ROME
9 November 2007
I’m
battling porcupines. And maybe a boar or two.
My broad bean and pea seedlings, lovingly
raised from organic seed on my Rome balcony, lasted about six hours after
I put them in the ground. I thought I was being so clever, leaving
just the summer’s yield of beautiful compost in the bed where it
was made. The compost one-third fills the bed. I pictured the bed as a
little sun-trap, easily covered over with fleece when the cold came, a
sunken haven of a garden where my plantlets would be out of the wind and
protected. Instead, the lack of a thick layer of soil meant that our resident
porcupine – at least I presume that’s what it was –
waited for darkness to fall then had no trouble at all digging under the
wooden edge and up through a thin layer of lovely crumbly compost into
seedling heaven. He chomped and thrashed and left me a disaster area.
Rat.
That was the penultimate time we were up there. Then last weekend, I found
all my cut-and-come-again beet neatly grazed. The tops had been sheared
off them all with great precision. Could this have been a passing boar?
I tried to take comfort in the fact that the leaves may indeed come again,
as they’ve been doing all summer. But I’m not holding my breath,
quite frankly, as nights are cold cold cold on our hillside now, even
if days continue to be stupidly warm.
This weekend we’re stuck in Rome. Which means that I won’t
know the fate of the many many little plants that I stuck – with
faint hope in my heart – in the ground last weekend: winter spinach
and lettuce, some garlic bulbs (though I must remember to plant more),
some cabbage and… well, there were other things but so resigned
am I to losing the lot that I can’t even remember what they were.
This time I put them in a properly-filled bed, and covered the bed tight
with white fleece. But any hungry passerby could easily poke a hole through
that. I wonder if they go on smell or sight. Out of sight, out of mind?
Again, I’m not holding my breath.
I won’t know, either, whether my predator has succeeded in scaling
the sharp bank behind the vegetable garden to polish off the many little
strawberry plants that I planted there. When I bought the strawberries,
from one of the men in CdP’s Saturday market, I said to him that
they’d probably soon be eaten by the porcupines, like everything
else.
“That’s easily fixed,” he said. “Porcupines eat
your plants… you eat the porcupines.”
I’m not sure whether porcupines are protected (yes, the Umbria regional
website tells me, they are, though they’re listed as being ‘low
extinction risk’… an understatement if ever there was one
in our area where they’re thick on the ground), or whether eating
them is just something that people prefer not to talk about too much.
Presumably they were once desperation food: something unsavoury that the
starving farmers could hunt without the danger of being accused of poaching.
Anyway, you certainly don’t find the beast on restaurant menus.
I didn’t think that “yurk, I’m a vegetarian” would
impress this elderly contadino unduly. So instead, I followed
an investigative line.
“What, you can eat them?” I asked, a picture of innocence.
Which made him look slightly shifty. “Well, yes, I hear that people
do… They say, those people, you know, the ones that eat them, that
it tastes a bit like chicken, except much much better. Not that I’d
know myself, of course.”
Having thus established that he’d never sink to such primitive practices,
he then proceeded to explain exactly how to prepare them. No easy task,
of course, because porcupines are big fellows, like an outsize cat, weighing
up to 30kg apparently… and then there are all those quills. According
to my informant, you heat up a huge cauldron of water over a fire and
drop the porcupine in. Not alive, lobster-style, but already passed away.
(On reflection, that should be self evident: I mean, imagine trying to
heave a struggling small-goat-sized bundle of sharp quills into a bubbling
cauldron.) That, he has been told, softens the skin and makes the quills
fall out. Then, I believe, you stew them; but other plant-buyers came
along at the point and our conversation was brought to an abrupt halt.
Sharing his woodland knowledge with this funny foreigner is one thing,
letting on to locals that he’s so well-informed is quite another.
Pests though they are, our Italian porcupines are rather fine beasts compared,
say, to the ratty-looking north American variety which has fine, wiggly,
barbed quills and climbs trees. You wouldn’t find our clackety,
thick-quilled but very dignified porcupines doing that. What we have here,
research shows, is the Hystrix cristata (Crested porcupine):
bigger, better… tastier. And all over the place, so why they’re
protected, heaven – and some office in some dusty ministry –
alone knows.
