16 August 2007

One big problem with being here is that it’s almost impossible to write about it. There are too many people about for a start – great, jolly housefuls of them. We have four here now, and four more in Maria’s agriturismo up the road. Actually, now they all seem to have headed off for a day of sight-seeing in Orvieto.

So I have been doing what constitutes another handicap: frittering away my time with a bit of floor-sweeping here, a bit of dishwasher-unloading there, some rounding up of stray mugs and wine glasses around the garden and downloading of stray photos here in my bedroom – all things that I would never dream of doing when there were so many people milling about to sit and chat and drink comfortable cups of coffee with.

Outside it’s cloudless and painfully blue. And very very hot which is yet another obstacle to writing… not because I can’t write when it’s hot – indeed, hiding inside in the cool of our house is an ideal activity – but because inside there are endless silly things to do, then by evening when it’s cool and I want to rush out into my garden, it’s time to think about feeding people and breaking open a bottle of wine and being sociable so the choice is between hard garden graft and these pleasant activities, with no time at all left for such idle pursuits as writing. Life is hard…

Needless to say, summer is also, for the self-same reasons, a fruitless time for getting much done in the garden. We came back from two weeks in Croatia at the beginning of July to find it hadn’t rained since we left and my lawn was looking positively moribund. Therefore much of my evening gardening time afterwards was dedicated to shifting sprinklers about (with much cursing of Maurizio who, unsurprisingly, still hasn’t installed the watering system). Despite assiduous watering, it continued to look distinctly unhealthy. Until, that is, we had one gentle and one terrifying storm, since when it has changed from burnt-out savannah to lush jungle in a matter of days. I can’t remember the last time it w needed cutting: now it’s positively long.

When my sister and brother-in-law were staying at the end of July, and he was happily occupying our kitchen and whipping up delicious dinners, it suddenly struck me what was missing from my life: a cook. With a cook – and it has to be an accommodating cook in summer, prepared to have the evening meal on the table shortly after dark, at 9.30 or even ten if necessary – I could go on creating and maintaining my garden through the summer with no trouble.

But life is not always like that.

Some little progress has been made. Now, for example, I have a full complement of six vegetable garden beds. Well, kind of. Because over the intervening months, some of my planks have bent and had to be replaced. And one was mysteriously sawed up and used to shore up the bank below our collapsing mini-swimming pool. So while I do have three new beds, none of them is complete. And of course the wood yard is closed for August.

So in the mean time I’ve busied myself building a couple of steps to get up there. Never have three steps taken so long to construct. For some reason, the only time I manage to get out is under the hottest of hot sun. Two blows with the sledge hammer to drive supports in and I’m staggering back to the house to consume another half litre of water. Through incompetence, absent-mindedness and a large dash of pure laziness I seem to have ended up with three steps… and a rather awkward ramp at the top. But it will all come out just fine when I get the wooden edging of the garden in, to prevent the gravel from escaping. It will, I’m convinced, look quite stunning. When it will look stunning is another matter.
In the mean time, my two ‘occupied’ beds (well, occupied by vegetables – another is producing a magnificent batch of compost) are awash with tomatoes. And I’ve had some rather delicious lettuces too. A couple of handfuls of beans came off the bean plants, though these were rather swamped by tomatoes – I don’t know how beans and tomatoes came to be climbing up the same supports – and there’s lots of chard up there, if only I could remember to harvest it. There are a couple of broccoli plants too, but if they manage to produce anything through their coating of greenfly it will be a miracle. I’ve decided to treat the broccoli as a greenfly decoy and hope that everything else remains unscathed.
My courgette plants, for some reason, seem very very unhappy on the bank surrounding the garden. They flower, and produce tiny incipient courgettes which then give up the ghost before they’re pick-able. They’re getting lots of water. But maybe the soil there is so bad that it’s actively counter-acting the holeful of rich compost that I planted them in. I shall persevere.

