Holy Dog and other news

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.

Wild forager of the month...

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...)

Furbo & Brutta Figura

We've just got back from a 3-night camping trip on our land to catch up with some work and I forgot to bring my camera, so no photos today. Summer has finally arrived with a vengeance and daytime temperatures have made work in anything but the early morning and late afternoon impossible. Currently my outside thermometer shows 35C in the shade!

So passing these hot lunchtime hours I thought I'll introduce you to 2 terms essential to understand the Italian mentality and I found occasion to use both in the last couple of days: furbo and brutta figura. The first is a desirable quality in Italians whilst the latter is to be avoided at all cost!

The word furbo, usually accompanied by an index finger tapped onto the side of the nose means cunning without the negative nuances it may have in English.

Cunning: artful, sly, deceptive, shrewd, astute, cute, on the ball and, indeed, arch. A word for for any praise and every prejudice. Cunning ... is a cunning word.

(quote from Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

In Italy everyone is furbo. Any old way to get around paying your taxes or dodge cumbersome laws, rules and regulations. Who needs them anyway. When we got our beagle puppy (or Beagol as the Italians insist on pronouncing the breed) everyone said: "Sono furbi!", meaning they are cunning dogs, which have a way of finding their own thing and are therefore difficult to train.

While we were staying on our land we found a perfect example of his cunningness. There is no physical barrier between our plot and the neighbours except the narrow path down, which serves as access to both our properties. The neighbour, who is not the most sociable person and mainly talks to himself, comes to his plot every single day of the year, come rain or shine, if for nothing else to put some food out for the local stay cat population. So on more than one occasion he had to chase Eddie out of his land, so he wouldn't steal the cat food. On many other occasions I had to drag him out of there by the scruff of his neck while telling him off in a stern voice.

By now he knows exactly it's a no-go area. Every time he as much as moves in the direction of the cat food terrace he gets a stern word from either of us, which usually does the trick. So what does Eddie do? He either waits until both of us have turned our back before sneeking up there, or, even more furbo, innocently wanders off in the opposite direction, whistling obliviously, just to find a longer, but for us undetectable route to the same goal. Only after not seeing him for a while and us wondering where he'd got to, we'd start looking for him and invariably finding him... at the neighbour's cat feeding station.

The neighbour has even resorted to putting the food on top of some old rabbit cages out of small dog's reach. But Eddie just found a way of going to the terrace above and then kamikaziing down on top of the cages. That's furbo!

As for la brutta figura, that's what all Italians try and avoid and of course I'm owning up to one now. It literally means ugly figure but can best be translated as loosing face in front of your peers. No Italian likes to admit they are wrong about anything and they are all experts on everything. So a really bad brutta figura is when you trip up in your actual field of expertise!

For example if you would serve me as a wine expert and nasty Vin de Plonk and I would declare it to be a top notch claret, that would be a brutta figura. But my more recent brutta figura has come from another chosen expert field, that of wild food gathering. As my regular followers know I talk about it a lot and even do a regular feature of it.

Now in recent months amongst fellow garden bloggers, amaranth has been a bit of a buzz word. The ancient food of the Incas, which has been cultivated in ancient times because of it's nutrtious values both of the leaves and the seeds. I first heard of it from Kate in Australia I think. Then I heard my mate Mr.H and others mentioning it. Finally I got some seeds from GetSoiled all the way from sunny Florida.

I sowed the seeds and nothing happened, zilch, zero, niente. I thought, well that's it then, it might grow in Tasmania, Idaho and Florida, but it clearly doesn't like Italy. Shame, because I also read that it makes some good companion planting, helping to break up heavy soil, which I've got!

It started dawning on me when Ayak posted some photos of some weeds she found in her garden and Mr H commented that one of them could be pigweed, a variety of amaranth. Now erm... whilst weeding around my sweetcorn I discovered something very much like it. In fact I remember it going to flower in previous years and another look around internet land pretty much confirmed it: I've got at least 2 different varieties of amaranth growing wild on my land!

