Path to Self Sufficiency

Plans for the new season

2012-02-15T12:28:00.000+01:00

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

2012-02-08T17:32:00.000+01:00

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!!!

2012-02-01T11:47:00.000+01:00

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!

2012-01-28T10:53:00.000+01:00

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

2012-01-17T12:39:00.000+01:00

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

2012-01-07T17:01:00.000+01:00

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

2011-12-11T14:32:00.001+01:00

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:

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
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
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
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!
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! :)

Break in the mountains

2011-12-03T14:53:00.000+01:00

As announced we have been spending a couple of weeks house- and dog-sitting for some friends in a small village 700m above sea level in the foothills of the Appenines above the pretty town of Pontremoli:

The village is only 6 km away from town as the fly crows... the cry flows... the flow cries... but as the main road is closed due to a landslide it's a 20km drive. The village itself is deserted during the winter, so we had the place pretty much to ourselves, us, Eddie, his 3 lovely girlfriends, a handful of cats, a chicken and a duck, plus plentiful wildlife such as badgers, foxes, deer, wild boar and a multitude of wildfowl, birds of prey and singing birds.

We didn't have much to do so we went on long walks around the woods with the dogs:

The weather was cold, but dry, which was good for going on walks, but unfortunately we didn't find any more fungi.

However near the house there was a beautiful field, where we took the dogs to frolick around every day, full of wild herbs...

... apple trees and lined with wild roses heavy with rosehips at their prime:

We made some rosehip jam and what was to be rosehip jelly and turned out rosehip syrup. As for the jam, it was really more of a marmelade as we used whole oranges and lemons as well as a grated apple for pectin. The taste and texture turned out be delicious, but what a lot of fiddly work to remove the seeds!

And the jelly... I don't like adding commercial pectin to my preserves, so I cooked up a similar mixture, saving myself having to remove the seeds, strained it through a muslin cloth and... it didn't set. Might just dilute the result with spring water as a drink. Also produced a batch of my infamous 'I can't believe it's not mango chutney' chutney made from some kaki / persimmon out of their garden. It was nice having a bit of a break from everything and ponder on a few things.

Conspiracy Cousin Barti is returning to us this week and we'll slowly settle into winter. The rain has finally arrived yesterday along with some cooler temperatures.

...and finally... Eddie, the Beagle had a particularly good time in the mountains... :)

Interuption to usual services

2011-11-25T11:59:00.000+01:00

Just a quicky to let you know that we are spending the rest of the month up on the mountains where the internet connection is painfully slow to non-existant. So apologies for not reacting to your comments or commenting on your blogs. We're just on a quick dash at home at the moment, enough to just let you know. More when we come back on rosehip jams and such.

To my American friends: happy belated Thanksgiving. I was reminded by my lovely 'sister' over at Ohio Farm Girl. Other news will include Eddie and his multiple girlfriends up in the mountains. So plenty to look forward to.

November Update

2011-11-15T11:37:00.000+01:00

Well, what's been happening I hear you ask, in fact some of you DID ask! Nature has thrown another storm at us, this time a bit further north, hitting Genoa badly. Both storms within a week of each other were described as the worst in over a century. In our vicinity 80 cars in the town of Aulla were scrapped, numerous businesses have been destroyed as well as a school. The pretty village of Vernazza as well as Monterosso in the world famous Cinque Terre have been devastated, but we only suffered minor damage, which we repaired yesterday in the glorious sunshine:

The barrier we had put up after last years landslides had broken apart, which was just as well as it was made from asbstos, which I didn't like to have lying around anyway. I still don't know how to get rid of it though... There's Eddie testing the new construction for strength.

The material used were a bunch of old tyres as the base and an old wardrobe we found on the skip complete with mirror door.

It was also time to turn the compost and start a new one:

...and the reason why you haven't heard so much from us...? Twofold really: one is that we're spending much of November and part of December up in the mountains where we are looking after the house and dogs of some friends. It's beautiful up there and a true wild food paradise. The chestnuts have not been affected by the chestnuts gall wasp yet as they have around us and are still abundant. The woods are full of fungi including parasols, blewits and porcini. There's a beautiful field full of wild herbs, crab apples and rosehips. So as you can imagine, I'm in heaven up there taking 4 dogs for endless walks foraging.

The other reason is that these two weather events have got me thinking and doubting. We are just scraping a meagre living from our impossibly steep piece of land and everytime it rains I have sleepless nights wondering if we have anything to come back to. So we have started considering some other options including maybe leaving Italy in search of some like-minded people to join a community. Nothing is certain yet and I'm determined to keep my feet on the ground and live in the present. It is easy to get side-tracked and neglecting your current situation by dreaming of a future. I have long thought that with Italy we have finally 'arrived', but we haven't reached as far as I would have liked on the Path of Self Sufficiency. So we are considering Portugal or Greece or maybe somewhere else.

If anyone out there is thinking along similar lines of setting up a community and wants to join us or knows of an interesting project we should consider, please let us know. We may of course stay put, but this is something that is going around in our heads at the moment.

A narrow escape...

2011-10-27T17:27:00.000+02:00

First of all thank you all those sending messages phoning or trying to phone and asking after us. We were 48 hours off line and we have received a deluge of messages. We are fine and the land has suffered no significant damage is the good news first!

For those of you who haven't heard, although it has made the international news in Europe, our area has officially been declared a disaster zone. Six people died and at least another six are still missing as we suffered what I have heard described as an inland tsunami. We just escaped the worst of it by being just off the eye of the storm. The first we knew of the disaster was when concerned relatives phoned me on my mobile phone.

Yes it had rained most of Tuesday and during the night to Wednesday at times pretty hard. The really bad bit didn't seem to last for more than 2 or 3 hours though, so we weren't all that worried. It wasn't like last year, when it rained for weeks on end and then a 24 hour downpour on top of that. This year we'd had hardly any rain, so we were in fact quite happy to get some.

However what nature threw at this region this time was something quite unprecedented. Within these 2-3 hours almost half a metre of rain fell! Half metre deep that is, not wide! This caused a huge tidal wave down two river valleys, the Vara and the Magra, taking everything with it in its wake as well as causing massive destruction in the world famed Cinque Terre region, cutting the it off from the outside world. To give you an idea of the geography and how close we came to disaster ourselves I made this little map, which shows the main eye of the storm as far as I understand it.

The blue stripes show roughly the eye of the storm. The red circles are the worst effected areas. The green circle is where we live and where our land is. I highlighted the two rivers. As you can see they come together just upriver from us. The combined wave then surged down to the sea where it destroyed the last bridge before the mouth of the river.

Today I took the bike across the valley to see if everything was ok on the land, which as I say it was. Here are some of the scenes I saw on the way over:

The normally paved road to the river is under a foot of mud. On the left is an olive grove, not a rice paddy.

Even some olive trees got uprooted...

Many cars just got swept along by the floods and dumped on top of each other.

Horses normally graze there. And that boat wasn't there last week... This is 500 metres from the river! The stables in the background are ruined.

Shipping containers scattered like toy bricks...

Locals were quick to blame authorities for not doing enough to clean up the river. Debris, like the tree trunks, quickly get stuck on obstacles like bridges, diverting the water from it's usual course and into built-up areas.

Our thoughts go out to those of our near neighbours who have lost property or worse loved ones. I understand that most of the victims were elderly people who drowned in their own houses as flood waters rose with 10 minutes, leaving the frail no time to escape.

Of Roots

2011-10-16T10:12:00.001+02:00

It's Blog Action Day once again. Some of you may remember I participated last year talking about water. This year's theme is food. Now I racked my brain long and hard what to write about, because essentially this is what this blog is all about, food. I write about it all the time, about growing it, foraging for it, preparing it, sometimes even eating it. So how do I get a new angle on it.

Well two current news got me on roots, both literally and figuratively. Unfortunately I appear to have mislaid my camera, so the images today have been nicked, apologies to anyone claiming copyright to these pics...

As one of the new things I have experimented with this year in the garden is a root vegetable known by it's Italian name of scorzanera. I don't normally do well with root crops so I set aside a deep pot filled with quite a rich turf in it and sowed a few plants. I didn't know what the end result would look or taste like. Well as for looks (I did have a photo on my disappeared camera...):

This is it. They are very slow growing. I sowed them back in April I think and only just now harvested them.

Once peeled I seemed to remember my Mum trying to feed me these things unsuccesfully. However that doesn't mean much, because I was the world's fussiest eater as a kid. (Incidentally this just shows you it's all in the mind, because as I grew up I became the world's unfussiest eater.) Anyway, I seemed to remember my Mum cooking them in a creamy sauce, so that's what I did, and I as I didn't have a huge amount I threw a handful of chicory leaves in with it and served the lot over some cooked potatoes. Very nice and I shall try growing some more next year.

The other root story is quite an embarrassing one, I know you will laugh out loud about this Mr. H

My blogger friend Mr. H in Idaho has often mentioned growing Jerusalem artichokes on his land, or as he prefers to call them, sun roots. He's asked me if I had ever tried growing them, as they are a very easy to grow root crop. I told him, that I had never seen the tubers to start the plants of with for sale in Italy and didn't think they were known to Italians.

Now currently we have a helpXer staying with us, who incidentally is not exactly from Jerusalem, but from Israel. As we went on a walk with the dog the day before yesterday, showing her some of the wild foods growing around here, she pointed at these tall yellow flowers asking me whether they were sunflowers or Jerusalem artichokes:

I said I was sure they weren't sunflowers, and I didn't think they were Jerusalem artichokes as they grew wild everywhere including on a wilder corner of our land. She said it did look like the latter though, and if we did have some on our land, we should dig for the roots and have a look. And lo and behold... this is what we dug up:

I peeled a bit there and then and tasted it... Hmmm! Really juicy and tasty even raw. So here we go, Mr.H, no need to send me any tubers I just cultivate some of the wild stuff that grows abundantly all over the place! I now understand too why you call them sunroots. I don't think you have ever shown us a picture of the pretty flowers.

A quick word about food in general and roots in the figurative sense. We should all go back to our cultural roots eating in season and re-learning to find and use the wild foods that nature gives us so abundantly for free both for the good of our planet and for our own health. Now wasn't that all beautifully summed up and brought to a conclusion, (if I say so myself... ;)).

PS: I now found my camera and replaced the above images with my own,,,

The Solution

2011-10-11T12:07:00.000+02:00

I better tell you about the solution of last weeks 'wild food quizzzzzzzzz'
Greater plaintain. Edible, but not very tasty. Mostly used as a medicinal herb for a variety of maladies including liver cleansing.

Colts Foot: Leaves can be cooked and eaten, but contain a liver damaging alkaloid and should therefore only be consumed in moderation. The yellow flowers appear before the leaves and disappear again before the leaves come out. A tea made from the flowers and leaves relieves coughs

Ribwort plantain, or as I call it, pointy-leafed plantain. Used the same way as greater plantain.

Golden Rod. An aromatic herb, a tea made from the flowers and leaves helps with various maladies of the water system, i.e. cistytis, kidney trouble etc.

Oak. Acorns themselves are edible, but need repeated boiling to reduce the bitterness so are not really an option. Young leaves are edible though and a palatable wine can be made from them

Comfrey. Again not recommended for those with liver trouble and should be consumed in moderation. My favourite way of eating comfrey leaves is covered in a tempura batter dipped in soya sauce. The health benefits of this plant probably outweigh potential harm caused by alkaloids.

Wild strawberry. Also the leaves are edible and go into my spring tart alongside primroses and sweet violets.

Some kind of mint. Could be catnip.

Stingy nettles. They don't need much an introduction

Walnuts.

Oregano

Clover

Fennel. Easily confused with dill if you only see the picture.

...and....(drum roll...), well done Tanya, butcher's broom. The berries aren't poisonous as such, but will give you the runs. Young shoots are edible like asparagus. The seeds can be made into a coffee substitute. But the main function is medicinal. The roots used internally and externally are a cure for varicose veins and hemorhoids.

Nobody got the bonus plant, but hey, maybe it's just a useless weed, although there aren't many of them... Well done to those who had a go. Tanya, Mr.H and Ruth all managed 11 right!

Wild food season

2011-10-04T19:02:00.001+02:00

We went on a photo safari the other day for the book I'm writing, the guide to edible and medicinal wild plants for pilgrims. Within a relatively short walk we found all these:

Who can tell me what these all are? Go on have a go. You can click on the photos to enlarge them.

For a bonus point, what is this one?

I haven't identified it myself yet. The flowers are actually yellow. Looks like it should be medicinal.

Finally on a separate excursion we visited some friends in the mountains and came away with tons of chestnuts (the woods around us have been badly affected by the chestnut gall wasp), crab apples and one lovely porcini mushroom:

I'm back...

2011-09-27T16:14:00.001+02:00

This is not so much a gardening post, but an update on what's been happening to us. Good god, has it really been over a month since my last post? Thank you for all your enquiries about our well-being, we're still here, although our lives certainly haven't been boring.

The reason for my silence? Well it was a tale of broken friendships, betrayal and sex and you really don't want to know about it... Well I'm not going to tell you about it anyway, even if you do. The consequences: Conspiracy Cousin is back in the Netherlands for the time being, but has threatened to return soon, we went on a holiday to clear our heads and another lesson learned about humanity.

Well this holiday turned out to be particularly eventful. we went to see our very good pilgrim friends (you may remember them from the visit they paid us with their horse and dog last year) in Arles in the Provence. Just 5 km into the journey we smashed the car against the wall.

It was very spectacular, with airbags inflating and all. Luckily non of us was hurt and the car only had some minor damage. So on we went to France to relax a few days with friends. Eddie re-aquainted himself with his old friend from last year and the 2 dogs got on like a house on fire. So when one day we went to see some vineyards in the region we felt it was safe to leave the 2 dogs in the house. Unfortunately Eddie felt he had to live up to his name of Eddie, the B(eagle), named after the famous yet inept Britsh ski jumping legend, and jumped out of this fist floor window:

and got himself lost amongst the many lanes and alleyways of the city. It took a few hours of wandering around and quizzing the neighbours until we finally located him, as he had been taken in (kidnapped) by a family and held for ransom.

At the end of the week we finally limped home on a flat tyre. We had two very nice Norwegian helpXers house sitting in the meantime and looking after Mickey the cat and watering our land.

What else have been up to? We went grape picking for some friends:

...and I'm finally seriously working on a book: edible and medicinal herbs along the pilgrim routes of Europe. That'll keep me busy over the long winter evenings.

and in the garden? Although the temperatures are still pleasant, autumn is definitely in the air. We've had the first bits of rain after months of drought conditions and evenings are getting cooler. Generally yields this year were lower than usual as expected due to the loss of topsoil during last winter's landlsides. Weather conditions were almost perfect this year though, hadn't it been for that hailstorm, which destroyed much of our fruit crop.

