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!

Rain...

Just to give you an idea what the rain was like about 2 km from our land.  No wonder Arcola, which is situated on that same road looked like it was hit by a monsoon.

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...

They've been lying to us!

When we had snow during our first winter here back in 2004/5 they told us that this close to the coast it only happened every 25 years or so and dug up photos for us to see of 1979 when it last snowed.  The following 4 winters were more 'normal therefore with hardly any frost even.  Than last year we had snow shortly before Christmas and now this!

This is Eddie seeing snow for the first time:

After and initial sniff at the strange white stuff he went running around it like mad, chasing snowflakes.  This is the last photo he stayed still long enough to actually be in the photo!

 

Here a few more snowy impressions of our village:

Before the snow we had a few days of dry sunnt weather.  We were hopeful of getting a second harvest of our olives in.  But alas the clear skies also meant quite severe frosts inland where the olives are and what remained on the trees never turned black properly, but just shrivelled.  So no more olives this year.  However we did get some more firewood off the olive grove and off a large pear tree we pruned.  Very needed now we have this cold snap.

I'll leave you with a photo of the Christmas lights in our village:

and a sunrise before the snow arrived:

Story of Stuff, Full Version; How Things Work, About Stuff

Thanks Veggie PAK for this link. This is a good and easy to understand video on where things are going wrong in our present system. The key, as in permaculture, is to find a circular not a linear system.

Skippy, or on Food Waste

While the cat is away...  Well Susan is away for a few days, visiting her family back in Belfast, leaving me and Eddie to get up to all sorts of mischief.as you can see from the slightly guilty look on Eddie's face...  Oh, and happy Saint Nicolas Day everybody in the Germanic world, hope Santa Claus (who has been hijacked by the Anglo-Saxon world to deliver their presents at Christmas) and his helper Black Peter (or has he become a politically correct Afro-Caribbean Pete in the Netherlands these days...?) have filled your boots with goodies this year.

Any way before I launch into today's main subject, I owe you the story of what we've done to that spiky bit of veg I found the other day and asked you about.  It turns out it's a spiky courgette simlar to a chayote (which I hadn't heard about before either).  Thanks everybody for the info.  Once shaved, I sliced it into thick slices, removing the one long, soft seed out of the centre, turned it in a mixture of flour and salt and fried it in olive oil. 

It was absolutely delicious.  I think in terms of flavour this may be my favourite vegetable from the curcubita family.  I must find myself some seeds to grow it myself (unfortunately I sliced the seed inside this one before I realised it...).

Anyway, I digress.  I was going to talk about food waste today as a follow-up to the book review of Mark Boyle's the Moneyless Man.  I had talked about the practice of 'skipping'.  I believe in America this may be known as 'dumpster diving'.  I also like 'bin raiding'.  All of it meaning the same thing: searching through rubbish tips, trash cans, waste skips at the back of supermarkets.  Inspired by the book, I decided to give it a go.  Now is the time to distance yourselves from me if you think I'm overdoing things, but hear me out first.

An e-mail conversation with my bloggy friend Angela made me realise how little is known of the extent of food waste in the industrialised world.  Here are some stats:  According to British non-profit organisation Food Aware there are some 18 million tons (EIGHTEEN MILLION TONS!!!!) a year of food in the UK, which ends up on landfill sites.  According to a 2004 study around half of all food produced in or imported into the USA ends up in landfills (HALF OF ALL FOOD!!!).  Japan and Australia are not far behind those statistics.  The only slight exceptions are in fact Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland who have managed to reduce the percentage of food in landfills to below 5%.  Other countries have pledged to reduce (reduce! Hah!) this percentage to 20% from a current 40-50%.  Even in Italy, where people are justly proud of their 'cucina povera', their poor (wo)man's cuisine, where the old generation who have lived through the war and won't let anything go to waste, a new generation of supermarket goers is growing up, who no longer realise the real value of food.  To put it into the words of the UN: the USA produces enough waste food to fill every hungry stomach in Africa, France could feed the Congo and the crumbs falling off Italian tables could feed Ethiopia.

Now excuse my excessive use of exclamation marks and capital letters, but isn't that a crime!  And a shockingly under-reported one.  People say with a growing world population there's not enough food to go around for everyone.  Apart from the fact that people in industrialised countries often eat more than is good for them, there's plenty of food there, if it was only distributed to those in need, rather than going into landfills.

The problem of course is not only the complete and utter injustice of this, it's the environmental impact of it.  Some this food gets shipped halfway around the world to end up on a landfill site near you.  Not to mention the packaging.  And slowly decaying food produces methane, rather than CO2 had we eaten it.  Methane is a much more poweful greenhouse gas than CO2. 

Now where does all this waste come from?  Much of it gets sorted out at the production end.  According some EU regulation or other, this carrot is too bent, long, thin, that cucumber to pale, ridgy, small, that banana, too straight etc...  Nothing for it but chuck it.  Other bits go off or get damaged in transport, kiwis from Kiwi Land, Bananas from Panama, garlic from China (honestly, I recently saw garlic from China on sale in an Italian supermarket!  I mean, WHAT????).  It's a long way from some of these places.