Whilst still camping on the land I actually added some to a potato, leek, courgette and bean bake I made on the BBQ and we've survived the experiment! (Nothing goes over the taste test: if it doesn't make you very ill, it's edible!).

Now unfortunately, as I said above I didn't have my camera with me, but will post some pics soon.

Feeling guilty...

Bless me father for I have sinned. It has been more than 2 week since my last confession... blog entry! sorry, blog entry! Sorry got a bit carried away there. I'm just so far behind, not only with blogging but with gardening too!

This is really just a quick "I'm still alive" entry with a pictoral record of what's been happening in the last 2 1/2 weeks or so.

The pilgrims left us again on their way back to France. They haven't updated their blog for a bit, but I have heard from them and they are still progressing well.



Hardly had they gone when the next batch of visitors arrived. So with them we frollicked in the sea:

...sunbathed...

Eddie proved so popular with Iana and Peter the 7-year old twins that Peter drew this picture of him:


The text on the top reads: "Dear Hako. I like your puppy so much that I sometimes think he's a rock star..."

We also went to the annual flower carpet display on Corpus Domini in Santo Stefano di Magra. Spectacular as always!

Elisabetta, our English pupil has had her first Communion (now she's allowed to confess her sins.)

We met a tortoise.

It hasn't all been idle though. I did get some work in every now and then, like a second strimming session before our land was returned to jungledom. This is me and Eddies having a wee nap afterwards. Note the grass flecks all over me of evidence that I really did do some work that day at least.

And now... It started raining again after a spell of very nice weather. So I'm still behind on the weeding, cutting side shoots off the tomatoes and tieing them up, planting out leeks, more weeding, picking more cherries, picking plums, weeding, cutting down the dead willow tree, cutting down the virtually dead plum tree, weeding, planting out the litchi tomatoes (they are still tiny, but they are showing!), weeding, weeding, weeding...

Another invasion has announced itself for September. I must make sure I'm better organised before they all arrive.

Busy times

Good Lord, it's been a busy old time. Hardly have time to draw a breath, getting behind on the gardening work and have loads of catching up to do on the blog. So here it comes, a big one today.

First of all this week turned out to be a bloggy friends visitors week. Monday our blogger friend Stefani and her husband Eric came all the way from California to see us (hey I think I might have finally worked out how to do a link!). Of course they didn't come all that way just to see us, but they took a day out to come down from Genoa, where Eric attended a conference.

We picked them up from La Spezia and gave them the guided tour of our land and our village and fed them some of our food, broad beans, as well as a mallow soup and some cherries and strawberries.



Stefani and I had a great time exchanging gardening tips and discussing the pros and cons of a small intensively used garden in contrast to 18 sprawling steep terraces.

On Wednesday our blogger friends Babette and Paul turned up. Babette was amongst the first followers of my blog, apart from friends and family. They are semi-professional pilgrims, if there is such a thing. After taking early retirement they followed the St. James' Way to Santiago di Compostela on horseback. Looking for a new challenge they took their horses down the Via Francigena from Canterbury to Rome on horseback. This much less travelled route goes straight through our village and hence the connection.

Having found on their first trip, that signposting was not always good and facilities for would-be pilgrims were rudimentary along some stretches of this route, they decided to do it again, this time on bicycles and write a guide book about it. They now have written and published a number of books on their travels.

Their latest venture is finding a connection route between these two routes, whilst at the same time raising money for a charity that is building a school in Burkina Faso. So please do look up their blog and donate if you can! 2 months ago they set off from their home in Arles in Southern France, on foot this time, but accompanied by their trusty pack horse Nelly and their little dog Flea (Eddies new best friend!). We met them 15 km before our village on the other side of the mountains and walked back with them.


They've been having a few rest days with us here, before heading off back home on Sunday.

As this is meant to be a gardening blog, here a few impressions of the current state of our plot:

kohlrabi

Lentil in flower

Ripe cherries (Hurray the fruit season has started!)

Winter squash.

Max the pumpkin

Basil

In other news, Eddie the puppy is growing fast. Here he is lounging on a deckchair on our land.

