Another Natural Disaster!

Someone obviously wants to tell us something...  My camera has finally given up it's ghost, so no photos of the devastation this time.  Northern Italy was rocked by a 5.4 magnitude earthquake yesterday afternoon.  We were in Florence with a friend for the day and didn't notice anything, but Cousin Bart and Eddie the Beagle stayed at home and got one almighty fright.

Listening to the various accounts, many people have felt the tremors, but we appear to be the only ones who have actually sustained any damage.  Apparently it rained some 200 bricks off of our 3-storey high roof onto the little piazza outside our front door.  Half the roof, many of the stone gutters and possibly a chimney have collapsed on our 300 year old building.  The emergency services have sealed off our front door and the area in front of our house.  There is still a lot of loose debris up there.  Also many of the large stones the locals use for holding down there roof tiles, look precariously close to the edge all of a sudden.

Miraculously we have not been evacuated as the structure inside the building still appears sound.  We don't own the the top floor of the building, so are not directly beneath the roof.  Now we are just hoping there are no more shocks (it was the second in the 3 days) making the damage any worse and no heavy rains, which may pour through the damaged roof.

It's quite ironic this happening in the aftermath of the recent floods and us being in the process of considering to move on.  Somebody seems to be giving us rather large hints here...

Toadflax

I'm doing an online permaculture course at the moment and I'm reading Gaia's Garden by Toby Hemenway as part of that.  Both highly recommended and free.  If you want to try the course, just click on the link above and ignore the FBI copyright notice, it will go after a minute or so.

Anyway, the first rule of permaculture is to observe.  Observe nature and see how it works, so you can copy it and observe your plot of land to see what wants to grow there, what are your general conditions.  So, the other day I took a leisurely stroll through my terraces on a sunny spring-like day, taking note of what I saw.

I have already identified many edible and medicinal species on our land before and, as our land is to 50% vertical, I let most weeds grow on those parts.  I really only use half my land for planting, i.e. the horizontal parts.  Species of 'weeds' I picked up on this at this time of year included: dandelion, primroses, sorrel (loads and loads), borage, wild parsley, wild leek, goosegrass, oregano, yarrow, wood sorrrel, wild strawberries, mallow, corn cockle, fennel, wild beet to name but a few. 

But then there was this pretty yellow flower pictured above (in flower now!) which I couldn't immediately identify.  Always the intrepid explorer I picked some leaves and a flower, rubbed them together and had a sniff... Not much smell to it.  So I popped a flower in my mouth and boy(!) it was delicious.  It has a really nice sweet flavour to it.  I thought to myself something so tasty couldn't be poisonous, so I ate some more.  Back home I checked out my herb books and identified it as common toadflax.  It's nowhere described as an edible, but it does have medicinal properties aiding in bladder problems and also liver complaints.  Although I have seen it described as mildly toxic (hey so is Tequila!), I have not noticed any ill effects on me.  I shall sprinkle a few onto future salads I reckon.  Hurray for edible weeds. 

Woodland garden plans and carbon off-setting

We're back from the mountains and have survived the festive season in one piece.  We are now at the beginning of a new year and a new growing season, wondering where the path to self sufficiency is going to take us next.  I have already mentioned that we are toying with the idea of joining or setting up an eco-community.  This is still very much on our minds and I'll write a bit more about it next time around.

In the meantime though it's time to plan what we are going to do with our land for this year.  I'm all for living in the now and not abandoning half projects, just because of some future plan which may or may not come to fruition.  I have now decided to turn our 18 crumbling terraces into a permaculture woodland garden, planting at least 30 more trees and shrubs.  The roots should therefore help keep the hill from sliding down, minimising erosion and self-fertilise the soil.  Everything I am planning to grow will have some edible use to it.  I doodled around a bit making a little collage of plants I'd like to plant:

As those of you who follow my blog regularly may know, we already have quite a few permanent features on our land, some 100 trees and shrubs.  Apart from the usual suspects of olive, apple, pear, peach, cherry, plum trees etc, I'd like to grow a few exotics.  I've done a bit of research, many of the following will be difficult to find in Italy, as Italians don't go much for the unusual.  So if anyone out there can help me obtain cuttings, seeds or knows where I could get hold of plants, please let me know.

Here's a list of what I'm looking for:

For the canopy level:

• A mulberry tree.  Never seen one here, but should be able to find one.
• Japanese Dogwood.  Don't know this tree, but it is said to grow to 10m and produce some nice fruit.
• Hawthorn:  Leaves and berries are edible (see my haw ketchup and haw jelly) as well as hugely medicinal as a heart tonic.
• Elder: for the flowers and berries
• A lime tree:  Apparently the young leaves are really tasty in salads.

