth and boy(!) it was delicious.  It has a really nice sweet flavour to it.  I thought to myself something so tasty couldn't be poisonous, so I ate some more.  Back home I checked out my herb books and identified it as common toadflax.  It's nowhere described as an edible, but it does have medicinal properties aiding in bladder problems and also liver complaints.  Although I have seen it described as mildly toxic (hey so is Tequila!), I have not noticed any ill effects on me.  I shall sprinkle a few onto future salads I reckon.  Hurray for edible weeds. 

Woodland garden plans and carbon off-setting

We're back from the mountains and have survived the festive season in one piece.  We are now at the beginning of a new year and a new growing season, wondering where the path to self sufficiency is going to take us next.  I have already mentioned that we are toying with the idea of joining or setting up an eco-community.  This is still very much on our minds and I'll write a bit more about it next time around.

In the meantime though it's time to plan what we are going to do with our land for this year.  I'm all for living in the now and not abandoning half projects, just because of some future plan which may or may not come to fruition.  I have now decided to turn our 18 crumbling terraces into a permaculture woodland garden, planting at least 30 more trees and shrubs.  The roots should therefore help keep the hill from sliding down, minimising erosion and self-fertilise the soil.  Everything I am planning to grow will have some edible use to it.  I doodled around a bit making a little collage of plants I'd like to plant:

As those of you who follow my blog regularly may know, we already have quite a few permanent features on our land, some 100 trees and shrubs.  Apart from the usual suspects of olive, apple, pear, peach, cherry, plum trees etc, I'd like to grow a few exotics.  I've done a bit of research, many of the following will be difficult to find in Italy, as Italians don't go much for the unusual.  So if anyone out there can help me obtain cuttings, seeds or knows where I could get hold of plants, please let me know.

Here's a list of what I'm looking for:

For the canopy level:

• A mulberry tree.  Never seen one here, but should be able to find one.
• Japanese Dogwood.  Don't know this tree, but it is said to grow to 10m and produce some nice fruit.
• Hawthorn:  Leaves and berries are edible (see my haw ketchup and haw jelly) as well as hugely medicinal as a heart tonic.
• Elder: for the flowers and berries
• A lime tree:  Apparently the young leaves are really tasty in salads.

For the shrub layer:

• Black and redcurrants
• Flowering Maple (abutilon vitifolium): This small tree flowers abundantly and the flowers are edible with a pleasant mild flavour used in salads.
• Juneberry (amelanchier): a 2-3 m shrub bearing small currant like fruit in mid-summer
• Strawberry tree
• Autumn Olive trees:  I saved some seeds from the last wild harvest
• Myrtle: With the previous two the fruit of this makes my delicious Christmas jam!
• Salt bush: The leaves and young shoots of this plant make a tasty spinach substitute or can be added to salads.
• Tree collards and daubenton: These are two varieties of perennial brassica, the latter from the kale family.  I understand they quite tricky to find, so if anyone has any seeds of these...?
• Dwarf quince: Not a true quince, but the flavour of the fruit of this small tree is very similar to quince
• Cornelian cherry: A 5m shrub flowering bright yellow in winter and producing some cherry-like fruit in summer
• Blue Sausage Tree:  Now this has got to be my favourite!  I've never seen this, but this 4m tall shrub bears blue sausage shaped fruits, which looks disgusting but tastes good.  Anyone know where I can find one of those?
• Eleagnus: A genus of evergreen or deciduous shrubs producing delicious fruit with edible seeds
• Fuchsia: Not sure how well this would do with us, but the flowers are actually edible.
• Wolfberry or gojiberry:  I've heard a lot about the nutritious values of this little berry.  I'd love to get hold of a few shrubs
• Oregon grape: Medium -sized shrub with blue edible berries
• Chilean guava: Not a true guava producing small deliciously aromatic fruit in flavour somewhere between a wild strawberry and a guava

On top of that of course a herbaceous layer as well as some climbers such as some additional kiwis, some ground nut (edible roots) and Schisandra rubiflora (tall fruit bearing climber).


