It’s
Monday night (well, Tuesday morning) and I haven’t seen
a living soul since Saturday at 7.30pm. That’s the glory
of this place: utter seclusion when you have no desire to
be sociable. I have, however, seen a lot of my robin, who
sat twinkling at me, within reaching-out-and-touching distance,
on the funny, twisted little manna ash (the one I’ve
always wanted to take out, but not had the courage, which
means that one of my peach trees will never grow) for the
couple of hours that I managed to spend weeding and preparing
out there this afternoon.
He’s a constant presence, my robin:
hopping and dodging and buzzing my head as I work. He bobs
from cherry tree to chicken house to ash tree to roof of house,
a kind of untidy figure of eight zig-zag, and can barely wait
until I have finished weeding in any given patch before he
starts combing it for food. Why is it that robins look so
intelligent? And why do they always seem to be laughing at
you?
This is my country week, when L is at the
Berlin film festival and C is off skiing. It’s a week
I dream of from well before Christmas, the week when I’ll
be up here pottering with no one else to think of. Unfortunately
this year it doesn’t seem to be with nothing else to
think of. Today, for example, I spent the whole morning and
a good part of the afternoon huddled up under my duvet (sadly
stingy I may be, but I just can’t bring myself to turn
the heating on in the day when I’m here by myself) designing
a terrace for a crusty old doctor in Rome – particularly
galling when I know that he’ll do none of the things
I tell him to do. (Shame, because his long narrow terrace
could be a delight. But he wants to spend nothing, therefore
it will look like nothing. It’s the way with gardens,
except if you’re exceptionally creative and doing it
all yourself. I suspect my client doesn’t fit this description.)
Then someone from university days asked me to look over his
English translation of his CV. Then I remembered that I hadn’t
sent out the invitation to our clan gathering in September,
something I should have done days ago. Then I had emails to
send and people to hassle – Maurizio and the still uninstalled
watering system, the man who was meant to deliver a sideboard
that L fell for on eBay (fingers crossed: looks good in the
photos but who knows what will turn up tomorrow morning).
I haven’t even begun to do the one thing I was resigned
to working on while up here, ie the latest update of my Rome
guide. How will I ever get that finished?
Aims for my rural week?
1) cover veggie garden with fleece and
cover fleece with gravel.
This sounds quite simple but it is, of course, proving to
be long and complicated.
I want the fleece that’s thick and pale green and woolly
feeling. No one seems to have it. Everyone I call is telling
me that what I really need is not that kind (tessuto non
tessuto) but the woven black plastic kind (tessuto
camping). They tell me that in a “are you stupid,
woman? No one would ever use the pale green kind for suppressing
weeds and supporting gravel” kind of voice, which galls
me, if only because that is precisely what my kind of fleece
is designed for. I tell them that I know very well what I
want, and it’s the pale green kind. They tell me once
again that I’m making a big mistake. But the black woven
plastic kind (also a weed suppressant) is no better, in my
opinion, at keeping down weeds than the fleecy fleece; and
it’s much worse at making a pleasant surface to walk
on – gravel always feels a bit slippy on its shiny surface.
Logical really. Also, the woven kind shreds and sheds at the
edges, and you find long strands of infuriating plastic blowing
around your garden, wrapping themselves around your struggling
plants. No, I know exactly what kind I want. Good old Stefano
(whom I should have asked right from the start) has now pointed
me in the right direction. So let’s hope the sideboard
delivery man gets here at the time he said tomorrow morning,
so I can scoot down to Chiusi Scalo to get it. After which
I can get the gravel delivered from town.
2) prune roses.
This, too, should be a walk in the park but somehow it always
takes longer than I could ever imagine. I spent the whole
of sunny Sunday up among my rugosa roses by the top carpark.
The actual pruning, I think, may not have even taken 90 minutes.
But the weeding and shifting (Vittorio had misunderstood my
instructions and planted some of my bare-root stock –
the extra ones I bought to fill in the gaps around the new
gate posts – in the wrong place: I hope moving them
when they’re already producing buds won’t kill
them off) extended it infinitely. And then of course I happened
to notice that the little fruit trees up there were being
choked by weeds, so I had to weed large areas around each
trunk. And what would have been the point of clearing but
not spreading some manure around too? And how long does it
take to transport enough manure for all that when you don’t
have a wheelbarrow. Which reminds me.
