of Julie and other visitors

Sorry about the break in communications. We have been keeping busy one way or another over the last week or so. The weather has been mostly fine with various odd rain breaks (Thursday, Monday night, Tuesday, last night and this morning), so we’ve got more beds prepared to plant out the various things growing indoors. Although with the cool weather, even the indoor plants have been slow to grow. Whilst there are more peppers to plant out, the tomato and aubergine plants are still very small.

During the last week we had an e-mail from our jet-setting, budding super-model daughter Julie that she had returned to London from a month of work in New York and Los Angeles and that she would be in Milan for a few days. So not having seen her for a while we decided to drive to Milan on Monday to see her. She had been doing a fashion shoot for Amica magazine and she only had a couple of hours to see us in the evening. She had only arrived early that morning and needed her beauty sleep to be rested for another day’s shooting and flying on to Paris in the evening for another job. Susan in particular was very excited about being reunited with her daughter albeit briefly.




Yesterday my cousin Karin and husband came to see us for a brief visit from Holland. They had spent a week in Southern Tuscany and stayed a night here. We had an afternoon to show them the highlights of the area briefly and went out for nice meal in the evening at our local restaurant. We had a really nice time and it was great to see them. Also our Swiss friend Irene is down here at the moment and we went to her house for a meal the other day. So as you can see we’ve been quite busy socializing and a few other people have already announced visits for later this year

On our way to Milan on Monday we stopped the morning at Villa to see how our recently planted vines were faring after the early setback of the frost damage. We’re happy to report they have virtually all survived and have developed second shoots. Other than that the weather seems to have delayed flowering and fruitset of many things, but no major damage seems to have occurred with our plants anyway. Marco from next door said that they won’t have any apricots at all this year due to the flowers having been blown off one particularly windy day, but that is the problem with Ponzano Superiore being very exposed to winds from all directions, whilst our plot in Arcola certainly is quite sheltered from the prevailing winds. The forecast is for more settled weather in the next few days, so hopefully we’ll be able to report the first harvest of peas, broad beans, strawberries, plums and loquats soon.