Amongst the successes were litchi tomatoes, or rather as I prefer to call them by their less confusing scientific name (as they don't have much to do with tomatoes and nothing with litchies), vicious bastards.

It was Mr. H.'s sick sense of humour to send me some seeds of these. Yes, they do grow really easily, are drought and disease resistant and very decorative. But man! those things have some mean spikes on them! And now that I have a whole lot of these fruits, what do I do with them, having got bleeding fingers from picking them? They taste ok, a bit cherriesh, a bit tomatoish..., but I miss a bit of acidity in those things. They are fine as an addition to a salad that involves real tomatoes. So what else can you do with them?

Anyway, enough of this. A second crop of green beans is coming along very nicely. The first crop succumbed to disease and were finished off by the hail, but this lot's long healthy and is delicious.

Watering is no longer needed as seem to have enough dew at night to keep the soil sufficiently moist. I'll try not to make the next gap between posts so long.

Oh and we had a little concert in our house as part of the annual poetry competition:

What's wrong with this world

2011-08-23T09:38:00.001+02:00

No I won't be attempting you give you a comprehensive answer to that. This is just to hook up with the recent post appealing for help for our helpXer who had all her kit stolen out of our caravan. First of all thank you everybody for your offers of help and support. Unfortunately, for reasons I don't really want to speculate about on a public blog, our helper has left in rather acrimonious circumstances, not really cooperating with any efforts to help her. I have therefore had to refuse any of your kind and generous offers. But thank you again, I was touched to hear from total strangers, who don't even normally comment on my blog.

In the meantime it has come to my attention that there has been quite a spate of small crimes committed in the area. A number of our immediate friends and aquaintances have had their houses and/or cars broken into. At the same time in England kids have taken to the streets for several days in a free for all rioting and looting extravaganza. What's going on? Have you noticed or heard of an increase of crime where you are?

Here is my take on the story. What those looters stole or even the damaged they caused, without of course wanting to condone any of it, is peanuts compared to what speculators and stock brokers have looted from the markets! Our whole system is based on greed and greed only. These bankers are no more than large scale thiefs and robbers, helping deplete natural resources.My fellow blogger Jeremy puts it much better than I could.

I also loved the quote of my money-less friend Mark Boyle, who said:

I love the way that we call people who break into chainstores 'looters', yet the rest of us law abiding citizens get to loot the entire planet and are deemed peaceful. Instead of H&M, read rainforests. Instead of JD Sports, read oceans. Instead of Tesco, read soil. If you want to see a looter, look within, we're all looters. Just some are culturally normalised.

We live in a consumerist society where what you have defines who you are and if you have nothing you are nobody. We are bombarded with adveritising telling us what we must have. The politicians keep telling us the economy must grow so we must spend, spend, spend. According to this ethos we only contribute to society by spending and buying consumer goods, thus at the same time depleting the world's resources.

But as the gap between haves and have-nots is ever widening, those who don't have the means to buy all those glitzy new gadgets, the latest car, the newest fashion accessory will inevitably find other ways of obtaining them. And as they see those criminals at Wall Street and in the City, the big company bosses and corrupt politicians get away with murder, they feel they haven't got much to loose.

They won't fix the system by locking up 12 year olds for stealing a bottle of wine, but by radically changing to a fairer more just, not to mention DEMOCRATIC system. All those guys giving their lives in Lybia and Syria aledgedly fighting for democracy. What a rude awakening they'll have when they find out there's no such thing...

But enough of the ranting. It's been boiling hot our way, so physical labour has been off the schedule for a while. Thus I've had some time to rant a bit. But now the sweat is starting to drip on my keyboard so I better stop.

Oh but one more thing: I'm now the proud foster parent of Foster, the Ducklet all the way over in Ohio. Check out my "sister's" blog here.

Farmer Heiko's latest adventure with Mr. Monsanto

2011-08-13T14:09:00.000+02:00

Bad Luck Strikes Again

2011-08-07T09:13:00.000+02:00

After the landslides in winter and the hailstorm last week we again face ourselves with another disaster. This time caused by humans though.

Until today I have always felt we were living in a relatively low crime area. In our village we routinely leave the key in the front door, even when taking the dog out for a walk. I have repeatedly forgotten to lock the car, even leaving the windows open for a few days on the village car park. But today we found that you shouldn't let your guard down, because there's always some opportunist out there. We were on this occasion not the victims ourselves though, but one of our helpXers, which makes us feel particularly bad.

We are currently having two young girls staying in our caravan on our land helping us with some work in exchange for some free lodging. While we were all working a few terraces lower, not having locked the caravan, one of the girls, Diane from France, had all her belongings stolen in broad daylight yesterday morning. Her rucksack with everything. The Carabinieri aren't interested. They're just saying come back Monday morning!

This is Diane a few days ago lifting some potatoes:

Diane was at the beginning of a trip of a lifetime. She had planned to stay 2 weeks with us followed by another 2 weeks in Italy and a few months in India. She luckily had her passport and cards on her, but lost a considerable amount of cash as well as all her clothing and various other personal things.

Those of you who know us and/or have been following this blog for a while, know we don't have any money. Neither are we or Diane insured. However we feel responsible for this, as she was staying as our guest. I'm asking any of you please (!!!), to give this young woman back her confidence in humanity. If it is at all within your means donate something for her, so she can continue her travels. Every little would help. Please be in touch, send us an e-mail (heikover@libero.it) if you can help in any way.

Raspberries & Festas

2011-07-31T11:03:00.001+02:00

Yesterday we want on another raspberry finding mission. This time we went to the other side of the mountains, where a friend was going to show us exactly where to loo. We brought our latest little helper along, Athelas from Taiwan. We are getting very international lately...

After passing through some beautiful beechwoods at about 1,100 metres altitude...

... we soon spotted our first raspberries.

We soon dived into the raspeberry bushes picking busily:

Athelas had never seen or tasted raspberries before!

We gathered over 3kg and made lots of jam. Reason enough to hug a tree in thanks to nature:

Athelas was also lucky as she arrived at the height of the festa season. She arrived on Friday and we took her directly from the station to our neighbour village of Caprigliola where there was a Festa della Contadina a Festival of the Farmer's Wife. Part of the festivities included a fashion show, where young girls where showing off the wedding dresses of their grandmothers.

And yesterday after the raspberry picking we went to our town of Santo Stefano di Magra, which was turned into a scene of Monty Python for the annual Medieval Festa...

including whiches (BURN, BURN!!!):

...body collectiuons (BRING OUT YOUR DEAD!):

Fun was had by all ages:

Happy August everyone!

Another Minor disaster...

2011-07-24T19:34:00.000+02:00

Einav and Yotam our current helpXers are leaving tomorrow after doing a sterling job for us weeding, pruning a tree, dog-sitting, securing a terrace and building a movable compost toilet and a new little viewing terraces right above the toilet as seen on the picture below:

However the last night they spent in the caravan they thought the heaven was falling on their heads. We heard the thunderstorm on our side of the valley, but didn't get hit by it's full force. However as soon as we drove into Arcola we realised that it must have been much worse around our land. On the way up the hill we saw trees stripped of their foliage. Still not quite realising the full extend we arrived on the land. These were the size of the hailstones several hours after the storm with the sun already high up in the sky!

They must have come down the size of golf balls originally during the night! The damage was pretty extensive. Some of our plants looked like they've been through a shredder.

This was the volunteer pumpkin plant:

The surface of the pumpkins themselves looked like the planet Mars with numerous craters caused by comets:

Another squash with craters:

Swiss chard shredded to pieces:

...and the Greek corn:

and courgettes:

Many unripe tomatoes have been blown off the plant, but at least most of the plants themselves seem to have survived. Many apples and peaches were scattered prematurely. Another little step back, the vagaries of nature... :(. At least the caravan survived the onslaught, our guests were safe and all the terraces are where they were before.

In other news we took a trip into the mountains today to a village called Vinca on the a tip that we might find raspberries up there. I love raspeberries, but can't grow them on our land. They only thrive in our climate above a certain altitude, so I was very excited.

The surroundings up there were stunning:

and Eddie played with his new friend Yotam:

but alas no raspberries. Either we went up the wrong path or someone else got there before us. We found one and Yotam ate it.

We might try another path next week and I'll let you know if we find anything that time.

Finally everybody, it's time to sow your cats for next season:

She's done it again!

2011-07-19T12:22:00.000+02:00

Do you remember last year? I was lying in bed with a splitting headache when right in front of my nose Rooney, our semi-feral cat dropped two kittens. She did it again! Not right in front of my nose, she only brought them after a few days, when their eyes were already open.

So anyone wantong a sweet little kitten... or can help us get Rooney neutered once she's finished suckling these little terrors, pleeeease come forward!

In other news, Shaun and Molly from Texas have moved on after leaving our caravan enriched by this little piece of artwork:

... and they have been replaced by Einav and Yotam from Israel who are busy weeding and building a compost toilet:

First caravan party!

2011-07-05T20:21:00.000+02:00

It was the Shaun our helpXers birthday today so we had a little party for him in the caravan.

I knew these party hats would come in useful for something!.

And there were even birthday cake candles there and a 'buon compleanno banner. What else do you need for a party!

Solar Dehydrator

2011-07-03T21:06:00.000+02:00

Step 1: Find an old kitchen unit, knock out the bottom and attach legs

Step 2: Find a couple of old bee frames coincidentally fitting your kitchen cabinet. Ask your wife or your cross dressing boyfriend for an old pair of tights and stretch over bee frames. Take some old bits of mirror to put on the sides to reflect light from various angles.

Step 3: put a glass pane across and place on a sunny south facing spot.

Within minutes temperatures rose to 45 C. The first experimental batch of courgette slices for drying, we've got plenty of them at the moment, so no great loss if it doesn't work. We're anxiously awaiting the results tomorrow... and next maybe figs... or pear slices... prunes?

In other news Shaun and Molly from Texas made themselves at home in the new caravan and building some steps down from the caravan to the nearest tomato bed:

and a flood defense dike along the top of our land:

amongst other things...

Farmer Heiko strikes again

2011-06-20T12:32:00.000+02:00

Move that thing

2011-06-20T08:40:00.000+02:00

After finally moving the few cubic metres of earth tp make room we moved that thing into place. It was quite an adventure, but I better not go into detail in case the local traffic police read my blog.

Suufice to say that the caravan was given to us by our friends Sarah and Alex, who inheritited it with their house some 30 km up the valley. The previous owners had left a load of stuff in it, which in turn has now passed into our possession. Some of this stuff is and will be useful, others bits less so. Some of the things you may spot on the little slide show below, including numerous board games, pots and pans as well as camping crockery and cutlery, various types of glue, hundreds of light bulbs, bedding, towels, various shoes, some my size, some Susan's size, some someone else's size, 2 wooly hats, 2 pairs of wooly socks, 2 baseball caps, one of them inscribed 'Spice Boy', 2 pairs of brand new swimming goggles, a set of party hats, a beach ball, an iron board and iron (I've never ironed anything in my life!), a pair of half length corduroy shorts my size, a catering size can of instant coffee approximately 37 years old (I hate Necafe), 27 packets of painkiller, 17 bottles of suntan lotion plus numerous creams, potions and lotions (ask Susan about the details...)...

So Sarah and Alex, if you recognise any of the above as unintentionally left, say so now and if anyone else use for one or the other of these items, we may have some spare. Ask for details.

Well, we moved that thing, now we just have to clean it and tidy up. Cousin Barti is off on a well deserved holiday next week and is going to be replaced by two helpXers who will be the first to stay in there.

Farmer Heiko on the economy

2011-06-19T09:43:00.000+02:00

Courgettes, corn, curcubita and clouds

2011-06-17T17:26:00.002+02:00

Just a quick update on the garden. I was a way for a week during which we had some much needed rain. Now back we're hard at work again. Tomorrow we'll be getting the caravan, more pictures of that then. In the meantime veg production really kick started.

We have courgettes:

...and courgettes:

...and some.... courgettes:

The Greek corn is really thriving in our conditions. Much better than what I have sown a couple of terraces higher up.

One of the 'tipis' of Buenos Aires beans is growing upwards rapidly, whilst the other one right next door misteriously died en-masse:

...and this giant cucubita, presumably some kind of pumpkin, sprung spontaneously from where the compost heap was last year.

and for the final 'C' a sunset from the other day when we had a full eclipse of the moon. As the picture of a dark moon in the dark sky was a tad boring I'll show you one in the other direction with a pretty cloud. :)

Farmer Heiko on Food terror

2011-06-07T21:23:00.000+02:00

And because it was so much fun, here the second instalment of Farmer Heiko's adventures. Excuse the difficult to understand accent of Conspiracy Cousin, he's foreign.

New series of Farmer Heiko animations

2011-06-07T08:33:00.000+02:00

The long awaited rain has finally arrived, so I played around a bit on YouTube and have come with a new irregular series, where Farmer Heiko will comment on current issues. Hope you enjoy it. :)

On Weeds and the Meaning of Life

2011-05-31T18:31:00.000+02:00

Every plant-loving gardener massacres plants by the tens of thousands every year. A market gardener kills millions every week. And their only crime is that they are seeking their place in the sun. Tragic isn't it? For them, natural selection has been superseded by the whim of a bloke with a sharp stick.

Chas Griffin from More Scenes from a Smallholding

It's the time of year again where we battle against those un-invited guests in our gardens: weeds. Don't you hate them? We spend so much time detroying plants instead of getting on with the real job of growing plants. But hey, hang on a sec...is this really so?

First of all we need to define weeds. They are spontaneously growing plants on cultivated land on which we have high hopes of growing something else. But are all weeds bad? Let's take a look at some of them.

On the photo above Susan is clearing the plants threatening to engulf some coriander and chives seedlings. I like coriander... and chives.... not so much grass or these tall plants pretending to be parsley when young. So weeds = bad.

Amongst all this here I'll be searching for shiso, parsley and leeks. Again, not good.

But, what about this one:

In front of my experimental plot of Greek corn several leafy plants like this have popped up. Wild beet. Delicious and heathy eaten just like spinach. Also pretty non-invasive, so we'll let that one live (until it ends up in the soup, that is... or the vegetable tart...)

Or what about this one:

Amongst my tomatillo plants, there's some fleshy ground covering stuff, what's that? Purslane. The best source of Omega-3-Fatty Acids in any land based food. Great in salads. Again we leave it where it is and eat it over the summer with tomatoes and cucumber. Mind you I can spot one of those pretend parsleys amongst that crowd too!)

And then there's this one:

Pigweed. A relation of amaranth and considered a superweed by Monsanto farmers, because it is resistant to roundup. I like it for that simple reason alone. It is also edible cooked like spinach. However it is rather invasive and there's only so much of it you can eat. So I've been pulling some out where it threaten to take over my Buenos Aires beans and left some elsewhere, where it wasn't so much in the way.

Do you recognise this one?

