Our Terraces Part I

Well, we’ve been busy, busy, busy. The weather has been doing what you expect of it in April, i.e. the unexpected: showers followed by warm sunshine, then a touch of hail. Nothing overly dramatic though and all in all the sunshine has dominated. So we’ve got all our terraces strimmed nicely and a few more beds dug over in readiness for the runner bean planting next week and to make room for the peppers and aubergines to be planted out. The tomatoes are already out. We are also eating our daily ration of lovely fresh broad beans, as well as lettuces and radishes, which now have reached the size of tennis balls!.

The broad beans are just so nice and they represent the quintessential taste of spring for me. I wonder if some village or other in Italy has thought of doing a ‘sagra della fava’, a broad bean feast, they have a sagra around any other foodstuff. Must find out, and if not, I shall plant 2 terraces with broad beans next year and invite the whole village to my own sagra della fava, probably around the first of May. Anyone else up for that? Or anyone knows a good recipe for broad beans, please leave it on my comments.

Today, it’s raining a bit more persistently today, I’m starting a new 9-part series. Yesterday, on ‘Liberation Day’ (Italians are currently discussing whether to call it Liberty Day or Liberation Day), I took a series of photos, of each of our 18 terraces. I thought I’ll publish them here, so you all have a bit more of an idea of what we’re working on. As my internet connection is excruciatingly slow, downloading all 18 photos onto one blog-entry would take days, and similarly other people with the same problem would need ages, before they would actually see anything. So I’ll bring them out in bite-size chunks, starting from the top, working our way down. All photos were taken on the 25th April at about 10am. Obviously this a snap shot, things were different a week before or a month hence, but it gives you a flavour.

Here is the top terrace:

As you can see, it’s next to the access road and is very narrow. It’s not really much use apart as for somewhere to leave our bikes. I planted am agave, which had outgrown it’s pot and at the far end is a mature olive tree. Along the top is a row of trees, mostly oak, but also one sweet chestnut and one pear. I’m not sure whether they are still ours or not, but I pick the pears and chestnuts anyway. And if one of the oak trees is starting to look a bit pale around the nose, I chop’em down for some firewood. That is because they are a royal pain in the butt. They drop their acorns onto our land, where the seedlings become a right nuiscance. Now if I had pigs, they’d love the stuff. So any ivy growing up those oak trees is positively encouraged. I suppose those trees also serve a function to keep the road on top of our land, rather than at the bottom…, so maybe I should replace any felled ones with something more useful, like more sweet chestnuts for example.

Terrace 2 is what this year is known as ‘the potato terrace’. It’s also quite narrow, so I could only sow one row of potatoes. It’s the first year we’ve put anything on it. In the foreground you see an apple tree and at the far end another olive tree. In between I planted the pomegranate shrub this winter. After lifting the spuds I’m hoping to replant vines onto that terrace next winter.

So much for today, don’t miss part two of the series, coming up on your computerscreens any day now

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.