3) get wheelbarrow wheel repaired.
L has pumped up our completely flat wheel countless times.
He has taken it to the gommista to have it repaired.
The gommista snorted and said there was nothing wrong
with it, then pumped it up. Two hours later it was flat as
a pancake. That was two weeks ago. Since when it has been
bumping about in the boot of our car. I must get it back to
the gommista.
4) spray poor struggling little vegetable
plants with neem.
This is my experiment for this summer: neem (Azadirachta
indica). From www.neemitalia.com
I have ordered large quantities of a neem-oil-based fertilizer
which, they promise me, will make all my plants phenomenally
green and vigorous and will keep most nasty bugs known to
man away from them. Given what those bugs do to my plants,
I rather like (in a sadistic way) the description of what
neem does to them: not kill them so much as shut down their
ability to eat, breed or go through their natural metamorphoses.
So the effect is the same, really. Indians, apparently, call
the neem tree “the village pharmacy” which is
such a lovely, evocative name. Because not only is it used
for healing just about evething, it is also the short-trunked,
wide-branched kind of tree that you could imagine a whole
village of ailing Indians relaxing beneath. Or ailing anyones,
come to that. I wonder if I could grow it here? Drought resistant,
yes. But would it stand our sub-zero bursts in winter?
5) make beds for courgettes.
The poor little courgette plants I plonked into the precipitious
bank above veggie garden and carpark died a long drawn-out
straggly death last year, with hardly a courgette to show
for themselves. Of course they did, the poor things: sheer
drop and poor soil – what was I thinking of? So what
do I plan to do? Put them back in exactly the same place.
But this year I shall make levels for them, so that the water
I give them doesn’t rush straight down the bank and
away like it did last year, and so that in the immediate vicinity
at least, they have excellent soil in which to spread their
little roots. These rustic-looking beds will mirror the ones
further down in which I’ve put the rhubarb. I was so
cruel and thoughtless towards my rhubarb last year that I
thought I’d killed off all but one brave little plant.
But what did I notice last weekend? Two more teeny little
pinky red leaves struggling out from beneath stones and leaves.
So I have dug around all of these, patiently and lovingly,
and have covered them over with old pots to protect and force.
Where no little leaves were poking through, I started off
by presuming that there was no hope. Stupidly. Because my
first deep thrust of the trowel removed a tightly folded bundle
of leaves that had just been about to appear above ground.
I felt so bad, my heart dropped into my boots. I covered that
poor maltreated root too, in the hope that it would forgive
me sufficiently to produce some more leaves. We shall see.
Needless to say, in the other three beds where I had planted
rhubarb last year, I operated, as the Italians say, with piedi
di piombo – feet of lead – gently massaging
the soil, clearing it of fallen pebbles, and hoping that more
little pink leaves will appear to be coddled.
6) plant more fruit trees.
Just three: two plums (one red, one yellow) and a cherry.
The old cherries at the house end of the carpark have definitely
taken on a new lease of life, but they’re old and their
fruit is small and sharp (the jam I made from them last year
is the best jam ever). So we definitely need another eating
cherry. And the spindly damson tree in the middle of the vegetable
garden produces unbelievably more each year, but we don’t
have a single eating plum, so we definitely need that. In
all cases, I plan to go for old varieties: a Bigarreau Moreau
cherry, a Queen Claudia or Shiro yellow plum and a Coscia
di Monaca (nun’s thigh) dark purple one. These
last are wonderful things, long and dry but so tasty. And
they are, the Perugia University agrarian studies department
site tells me, a true Umbrian variety.
7) build compost bins.
Here I really am getting over-ambitious, but it so
needs to be done. I can’t continue sacrificing one of
my raised beds to compost production. I need that bed. So
tomorrow morning, as soon as the delivery man has turned up,
I shall descend from my lofty heights down to Fabro Scalo
and order the appropriate pieces of wood for this. Make something
simple, rustic, modular. And well-covered. Each time I look
at the odd scraps of plastic with which my compost is covered
now, I despair. But I’ve found the solution, in what
used to be Bricco OK and is now called something equally silly:
thick black plastic pseudo-linoleum flooring material. As
soon as my shiny new compost bins are in place, I shall invest
in some of that too.
CdP
11 February 2008