However the worst offenders are supermarkets and consumers themselves.  Food distributed to supermarkets mostly has to have a best before date stamped on it.  This does not necessarily mean the food will go off on or imediately after that date of course.  In fact many foods will literally be fine for consumption YEARS after their sell-by date.  Have you ever noticed, mineral water has a sell-by date stamped on it.  What could possibly go wrong with water in a hermetically sealed plastic bottle?  Or canned vegetables or jams, for that matter can safely be consumed for years if left unopened.  A neighbour recently gave us a large bottle of Tabasco sauce, because she was worried it would go off as it was nearing it's sell-by date.  I have absolutely no qualms about using it for several months yet.

So anything that reaches this date in the supermarket, by law, has to be removed from the shelves and ends up in the skip around the back.  Any damaged packaging... out with it!  Bread going a tad stale, veggies looking a little wilted, fruit a bit bruised... bin, garbage!

For consumers supermarkets have become the one-stop-buy-all places.  Rather than going down the market, the greengrocers, the local butchers, the bakers for a daily trip for fresh goods, people go once week or once a fortnight and, being unable to plan that far ahead how much they'll be eating, invariably buy far too much, a percentage of which ending up in the bin.  Then of course there's the leftover's in restaurants and fastfood joints.  No wonder city foxes, cats, stray dogs and I believe in some parts of the world bears, hang around rubbish bins for a living.  There are plenty of rich pickings to be had.

Right, enough of the lecture.  I have decided I was going to have a go myself at this skipping business.  At the moment, this wasn't quite out of a real need yet, but this need may arise and I'd like to be prepared for that eventuality.  One quick word on the legality of this.  At best this can be described as a grey area in legal terms.  In theory you can be prosecuted for trespassing on private property as well as theft.  In practice this is rarely done.  Supermarkets don't want the negative publiciity that might go with this, revealing just how much they throw away and then denying it to a hungry person.  And morally, would you call this theft?

I decided a Sunday early evening was a good time for the particular supermarket I had selected, as it is only open a few hours in the morning that day.  During the day I had already looked for a way into the property which didn't even involve climbing any fences.  Needless to say, I felt a little apprehensive on my maiden skipping expidition.  Early nighfall and cold weather as an excuse to wear a woolly hat and scarf to obscure my features from security cameras are good friends of the skipper (I did bring Eddie though, so he might be identified in an identity parade).

I was surprised how brightly lit the back of the supermarket was late in the evening, and the security cameras were visible, so I didn't want to linger too long.  But just a few minutes rummaging revealed this:

plus much that I couldn't carry.  There were 2 large black bin liners stuffed full of bread.  And I'm not talking really badly stale or even mouldy bread.  Look at the size of the large loaf I brough home with me.  It's the size of our occasional table (occasionally it's a halucinogenic mushroom... when it's not a table I mean... sorry, getting side-tracked...).  The amount of bread I found could have easily fed a couple dozen household!  This in a country where they are proud of their recipes involving old bread such as panzanella salad or rustic Tuscan soups.  I've been eating this bread ever since.  Even today it's not even stale.  As far as Italian bread goes it's relatively dark and therefore keeps a couple days longer.  The foccaccia was also still perfectly edible after I heated it in the oven and then there were those vol-a-vent cases, which I haven't made use of yet.  In addition there was a slightly bruised marrow and a few kiwis. 

I have since eaten the foccaccia for a starter, made a cabbage & marrow soup with loads of croutons and had about 12 slices of toast for breakfast this morning.  I was kind of hoping for some out of date cheese or so, but hey, I think I did quite well for my maiden skip.  Anything I won't be able to eat will be turned to breadcrumbs (there are seriously people out there buying ready made breadcrumbs...) and used as and when.

Of course governments and businesses don't want you to know about the extent of food wastage, because it's bad for business.  Every item scavanged from a supermarket bin is one not sold through their tills.  Bad business for retail slows economic growth, the be-all and end-all mantra of our oh-so-wise leaders.  Of course skipping is not a long-term sustainable option.  For a start much of the food you'd be likely to find is neither organic nor particularly healthy.   But while there is this food out there I regard it almost a civic duty to save at least a small portion from being dumped and I shall repeat yesterday's little trip as and when the weather permits (It luckily did last night, but today the miserable weather returns... ).

Anybody seen one of these before?

Been out walking and foraging today and came across a whole load of these.  They were actually grown behind a fence, but whoever planted them wasn't that bothered about them as they were scattered all over the ground.  One had fallen on the other side of the fence and intrigue I picked it up.  I'm assuming it's edible, but haven't cut it open yet, wanting some idea what to expect, sweet, savoury...?

I couldn't work out whether they had come of those climbing vine-type plants or a low tree.  There was one still hanging in the tree, but it may have been a vine climbing up that tree.  it's extremely prickly and you can see the size on the photo.  There's no discernable smell from the outside.  Anyone of you clever people out there...?  If no-one comes up with anything I'll cut it open tomorrow and show you the insides too.