The biggest change is around the caravan. And I can claim no praise for that at all. But let me back-track a bit. First of all, I found someone to help in the garden, a lugubrious young Romanian called Costantino who lasted all of three weeks then decided that between his job at the wonderful Margheriti nursery and the villa he oversees for some wealthy foreigner around here, be was being fanciful thinking he could work for me too.
So he sent me a perky little recent retiree called Vittorio. And Vittorio is wonderful. Well, actually, Vittorio has some drawbacks in that bending over and patiently pulling out weeds is clearly not his favourite activity. But I have decided to overlook this and play to his strengths, which are working extremely hard and getting on with things. I asked him, for example, to move our unsightly woodpile – the one that for the past four years has created a bottleneck past which we could never have moved the caravan even had we had somewhere to move it to – and three hours later the whole huge thing was neatly stacked inside the chicken house. Hooray. He has hacked back all those pesky little shoots that the elm trees throw up the whole time. He has strimmed the bank outside the kitchen so that the uncomfortably large snake that I saw once (and our rentees saw several times) hanging about there was driven somewhere else. But the very best thing about Vittorio is… he wants the caravan for his chickens. And he has a friend with a tow-away truck who’s going to come over in the next few days and take it away. Bliss!
If this weren’t wonderful enough, the nasty little elm trees that used to support the woodpile – the ones growing right under and into the big oak, and therefore stopping our sightlines right up into that magnificent tree – have been sawn down. This was meant to be Vittorio’s job; indeed, I hope he isn’t upset when he comes back and finds it has already been done (there’s still the wood of the trees to be cut up and added to the woodpile). But it was Andrew and Joseph, the sons of our current guests, who attacked those eyesores with saws (and much help from their father). And before we knew it, we had an open vista (over the caravan – help! – but that will be remedied soon) beneath a lovely arch of oak… I find it quite moving, how trees shape themselves to accommodate other trees.
So, 'all' that remains there now is (1) to rid ourselves of the caravan, (2) to weed and revamp the whole garden all around the ex-caravan area, (3) to decide where the barbeque should be and (4) to get Francesco the blacksmith to build the metal frames for table and benches. Because what that’s going to be over there is our outside barbeque dining room. It’s perfect for it.
The bricked area that the caravan stands on is one of those little perks of the place, an unexpected bonus that we’d never have known about had Luigi not come down and pointed out to us that beneath a gently-sloping area of thick weed there was, if he remembered correctly, the concimaia – that brick-paved area set far away from the house that Mussolini ordered all farmers to build to counter the rather unsalubrious age-old habit of piling up manure close to the back door. We dug and dug and dug some more and there is was, totally intact. Hardly anyone has them any more: covered by debris, they’ve been dug up inadvertantly, or their bricks have been recycled for other uses. But ours is perfect, complete with raised bit around the edge and a great pit at one end where, presumably, the run-off from the manure once flowed, to be used as liquid fertiliser. We even cleaned the pit out once, so that rainwater drained off better. But we never worked out where the water went once it had finished up in the pit.
Ever since we’ve had the caravan, we’ve had a barbie over there: a pile of bricks thrown together with a grill across the top. The other evening, as part of the elm-cutting-down parcel, Andrew re-engineered it magnificently, rearranging the bricks and inserting a long raised metal plate on which to build the fire (it used to be so difficult to get a fire going on the ground when it was damp). We tried it out with salmon and swordfish and squid for 11 and it was great. But even that will have to go when we beautify everything over there. And we’ll need a higher, more elegant affair, probably pretty much where it is now… just a little less makeshift.
So now I need to get working on the garden around. It’s looking a little less hopeless since I reconstructed that bit of my watering system. Those Hydrangea quercifolia which by now should be about two metres tall (but are in fact pathetic specimens barely visible above the ground) are beginning to look less rachitic, for example, now that each has its own drip. And I started hacking away at the excess Vinca major beneath the funny old peach tree, and at the bits that were strangling that lovely Lonicera in the space in front of the caravan. After which I got sidetracked and haven’t been back… except the other day when I went to remove some iron rods that used to support the woodpile and had been chucked onto the garden by Vittorio… only to see a little snake wiggling away from beneath them, after which I decided I wouldn’t resume my gardening in that neck of the woods for the time being.

Further progress?

I readjusted the water to my philadelphus and winter jasmine bank up behind the caravan and, again, wow! what a difference the right amount of water makes. It seems such a banal thing to say, but in my haste I often prefer to hoodwink myself into believing that the irrigation I throw together – usually as I’m trying to get into the car to dash back to Rome for something or other – will suffice. I had long thought that these plants, for example, were getting plenty. But now, with a drip going straight to the root of each plant, and a little well to keep as much of the water as possible right where it’s needed, they’ve doubled in size in the past three weeks. So obvious, so difficult (and time-consuming) to get right.

And I have planted pots of hostas and three lovely Hydrangea serrata Bluebird among the Chaenomeles speciosa beneath the cherry trees by the car park. L announced to me some months ago that he now “quite likes” hydrangeas, just as long as they’re blue. That’s after years of telling me that he loathes them, whatever colour they are. So I took that as an invitation to plant them in very prominent positions, like the first thing that hits you as you come down the drive. Why not? The serrata are so beautiful. All right, I rather suspect that they weren’t what L had in mind, but I’m sure I can talk him round. I hope.