For the shrub layer:

• Black and redcurrants
• Flowering Maple (abutilon vitifolium): This small tree flowers abundantly and the flowers are edible with a pleasant mild flavour used in salads.
• Juneberry (amelanchier): a 2-3 m shrub bearing small currant like fruit in mid-summer
• Strawberry tree
• Autumn Olive trees:  I saved some seeds from the last wild harvest
• Myrtle: With the previous two the fruit of this makes my delicious Christmas jam!
• Salt bush: The leaves and young shoots of this plant make a tasty spinach substitute or can be added to salads.
• Tree collards and daubenton: These are two varieties of perennial brassica, the latter from the kale family.  I understand they quite tricky to find, so if anyone has any seeds of these...?
• Dwarf quince: Not a true quince, but the flavour of the fruit of this small tree is very similar to quince
• Cornelian cherry: A 5m shrub flowering bright yellow in winter and producing some cherry-like fruit in summer
• Blue Sausage Tree:  Now this has got to be my favourite!  I've never seen this, but this 4m tall shrub bears blue sausage shaped fruits, which looks disgusting but tastes good.  Anyone know where I can find one of those?
• Eleagnus: A genus of evergreen or deciduous shrubs producing delicious fruit with edible seeds
• Fuchsia: Not sure how well this would do with us, but the flowers are actually edible.
• Wolfberry or gojiberry:  I've heard a lot about the nutritious values of this little berry.  I'd love to get hold of a few shrubs
• Oregon grape: Medium -sized shrub with blue edible berries
• Chilean guava: Not a true guava producing small deliciously aromatic fruit in flavour somewhere between a wild strawberry and a guava

On top of that of course a herbaceous layer as well as some climbers such as some additional kiwis, some ground nut (edible roots) and Schisandra rubiflora (tall fruit bearing climber).


Apart from the fact that many of the above plants will not be easily obtainable in Italy we have one other problem, our perennial shortage of money to buy these plants.  A recent blog post from Jeremy on Make Wealth History gave me an idea though.  He blogs about many issues surrounding the threat of global warming and tries to offer solutions to the problem we face on earth.  He himself strives to keep his own carbon footprint low and has recently been wondering how to off-set his rest carbon emission.


So if anyone out there would like to make a positive impact to counter-balance their direct or indirect emissions, you could donate to the 'Pathtoselfsufficiency Tree Planting Fund'.  Ok I'm not certified and I can't tell you exactly how much you reduce your carbon by, but I promise I will give you a full report on exactly the trees your money has helped to plant. I will even individually name the tree, as some concerned friends of mine have already found out when I showed them around introducing them to trees by name (Stan the plum, Ollie the olive tree, Simon the cherry tree, Bela you can call him Edgar the olive tree, Walter the walnut tree, Al and Capone the almond trees, Ronny the rennet apple tree etc...).  Any donations would be very welcome.  :)  Tree planting will start in early spring.

December update and an award

I've won an award once again.  A while ago they seem to come along all the time, but then seemed to go a bit out of fashion.  I'm particularly pleased as this one was given to me by a relatively new bloger friend, Tanya from Lovely Greens.  Tanya is an American who somehow got stranded on the Isle of Man, that big blob between Britain and Ireland that the Irish giant Fionn mac Cumhail threw after his Scottish foe.  There she gardens, forages and makes things such as soap.  I don't know how much German she knows, but 'Liebster' in german means darling!  My wife is getting a little worried about these advances by strange women! ;)

Part of the award is that I am to pass it on to 5 other bloggers... I have recently not got around to following as many blogs as regularly as I'd like (partially due to my wife nagging me about spending so much time on the internet chatting to strange ladies...) well let's see, here we go:

1. Top of the list has to be the blog by my adopted virtual sister at Ohiofarmgirl' Aventures in the good land.  Her stories about he she manages her menagery of farm animals make me laugh out loud without fail and never fail to cheer me up
2. Jason at Zuchini Island in Australia has et himself a target of 80% food self sufficiency from a standing start.  I think he is finding it harder than he initially thought, but seems to have a lot of fun trying
3. Next fellow Italian farmer and revolutionary blogging from Puglia in the south of Italy on olive farming, dry stone walling, many recipes etc: La Contadina's blog 
4. Next a blog from the opposite end of Italy the far north at the foot of the Alps: L'Orto Orgoglioso, the proud garden, by Rowenna, a Hawaiian in Italy, I believe.  Her motto is: "You may not be reciting Dante in your dreams, but in the end, anyone can be the owner of a proud garden."  I like it!
5. Finaly I would like to pass the award to Little Paradiso.  Not a gardening blog, but it describes the life of a Texan in Monterosso in the Cinque Terre.  She recently wrote a lot about the destruction caused by the recent rains and the efforts of the villagers to rebuild their homes.  Do visit her site and find out how to help these people in desperate need..

Right, awards out of way here's what's happening in our garden;  There's been a wee bit of rain in the last few days, but temperatures are still more like spring fooling many plants into sprouting lush greens in what should be winter.  On the land I planted out seedlings of pak choi, tak soi and kale:

This the seed packet described as 'Japanese spinach, but are clearly of the brassica family:

Swiss chard sowed itself out all over the place and is looking lush:

Even the litchi tomatoes is still producing:

The broad beans for next year have started off well:

Conspiracy Cousin is back helping out.  Here is in action picking wild autumn olive berries for making our Christmas jam.

