Waning moon sowing

With my very much simplified understanding of gardening with the moon phases, I plant things growing up during the waxing moon phase and things growing down during the waning moon. In keeping with that I planted potatoes, carrots and leeks yesterday. The carrots, a variety called Karnavit, and the leeks ("long winter") I planted in the cold frame. I had already sowed some leeks of a variety called "Carentan" during the previous waning moon phase and they are coming along nicely.

During the spring-like weather until the weekend, the temperatures inside the cold frame hovered around the mid-twenties Celcius range, much warmer than any part of our house! However, the last couple of days the temperatures dropped noticably again and inside the frame it's now more like 15 C (still warmer than the house...just). I hope that it's not going to get much colder again, as it sometimes does with us. In some years we've had the coldest weather of the winter in mid-March.

The seed potatoes I've used are partially left-overs tiny ones from last year, which have sprouted nicely. They are a mealy type yellow potato. The others are from a local supermarket. They've reduced the price of a 10kg sack of red potatoes, because they had started sprouting. That's of course ideal for planting them and they only cost me €2.

I planted them on the terrace that last year had aubergines and some borlotti beans. The bigger ones I cut in half or even in quarters, because they had so many eyes on them.


Elsewhere in the garden the broad beans are looking well:

Note the bumble bee on the broad bean blossom! I feel another poem coming on. Something like: Bumble bee battering broad bean blossoms but bringing blenty bollen... no... no... something's not working here... Anybody with any better ideas?

In the cold frame the first seedlings are appearing:

gherkin

lentils (it's working!... so far...)

kohlrabi (old seeds, but still germinating)

A view underneath the glass to the half with the lettuces in the background and raddishes (also sown a month ago) up front,

Back to work!

First of all to all those who have been worrying about my arm being amputated, it's still attached, complete with bit of bamboo inside! I don't know what they were thinking. Maybe they thought they only had to pull out a wee splinter or something! The conversation with the surgeon went something like this:
"Well what have we got here then?"
"A bit of bamboo inside my arm."
"Are you sure?"
"Yep, pretty sure."
"But how did it get in there?"
"Entered from the other side, when I hit a bamboo stick supporting some tomatoes."
"But that's impossible! How deep did it go in?"
"Dunno, but evidently deep enough. I pulled 1 1/2 cm of if back out and your A&E department couldn't find anything else at the time."
"How long has it been in there?"
"Oh about 6 weeks."
"Madonna!"

At that stage the assistant puts in: "Shall I put 'urgent' on the form?"

So he had evidently not sharpened his skalpels yet, also he wanted to know how big the actual thing is. So after filling in various forms and signing my life away to the responsibility of those medicals, I now have to return, stick in me arm and all, on the 8th, to have it all scanned and than have it removed in the hopefully not too distant future.

This is my arm now. Note the wee blob just to the right of the scar (old war wound still giving me the gipes occasionally), it's not an insect bite!

Sorry about that, hope I didn't upset you all too much. Here's a nicer picture for you to look at




Anyway, I can't hang around waiting for those doctors to fix my arm, there's work to be done, and I'm already behind, because of this episode. Today it was time to lift the rest of the spuds. It wasn't a good year for potatoes, with the dry summer again. But it'll keep us going for a wee bit.

We also sowed out our some broad beans and peas for spring harvesting on the terrace where we had just dug up the potatoes. Having been delayed we have also bought some ready plants, leeks and broccoli, to plant out. We had to prepare the beds for them too, so it's been a pretty busy day, and the arm was quite sore by the end.

Yesterday I made some elderberry chutney. I know it's not exactly elderberry time any more, at least not around here, but as matter of routine, whenever I pick elderberries I stick them straight into the freezer, because they are so much easier to strip off their stalks when frozen. But it also means I can use them as and when I feel like it and have a spare half hour or two.

I've already made elderberry jam and liqueur, now I've made a chutney with the rest. Would you like to know the recipe? Well here it goes. Too late if you said 'no'.

ELDERBERRY CHUTNEY

Ingredients:

for pickling spice:

• 2 Cinnamon sticks
• 1 tbsp mustard seeds
• 1 tsp black peppercorns
• 1 tsp cloves
• 1 tsp juniper berries
• 1 tsp mace
• 1 tsp dill seeds
• 4 dried bay leaves
• 1 tsp dried ginger
• 1 tsp whole coriander seeds

for the chutney:

• 2 kg elderberries
• 500g onions, chopped
• 200g raisins, chopped
• 1 l white wine vinegar
• 2 tsp salt
• 2 tsp ground ginger
• 3 tsp of above pickling spice tied into a muslin bag
• 1/2 tsp chilli
• 1 tsp mustard powder

Method

1. Simmer onions in half the vinegar until soft.
2. Strip elderberries off the stalks & add to the onions together with the raisins, salt, ginger, chilli, mustard & pickling spice.
3. Simmer until the mixture has softened. Add the sugar, stir well & boil until the chutney is thick.
4. Remove the pickling spice, leave to cool and pot into clean jars.
5. Serve with meats such as venison, turkey or rabbit or spicy mature cheeses.

Put the rest of the pickling spice into a jar and use for you next chutney or pickle. I shall use mine for some green tomato chutney as soon as I have gathered enough jars together again.

