Sh*t, Sh*t, Glorious Sh*t ♫

Sorry I forgot children read these pages… Well, but tha’s what we spread on our land today. Out next door neighbour Piero has a whole menagerie of animals on his plot of land, namely 4 donkeys, numerous chickens, 32 hunting dogs, uncountable cats and 3 wild boar. The produce of the donkey was what interested me today, a whole pile of, nicely rotted down. I filled the car to capacity (filling the manure into bags first of course) and drove it down to Arcola.

There we used it as a foundation for a couple of trees we also planted today, a cherry tree, to replace the one we had to chop down recently and a pomegranate tree. I’m looking forward to finding out what all you can do with this fruit, can’t say I have used it much before. The weather was good for working today. It has continued to be mostly sunny, but rather cold with night frosts. Nothing as bad though as I have been hearing from other parts of Europe.

The recent rains though have resulted in a number of land slides. As you can see above, the rear end of one of our terraces had collapsed, which was one of the less serious cases though. The main along the main road to Borghetto Vara the Via Aurelia, one side of the road had slid into the river, causing night time closures to repair the damage. After Taking Susan to her class up there we had to take a scenic route over some little mountains road to get back home, nothing as bad as our rally driving the other week though.

Around Arcola a couple of roads have collapsed too, causing us various detours to get to and from our land. Anyway, one terrace is now nicely fertilized and I can have more manure any time, including chicken poo and wild boar droppings. Piero himself doesn’t need any of it as he doesn’t grow any veg himself. He says he’s got enough to do with his animals and they’d ruin his crops anyway. Incidentally, each of his many animals has a name! How he remembers them all I have no idea, but I have noticed before that he has a remarkable memory. Every time I introduce him to any visiting friends or relations just once, he will remember their name for years to come and occasionally asks you how a particular person is that you haven’t seen since that visit yourself.