...and here he is chasing a pine cone (we'll try him on rabbits next).

Furthermore, I had to go back to Franco the bicycle man saying he no longer needed to keep the bike aside for me, I found one on a rubbish tip. All thet was wrong with it was that it had a bent front wheel. I didn't even need to change the height of the saddle or pump up the rear tyre. I replaced the front wheel with one from my old bike (one of the few bits that were still ok on it) and hey presto: a virtually brand new bike!

Here's the kittens trying it out: Pelé steering...

...and Georgie trying to pedal.

Incidentally we have found a home for the third of the trio, so one down two to go. Sure you wouldn't want one? They are very sweet!

Eddie the (B)eagle

Just a quick update after having been off-line due to yet another lightning strike left us phone and internet-less for a week. This tells you something of the continued bad weather last week, but just the last couple of days it's finally starting to feel like May, but more of that later (i.e. tomorrow or when I get a chance...)

I just wanted to introduce you to the latest addition to our family: Eddie the (B)eagle:


Named after another sporting legend, Eddie the Eagle. For those who haven't heard of him, he was the guy who had a dream of competing in the winter Olympics for Britain. Downhill skiing was his speciality, mind you due to his extremely bad eyesight and his glasses steaming up all the time, he wasn't much good at it. Not good enough to qualify for the Olympics at any rate. So he switched to Ski-jumping, mostly because there weren't any other British ski-jumpers of note and hence he'd have no competition. Needless to say that when he did compete in the 1987 winter Olympics he came last, but he didn't break his neck!

Anyway, back to the dog. Note Mrs. "I-don't-want-a-dog" Susan!



One of Eddies functions was to keep the cat invasion at bay. It doesn't seem to be working...

He's rapidly making friends with everyone in the village, including our English pupil, Elisabetta.


But he poos for Italy! I've seen twice his own body weight in pooh coming out of him in the last 24 hours! Other than that he counts amongst his hobbies biting toes, eating stones, whingeing about pointless, boring walks if you can do your business just as well at home, falling down stairs and trying to sleep on the bed with us (luckily he's still to small to get up the bed.)

More news about the garden and the promised photos of the party are to follow.

this 'n' that

I'm a bit busy with other things at the moment, so again just a quick post with a few photos from the last week or so.

First the kitten photo of the week: Kittens at 2 weeks. They now have their eyes open, except Cruyff, who has only opened one eye.

...followed swiftly by.... our puppy photo of the week! Yep one of those 10 day old little worms has got our name on it! They are Beagles, so thinking ahead I was thinking of Snoopy. I'd have to get him flying goggles and a leather helmet. Alternatively Gigi, as in Gigi Buffon the goalkeeper of the Italian national team to complete our football team. Susan wants to call him Ben. Any other suggestions out there?

And here's the Mama.

on the land the figs are coming on,

the cherries are in flower,

closely followed by the apples,

the kiwi leaves are sprouting. Although in previous years they've always made a good start to then slow right down and refuse to flower or give us fruit. Maybe this year?

and finally the potatoes are breaking through the ground. So all looking good.

Next week I promise you the next instalment of the wild food of the month series.

...gone to the dogs

I just quickly wanted to introduce you to Rufie. He's been our helper on wild food forages over the last 2 weeks, while his owners were away in England.


His self esteem has been suffering a bit while he was with us, as the people in our village gave him the nick name "il cinghiale", the wildboar and was described as "simpatico, ma un po brutto", friendly, but a bit ugly. I must admit he wouldn't be my ideal dog, I'd prefer one with actual legs, so he can manage to go on one of our longer walks. This one gives up after about 10 km.

Anyway, today him and his to two cat friends are going back home, but on my final walk with him this morning I bumped into our neighbour Piero. You know the one with the donkeys, chickens and wild boar and 25 hunting dogs. He said one of his dogs is about to give birth to a litter of puppies at the end of the month and asked if I wanted one. Now I only have to twist Susan's arm. I'm not sure what kind of dog it is going to be yet, so will have to make sure it has legs first.