Of course! Borage. Flowers and leaves are extremely tasty in salads or stuffed into ravioli. Some people sow them deliberately, but mine came from nowhere and I leave it wherever it feels comfortable. It's only an annual plant anyway and is loved by bees.

And this one here is entwined with a pretty yellow flower behind a squash plant:

Not only has that plant pretty yellow flowers it also attracts bees and other pollinators galore, a good thing for the garden.

You see, it's not always so simple to tell what is a weed and what isn't. Many are edible or in other ways beneficial to your garden.

This has also got me thinking of the quote above. Plant-loving gardeners killing tens of thousands of plants every year? Well do we? I actually find it very hard to actually kill a weed. And how to do you count how many species you manage to eliminate. Going over a bed with a hoe will keep the weeds down for about.... a day? The same species will come straight back at you. Even if you employ the mind bogglingly boring and tedious finger and thumb method, pulling the weeds out by the root, you'll succed in keeping them down for maybe... 3 days... if you are very lucky.

And aren't those plants the same individuals? Just a fraction of the root stays in the soil and imediately push up a new plant. Genetically the exact same as the previous one. Is this not the same plant that you 'killed' 3 days ago? Are they like the Lord Jesus and come back after 3 days? It's a miracle!!!

Some weeds have such long tap roots shoots of the same plant pop up several metres apart, like the bamboo that continiues to defy all our efforts to eliminate it. Or grass. How do you define an individual gras plant on a lawn or meadow? It makes you think, doesn't? Well it makes my tiny brain wonder anyway....

If the borders between individual plants are a bit blurred, maybe our whole idea of individual lifeforms doesn't fit. With the whole world, all life on earth being intricately connected, maybe the whole idea of us being individuals is an illusion. After all our bodies are made from second hand bits that once were something or someone else and are constantly being replaced.

My ethics are built on the fact that if all life is inter-connected anything I do to hurt another life-form ultimately comes back to me. This doesn't mean that I won't hurt other life forms. Apart from me killing tens of thousands of weeds I also kill plants to eat, not to mention animals. It's part of life that we do so. But it does mean that I do my best not to contribute to the wholesale destruction of the planet, because ultimately it's me, or what will be left over of me and transformed into another lifeform and another and another etc that will be hurt.

So treat all life with respect, you may come back as a Monsanto defying amaranth plant... With this, happy summer everyone!

Oh and finally... the fruit season has begun, hooray:

Summer in full swing

2011-05-23T21:58:00.000+02:00

I'm happy to report that after last year's disastrous May this year the weather has turned if anything to the opposite. We have had no significant rain for, ooh I don't know..., at least 6 weeks. So watering is a daily task (above Susan watering the corn) and we're taking advantage of the long dry spell to spend as much time as possible out on the land repairing the landslide damage from last winter, leaving very little time for blogging or reading blogs. I'm evidently not the only one though who is too busy elsewhere to blog.

To give you just a small sample of things we are harvesting at the monent, here is some chicory:

We finally found a pea variety that is doing well for us although the name escapes me just now. We also have some sugar snaps doing well sent to me from a dear Floridanean blogger friend.

We are gourging ourselves on letrtuce such as oakleaf lettuce:

...and Mike's Red Lettuce:

But the main news at the moment is that after a recent appeal to friends and family for some support after last winter's catastrophic damage, we have been very lucky to receive many generous gifts, including some tools, seeds and... a caravan. Now those of you who have seen our land will be wondering, where on earth are they going to place a caravan on those steep and narrow terraces?

We pondered that same question for a long while, but were to busy with rebuiding beds, so we'd have at least some sort of crop this year. We had a vague idea that the top terrace near the road would only need a little widening and then all we'd need was for someone to tow the caravan to the top and then someone with a crane who could lift it down a bit from the road. Then we'd have to dig some steps into the terrace below the caravan so you wouldn't fall 8 feet down as you stepped out of the thing...

So with the continued help of my cousin Bart, we started digging to widen the terrace, and then all of a sudden the answer came to us! We'll level the a huge bump separating the top terrace from the road, so we could simply push the caravan in and not having to invest into the hire of a crane. All it needed was shifting some... 30 cubic metres... or so... of earth and... put it... somewhere else...

We soon realised this was causing all sorts of problems. First we had to support the terrace from below as it all of a sudden it was half metre higher and a ton heavier. Some earth went above to be put back later, so water wouldn't run down our terraces but along the road in heavy rains. Then we built a little mini terrace on the side. Some more earth went on another bit along the road, making sure future floodwaters were diverted from our land.

And finally everything else was just chucked in the corner, where it can do what it likes:

We've been working extremely hard on this for the last few days in searing heat. We're not quite there yet, but I'll let you see the final result. There's only about a foot to go. I bet you can't wait for the result. A caravan is going to enable us to spend large parts of the summer on the land. Any future helpXers can stay there. It would just improve our lives so much. Another week or so...

April update

2011-05-01T11:29:00.001+02:00

I know, I've got behind a bit with blogging, we've just been so busy! One helpXer left to find her luck in Madagascar and the next one, Alex from Canada has arrived. Alex has been busy helping us with the ongoing repairs to the terraces after the winter landslides, preparing beds for planting and watering the young plants everywhere. Here just a quick pictorial record on how things are looking:, in no particular order:

Ronny, the rennette apple tree looks like giving us more than 1 apple for the first time

The corn is growing on one of the upper terraces:

On a separate plot a small experimental bed of special Greek corn, which is supposed to be particularly drought resistant. I was given the seeds by Gaia's Hope from Greece.

The kale is holding its own above the encroaching weeds.

One of the repaired terraces, although narrower than before, now supports multi-coloured Swiss chard.

The new cold frame is stuffed full of lettuce including the delicious Mike's red lettuce and oakleaf lettuce as well as some raddishes and mooli.

The top of one of the new supporting tyre walls is now sprouting courgettes.

The old cold frame that had ended up on the edge of a cliff face after the landslides is now secure again and has some broccoli growing in it amongst other things.

Two tipis that will support Buenos Aires beans supplied to me by a dear gardening friend in France. The are apparently prolific climbing beans producing flat, tender green beans.

My first try at scorzanera is showing this year inside a deep bottomless bucket.

Al the almond tree is promising his first yield this year, whilst Capone is still a little shy.

Stud the kiwi is brimming with flower buds, but unfortunately his harem is not following suit (he's called Stud because he's the male amongst the females. Unfortunately he doesn't bear fruit, he's only there to pollinate the females,,,)

...and finally the sugar snap peas will soon be ready! Hmmmmm!

On the minus side, we have a vastly reduced broad bean harvest this year with many of the plants buried under the landslides. On the wild food front, it's elderflower time! Making a new batch of elderflower champagne every few days and eating elderflower fritters. The joys of spring!

Natural Sun Protection

2011-04-04T17:27:00.000+02:00

This really is just an appeal for help and advice into bloggy-land. Now we don't go out sun-bathing or anything like this, but working in the garden and walking outside, we naturally get exposed to the sun a lot. The Italians like to roast out in the sun on the beach... in summer. Then they will put on conventional suntan lotion. However, this early in the season it is impossible to find in the shops. I don't have too sensitive a skin and colour easily, building up my own protection. Of course I am also sensible and don't over expose myself. However, Susan is an Irish Rose with fair skin, and she wears sun protection all year around. She has now finished her last tube and cannot find any in any of the shops anywhere, which is just ridiculous!

So, the question is, is there a natural alternative, preferable something based on olive oil and wild herbs, which we have plenty of. I have found some recipes on the internet with various exotic oils, which are difficult for me to obtain and are very expensive, including mixtures containing almond oil and jojoba oil. What are the active ingredients in sun protection creams and where can I find them in nature?

Any advice much appreciated.

Phewww!!!

2011-04-02T08:56:00.000+02:00

Apparently yesterday's scare story was a hoaks, thank god for that! It was to highlight the law concerning herbal medicine, which most definitely is coming into force. It just sounded something perfectly plausible. Nothing coming from Brussels surprises me. Wild food gatherers don't contribute to the economy, so it must be an illegal activity! So I shall carry on writing about wild foods and... I'm looking into starting wild food walks. So if you are in the area, I'm for hire! ;)

Wild food ban!!!!!!!

2011-04-01T09:08:00.000+02:00

I am hoping this is not a particularly bad April Fools joke, but please, please read this blog post on new EU laws, preventing me from continuing this blog and do as much as you can to prevent and if necessary defy this law. It's an outrage and a travesty.

Mangiar la Foglia

2011-03-27T13:03:00.001+02:00

About a week ago these posters appeared all over our village: "Mangiar la Foglia" - Eat the Leaf. It announced a 2-day wildfood event orgnised by our local council. Those of you who know me, will know that I immediately got very excited indeed. Whilst I do know many of the wild edibles in our region there's always scope to learn some more. And of course our helpXers currently with us also have an interest in free and wholesome food.

The event kicked off on Friday night with a talk and slideshow in the village sports centre. The speaker introduced himself as an enthusiast rather than an expert, and he said he would restrict his lecture on seasonal greens found in our region only, thus excluding the whole field of fungi, which he reckoned merited a separate lecture. He then proceeded in showing us slides of some 100 plants and told us about their uses and how to identify them. Many examples were laid out on a table too for everyone to touch and ask about. There was so much information crammed into the 2 hour talk, that it was impossible to take it all in and it bode well for the guided walk the next day. 80 people had turned up for the event (i.e. a third of the entire population, although a few people turned up from outside the village).

Saturday afternoon we all met up again down in the valley, where the whole crowd started off, initially in an orderly fashion with only occasional dives into the grassbanks...

...into the olive groves of a local landowner (with his express permission), where a true wild food gathering frenzy ensued...

The two accompanying experts were in constant demand: "Can you eat this?"

"This is how you cut this"

Stephen, one of our helpers, proudly displaying a find. The message being, anything that vaguely looks like dandelion is edible, although I forget what this one was called.

Amongst our more interesting finds were wild parsley (above and below). Although it does not smell as intensly of parsley the taste is unmistakable.

This they simply called salvia / sage, but it doesn't resemble common sage in any way, neither in looks nor smell. It must be different variety altogether although I haven't been able to find out what it is exactly:

The roots of this plant are very tender and tasty. Someone named it Castracano, but I may have picked the name up incorrectly as I can't find anything under this name. Anyone know what this is:

Of course Addie also enthusiastically joined in the fun.

Amongst other treasure we found were aspragine, navel's wort, we found that some of the aspargus we've been collecting wasn't asparagus at all, but hop shoots, which are just as edible. After some exhausting foraging the owner of the olive groves served us all with a snack of testaroli (local type of pancake) with pesto and a glass or three of his wine.

The whole event finally wound up back at the village hall, where we had a dinner of wild asparagus risotto wild greens tart and a grilled meat platter accompanied by a mixture of wild greens.

It happened to be Stephen's birthday as well, so it was a memorable one for him. Sadly Frances and Stephen were on their way again this morning heading south, but they promised to see us again on their way back up the Italian boot. If you want to read what they have made out of the olive pruning and their other adventures check out their blog. I'm pleased to say that not only have we benefitted from their help with the olives and the repair on our terraces, but have also gained a couple of new friends. That is what helpX should all be about. Thank you Frances and Stephen!

NB: I've just figured out that it's called aspraggine and in English known as Hawkweed Oxtongue. It's what Stephen is holding up on the central picture.

Olive Pruning

2011-03-21T10:28:00.000+01:00

The weather suddenly turned spring-like, giving us a chance to finish off the pruning of the olives. We had started looking after the olive grove last year. Before that the trees hadn't been touched for some 10 years, so major restorative pruning was called for. We never managed to finish all the trees last year, so we needed to take care of the remaining 15 odd trees, which had grown to a majestic height.

Thursday just Susan and I made a start, then Thursday evening reinforcements arrived out of the blue: two more helpXers arrived, Stephen and Frances from England. Even better they came with their own accomodation, as they are travelling around Europe in their camper van. The kitchen is already full with my cousin Bart and our other helpXer Addie. We immediately found we got on extremely well and they agreed to help us finish the pruning.

I climbed up into the trees with the chainsaw cutting off the big branches, Susan, Frances and Stephen cut the branches into smaller bits and dragged them up to the fireplace while Addie picked a bunch of nettles, sorrel and mallow to make a wild food soup which we then cooked on the embers of the fire.

Bart was in charge of the fire.

Last night we celebrated a job well done by downing numerous litres of vino. Today my head feels a bit delicate and we're enjoying a well deserved break. So thank you sooooooo much to our helpers, we wouldn't have been able to finish the job so quickly without you.

If my ramblings sound a little disjointed, it is because I still feel a bit disjointed...

Of wild food and spring preparations

2011-03-15T16:54:00.000+01:00

We've been having a little helper with us again, Addie from California, although we haven't quite agreed what we all call her so we don't confuse her with Eddie, the Beagle. Here was one of those situations: "you talking to me or him?"

Addie has come here to learn more about wild foods, so we have been indulging in my favourite past time once again. We've been eating wild asparagus 'til we were sick (literally in the case of Bart my cousin, who likes it so much here, we can't get rid of him any more...), we've made my Spring Tart, crystalised angelica stems, Everything we could find soup, gorse flower wine, wild salads, etc. Everything really started growing now as the temperatures slowly creep up. This week rain is threatening the bits we haven't secured yet, we'll still be busy with this for a while.

Of course we have been sowing the usual things inddors and outdoors, but I won't go into details. Today we planted 2 new trees though, Franz, the Kaiser pear tree is to replace the pear tree which got washed down the hill by the landslides. Unlike my other pear trees, this one is a late ripener. We also planted a new olive tree, a 'Pendolino'. I was going to christen it Edgar, after EdgarAllen Poe, because of the story The Pit and the Pendulum, but was outvoted by Addie, who wanted to name it after her best friend Bela. So from now on it shall be introduced as "Bela, you can call him Edgar".

Addie refused to pose with him...

So far our latest update. Adiie is out as we speak, hunting for some borage to make Ravioli al Boragine... Mmmh!

Signs of Life

2011-03-01T20:25:00.000+01:00

This is both a sign that we are still alive as well as nature waking up to a new growing season. Apologies for the long gap in posting, but I had to go to see my parents as they had some health problems and needed urgent help. So I was out of the country for a bit, but luckily my cousin was still here to hold the fort together with Susan and Eddie, the Beagle.

During my absence they aparently didn't have the best of weather (I experienced snow and sub-zero temperatures while in Germany), but still managed to make some progress with supporting more damaged terraces. Rains did cause some more minor damage on some terraces we hadn't secured yet, but all in all I came home to a general improvement.

They also planted the potatoes while I was away:

In other news the pak choi in the older coldframe is doing well:

and Al & Capone the almond trees are in flower:

Spring is on it's way! We are expecting another helper this week who is particularly keen on wild foods, so soon we'll be gathering our wild asparagus and other spring greens. It's still cold, but an end is in sight. This year better be an improvement on last...