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

Here's to you Paddy

Well happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone, for a start. We were going to go to our favourite bar, Pegaso at Arcola, which has a do on tonight, but unfortunately we are to broke for that. We’ll just nip over to our neighbours with a couple of beers to have at least a wee celebration. Spring has definitely arrived in force now. The weather has been fine since the last post, glorious sunshine and daytime temperatures in the upper teens and even lower twenties. These primroses above I spotted on a walk I went on near Brugnato yesterday, while Susan was giving her class. They were in a little wood, which was literally covered with them. Incidentally, to anyone reading my post on the wild salad, I don’t recommend the use of primrose leaves at any rate, unless you have a fetish for drinking your bathwater. It tastes of soap!

The moon is now waning and as a general rule of thumb as far as I understand, things that grow downwards should be sown during this period. So today we were out in Arcola and sowed out potatoes at one of the top terraces and carrots on one of the beds, which has already onions growing in it. Carrots and onions are said to make excellent companion plants as the smell of one repels the pests of the other. I have so far not had much success with carrots. This is partially due to our heavy soils and on the other hand due to the fact that evolution seems to be extra quick around here. As soon as you grow something like carrots, all surrounding weeds take on the same shape, so you don’t know which is weed and which is not. So you either pull out things you meant to keep or leave things in you didn’t. Either way you can’t win! We had, just before the full moon sowed out one more bed of peas as well; hope not too late.

From previous years experience we tend to get one more cold spell at the end of March. Hope we’ll escape it this time. As my dad would say: “Wouldn’t mind if the weather stayed like that until… Christmas… and then slowly got better.” Well a bit of rain would be useful, as long as it falls at night and not too heavy.

Of slimming, beer and mushrooms

The perfect slimming plan! Guaranteed to work.
Step 1: Base your diet mostly around potatoes. You can do with them what you like, boil them, fry them, eat them as mash or gnocchi or whatever else.
Step 2: Grow your own potatoes. Choose a plot some 25 km away from your home, preferably up a hill. Only ever cycle to this plot. Turn an uncultivated stretch of this land over with a spade prior to planting your potatoes, then plant them.
Step 3: After a few months come back and dig over the plot again to retrieve your potatoes. The calories you have expended on growing the potatoes are roughly equal to the calories you take in from consuming them.
Step 3 ½: If you are feeling particularly energetic, you can come a few times in between to weed, water (carrying the water up a few terraces from a nearby river) and earth up around the plants. This will increase your crop, but of course also involve further expenditure of calories. As you can see here we were out potato digging in Villa today, cycling back with over 10 kg of spuds on the back of my bike, which is particular fun coming back up our hill… Mushroom season has also started in earnest. Around us it’s still to dry, but in Villa we found a good crop of chanterelles last week. Today we found a good handful of little brown button-like mushrooms, which I haven’t actually identified, but I had thrown a couple in last time with the chanterelles and we’re still alive. We also found two beautiful porcini. So we’ll have a lovely mushroom dinner.
This evening we also decided to test my home-made maize beer. As you can see it’s a bit cloudy, but it has a distinct hoppy aroma from the wild hops we picked and a nice dry finish. It actually tastes of beer despite the fact that it hasn’t seen any barley. Alcohol content is about 5% AbV. I only made an experimental 3 litre batch, but shall try a larger amount next time.

Finally the festa on Sunday got pretty much rained off. There was a poetry reading in the small community centre in the village, but the concert was called off. They had actually lugged up this huge concert piano up to outside our house. Anybody who has ever visited us knows how many steps this involves. They just covered it up against the rain and collected it again the next day. We did have a little private festa in our kitchen though. The pianist and two lost Swedish tourists came down for a glass of wine. We had the Swedish couple over for dinner even. They weren’t actually lost. Elin and Martin were on their holiday and, looking on the internet, found themselves a little B&B just outside our village. It turned out a jolly evening.

Spring at last

Spring does seem to have arrived at last, but only after winter really had hit out again one more time. Yesterday we returned to Villa for the first time since planting the new vines. All of them had suffered frost damage. They had been reared at the relatively mild coastal climate above La Spezia and had already sprouted green shoots, well ahead of their cousins up in Villa. Now all those green shoots have died. I hope the vines still have enough in them to sprout again. We gave them a good watering anyway and can now only hope. It can’t have been lack of water anyway, as there had been plenty of rain, hail and possibly up there snow.

Still lacking a plough, (the local bicycle and small machine repair man in Santo Stefano said he’d keep a lookout for a second hand one for us), we were hard at it to dig over a large area to bury the potatoes. After some 5 hours solid digging my shoulders were about to drop off. We managed to plant most of the spuds we had, but we’ll have to finish off the job tomorrow. Hope they won’t get dug by the local wild boar population. There only seems to be evidence of them lower down though and not 3 terraces up. They obviously don’t like climbing, but you never know once they get the scent of some nice nourishing potatoes…

Today we were back in Arcola to plant out some radicchio lettuces and water the veg we planted the other day. One of the cucumber plants had been dug by the neighbour’s cat, what a nuisance. The peach and plum trees are pretty much finished flowering, now it’s the turn of the cherry (top photo) and pear trees. Many wild and semi-wild flowers are also in bloom. The bees love the borage (middle photo), which has sown itself out between the strawberries (bottom photo). Borage and strawberries are said to make good companion plants and once you’ve sown borage they will happily sow themselves out year after year. I love the delicate flavour of ravioli al boragine, borage and ricotta filled pasta. And as for strawberries… shouldn’t be long now for the first crop.