Olive picking under way

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

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!

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!

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

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

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