Life Is Good!

2011-02-04T17:31:00.000+01:00

When I started blogging I did it as a way of keeping in contact with existing friends and family, as a note to self and maybe, quite possibly come across some like-minded people who might find my ramblings useful or have some useful advice to give to me, because, quite frankly, I had no idea what I was doing when I started on my path to self sufficiency. So the last thing I was expecting was to make new friends via this medium let alone find new additions to my family.

But that is just what has happened! Not only have I made some great friends, some of whom I have actually met in REAL life (non of them so far have turned out to be axe wielding psychopaths...) and I have gained a brother and sister. So I am especcially pleased to have received an award from aforementioned sister (needless to say our brother got one too... :)). She goes by the name of Ohiofarmgirl and she blogs about her life in an Amish village (I don't think she is Amish given her like of Tequila...) growing food, raising all sorts of livestock and hating pigs. So thank you sooooooooooooooooooo much sis, I shall oblige with the rules of thanking you, answering a bunch of silly questions and passing it on.

Here we go:

1. If you blog anonymously, are you happy doing this? If you are not anonymous, do you wish that you had started out anonymously, so that you could be anonymous now?
I sometimes think I should have stayed anonymous, especcially since various authorities and banks are after me around Europe and I'm now rather easy to find. But hey, who's worried? I never thought this would go much beyond my original circle of friends.

2. Describe an incident that shows your inner stubborn side.
Well, the recent landslides on our land and my determination to carry on illustrates it quite nicely I think. But another early incident in my life was when I was hitchhiking to Greece with a friend aged 18. I refused to take a bus even for a few miles to get to a better spot to hitch a lift, preferring to remain at a dusty spot for 36 hours on the outskirts of Zagreb.

3. What do you see when you really look at yourself in the mirror?
I don't look into a mirror much, only when trimming my beard, which only happens when I start eating more hair than cream cake. Then I see lots of hair. I've given up going to hairdressers, because I get spooked by sitting in front of a large mirror for any length of time.

4. What is your favorite summer cold drink?
There's nothing like a cold beer after a hard day's work. If I don't have that excuse, a fresh glass of Prosecco with some olives and bruschette.

5. When you take time for yourself, what do you do?
Reading is high up on the list. Anything from light fiction to old classics, gardening books, philosophy. Listening to some music is also great. Again my taste is fairly Catholic (in the sense of all encompassing...) I listen to anything from Bach to the Stones, a lot of weird and wonderful world music, Mongolian throat singing, Finnish folk, Blues, Jazz, you name it. As I write this I am listing to Ojos de Brujo Flamenco.

6. Is there something that you still want to accomplish in your life? What is it?
I still want to reach a greater degree of self-sufficiency. Livestock will have to be a part of this, bees, chickens, goats, a wild boar or two... We're also phantasising about an eco-village... And I want to meet my long lost brother and sister in the flesh.

7. When you attended school, were you the class clown, the class overachiever, the shy person, or always ditching?
I hated school from day one I hated school. My brother (the one that I have met) taught me everything I thought I needed to no (counting to 1000 in German and English, the alphabet, who played at Woodstock and how to get into a cinema for films rated 16+), so I wasn't interested. I went to one of the roughest schools in town, so it was best to keep your head down to avoid being head-butted. Whenever it was safe to stick your head up though I tended to make the jokes. If I did offend one I could always refer them to my big brother, which usually did the trick.

8. If you close your eyes and want to visualize a very poignant moment in your life, what would you see?
When I was 5 years old going to Rotterdam City Hall with my mother (I was brought up in Germany). It was time with our constant travelling between Holland and Germany that I had my own passport. The only question was, whether it should be a Dutch passport or a German one. So my mother took me along to ask whether I would be drafted into the Dutch army when I was 18 if I lived outside the country.. The answer was no, thus I avoided both the German and the Dutch army draft and stayed a pacifist all my life.

9. Is it easy for you to share your true self in your blog or are you more comfortable writing posts about other people or events?
Nope, this is me as I live and breathe.

10. If you had the choice to sit down and read a book or talk on the phone, which would you do and why?
Read a book every time. I find it difficult talking to people I don't see. When I worked with deaf children many years ago in India I found that when you only have your body language available to speak, it is impossible to lie.

I would like to pass this award on to two people: Laura at the French Country Challenge who has threatened to visit me in the near future, even if she has been a bit quiet of late and Vrtlarica, with the unpronouncable name, who gardens and smokes bacon in Croatia (ps: I believe the first part of her name means garden...)

Reinforcements have arrived

2011-02-02T17:49:00.000+01:00

...to reinforce the terraces and repair the damage. My cousin from Holland has been with us for almost 2 weeks now and staying for another 2 months to help with clearing up the damage caused by the landslides. Much needed support. So far we have built some supports such as this one:

... built an additional cold frame:

constrcuted a raised bed, which we have planted with various brassica:

Daytime temperatures have been quite spring-like and we are making good progress. Next week the first instalment of spring sowing will get under way and things are looking a lot brighter than a month ago.

Saved from landfills

2011-01-17T13:26:00.000+01:00

I'm out of commission for a couple of days due to sore toe. Nothing serious, but I need to give it couple of days rest. Shame, as the weather has been rather good recently, but hey, this gives me a chance to write a blogpost I've been meaning to do for a while.

Below find an incomplete list if things we found on rubbish tips near us or prevented from going even that far during the last year. This list only includes the things that I remember and I know as soon as I publish this list, I'll remember half a dozen others, but it gives you a flavour anyway:

We start with our latest find, a piggy iron watering can:

..and on the piggy theme a piggy bank:

It actually had money in it, but unfortunately they were old Italian Lire, which are no longer legal tender. The rude inscription means "What balls!".

Next, ampngst the many bits of furniture we found a new Ikea occasional table,

a sturdy bookshelf with one slightly gnawed leg,

a fold-up high chair,

a comfy arm chair (ok ugly pattern and a bit dirty, because the dog likes lying in it...but comfy!)

Numerous other more rickety chairs, some are sitting on our land others eventually fed the fire.

On top of that a number of useful kitchen implements such as this espresso maker with all bit attached and fully functioning, retail value €60:

a pasta maker, which just needed cleaning up a bit,

an almost complete matching dinner set

as well as numerous non-matching plates, bowls baking trays and saucepans and a new bucket and mop

We also found 2 bicycles, one mountain bike needing minor repairs and a sports bike, still needing an overhaul.

a large, sturdy rucksack, ideal for going skipping with to save more things from landfills

Finally not pictured a pair of new Diesel trainers in Susan's size, numerous bits of wood for either burning or repairing our terraces, glass windows for constructing cold frames (another one is planned), some functioning wrist watches (I didn't even know I needed one), some picture frames and... and... that's all I can remember just now.

Isn't it amazing what people throw away?

Repairs have begun

2011-01-07T11:22:00.002+01:00

The first week of the year the weather was quite good giving us a chance to start on some of the repairs to our terraces. Some are of course beyond repair and I'm going to have to get used to a new geography. Other places are still too unstable to consider repairing them before the danger of winter rains has passed.

So starting at the top we concentrated on securing what's still standing and patching up minor damage. On the top two or three terraces the damage isn't too bad except some bits near the messy neighbour's land. On a few places just a bit of the front of the terrace has slumped down by a few feet. So the strategy here is to first support the remaining bit before it also collapses and takes the rest down several terraces, then build another support wall on the sunken bid like so:

and so:

The idea is that the lower bit in front can now be filled with manure and compost giving me a really deep fertile soil. The rear part in this case will also be held up by a pomegranate shrub, which is still young at this stage.

Now the rain has returned and we are having another enforced break. Luckily it's just a general drizzly damp rain come windy fog and not another downpour. So hopefully no further damage... Meanwhile I have some kale and tatsoi ready to be planted out, But I don't know where I'm going to put it...

Oh and the Epiphany witch hasn't come to visit for the second year running. I wish she would let me know when and how I have been naughty so I can improve my behaviour in future.

A New Beginning

2011-01-02T18:19:00.000+01:00

Ok I know. Not very impressive those fireworks as taken from our 'terrace' towards La Spezia, but the zoom on my camera has packed up some time ago. Take it from me, it looked better in real life. So let's banish this bummer of year with a bang and usher in the new one, it coudn't get worse sure!

First of all an apology if I have caused a mass panic amongst the populace of the village of Caprigliola when I spread rumours that they have been evacuated. I have meanwhile been reliably informed (by someone who lives there) that the place is still securely positioned on it's hill as ever and only a small scale evacuation has taken place in Albiano on the other side of the river due to a collapsing wall.

Here's a picture of one of the 'roads' off our hill as it still looked on New Year's Eve:

The main road however has been re-opened. Not sure about the road up the valley, but things are starting to return to normal.

Secondly, from the bottom of my heart, I would like to thank all you lovely people who have been sending me messages of support through the comments, on Facebook and through personal e-mails. The general consensus was to keep at it and stay positive. We even have had offers of practical help, financial aid and free holidays in the South of France and Tasmania(!). As many have said things could always be worse. My cousin for example had been diagnosed with cancer about a year ago. They said there wasn't much they could do for him except for very invasive treatment, which he refused. A couple of weeks ago he went for a check up and to the bafflement of the docs, he's clear. Now if that isn't a good news story to cheer us up! He's promised to come down from the Netherlands in the next few days to help us with the clear up as he had sold everything he had and now just wants to get on with enjoying his life.

Today Operation Clear Up has got on the go. The bad news is that much of the topsoil and many of the beds that have taken years of slowly building up on top of our merciless clay soil have been washed down and buried under said clay mud. A pear tree toppled over and uprooted. It fell onto a pear tree on the terrace below, breaking half of that off. The broken off bit than swam further downhill where it buried a Christmas tree. Eva the fig tree is buried in mud and Stud as well as one of his female companion kiwi vines have slid down a terrace, but might recover. Of the few veg crops still producing, about 20% of my broad beans are gone, most the endives and Russian kale, all the cardoons and some of the parsley has been lost.

This means that we will have to rely more on our new found 'hobby', skipping. On New Year's Eve, after the shops had shut, we went on another expedition coming home with this:

So as you can imagine, we are still eating cauliflower and artichoke soup.

On the plus side of the landslides, areas on the edge of our land that we have so far never really cultivated but generally just kept under control have now flattish open places, which could now have something planted on them. The reason we didn't use some fringe areas of our land was that the messy neighbours invasive brambles and bamboo kept threatening our edges. Now all this has been washed down. And as a bonus the border between their land and ours has become very blurred. As that land is for sale (with planning permission to build, which I reckon might well be withdrawn once planners see the state of that ravine), the new owners won't know where the original borders are. So we can re-draw the border a bit, gaining a few square metres here or there and adding at least one plum tree and a chestnut tree to our bit, plus, depending on how creatively I re-draw the border an olive tree. There would jave been another fig tree too to replace Eva, but that's come down in the floods too. Seems only fair to get some compensation, after all it was there total neglect of their land that has caused some of the damage on our land.

Also on the plus side is that of our nearly 100 permanent features, most are still there. Today we got on with the job of securing one bed, before it slides down, chopping up the pear tree for firewood, planting garlic and onion sets amongst the rows of broad beans which have been damaged less (it was the only place I can be sure is still likely to be there by the end of winter) and pruned the olive and apple trees and the hazel shrub. The weather has improved and depression has lifted, let#s all have a good 2011!

Rain...

2010-12-28T21:46:00.000+01:00

Just to give you an idea what the rain was like about 2 km from our land. No wonder Arcola, which is situated on that same road looked like it was hit by a monsoon.

Anus miserabilis or of Vertigo

2010-12-28T14:43:00.000+01:00

In the famous words of the Queen, this truly has been an Anus Miserabilis (a miserable arse of a year, excuse my French!) Yields on everything were already low due to an unusually cold spring followed by a wet and often cool summer followed by deluges of rain during autumn and now winter.

The snow from last week did not last long and was soon replaced by more rain. Big rain! Bad rain! The first inkling that the rain just a couple of days before Christmas wasn't just some more rain was when we received a phone call from our friends Pam and John as they were on their way to their holiday home on the other side of the valley. They were asking for advice how they'd get home as most roads in the valley appeared to be closed. The last part of the journey which should have taken them half an hour took them 5 hours!

Christmas Eve and Chistmas Day we spent quietly at home, not listening or watching any news and hoping things would just settle down by next time we went out. Although we had already discovered that a rough unpaved road down our hill was blocked in various places due to landslides and various houses had been cut off from the outside world.

On Boxing Day we were invited for lunch with friends up the valley a bit. As we took the car out we discovered that 2 more roads down our hill were also closed for the same reason, including the main road down. So we took a little side road over the hill towards our neighbouring village of Caprigliola. The road was bumpy but passable, but when we got to Caprigliola it seemed eerlily quiet... Subsequently we found out that the village had been evacuated, because it's in danger of falling off the mountain. It has stood at this place for over a 1000 years with it's bulky Medieaval fortification walls! As we finally made it down into the valley it transpired that the only road up the valley apart from the toll motorway was also shut in 2 places.

After all that I was getting very aprehensive what we would find once we managed to get back to our land, and with good reason. Today we finally got over to Arcola, where our plot is situated. The town itself was caked in stinking mud, presumably due to a broken drain pipe. The last time I smelled anything like this was in the slums of Bombay during monsoon season!

Then the first glimpse of our land:

This is actually mostly the plot next door, which has been neglected for years, but a lot of what came down on their side swamped the edges of our land.

This reapir from the last landslides didn't withold the next avalanche.

And new landslides developed taking down another kiwi plant with it.

The foundations of my earthship are buried and a pear tree fell over it.

just devastating...

Some of my broad beans buried under mud.

It's not entirely clear any more where the border between our land is and next door's. On the plus side many of their invasive brambles have been buried in mud too...

Under that are the remains of Eva the sweet fig tree...

most of our land as seen from the (messy) neighbour's side. Our bit is below the red line. You can clearly see the scars in the earth.

Now is the time we should be planning for next season, collecting manure from our neighbour to apply to future beds. But what can I do? For the moment the rain has let off, but for how long? The earth is beyond saturation point. I don't know which beds will still be horizontal next week. All of the 18 terraces have been affected somehow by either bits broken off or bits falling on it.

I feel like thowing it all in...

They've been lying to us!

2010-12-17T10:53:00.001+01:00

When we had snow during our first winter here back in 2004/5 they told us that this close to the coast it only happened every 25 years or so and dug up photos for us to see of 1979 when it last snowed. The following 4 winters were more 'normal therefore with hardly any frost even. Than last year we had snow shortly before Christmas and now this!

This is Eddie seeing snow for the first time:

After and initial sniff at the strange white stuff he went running around it like mad, chasing snowflakes. This is the last photo he stayed still long enough to actually be in the photo!