Other than that we are slowly getting ready for Christmas, which we will be spending up in the mountains again.  We've baked mountains of biscuits / cookies, including kaki cookies.  The little rain in the last few days has brought up some interesting fungi again, so hopefully we'll find some edible varieties in the mountains:

Have a great pre-Christmas time everybody and don't yourselves too stressed, it's not worth it! :)

Break in the mountains

As announced we have been spending a couple of weeks house- and dog-sitting for some friends in a small village 700m above sea level in the foothills of the Appenines above the pretty town of Pontremoli:

The village is only 6 km away from town as the fly crows... the cry flows...  the flow cries... but as the main road is closed due to a landslide it's a 20km drive.  The village itself is deserted during the winter, so we had the place pretty much to ourselves, us, Eddie, his 3 lovely girlfriends, a handful of cats, a chicken and a duck, plus plentiful wildlife such as badgers, foxes, deer, wild boar and a multitude of wildfowl, birds of prey and singing birds.

We didn't have much to do so we went on long walks around the woods with the dogs:

The weather was cold, but dry, which was good for going on walks, but unfortunately we didn't find any more fungi.

However near the house there was a beautiful field, where we took the dogs to frolick around every day, full of wild herbs...

... apple trees and lined with wild roses heavy with rosehips at their prime:

We made some rosehip jam and what was to be rosehip jelly and turned out rosehip syrup.  As for the jam, it was really more of a marmelade as we used whole oranges and lemons as well as a grated apple for pectin.  The taste and texture turned out be delicious, but what a lot of fiddly work to remove the seeds!

And the jelly... I don't like adding commercial pectin to my preserves, so I cooked up a similar mixture, saving myself having to remove the seeds, strained it through a muslin cloth and... it didn't set.  Might just dilute the result with spring water as a drink.  Also produced a batch of my infamous 'I can't believe it's not mango chutney' chutney made from some kaki / persimmon out of their garden.  It was nice having a bit of a break from everything and ponder on a few things.


Conspiracy Cousin Barti is returning to us this week and we'll slowly settle into winter.  The rain has finally arrived yesterday along with some cooler temperatures. 

...and finally... Eddie, the Beagle had a particularly good time in the mountains... :)

Interuption to usual services

Just a quicky to let you know that we are spending the rest of the month up on the mountains where the internet connection is painfully slow to non-existant.  So apologies for not reacting to your comments or commenting on your blogs.  We're just on a quick dash at home at the moment, enough to just let you know.  More when we come back on rosehip jams and such.

To my American friends: happy belated Thanksgiving.  I was reminded by my lovely 'sister' over at Ohio Farm Girl. Other news will include Eddie and his multiple girlfriends up in the mountains.  So plenty to look forward to.

November Update

Well, what's been happening I hear you ask, in fact some of you DID ask!  Nature has thrown another storm at us, this time a bit further north, hitting Genoa badly.  Both storms within a week of each other were described as the worst in over a century.  In our vicinity 80 cars in the town of Aulla were scrapped, numerous businesses have been destroyed as well as a school.  The pretty village of Vernazza as well as Monterosso in the world famous Cinque Terre have been devastated, but we only suffered minor damage, which we repaired yesterday in the glorious sunshine:

The barrier we had put up after last years landslides had broken apart, which was just as well as it was made from asbstos, which I didn't like to have lying around anyway.  I still don't know how to get rid of it though...  There's Eddie testing the new construction for strength.

The material used were a bunch of old tyres as the base and an old wardrobe we found on the skip complete with mirror door.

It was also time to turn the compost and start a new one:

...and the reason why you haven't heard so much from us...? Twofold really: one is that we're spending much of November and part of December up in the mountains where we are looking after the house and dogs of some friends.  It's beautiful up there and a true wild food paradise.  The chestnuts have not been affected by the chestnuts gall wasp yet as they have around us and are still abundant.  The woods are full of fungi including parasols, blewits and porcini.  There's a beautiful field full of wild herbs, crab apples and rosehips.  So as you can imagine, I'm in heaven up there taking 4 dogs for endless walks foraging.

The other reason is that these two weather events have got me thinking and doubting.  We are just scraping a meagre living from our impossibly steep piece of land and everytime it rains I have sleepless nights wondering if we have anything to come back to.  So we have started considering some other options including maybe leaving Italy in search of some like-minded people to join a community.  Nothing is certain yet and I'm determined to keep my feet on the ground and live in the present.  It is easy to get side-tracked and neglecting your current situation by dreaming of a future.  I have long thought that with Italy  we have finally 'arrived', but we haven't reached as far as I would have liked on the Path of Self Sufficiency.  So we are considering Portugal or Greece or maybe somewhere else.

If anyone out there is thinking along similar lines of setting up a community and wants to join us or knows of an interesting project we should consider, please let us know.  We may of course stay put, but this is something that is going around in our heads at the moment.