				CdP

				16 August 2007

			One big problem with being here is that it’s almost impossible to write about it. There are too many people about for a start – great, jolly housefuls of them. We have four here now, and four more in Maria’s agriturismo up the road. Actually, now they all seem to have headed off for a day of sight-seeing in Orvieto. So I have been doing what constitutes another handicap: frittering away my time with a bit of floor-sweeping here, a bit of dishwasher-unloading there, some rounding up of stray mugs and wine glasses around the garden and downloading of stray photos here in my bedroom – all things that I would never dream of doing when there were so many people milling about to sit and chat and drink comfortable cups of coffee with. Outside it’s cloudless and painfully blue. And very very hot which is yet another obstacle to writing… not because I can’t write when it’s hot – indeed, hiding inside in the cool of our house is an ideal activity – but because inside there are endless silly things to do, then by evening when it’s cool and I want to rush out into my garden, it’s time to think about feeding people and breaking open a bottle of wine and being sociable so the choice is between hard garden graft and these pleasant activities, with no time at all left for such idle pursuits as writing. Life is hard… Needless to say, summer is also, for the self-same reasons, a fruitless time for getting much done in the garden. We came back from two weeks in Croatia at the beginning of July to find it hadn’t rained since we left and my lawn was looking positively moribund. Therefore much of my evening gardening time afterwards was dedicated to shifting sprinklers about (with much cursing of Maurizio who, unsurprisingly, still hasn’t installed the watering system). Despite assiduous watering, it continued to look distinctly unhealthy. Until, that is, we had one gentle and one terrifying storm, since when it has changed from burnt-out savannah to lush jungle in a matter of days. I can’t remember the last time it w needed cutting: now it’s positively long. When my sister and brother-in-law were staying at the end of July, and he was happily occupying our kitchen and whipping up delicious dinners, it suddenly struck me what was missing from my life: a cook. With a cook – and it has to be an accommodating cook in summer, prepared to have the evening meal on the table shortly after dark, at 9.30 or even ten if necessary – I could go on creating and maintaining my garden through the summer with no trouble. But life is not always like that. Some little progress has been made. Now, for example, I have a full complement of six vegetable garden beds. Well, kind of. Because over the intervening months, some of my planks have bent and had to be replaced. And one was mysteriously sawed up and used to shore up the bank below our collapsing mini-swimming pool. So while I do have three new beds, none of them is complete. And of course the wood yard is closed for August. So in the mean time I’ve busied myself building a couple of steps to get up there. Never have three steps taken so long to construct. For some reason, the only time I manage to get out is under the hottest of hot sun. Two blows with the sledge hammer to drive supports in and I’m staggering back to the house to consume another half litre of water. Through incompetence, absent-mindedness and a large dash of pure laziness I seem to have ended up with three steps… and a rather awkward ramp at the top. But it will all come out just fine when I get the wooden edging of the garden in, to prevent the gravel from escaping. It will, I’m convinced, look quite stunning. When it will look stunning is another matter. In the mean time, my two ‘occupied’ beds (well, occupied by vegetables – another is producing a magnificent batch of compost) are awash with tomatoes. And I’ve had some rather delicious lettuces too. A couple of handfuls of beans came off the bean plants, though these were rather swamped by tomatoes – I don’t know how beans and tomatoes came to be climbing up the same supports – and there’s lots of chard up there, if only I could remember to harvest it. There are a couple of broccoli plants too, but if they manage to produce anything through their coating of greenfly it will be a miracle. I’ve decided to treat the broccoli as a greenfly decoy and hope that everything else remains unscathed. My courgette plants, for some reason, seem very very unhappy on the bank surrounding the garden. They flower, and produce tiny incipient courgettes which then give up the ghost before they’re pick-able. They’re getting lots of water. But maybe the soil there is so bad that it’s actively counter-acting the holeful of rich compost that I planted them in. I shall persevere. The biggest change is around the caravan. And I can claim no praise for that at all. But let me back-track a bit. First of all, I found someone to help in the garden, a lugubrious young Romanian called Costantino who lasted all of three weeks then decided that between his job at the wonderful Margheriti nursery and the villa he oversees for some wealthy foreigner around here, be was being fanciful thinking he could work for me too. So he sent me a perky little recent retiree called Vittorio. And Vittorio is wonderful. Well, actually, Vittorio has some drawbacks in that bending over and patiently pulling out weeds is clearly not his favourite activity. But I have decided to overlook this and play to his strengths, which are working extremely hard and getting on with things. I asked him, for example, to move our unsightly woodpile – the one that for the past four years has created a bottleneck past which we could never have moved the caravan even had