Here a few more snowy impressions of our village:

Before the snow we had a few days of dry sunnt weather. We were hopeful of getting a second harvest of our olives in. But alas the clear skies also meant quite severe frosts inland where the olives are and what remained on the trees never turned black properly, but just shrivelled. So no more olives this year. However we did get some more firewood off the olive grove and off a large pear tree we pruned. Very needed now we have this cold snap.

I'll leave you with a photo of the Christmas lights in our village:

and a sunrise before the snow arrived:

Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff

2010-12-06T16:00:00.001+01:00

Thanks Veggie PAK for this link. This is a good and easy to understand video on where things are going wrong in our present system. The key, as in permaculture, is to find a circular not a linear system.

Skippy, or on Food Waste

2010-12-06T11:41:00.000+01:00

While the cat is away... Well Susan is away for a few days, visiting her family back in Belfast, leaving me and Eddie to get up to all sorts of mischief.as you can see from the slightly guilty look on Eddie's face... Oh, and happy Saint Nicolas Day everybody in the Germanic world, hope Santa Claus (who has been hijacked by the Anglo-Saxon world to deliver their presents at Christmas) and his helper Black Peter (or has he become a politically correct Afro-Caribbean Pete in the Netherlands these days...?) have filled your boots with goodies this year.

Any way before I launch into today's main subject, I owe you the story of what we've done to that spiky bit of veg I found the other day and asked you about. It turns out it's a spiky courgette simlar to a chayote (which I hadn't heard about before either). Thanks everybody for the info. Once shaved, I sliced it into thick slices, removing the one long, soft seed out of the centre, turned it in a mixture of flour and salt and fried it in olive oil.

It was absolutely delicious. I think in terms of flavour this may be my favourite vegetable from the curcubita family. I must find myself some seeds to grow it myself (unfortunately I sliced the seed inside this one before I realised it...).

Anyway, I digress. I was going to talk about food waste today as a follow-up to the book review of Mark Boyle's the Moneyless Man. I had talked about the practice of 'skipping'. I believe in America this may be known as 'dumpster diving'. I also like 'bin raiding'. All of it meaning the same thing: searching through rubbish tips, trash cans, waste skips at the back of supermarkets. Inspired by the book, I decided to give it a go. Now is the time to distance yourselves from me if you think I'm overdoing things, but hear me out first.

An e-mail conversation with my bloggy friend Angela made me realise how little is known of the extent of food waste in the industrialised world. Here are some stats: According to British non-profit organisation Food Aware there are some 18 million tons (EIGHTEEN MILLION TONS!!!!) a year of food in the UK, which ends up on landfill sites. According to a 2004 study around half of all food produced in or imported into the USA ends up in landfills (HALF OF ALL FOOD!!!). Japan and Australia are not far behind those statistics. The only slight exceptions are in fact Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland who have managed to reduce the percentage of food in landfills to below 5%. Other countries have pledged to reduce (reduce! Hah!) this percentage to 20% from a current 40-50%. Even in Italy, where people are justly proud of their 'cucina povera', their poor (wo)man's cuisine, where the old generation who have lived through the war and won't let anything go to waste, a new generation of supermarket goers is growing up, who no longer realise the real value of food. To put it into the words of the UN: the USA produces enough waste food to fill every hungry stomach in Africa, France could feed the Congo and the crumbs falling off Italian tables could feed Ethiopia.

Now excuse my excessive use of exclamation marks and capital letters, but isn't that a crime! And a shockingly under-reported one. People say with a growing world population there's not enough food to go around for everyone. Apart from the fact that people in industrialised countries often eat more than is good for them, there's plenty of food there, if it was only distributed to those in need, rather than going into landfills.

The problem of course is not only the complete and utter injustice of this, it's the environmental impact of it. Some this food gets shipped halfway around the world to end up on a landfill site near you. Not to mention the packaging. And slowly decaying food produces methane, rather than CO2 had we eaten it. Methane is a much more poweful greenhouse gas than CO2.

Now where does all this waste come from? Much of it gets sorted out at the production end. According some EU regulation or other, this carrot is too bent, long, thin, that cucumber to pale, ridgy, small, that banana, too straight etc... Nothing for it but chuck it. Other bits go off or get damaged in transport, kiwis from Kiwi Land, Bananas from Panama, garlic from China (honestly, I recently saw garlic from China on sale in an Italian supermarket! I mean, WHAT????). It's a long way from some of these places.

However the worst offenders are supermarkets and consumers themselves. Food distributed to supermarkets mostly has to have a best before date stamped on it. This does not necessarily mean the food will go off on or imediately after that date of course. In fact many foods will literally be fine for consumption YEARS after their sell-by date. Have you ever noticed, mineral water has a sell-by date stamped on it. What could possibly go wrong with water in a hermetically sealed plastic bottle? Or canned vegetables or jams, for that matter can safely be consumed for years if left unopened. A neighbour recently gave us a large bottle of Tabasco sauce, because she was worried it would go off as it was nearing it's sell-by date. I have absolutely no qualms about using it for several months yet.

So anything that reaches this date in the supermarket, by law, has to be removed from the shelves and ends up in the skip around the back. Any damaged packaging... out with it! Bread going a tad stale, veggies looking a little wilted, fruit a bit bruised... bin, garbage!

For consumers supermarkets have become the one-stop-buy-all places. Rather than going down the market, the greengrocers, the local butchers, the bakers for a daily trip for fresh goods, people go once week or once a fortnight and, being unable to plan that far ahead how much they'll be eating, invariably buy far too much, a percentage of which ending up in the bin. Then of course there's the leftover's in restaurants and fastfood joints. No wonder city foxes, cats, stray dogs and I believe in some parts of the world bears, hang around rubbish bins for a living. There are plenty of rich pickings to be had.

Right, enough of the lecture. I have decided I was going to have a go myself at this skipping business. At the moment, this wasn't quite out of a real need yet, but this need may arise and I'd like to be prepared for that eventuality. One quick word on the legality of this. At best this can be described as a grey area in legal terms. In theory you can be prosecuted for trespassing on private property as well as theft. In practice this is rarely done. Supermarkets don't want the negative publiciity that might go with this, revealing just how much they throw away and then denying it to a hungry person. And morally, would you call this theft?

I decided a Sunday early evening was a good time for the particular supermarket I had selected, as it is only open a few hours in the morning that day. During the day I had already looked for a way into the property which didn't even involve climbing any fences. Needless to say, I felt a little apprehensive on my maiden skipping expidition. Early nighfall and cold weather as an excuse to wear a woolly hat and scarf to obscure my features from security cameras are good friends of the skipper (I did bring Eddie though, so he might be identified in an identity parade).

I was surprised how brightly lit the back of the supermarket was late in the evening, and the security cameras were visible, so I didn't want to linger too long. But just a few minutes rummaging revealed this:

plus much that I couldn't carry. There were 2 large black bin liners stuffed full of bread. And I'm not talking really badly stale or even mouldy bread. Look at the size of the large loaf I brough home with me. It's the size of our occasional table (occasionally it's a halucinogenic mushroom... when it's not a table I mean... sorry, getting side-tracked...). The amount of bread I found could have easily fed a couple dozen household! This in a country where they are proud of their recipes involving old bread such as panzanella salad or rustic Tuscan soups. I've been eating this bread ever since. Even today it's not even stale. As far as Italian bread goes it's relatively dark and therefore keeps a couple days longer. The foccaccia was also still perfectly edible after I heated it in the oven and then there were those vol-a-vent cases, which I haven't made use of yet. In addition there was a slightly bruised marrow and a few kiwis.

I have since eaten the foccaccia for a starter, made a cabbage & marrow soup with loads of croutons and had about 12 slices of toast for breakfast this morning. I was kind of hoping for some out of date cheese or so, but hey, I think I did quite well for my maiden skip. Anything I won't be able to eat will be turned to breadcrumbs (there are seriously people out there buying ready made breadcrumbs...) and used as and when.

Of course governments and businesses don't want you to know about the extent of food wastage, because it's bad for business. Every item scavanged from a supermarket bin is one not sold through their tills. Bad business for retail slows economic growth, the be-all and end-all mantra of our oh-so-wise leaders. Of course skipping is not a long-term sustainable option. For a start much of the food you'd be likely to find is neither organic nor particularly healthy. But while there is this food out there I regard it almost a civic duty to save at least a small portion from being dumped and I shall repeat yesterday's little trip as and when the weather permits (It luckily did last night, but today the miserable weather returns... ).

Anybody seen one of these before?

2010-12-02T20:37:00.000+01:00

Been out walking and foraging today and came across a whole load of these. They were actually grown behind a fence, but whoever planted them wasn't that bothered about them as they were scattered all over the ground. One had fallen on the other side of the fence and intrigue I picked it up. I'm assuming it's edible, but haven't cut it open yet, wanting some idea what to expect, sweet, savoury...?

I couldn't work out whether they had come of those climbing vine-type plants or a low tree. There was one still hanging in the tree, but it may have been a vine climbing up that tree. it's extremely prickly and you can see the size on the photo. There's no discernable smell from the outside. Anyone of you clever people out there...? If no-one comes up with anything I'll cut it open tomorrow and show you the insides too.

Book Review: The Moneyless Man by Mark Boyle

2010-11-29T21:00:00.000+01:00

I very occasionally do a book review on this, so today I have felt moved to do one again. I have been following the exploits of Mark Boyle for a wee while. He has been in all the papers as the mad man who had decided to go without any money for one year. It immediately caught my attention, partially because we live virtually moneyless ourselves and was wondering how he managed to completely avoid it and on the other hand because the subject of money has been one that has always puzzled me (as can be read on a previous post of mine) and Mark having a degree in economics clearly must be more knowledgable on the subject than me.

First of all I should tell you how I managed to get hold of a copy of this book. I did ask the man himself for a free copy, from one moneyless man to an almost moneyless man type thing. He said in principal yes except he didn't have any money to send it to Italy. Makes sense of course, just testing... ;) So my bloggy friend Laura of the French Country Challenge very kindly ordered me a copy for my birthday. Thank you Laura. In the meantime it has come to my attention that another friend has actually ordered me a copy too. If and when that arrives, I have at least one copy free to whoever would like it. Unlike Mark I think I could spare a little for postage.

Right enough of all that, what's the book all about then, I hear you ask. Below read the very first paragraph of the book:

From the onset I knew I was going to like this book. Mark describes his experiences of his first year of living moneyless and outlines his reasons why he did it. I say his first year, which was the original intended period he had set himself as a sort of social experiment, but today in fact he has just completed his second year and has no intention of quitting.

The really refreshing thing about the book is that nowhere does he claim to be certain that his way is the right or correct way or even the only way of living. He states his main reason for renouncing money as, that it separates the human being from what (s)he consumes. Thus it makes us unaware of the real impact of what we consume. In other words we consume something and when it's broke we throw it away and buy a new one. If we had to make this item ourselves, we'd learn very quickly to keep things going as long as possible. Or as Mark put it: if you had to clean your own water, you sure as hell wouldn't crap into it.

I can relate to this. Take the example of the olive oil we pressed a few days ago. Pure costs were something like €30 for petrol and the same for pressing. Add to that 3 people putting in an estimated combined 80 (wo)man hours in at say a paltry €5 an hour that would result in a price per litre of €23! That's expensive oil! Whilst I was a bit disappointed at the low yield this year, I have a real sense of achievement and I know the real value of this oil. It wasn't a moneyless transaction in my case, but the principal applies here too. I could have gone to the supermarket and buy a €2.99 bottle

In the early parts of the book Mark shows that he has an economics degree, when he describes some of the more ridiculous problems with the current economic systems. One of the more interesting facts, which I eerily had read somewhere else on the same day is the practice of fractional reserve banking. When I wrote my history of money I had no idea this unbelievable practice exists, but it essentially means - now hold on to your seats if you are an economic greenhorn like me - that the banks basically make up the money the lend you as they go along. yes, as in make-belief. It's true! 95% of money DOES NOT EXIST!

Mark gave a nice simple explanation how this works, so even dim lights like me can understand this: Mr. Jones deposits 100 moneys with Mr. Bank. Mr. Smith comes along and wants to borrow 90 moneys from Mr. Bank. With this he goes to Mrs. Baker to buy bread. Mrs. Baker then deposits the 90 moneys with Mr. Bank. How much money does Mr. Bank now have? 100 or 190? According to their books 190. And what happens if Mr. Smith can't pay back his loan and Mr. Jones and Mrs. Baker want to withdraw their money? That's the mess the world economiy finds itself in now!

What I want to know is, if the banks have just made up the money they've lent me, surely I don't have to repay them money that didn't exist in the first place? Or I could make it up myself and pay them back with Monopoly money?

Anyway, I digress. Whilst the book is not exactly a how-to guide, Mark has added some practical tips, some of which I shall try out in due course. He tells us how to make a rocket stove:

Must look out for a couple of oil tins to build one of those on our land. He also tells us how to make paper and ink from mushrooms:

He makes toothpaste from cuttlefish bones and fennel seeds. Now I don't know where I'd find a cuttlefish bone, but I added fennel seeds to my latest batch of homemade tooth paste.

Mark keeps saying he went into this experiment being essentially unskilled, however he is putting himself down there. The skill that has made his experiment such a success and has brought him international fame (which I don't think he was seeking in particular...) is his boundless energy and enthusiasm. He managed to organise a free festival for over a thousand people with 3 weeks notice, feeding them, entertaining them and all, whilst simutaneously holding dozens of interviews. If what he writes is true (he may have made it all up of course...) he slept just 5 hours a night, sometimes less. Hat off to him for that, I couldn't manage it.

The other area that took my interest was what Mark calls skipping. Now before you all start hopping around, he means raiding supermarket skips for perfectly good food thrown out because it had simply run out of date, or the packaging is slightly damaged. Considering the many tons of food that get thrown away each year, Mark says it's not only not a slightly seedy activity rummaging through bins, but a civic duty to liberate perfectly good food from landfills.

I have had a short stint working for a small chain of convenience stores in London and I remember very well how it broke my heart to see sackfulls of food being written off on a daily basis. All my lunches during that time consisted of out of date food. I shall have a look at skips around us more from now on. It would solve sourcing many foods that I can't grow myself and maybe a few freshish morsels of meat for Eddie, the Beagle if nothing else.

I heartily recommend anyone who is serious about "green living" to read this book. It's a good read, not in any way schoolmasterly and it may give you some ideas on how you can make changes in your life that really matter. There are compomises along the way, which Mark admits. The royalties for his book are going into a trustfund to buy a plot of land to start a moneyless village, where people can come to (for free of course) to learn how to live moneyless. Or simply to try it out for a while.

I have an eye on a plot of land myself, with a clean river, enough land to support a small community, a number of mature fruit trees, possibilities to expand and planning permission. It's even on the market. If ever we come into money (and we may) we could buy ourselves into complete freedom. Mark has done it, just an ordinary guy from Donegal, so why not me... or you for that matter.