Apart from the fact that many of the above plants will not be easily obtainable in Italy we have one other problem, our perennial shortage of money to buy these plants.  A recent blog post from Jeremy on Make Wealth History gave me an idea though.  He blogs about many issues surrounding the threat of global warming and tries to offer solutions to the problem we face on earth.  He himself strives to keep his own carbon footprint low and has recently been wondering how to off-set his rest carbon emission.


So if anyone out there would like to make a positive impact to counter-balance their direct or indirect emissions, you could donate to the 'Pathtoselfsufficiency Tree Planting Fund'.  Ok I'm not certified and I can't tell you exactly how much you reduce your carbon by, but I promise I will give you a full report on exactly the trees your money has helped to plant. I will even individually name the tree, as some concerned friends of mine have already found out when I showed them around introducing them to trees by name (Stan the plum, Ollie the olive tree, Simon the cherry tree, Bela you can call him Edgar the olive tree, Walter the walnut tree, Al and Capone the almond trees, Ronny the rennet apple tree etc...).  Any donations would be very welcome.  :)  Tree planting will start in early spring.

December update and an award

I've won an award once again.  A while ago they seem to come along all the time, but then seemed to go a bit out of fashion.  I'm particularly pleased as this one was given to me by a relatively new bloger friend, Tanya from Lovely Greens.  Tanya is an American who somehow got stranded on the Isle of Man, that big blob between Britain and Ireland that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhail threw after his Scottish foe.  There she gardens, forages and makes things such as soap.  I don't know how much German she knows, but 'Liebster' in german means darling!  My wife is getting a little worried about these advances by strange women! ;)

Part of the award is that I am to pass it on to 5 other bloggers... I have recently not got around to following as many blogs as regularly as I'd like (partially due to my wife nagging me about spending so much time on the internet chatting to strange ladies...) well let's see, here we go:

1. Top of the list has to be the blog by my adopted virtual sister at Ohiofarmgirl' Aventures in the good land.  Her stories about he she manages her menagery of farm animals make me laugh out loud without fail and never fail to cheer me up
2. Jason at Zuchini Island in Australia has et himself a target of 80% food self sufficiency from a standing start.  I think he is finding it harder than he initially thought, but seems to have a lot of fun trying
3. Next fellow Italian farmer and revolutionary blogging from Puglia in the south of Italy on olive farming, dry stone walling, many recipes etc: La Contadina's blog 
4. Next a blog from the opposite end of Italy the far north at the foot of the Alps: L'Orto Orgoglioso, the proud garden, by Rowenna, a Hawaiian in Italy, I believe.  Her motto is: "You may not be reciting Dante in your dreams, but in the end, anyone can be the owner of a proud garden."  I like it!
5. Finaly I would like to pass the award to Little Paradiso.  Not a gardening blog, but it describes the life of a Texan in Monterosso in the Cinque Terre.  She recently wrote a lot about the destruction caused by the recent rains and the efforts of the villagers to rebuild their homes.  Do visit her site and find out how to help these people in desperate need..

Right, awards out of way here's what's happening in our garden;  There's been a wee bit of rain in the last few days, but temperatures are still more like spring fooling many plants into sprouting lush greens in what should be winter.  On the land I planted out seedlings of pak choi, tak soi and kale:

This the seed packet described as 'Japanese spinach, but are clearly of the brassica family:

Swiss chard sowed itself out all over the place and is looking lush:

Even the litchi tomatoes is still producing:

The broad beans for next year have started off well:

Conspiracy Cousin is back helping out.  Here is in action picking wild autumn olive berries for making our Christmas jam.

Other than that we are slowly getting ready for Christmas, which we will be spending up in the mountains again.  We've baked mountains of biscuits / cookies, including kaki cookies.  The little rain in the last few days has brought up some interesting fungi again, so hopefully we'll find some edible varieties in the mountains:

Have a great pre-Christmas time everybody and don't yourselves too stressed, it's not worth it! :)