we had somewhere to move it to – and three hours later the whole huge thing was neatly stacked inside the chicken house. Hooray. He has hacked back all those pesky little shoots that the elm trees throw up the whole time. He has strimmed the bank outside the kitchen so that the uncomfortably large snake that I saw once (and our rentees saw several times) hanging about there was driven somewhere else. But the very best thing about Vittorio is… he wants the caravan for his chickens. And he has a friend with a tow-away truck who’s going to come over in the next few days and take it away. Bliss! If this weren’t wonderful enough, the nasty little elm trees that used to support the woodpile – the ones growing right under and into the big oak, and therefore stopping our sightlines right up into that magnificent tree – have been sawn down. This was meant to be Vittorio’s job; indeed, I hope he isn’t upset when he comes back and finds it has already been done (there’s still the wood of the trees to be cut up and added to the woodpile). But it was Andrew and Joseph, the sons of our current guests, who attacked those eyesores with saws (and much help from their father). And before we knew it, we had an open vista (over the caravan – help! – but that will be remedied soon) beneath a lovely arch of oak… I find it quite moving, how trees shape themselves to accommodate other trees. So, 'all' that remains there now is (1) to rid ourselves of the caravan, (2) to weed and revamp the whole garden all around the ex-caravan area, (3) to decide where the barbeque should be and (4) to get Francesco the blacksmith to build the metal frames for table and benches. Because what that’s going to be over there is our outside barbeque dining room. It’s perfect for it. The bricked area that the caravan stands on is one of those little perks of the place, an unexpected bonus that we’d never have known about had Luigi not come down and pointed out to us that beneath a gently-sloping area of thick weed there was, if he remembered correctly, the concimaia – that brick-paved area set far away from the house that Mussolini ordered all farmers to build to counter the rather unsalubrious age-old habit of piling up manure close to the back door. We dug and dug and dug some more and there is was, totally intact. Hardly anyone has them any more: covered by debris, they’ve been dug up inadvertantly, or their bricks have been recycled for other uses. But ours is perfect, complete with raised bit around the edge and a great pit at one end where, presumably, the run-off from the manure once flowed, to be used as liquid fertiliser. We even cleaned the pit out once, so that rainwater drained off better. But we never worked out where the water went once it had finished up in the pit. Ever since we’ve had the caravan, we’ve had a barbie over there: a pile of bricks thrown together with a grill across the top. The other evening, as part of the elm-cutting-down parcel, Andrew re-engineered it magnificently, rearranging the bricks and inserting a long raised metal plate on which to build the fire (it used to be so difficult to get a fire going on the ground when it was damp). We tried it out with salmon and swordfish and squid for 11 and it was great. But even that will have to go when we beautify everything over there. And we’ll need a higher, more elegant affair, probably pretty much where it is now… just a little less makeshift. So now I need to get working on the garden around. It’s looking a little less hopeless since I reconstructed that bit of my watering system. Those Hydrangea quercifolia which by now should be about two metres tall (but are in fact pathetic specimens barely visible above the ground) are beginning to look less rachitic, for example, now that each has its own drip. And I started hacking away at the excess Vinca major beneath the funny old peach tree, and at the bits that were strangling that lovely Lonicera in the space in front of the caravan. After which I got sidetracked and haven’t been back… except the other day when I went to remove some iron rods that used to support the woodpile and had been chucked onto the garden by Vittorio… only to see a little snake wiggling away from beneath them, after which I decided I wouldn’t resume my gardening in that neck of the woods for the time being. Further progress? I readjusted the water to my philadelphus and winter jasmine bank up behind the caravan and, again, wow! what a difference the right amount of water makes. It seems such a banal thing to say, but in my haste I often prefer to hoodwink myself into believing that the irrigation I throw together – usually as I’m trying to get into the car to dash back to Rome for something or other – will suffice. I had long thought that these plants, for example, were getting plenty. But now, with a drip going straight to the root of each plant, and a little well to keep as much of the water as possible right where it’s needed, they’ve doubled in size in the past three weeks. So obvious, so difficult (and time-consuming) to get right. And I have planted pots of hostas and three lovely Hydrangea serrata Bluebird among the Chaenomeles speciosa beneath the cherry trees by the car park. L announced to me some months ago that he now “quite likes” hydrangeas, just as long as they’re blue. That’s after years of telling me that he loathes them, whatever colour they are. So I took that as an invitation to plant them in very prominent positions, like the first thing that hits you as you come down the drive. Why not? The serrata are so beautiful. All right, I rather suspect that they weren’t what L had in mind, but I’m sure I can talk him round. I hope.











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