More Rain Damage...

2010-11-28T13:13:00.000+01:00

After the olive harvest we needed a days rest on which we only went out on a walk for some wild food foraging. The one day turned to two as the rains returned. So yesterday was the first time in a while that we got back to our own patch of land in Arcola as opposed to the olive grove in Popetto. And we discovered further damage caused by the rain:

Half my cold frame had slid away. There used to be a yard in front of it where we could walk along and from where we could access the cold frame.

Inside the tyre there used to be a Florida cranberry, which was already unhappy about being planted in such an unhospitable climate. This has given it the final nail.

It had slid along with half the bed that we had just dug over to plant brassica on top of the straggling remains of my tomatillos. Susan is just rescuing what she can, while Eddie looks on being a puzzled about the new shape his familiar landscape has taken on.

I provisionally repaired the cold frame, but this is what the mud looked like that I was standing below it:

The soil is absolutely saturated! Today there's a bitter wind blowing and more rain...

At the Frantoio Part 1

2010-11-24T15:35:00.000+01:00

After another only half day on Monday due to miserable weather,

we finally got a whole day's worth of olive picking in on Tuesday, the day before we were due at the frantoio, the olive mill. Here are some views of my co-workers as seen from the top of a tree:

With all those rain interuptions we have only managed to pick about a quarter of the trees so far, however many were still quite green and might benefit from a couple of weeks longer on the trees. Besides, we couldn't have fitted any more olives into the car. As it was I let the girls drive to the frantoio, whilst I took the bike for the 15km journey. I got there 15 minutes before them, not having taken the scenic route the ladies took...

Anyway they got there without me having to send out the search troops. We unloaded the car onto the scales:

...and they weighed in at 184kg. I already started salivating and calculating. Last year our relatively small harvest (half of what we have picked this year so far) yielded 1 litre of oil for every 5kg of olives. I didn't realise at the time that this was a particularly good yield and was hoping to double our oil quantity for this year on the first harvest alone. I was wondering whether we brought enough containers.

Let me take you through the process at the frantoio. Unfortunately they no longer have the old stone presses to grind your olives. They are only left as reminders of more romatic times:

First the olives get separated from any leaves and stalks you may have been mixing in with them:

Next the olives are washed:

Then they end up in this container where they are crushed:

This is what it looks like from the inside:

Finally they are pumped into the press where the oil is separated from all the other components:

This is an overview of the control centre:

This whole process takes a little over an hour, during which time you wait in anticipation:

Finally the green liquid appears:

and you gather it in your containers:

Finally the result, but... big disappointment! This year's resa or oil content is a mere 10 % as opposed to last year's nearly 20%. This means out of every 10kg of olives you get only 1 litre of oil. Hardly more than last year, even though we have gathered twice as many olives!

Apparently we are not the only ones with that problem. All that recent rain has meant that, whilst the olives looked nice and big, even healthy (apparently olive flies don't like the rain much either, as we haven't noticed any signs of an attack at all), most of it is just water bloating up the fruit.

And the taste test? Not as good as last year. If you want to be kind you could call it 'delicate', but frankly it's rather on the thin and short side. It has some fruity and grassy notes, but much less of the spicy notes we had last year. And, so far at least, still not enough to last us through the year.

We are looking to get another appointment mid-December, but I can't help feeling quite disappointed. The cost of the pressing and the petrol for going up to Popetto a few times and then to the frantoio works out at the same price as some cheap supermarket oil, and whilst the quality is better than that, it's not exactly exceptional. The vagaries of nature... At least we know WE made our own oil.

So any helpXer's out there wanting to help gather our harvest mid-December, as Cat will be leaving us tomorrow. We've got quite used to having her around and she was definitely a help achieving what we did. So thank you Cat, come back any time (in 3 weeks would be good... :) )

Persimmon Cookies

2010-11-22T16:39:00.000+01:00

...or kaki biscuits, depending on your linguistic preferences Although, these things are definitely cookies, I reckon. You know the ones that Cookie Monster devours (I'm told he's now a politically correct veggie monster!).

Anyway, I'm often asked what I do with my kaki / persimmons / sharon fruit, whatever you want to call them. Some people apparently simply eat them, but I'm really not very keen on them, so have always turned them into my "I can't believe it's not mango chutney" chutney. But now our little helper Cat has found another delicious use for this fruit: Persimmon Cookies. She was reading a book called Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. At the end of the book there were some recipes including this one:

Apparently Mennonite cooking is particularly good, because they chain their women to a stove all day. Cat has made those for us twice so far (we didn't have to chain her up for that!) and they are delicious, retaining a nice moisture. Highly recommended recipe.

In other news our olive picking is being constantly interupted by rain. Sometimes this almost enhances the spectacular views from the olive grove in Popetto:

Other times we hardly see a thing:

And we have had plenty enforced breaks and didn't even bother starting on Sunday:

Finally Eddie and Cat are bonding well:

If you want to know what Cat makes of all this check out her blog.

Olive picking under way

2010-11-19T18:46:00.000+01:00

The olive harvest is fully underway at last. One has to make an advance appointment at the frantoio, the olive mill. We had decided we were going to deliver our batch on Tuesday the 23rd November, partially because, that's roughly when our olives were ready last year and partially because it was going to be the last full day of our little helper Cat. However, they told us they were booked out until the end of the month. After much begging and pleading they finally agreed to squeeze ('squeeze', get it?) us in on Wednesday after we established that Cat could stay an extra day.

So this put the pressure on: olives have to be picked by then, but... Last Tuesday rumours started going around, that were even reported on radio: 20 days of rotten weather. Apparently the cockerel crowed 3 times before sunrise 5 days before full moon, which according to local wisdom heralds 20 days of rain or something like that. So the signs weren't good. So when on Wednesday the weather gods sent us some glorious sunshine speccially for my birthday, although we had other plans, we decided to put at least a morning's work in on our land. We came home with 3 full trays, but we were resigned to the fact that we would probably get quite wet for the rest of the time.

Thusday it turned out just like that. It was miserable. We finished the largest trees on our plot in Arcola bearing the ripest olives, but left a few of the greener ones hanging, because we were just getting soggier and soggier. We'll pick them later for eating, we thought.

Today we went over to Popetto, where we look after a much larger olive grove consisting of 40 trees (our land has some 15 trees, not all of them producing). As we woke up and looked out the window, the weather looked good, but as we drove up the valley clouds moved in and it started raining heavily. By the time we reached Popetto we just waited 5 minutes before the skies cleared, giving us a great days work.

Unlike last year, this year some of the trees gave us incredible yields. The trees closer to the house, which were in better condition prior to us starting the pruning job last year were heavily laden with fruit this year

So we managed to get about 6 of the trees done today.

As you can see even some sunshine peeped through now and again. Getting home we weighed our spoils and altogether we've picked over 90 kg so far. That's more than we had from the entire plot last year and almost two thirds to our minimum quantity as charged by the mill of 150kg.

So another good day weatherwise and we'll be there! Grazie alla Madonna!

In other news we took a wee trip along the coast to one of my favourite places, Montemarcello and the nearby black beach of Punta Corvo (in Montemarcello we met the above Madonna, by the way). While there we got caught out in more heavy rain and a thunderstorm which churned up the seawaters in such a strange way that part of it turned sand coloured, leaving a distinct line bordering the areas over rock.

Wild Food of the Month November: Autumn Olive & of Little Helpers

2010-11-14T22:54:00.001+01:00

To those of you who have been following my recent posts it will come as no surprise what the wild food of the month for November is going to be. NO! NOT the coypu, i still haven't managed to catch one, it's the autumn olive berry.

Now I have identified it with the help of my dear friend Mr'H. in Idaho I can't stop singing it's praises! The name comes from the silvery olive colour of its foliage. It's a shrub or low tree, not at all related to the actual olive, native in Eastern Asia and producing oodles of bright red, juicy berries. Eaten raw they taste somewhere between a redcurrant and a cranberry, both fruits that I can't grow to save my life in our climate.

Further research revealed that the berry is not only edible and tasty, but extremely good for you with up to 16 times as much Lycopenes as raw tomatoes, making it a potentially powerful cancer preventative. The plant is regarded in many places as an invasive non-native species, which has been planted along river banks to prevent erosion, but because of its high germination success has been known to displace native flora in some places. The site where we found it there are only about half a dozen or so trees, absolutely laden with fruit.

Due to it's ability to absorb nitrogen from the atmosphere in can thrive on extremely poor soils and fix nitrogen in the soil and make it available for other plants. The wood makes good fire wood, carving wood or can be used to build solid wooden posts. The fruit, apart from simply enjoying it raw, can be juiced, made into jam, fruit leather, dried, added to cakes etc. etc. etc...

Now I want to save some seed to plant on my land. Non-native it maybe, but something that prevents erosion, a recent problem as you'll have noticed, and has so many other uses, sounds just like the thing I like to grow.

On a slightly different note, this week we are having a little helper staying with us, Cat from Oregon. We have recently signed up with a website called helpX, that brings together people who travel on a budget and would like to experience their destination more intimitely and are willing to work for a bed and meals, with people who can do with a hand with something. So Cat became the first in hopefully a long line of people who decide to share our lives with us. So today and yesterday we gave her an introduction into our lifestyle by taking her wild food foraging and then turning our spoils into lovely preserves.

It's the season for 3 different fruits at the moment. One is the fruit of the strawberry tree, which Cat is picking up there and of which I have spoken extensively last year in a post which is proving to be the most googled post on my blog. The recipe of a strawberry tree fruit jam I posted at the time was only a limited success. We ate it, but I wondered if it was worth our while again as it turned out to be a bit bland. So this year I decided to add some different ingredients to make a Christmas Jam.

This is what we did. We picked about 500g strawberry tree fruit. Then we added 500g of autumn olive berries.

and maybe 150g myrtle berries

Here's Susan in action picking some of them:

To those 3 fruits we added a chopped apple, zest and juice of one orange, a spice mixture consisting of cinnamon, vannilla flavoured sugar, nutmeg, ginger and cloves. We cooked that until soft, than added 500g sugar and boiled fast until setting point. After that we pressed this through my tomato mill to get rid of the rough seeds and achieve a smooth consistency..

Reheated it and bottled it in hot jars. Boy was this delicious! I shall make biscuits filled with this stuff for Christmas if I can keep my greedy mits off it for long enough.

The other experiment with autumn olive berries was along the lines of my (in)famous "I can't believe it's not mango chutney" chutney, in the sense that we made a "I can't believe it's not cranberry chutney" chutney consisting of unweighed and unmeasured quantities of autumn olive berries, apples, onions, ginger orange zest and juice and white wine vinegar.

Mix up and boil for a couple of hours until a good consistency is achieved and bottle into hot jars. Again, absolutely delicious and will make a great accompaniment for turkey or chicken.

I should have set the dog on you!

2010-11-11T18:23:00.000+01:00

After a few more days of torrential rain, we've set off to our land again for the first time to check for more damage and pick some food. On the way there we came across this fellow:

Big old rodent he was, never seen such a thing before. The body over a foot long, the tail too, huge webbed rear feet. Looks a little like a beaver, but has a round rather than flat tail. We had Eddie on a lead at the time and the chappy obviously had ventured a bit too far from the water and he's not the fastest on his feet. So he just sat there looking at us and we at him wondering who he was. He let me to within 3 feet of him and take this photo without a zoom lens before he slowly moved off towards the river.

Research on the web seemed to suggest he's a coypu or nutria. They are not native to Europe, but have been introduced from South America for their fur. Initially they were farmed, but they never proved very profitable, so they were released into the wild. Now they are regarded as an invasive species threatening much of the native fauna. Their meat on the other hand is lean and low in cholestorol. Now had I known all that, I should have let the dog loose, who was dying to get to him, hence would have done something good for the local environment, get a few good meat meals and a pair of new fur slippers. Well next time we see him we'll find out how good a hunter Eddie is... :)

In other news, the damage on the land hasn't got much worse. The kaki tree (persimmon) is dropping it's colourful leaves onto my favourite deckchair:

The kaki are nearly ripe, looking like bright Christmas baubles

And the river is full to overflowing

Happy days for coypu

Che Casino!

2010-11-03T20:32:00.000+01:00

After being holed up for 4 days indoors due to rain, today we managed to get out again. You can tell I was holed up, I was so bored that I even changed the look of my blog for the first time in 3 years. I've always felt content was more important than presentation, but I must say, I think this look is quite easy on the eye. I might still work on the background a bit.

Anyway, especcially 2 of those days, Sunday and Monday of this long bank holiday weekend (Bank holiday because it was Ogni Santo, the day they honour all the other saints they've forgotten about during the rest of the year...) were particularly bad. The rain was relentless and torrential for about 48 hours. Whilst I had heard tales of 'heaviest rainfall on record for the region' and landslides, deaths and floods - pictures on TV reminded us of the tsunami in Indonesia - living on top of a mountain where it all slides off it hadn't quite sunk in how bad it actually was.

So this morning it finally brightened up a bit and the wind had dropped. Having been indoors for 4 days we needed to find some fresh food, but Susan also needed to go to the hospital in Sarzana (nothing serious, personal problems, so mind your own business!). So instead of walking straight across to our land we took the much longer detour via Sarzana, a round walk of about 30km. Everything really turned autumnal now.

The river looked well swollen after all that water:

Going a different way from usual we were pleased to find an abandoned orchard and picked as many apples as we could carry (considering we still had 15 km to walk and 2 hills to climb...)

Finally we arrived at our land and we were crestfallen! Landslides everywhere! We've had a couple of minor slides before, but never anything like this:

The endives looking into the abyss, but the Russian kale is safe

Our compost heap is only just holding out.

It could have been worse. Some of neighbours decade old vines slid down in a river of mud now blocking part of the path, which seperates his land from ours.

An olive half buried.

Stud, the male kiwi nearly got uprooted just as he finally took some root.

Aubergine plants in mid-air... The root underneath is from a nearby olive tree.

As I say, it could have been worse. About 10% or so of our terraces are affected. Because we've got so many trees, the roots held much of the soil in place, but we'll be shovelling a lot of mud in the next few days... Apart from Stud no permanent plants were damaged and the broad beans which have just started growing are completely fine. Some of my cardoons were buried under mud, but more survived. A part secured after a previous small landslide held as did the excavation at the base of our Earthship. There are a couple more cracks which will go if there's another downpour like this, so I might have to shore them up too. All just before the olives are ready to harvest...

On a completely different note, we spotted these berries on our walk today:

They look a little like mottled redcurrants, but grow on trees like this:

I tasted some (intrepid explorer that I am!) and even tastes a bit like currants. The berries have one large seed inside. Anybody has any idea what this is?

