A New Beginning

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!

Anus miserabilis or of Vertigo

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...

More Rain Damage...

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...

Che Casino!

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.

Sh*t, Sh*t, Glorious Sh*t ♫

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

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

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

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