Oh and fianlly a little language lesson: if you are a bit of a gambler and find yourself in Italy make sure when asking for a casino to put the emphasis on the final o, i.e. casinò. Otherwise you will be directed towards the nearest house of ill repute! In the phrase 'che casino' - what a brothel - it's more to mean what a mess.

Holy Dog and other news

2010-10-31T09:37:00.004+01:00

A little add-on to the last post about our day in the slow life. You may remember that on my morning walk Eddie the Beagle made a dash for it and disappeared for half an hour. Until yesterday I didn't know where he had gone during this period, but the mystery is solved.

As we were walking along the road yesterday a nun passed by in her car, stopped and rolled down her window saying: "I know that dog! Did he escape last Sunday?" Thinking a moment I confirmed that he had. "He came visiting us at Mass! He's lovely dog isn't he?"

So there was me telling the dog for getting up to nothing but mischief and it turns out he went to church confessing his sins! Come to think of it I'm sure I've noticed a tiny halo above his head since then. If you enlarge the photo below, see if you can't spot it.

(...not to mention the dog collar... I think he may be destined for the ministry...)

The weather for most of the week was quite good, but last night we had severe storms and it's a grey rainy one again today.

Getting on top of most of the autumn tidy-up jobs, I've had a go at our Earthship once again. I restarted my initial efforts as I hadn't filled the rims of the tyres properly with earth. I have excavated a large useless corner at the back, which provided me with the earth to fill the tyres and will give me space for the foundations. The foundation wall is now 10 tyres long and 2 tyres tall as you can see. There's room for a further 4 or 5 tyres lengthways once I have completely excavated that corner.

Now I only need more tyres. This is the problem, you see. Whilst the actual building material is free, it isn't free to transport them to our land...

Susan in the meantime is keeping herself warm in these nippier temperatures by tidying up around the wilder edges of our land.

A Day in the Slow Life

2010-10-25T09:41:00.007+02:00

I've been memed. Or rather should I say I've been invited to meme, or write a meme, or whichever way you are meant to say that. It's the first time I've heard this particular term and I'm wondering if I'd find it in a dictionary. Well apparently it's when a load of bloggers write about the same thing and then pass it on, if that makes any sense to you.

Anyway, this one was given to me by my long lost twin brother, from whom I've been separated at birth: Mr H. over at Subsistence Pattern all the way from Northern Idaho. He would like me to describe a typical day in our 'Slow Life'. I like that expression, 'Slow Life'. We've come to live in the land where they have come up with the 'Slow Food' (pronounced slo foot in Italian) movement to live the slow life.

Having read a couple of these meme thingies now, it appears customary to give a brief outline how we arrived at the particular date chosen to represent all the other days. First of all the date I chose was yesterday, Sunday the 24th October 2010. I must say it was a challenge keeping track of it in detail. On a really typical day, we rarely know what time it is at any given point. In the middle of a job Susan will call over to me wondering what time it might be. "Four, I guess.." I'll answer. "No," says Susan, "it couldn't be later than three." I rummage around my pockets to see if I remembered taking my mobile phone along, our only time piece. It turns out to be five or two.

“Time, said Austerlitz in the observation room in Greenwich, was by far the most artificial of all our inventions, and in being bound to the planet turning on its own axis was no less arbitrary than would be, say, a calculation based on the growth of trees or the duration required for a piece of limestone to disintegrate.”

From Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

Anyway, I digress. How did we arrive at this point in time? Many years ago Susan and I met when 'working' together in Belfast (n.b.: the inverted commas around the word working are deliberate. Our official title was historical researchers and the we concentrated out research efforts on the historical pubs of Belfast...) after I had just completed a year's stint as a volunteer on an organic small holding / alternative living centre on the north coast of Northern Ireland.

For various reasons Susan wanted to leave Belfast again. For a start it didn't seem the right place and time to bring up her then 3 year old daughter. So after both completing our one-year contracts we moved lock, stock and barrel to England, Surrey to be precise, just outside London, where Susan had an offer of work.

To me England was always going to be temporary, until we could move on somewhere, where I could realise my dream of self-sufficiency, but having now a little girl to take care of, I had to live in what most people consider 'the real world' and earn some money. It soon became clear that due to brain damage and a therefore very unreliable memory resulting from a bad car accident long before I met Susan, she could not hold down any jobs for longer than 3 months. She was offered positions on the strength of a Masters degree, fluent French language skills and a pleasant personality, but she was unable to pick up any new skills required for the job, so she was always sacked after her probation period. To this day she finds it impossible to operate a computer even at the most basic level.

So I became the bread winner as I started a sort of career in the wine trade. Money wasn't great and hours were long, but we got by and even managed the first step onto the property ladder when house prices were down in the mid-90s. So temporary became 15 years, Susan's daughter became a beautiful young woman and went off to university. She now works as a successful model and still lives in London. This left us free to go our way.

To cut the rest of it short, just over 6 years ago we sold our house at a vast profit, enabling us to pay off our debts, buy a camper van and set off to find our piece of heaven. We finally found it in Italy, on the border between Liguria and Tuscany. For budget reasons we could only find a piece of land separate from our house (separated by over 10km!) and it was a jungle when we bought it, but slowly but surely we are getting to a point where we have 18 productive terraces with all manner of fruit trees as well as space for some vegetable beds.

Fast forwarding to the days before yesterday: to save money and petrol we usually walk or cycle to our land, involving a steep climb on the last stretch in either direction. As you can imagine, walking or cycling 12 km, followed by say 4 hours of physical work on the land and a return journey of the same length, tends to take it out of you, so we usually alternate days on the land with days at home. This depends of course very much on the weather as well. The past week the weather has been particularly good, so we've been particularly busy on the land for the final autumn clean-up, sowing the broad beans for spring harvesting and sowing some brassica in the cold frame (cavolo nero, pak choi and broccoli). On Saturday Susan walked across to the land whilst I cycled the 25 km to the olive grove that we look after to see how far the olives were. In my opinion they'll need at least another 3 weeks before ripening, but I also found a whole bunch of apples going to waste. I packed as many as I could onto the back of my bike, 10 kg or so.

Anyway, this all led to Sunday, 24th October 2010.

8 am: I don't have an alarm clock, nor an inner alarm. In fact I'm not good with mornings at all. Which is one of the reasons we got Eddie, the Beagle. On a sunny summer morning is soft nose will sniffle around my face at 7 or earlier, but on a semi-dark autumn morning he likes a lie-in too. On the other side of my head the soft purr of Mickey, the cat tells me that it's definitely time to get up.

Mickey wants her breakfast first. She gets it in the middle of our messy dining room table, so the dog can't get to it. Mickey is the only left of a whole battalion of cats that at one time seemed to invade our house. She is tidy and clean and well behaved. All the other ones didn't fancy playing with Eddie.

As Eddie and I step outside the door for our morning walk, it hasn't really got properly bright yet and dark clouds loom. It has been raining, but for the moment it's ok.

On our way we meet Pelé, one of the cats that was born in our bedroom.

With rain constantly threatening we go on a relatively short walk skirting the village, so we can dash for shelter if the heaven's open.

Over the sea it looks a bit brighter, but unfortunately the wind is coming the other way.

8.45 am: Just before we arrive home Eddie dashes ahead. When I arrive at home I just find Stella and Rooney saying good morning to each other in front of the neighbour's door, but no sign of Eddie. He's probably gone off to one of the many cat feeding stations around the narrow alleyways around our village to see if he can't get his share.

Now I make the first half of breakfast for us. Today it consists of some muesli with milk and some pure, freshly pressed apple juice from the apples I picked yesterday. Susan eats her's in bed, whilst I get the computer going, which takes a while (it's possibly as old as Mr.H's).

9.15: I eat my breakfast in front of the computer, while checking my e-mails, news on Facebook, latest blogs and have a nose through the newspapers (on-line). Eddie finally returns looking rather shame-faced. I tell him off for disappearing and give him his breakfast. Susan makes the second part of breakfast consisting of 2 slices of homemade bread with homemade jam, a small cup of mocca coffee and today, because it's Sunday and our next-door neighbour Piero has given us half a dozen of fresh eggs yesterday, a soft-boiled egg.

10 am: After having had her shower, Susan comes up with a mug of tea and tells me the shower is now free for me. We don't shower every day during the colder time of year. Our hot water comes from a 50l electrical boiler. Keeping it on constantly increases our electricity bill by 50%, so we only warm up water when needed and have relatively short showers, so we both have warm water. Today is also Susan's hair wash day and my haircut day. As Susan will proudly tell anyone who'll listen to her (even some who won't!) ever she has changed from her favourite brand shampoo and conditioner to using bicarbonate of soda, she has only needed to wash her hair every 2-3 weeks and it has never felt or looked better.

This is me before my shower and haircut...

...and this after Susan has cut my hair. Not a bad job, for someone who has only had a few goes at this, is it?

11 am: The rain outside really has set in now. I close the 2 gates leading into our inner courtyard, so the dog can run around freely as and when he wants, without being able to escape again. All clean, refreshed and dressed I'm looking at what needs doing. Indoor jobs get rather neglected if we are out on the land a lot, getting home knackered. I've been meaning to sort my seeds out. I have been saving some, gathering some from the wild and also have very kindly been given some by Stefani of Sicilian Sisters, who visited last week. I sort them by month in which they should be sown. Some need to be put into sachets and labelling, if I still remember what they are. While I do that I listen to some music, an MP3 I downloaded this morning from Rare World and Folklore Music, a collection of Celtic Music from Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany.

12.30 pm: Gosh is it that time already? Susan had been tidying up in the kitchen and now comes up with some lunch: 2 sandwiches each with a chestnut and cottage cheese spread topped with slices of cucumber (every time I think the cucumbers are finally finished for the season, I find another one somewhere). We wash it down with a glass of homemade cider as a Sunday treat.

1 pm: It's time for some wood chopping. Our wood to heat our kitchen comes from some and diseased plum and cherry trees I've cut down on our land, some olive prunings from last year and a lot of scrap wood given to us by various neighbours who can't be bothered carrying any old bits of furniture, support beams or other bits down several flights of stairs. So they end up in our fireplace instead.

I like to keep the pile on bottom of our stairs to at least my height.

2.15 pm: No point overdoing it, this is a rest day after all. Many of the apples I brought back yesterday had been bashed about a bit on the back of my bike and want using up, so I decide to make stewed apples. Susan meanwhile is starting to crack a pile of walnuts that we foraged recently in preparation for dinner.

The stewed apple (appelmoes in Dutch or Apfelmus in German) is very simple to make. Core and roughly chop the apples and cook slowly with a little water, sugar to taste and some cinnamon until soft.

Then I run it through my tomato press to get rid of the tough skins and a perfect elk comes out... caribou... no... moose! mousse!! comes out.

Like that it keeps well for a week or two in the fridge. You can eat it mixed with other fruit, cream cheese, icecream, or just on it's own as a dessert.

3.30 pm: It's Sunday, it's a rest day, it's time for some quality time. Some of us here have recently set up an Irish music session group and I am woefully bad, so I should get a bit of guitar and tin whistle playing time in. I try out a few new songs and tunes and Susan joins in. One of the new songs is Lannigan's Ball. I must practice it a bit more so that I don't keep tripping over the words of this fast jig.

5.45 pm: I use a break in the rain for another brief walk with the dog, but after just half an hour we run for the shelter of home as rain descends again.

6.15 pm: Susan and Eddie are complaining they are hungry, so Eddie gets his bowl-full. For dinner I had been wanting to try a recipe from Anna atBeautiful Liguria: Pansoti with Salsa di Noci. Pansoti is a simple egg-less pasta, stuffed with borage (foraged the day before), which is served with a walnut sauce. Pasta making is always a bit time consuming, but since I have found a pasta machine on a skip recently it has become a lot easier.

6.45 pm: Susan's programme on Italian TV starts: Chi Vuol Essere Millionario or Who Wants to a Millionaire. It helps her Italian she says as contestants take so long to answer the multiple choice questions that she can look up any unknown words in the question or answers in the dictionary and often still knows the answer before the contestants.

7.30 pm: Dinner is finally ready. Susan eats it while watching the rest of her programme, while I check on any e-mails again or other news. After the pasta we have a simple cucumber salald followed by some of the stewed apple I made earlier. Everything is washed down by another glass of cider or 3.

8 pm: After Milionario we watch some English language news on BBC World and a different version on Al Jazeera. Channel flicking I come across an old Sidney Poitier film in original language (I hate dubbed films, no matter what the original language), which finishes at 10.30 pm

11 pm: Susan goes to sleep, while I sit up for half and hour longer to read. Currently I'm reading A Year in Green Tea and Tuk-Tuks by Rory Spowers. It's about the author setting up an organic tea farm in Sri Lanka.

Today, Monday, it's raining again, so I have time to write all this for you. I would like to pass this meme on to two blogger friends I have been following if you feel so inclined:

Laura at French Country Challenge

and

Pat and Rick at Living the Dream in Portugal

Wild food of the month October & a bloggy visit

2010-10-19T17:46:00.004+02:00

Yesterday we had another bloggy visit. Stefani of Sicilian Sisters Grow Some Food came to see us all the way from California for the second time this year.

This time she didn't only bring her husband Eric along, but her 4 children as well, which insisted on being introduced to all the animals around our village.

Here's her youngest trying to feed grass to a donkey's bottom...

So, if you were wondering why she hasn't posted anything on her blog for a while, here's the answer: She's been taken her family on tractor rides in Italy amongst other things.

On another note, it's time for the wild food of the month feature. For October this should normally undisputedly be the chestnut. However, I have in the past written extensively about this beautiful fruit (here for instance), and this year we have an exceptionally bad year for them

Initially I had put that down to the vagaries of nature until I realised that just a few km up the valley, they have an extremely good year for chestnuts. Due to the above average rainfall this year, they have grown to a larger size and the crop is particularly healthy. The area around and just above our village on the other hand seems to have produced hardly anything and on closer inspection the leaves on the trees have started turning autumnal at least a month ahead of normal.

A chance meeting in the woods gave part of the explanation: insects have spread a virus amongst the trees and helicopters have already dropped large quantities of predatory insects to control the harmful ones, but it may already too late to save the extensive woods for a few km around us.

Further research on the internet seems to suggest that we are suffering from a twin attack of chestnut blight, which has caused famines in some of the remoter valleys shortly after the war, and the Oriental chestnut gall wasp. Over in Arcola we have a tree on our land which has not been affected so far, but we do have to go further afield for our chestnuts this year. I hope they'll manage to control these outbreaks, it's one of the most calorie-rich wild foods we gather.

So instead I'll write something on the little blue myrtle berry.

It may be a bit of an exaggeration to call it a wild food. The main use for it is as an ingredient for a Sardinian liqueur called mirto. There are 2 versions of it mirto bianco, made from the extremely aromatic leaves, and mirto classico, a dark red liqueur made from the berries. I have made neither so far, but I've picked a mixture of the berries and leaves today to dry for later use. The berries are also said to be good used cooked with venison or wild boar. The leaves, as I have already found out can be used in these essential oil burners instead of essential oil to spread a pleasant aroma in the room. I imagine they'd be good as part of a stuffing for some rabbit or grouse for example, although again not tried yet. Anyboy knows of any other uses, I'd love to hear.

Water, Water everywhere...

2010-10-15T08:55:00.004+02:00

...and not a drop to drink! Today is Blog Action Day 2010 organised by Change.org. This year's theme is water.

So I thought I'll loose a few words on the subject. Here a few facts and figures:

African women walk over 40 billion hours each year carrying cisterns weighing up to 18 kilograms to gather water, which is usually still not safe to drink.

Every week, nearly 38,000 children under the age of 5 die from unsafe drinking water and unhygienic living conditions.

It takes 24 liters of water to produce one hamburger. That means it would take over 19.9 billion liters of water to make just one hamburger for every person in Europe

The US, Mexico and China lead the world in bottled water consumption, with people in the US drinking an average of 200 bottles of water per person each year. Over 17 million barrels of oil are needed to manufacture those water bottles, 86 percent of which will never be recycled.

Every day, 2 million tons of human waste are disposed of in water sources. This not only negatively impacts the environment but also harms the health of surrounding communities

Today, 40% of America's rivers and 46% of America's lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life

Climate change, over consumption and waste are at the heart of these problems. Even when there is, as the saying goes, water everywhere, there may not be a drop to drink, like recent floods in Pakistan after the worst monsoon rains on record showed.

(Above is not a picture of the Pakistan floods in case you were wondering, but the river Magra near us overflowing during last winter).

As usual I'm trying to relate this problem to me personally. What is my impact, and where can improve my responsible behaviour. I have always felt slightly bad about the fact that I use quite a lot of water in my garden. Although due to an unusually wet summer this year my water consumption no doubt was significantly lower. Still I'd say between middle of May to the end of August I spent about 2 hours watering every3-4 days, so 50 days of the year, 2 hours a day. In a normal summer that would be more.

I'm aware I could improve on that were I to install a more efficient irrigation system and catch more rain and dew water. I could save a considerable amount of water, however, as ever I'm short of the financial means to invest in the appropriate equipment.

I am however feeling slightly better about my own efforts since I found this website: waterfootprint.org. People have got used to talking about their carbon footprints, but this website calculates the waterfootprint of any consumer goods, foods, of countries and individuals.

Do have a look at this site, it's absolutely amazing what the water footprint for say a kg of rice is or a kg of beef. You can also work out your own water footprint and compare it to the average of your country and the world.

Any of these sort of tests are of course rough approximations, and also I found it difficult to separate my waterfootprint from Susan's. For example we don't wash dishes separately or clothes, so basically I calculated our combined footprint although sometimes no doubt I'll have got a bit muddled with that particular distinction.

Anyway the result was as follows:

Our combined water footprint: 1051 cubic metres per annum, but of that 107 for veg and 212 for fruit, which I produce myself and would therefore be included in the figure for watering my garden. Largest part cereal with 365 cubic metres per year. This comes down mostly to pasta, rice and bread flour, all of which we consume a lot of.

The average for Italy is 2332 cubic metres per head per year 51% of that falling outside the borders of the country. Global average 1243 m3/cap/yr. So in other words, we are on a third of the global average (1051 minus 319 divided by two people equals 366). This is partially due to us growing most of our own food and partially to us buying virtually no consumer goods.

The two areas where we can still improve is human waste and as I said a more efficient irrigation system. The first point we will be able to do if and when we have built ourselves a more permanent dwelling on our land from recycled materials. At this point in time I don't fancy walking the 12 km across to our land with a bucket of slosh, so for the time being we are still flushing our valuable body wastes down the bog.

The more observant amongst you will have noticed the little Blog Action Day petition on the top right of my blog. It is to support UN action to tackle the global water crisis. Do sign it. And think about water consumption, not only by turning the tap off while brushing your teeth but even more so when you buy consumer goods or unseasonal veg. I mean for goodness sake, apparently there are aspargaus on UK shelves which have been grown in the Peruvian desert, thanks to a 10 million investment resulting in water levels dropping dramatically and dangerously in that part of the world.

Let's make sure we all have clean water tomorrow, it's a human right.

Cider making

2010-10-11T11:30:00.004+02:00

Now the promised post on cider making. Like all alcohol production it is actually remarkable simple. Last year we had a very poor apple harvest and hardly enough to eat let alone make cider. But the year before I had already made a batch of cider of which I wrote here. That time we crushed the apples in an old fashioned grape crusher and then pressed them in a basket press. Whilst this was a relatively quick way of working, I found the juice yield slightly disappointing. An estimated 50kg of apples gave us about 12 litres of cider after all the deposits were racked off.

This is how we did it this year. We picked some 100kg of apples of two varieties. One is a local variety caled Rotella, a slightly flattened shape apple with good acidity, firm juicy flesh and a very hard skin, which makes them good for cool storage.

The second variety I'm not sure what it is. It is similar to the Dutch variety Boskoop, which is generally regarded as a cooking apple. It is browny yellow in colour with a rough skin, high acid and sugar content and a more mealy consistency.

We first sorted the apples into to 2 batches, one with anything slightly damaged, bruised or with worm holes destined for the cider and the other with perfect appearance to be kept in trays in our cantina which we recenty took over from our absent neighbours (the absent neighbours don't know that, so we're calling it a squat...)

That left us with approximately 50 kg to go into the cider. This time I decided to really give our electric juicer a test and process it all through there. It passed the test with flying colours and the juice yield was much greater than with the method we used 2 years ago. However, it took us the best part of a day to get some 35 litres of juice.

This was filled into a large clean demijohn. It is important at this stage that you use a container big enough to allow the must to froth up during the first couple of days of violent fermentation. This particular container has a 70 litre capacity. Also make sure you place it where you will want the fermentation taking place before you fill it to avoid any hernias trying to move it afterwards.

You could simply leave it like that and fermentation is likely to start with any ambient yeasts, however I prefer to add some yeast at this stage. The enemy of any wine is oxygen, but one of the by-products of fermentation is CO2. As CO2 is heavier than ambient air it will form an invisible layer on top of your fermenting brew protecting it from oxygen. Hence the quicker your fermentation starts the better your chances are of not ending up with vinegar. So I added a few sachets of ordinary baker's yeast and put an airlock on top. The airlock is filled with water allowing excess gases to escape but not allowing anything into your wine in the other direction.

Now you sit back and wait. Depending on how much sugar your must contained originally and on the ambient temperature, fermentation can take anything between 1 to 3 weeks. Once you see that activitiy has seized, i.e. no more bubbles rising and your airlock not bubbling, you test the stuff. Carefully insert a length of plastic tubing inside and suck some into a test tube or similar. If you have a hydrometer insert it, and if it shows zero, all the sugar has been converted to alcohol and fermentation is finished. You can also simply test it by tasting. Concentrate on the front of your tongue to see if it is completely dry.

Now you are ready for the next stage. You will notice the cider being cloudy and a heavy deposit on the bottom of your demijohn. Carefully syphon the brew into a smaller container with a plastic tube avoiding to disturb the heavy deposit, which consists of dead yeast cells. The target container should be placed at a lower level and you simply suck at the end of the tube until you have a mouthfull and it will then start running into the lower container all by itself. Do not attempt to simply pour it from one container into another.

Ideally the smaller container should now fit the liquid snugly with as little as possible air in contact with the cider and it should be closed tightly with a cork. Leave like this for another week or 2, during which the liquid will clarify further and another much smaller deposit will form. Rack off this deposit in the same manner and bottle. Ideally you should now leave it mature for a few weeks before drinking it, if you can resist that long. In total, after the rackings we made 25 litres of cider at about 8% alcohol.

In an ideal world you have special cider apples, which make the best brews, but failing that you want sharp rather than overly sweet apples. Our brew is perfectly bone dry, quite high in acidity (we also picked much earlier than we did 2 years ago), with fruity apple notes and a certain earthiness. One other thing, whilst the odd worm or brown bit wouldn't spoil your final product, if there's a lot of rot I tend to cut that out. Another advantage of using the juicer as you handle each apple individually.

Cheers!

Wild forager of the month...

2010-10-02T16:23:00.006+02:00

This month's wild food forager is definitely Eddie the Beagle. He early on worked out that he liked all manner of fruit and gobbled up any fruit coming into season and falling off trees such as cherries, peaches, plums, figs, pears. With apples he likes chasing after them first before eating them. If I eat and apple he impatiently jumps up and down until I throw down the core for him.

When the hazelnut came into season, he first waited patiently while I picked those seemingly useless things. Finally he decided to have a go himself, cracked them with his teeth and ate the nut inside, before he ever saw me doing it. Very clever dog!

Now the chestnuts are coming into season, although it looks like a disappointing year for them. Eddie quickly worked out that you could eat them too and has no trouble getting them peeled, except... when they still have the prickly outer shell around them...

In other news, Susan and Eddie are bonding well. This was on their shared birthday (well Eddie's halfth birthday...)

Some stats

2010-09-27T11:48:00.004+02:00

As it's a rainy miserable day today, I just thought I bore you with some stats re. my blog. I had signed up for a 1 month free trial with http://www.web-stat.net/. I've had that little world map on my side bar for a while, but it told me was a country break down of the visitors to my blog and I had always wondered who these people were who visited from the more exotic locations around the world and how they found me. Web Stat gave me much more info and it was quite revealing. It may be interesting for some other bloggers out there. I don't think I need to know these stats all the time, so won't bother paying for this service, but the 1 month trial was interesting and I recommend it.

In the period from the end of August to yesterday I had a total of 872 hits on my blog by a total of 395 different people.

12th of September was the busiest day with 51 hits. It was the day I published the post on toothpaste, obviously a popular subject. The quietest day was the 3rd September with 7 hits, after I hadn't posted anything for almost a fortnight.

Visits are fairly equally spread over the week, with most days receiving around 15% of visits, except for Friday which is the quietest day of any week with only 11.5% of traffic.

The site even tells you about the busiest hours of the day, which is between 7 and 8 pm local time, reflecting the time Europeans are most likely to be on their pc's. The quietest times consequently are in the wee hours of the morning.

The majority of visitors come via direct access, i.e. my site is logged onto their favourites. Of the referrals from other web-sites, this makes interesting reading. Here is the top 8 for last month:

blogger.com 16.5%
subsistencepatternfoodgarden.blogspot.com 14%
google.uk 9.1%
contadina.wordpress.com 6.3%
lettersfromusedom.blogspot.com 5.3%
google.de 2.8%
olives-and-artichokes.blogspot.com 2.1%
jamjaragain.blogspot.com 2.1%

So as you can see there is traffic between bloggers, some will no doubt have been from the blog authors themselves though.

Now as far as key search words was concerned, this was possibly the most revealing. I have no exact stats without combing through each entry, because every time a slightly different combination is used it counts it separately, but here are the top 5 search words used by which Google and other seach engines direct people onto my blog:

self sufficiency (yes, that's good, although someone from Salt Lake City, Utah was particularly interested in self-sufficiency in the last days... :D )
Brutta Figura (I hope I could help some people understand Italian better)
strawberry tree (again, hope they found my post on the subject last year useful)
courgettes (ditto)
but by far the mostly used word for finding my web-site from many of the more exotic locations such as Kuwait, Indonesia, Egypt and Colombia... I daren't write the word lest I attract more unwanted traffic so I'll spell it: N. U. D.. E. I posted something a couple of years ago on me refreshing myself in a wild river in the all together, which as I had predicted at the time has become my most popular evergreen page! The word is usually accompanied by s w i m m i n g, but also some more exotic ones came up such as a f r o c a r r i b e a n or d w a r f m e n. I'm sure those visitors were very disappointed when they arrived on my site.

So bloggers out there, if you notice the odd exotic visitor to your site, they've probably just been mis-directed!

And talking about exotic visitors, this is an easier map to see from which countries visitors to my site have come

These dots show individual hits in the last month:

There were visitors from 49 separate contries. Here are the top 10 (for last month only):

UK 20.1%
Italy 19.6% (not all of it myself!)
USA 18.9%
Germany 16.8% (This is slightly distorted, more of that later...)
France 4.9%
Netherlands 2.8%
Australia 2.4%
Russia 1.9%
Canada 1.9%
Trinidad & Tobago 1.2% (Sharon?)

There are a couple of distortions due to some individuals, including myself hitting the site rather often. I feel I might have to give out an award to the most visiting person. I can see her already starting to blush...

Web-Stat not only breaks visitors down by country, but also region. Here the top 10 regions:

Bayern, Germany 15.3% (I can see a pattern emerging...)
Liguria, Italy 9.5% (about half of that will be myself, I'd say)
n/a, GB 4% (Somone follows me from a provider called America Online in the UK, I wonder who that is? It won't specify a region)
Idaho, USA 3.6% (Not only you, Mr H. :) )
Puglia, Italy 3.5%
Northamptonshire, GB 3.4%
Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur France 2.6%
California 2.6%
Tuscany 2.4%
New York State 1.9%

Over 300 different cities and towns have been registered. This is not always accurate. I will sometimes come under La Spezia, other times as Genoa and other times as something else. But here it comes anyway, the top 10:

Augsburg, Bayern, Germany 11.8% (and the top award of most frequent visitor goes to... ENGELWURZ!!! By the way I haven't had an e-mail from you for a long time)
Genoa Liguria, Italy 4.9%
Post Falls, Idaho 3.5%
Northampton, GB 3.4% (Hello James & Alison!)
Fivizzano, Tuscany, Italy 2.5% (a small town near us
Arles, France 2.3% (Hi Babette! Welcome back from your pilgrimmage.)
Amsterdam?) 1.7% (my family live mostly in Rotterdam, so don't know who there is in Amsterdam)
Carluke, Scotland 1.6% (Can't think of anyone I know around there...?)
Codiponte, Italy 1.6% (Another little place nearby)
Corato, Puglia 1.4% (Ciao Contadina)

Right enough of that. Next time I'll be back to proper posts.

Dinner

2010-09-24T21:29:00.003+02:00

After the breakfast and lunch posts here a dinner we've had today. Ok, it's not quite typical. We called it our harvest dinner. Dinner is our main meal of the day and today we celebrated a plentyful apple harvest we brought in day before yesterday. Yesterday we turned half of it into cider, more of which soon, and today I spent half the day cooking and unsurprisingly apples featured prominently.

In general I try to make 2 courses, but tonight it was 3, just for the 2 of us. We started with a Sardinian wild fennel and chickpea soup,

followed by coriander and hazelnut potato pancakes with apple and ricotta sauce. Ok it doesn't look pretty, but it sure was wholesome!

And finally an apple and walnut cake.

I'm working on a wee frugal and wildfood musical cook book which will be available an e-form. All recipes will feature. I'll keep you posted.