ROME
22 May 2008
British
magazines (of all ilks, not just gardeny ones) are full, at
the moment, of articles about how to go about feeding a family
of ten from a few old tin cans on the back doorstep. Well,
not quite. But as the I-hate-supermarkets movement blooms,
so do these articles… which, presumably, are closing
the stable door after the horse has bolted because if we weren’t
already doing it, it wouldn’t be being reported. And
anyway, it’s not like pots of basil and tomatoes in
grow-bags were invented yesterday.
The same theme has been taken
up by Italian mags, but with slightly less clamour. Understandably.
City-dwellers (whose windowsills and tiny balconies will certainly
harbour basil and sage, and maybe a little rosemary plant)
are likely to have a splendid fruit and veg market in the
vicinity. While people in the ‘burbs and the country
with their own patch of land will almost without fail have
a couple of tomato vines, a jungly courgette plant and some
cool, spiky artichoke bushes between their fruit trees. And
a garden without a bay bush and a spreading rosemary plant
is almost unheard of. This is not to say that Italians avoid
supermarkets – they very definitely don’t –
but the near-monopoly that the huge chains have on food distribution
(not to mention – worryingly – production) in
the UK, for instance, simply doesn’t exist here. It’s
a question of perception: people don’t consider them
the only places to shop.
I seem to have gone off at a tangent.
Because what I was planning to write was that I have always
been rather skeptical of these keen tin-pot gardeners-in-print.
Despite my tomato-glut last year, my orticello was
beginning to look a little small to me… I mean, if I’m
planning to keep us in vegetables year-round and feed the
starving hordes who will descend on us in summer. All right,
it’s far from a couple of pots on a porch; but the six
beds together can’t be much more than 18 square metres
of growing space. (I’ve just taken a break here to see
how big the average British allotment is: 250 square metres!
I have trouble enough keeping my few square metres tidy and
planted. How can anyone cope with that much land?!) And so
far, you need a magnifying glass to spot the contents (tomatoes,
peppers, fennel, broccoli…) of four of the six beds.
But when I arrived up there last
Sunday evening, after an absence of ten days, my heart leapt
then sunk in quick succession. So much produce! But what,
oh what to do with it?
To be honest, my produce extends
well beyond my vegetable garden. Much to the consternation
of Vittorio, who won’t touch anything vegetably because
he says he doesn’t understand my system and doesn’t
want to make mistakes, (if only he’d believe me when
I tell him that there isn’t a system, that I just make
it up as I go along…), you’ll find all kinds of
edible things in odd places.
The 43 good-sized artichokes
I picked (leaving dozens more to grow bigger) are on plants
along the left-hand bank as you come down the drive. They
are beautiful and healthy and a glorious green-blue-grey.
(The garlic planted between the rosemary bushes on the right
of the drive is looking huge. This year, the little courgette
plants I put in specially prepared and manured beds on that
steep unwelcoming bank above carpark and orto seem
to be thriving, as do the little cucumber plants that I have
put down the slope at the back of the vegetable garden. It
remains to see whether the onions along the edge of the carpark
that I never gathered last year will in fact produce anything
more than pretty flowers.)
But the hill of broad beans
and even greater mountain of spinach that I harvested come
right out of the orto.
My neglected, bolting spinach
occupies only one half of one bed (neglected bolting lettuce
plus a row of garlic take up the other) yet from this space
– 1.5 square metres at the absolute outside –
I took two big bagfuls for friends with a little hotel nearby,
one big bagful for an emergency stop at friends’ back
in Rome, one medium bagful for our Roman neighbour and enough
for C and me to go on eating it as an accompaniment for four
meals. So as long as you devoted a couple of those backstep
pots to spinach, you definitely could feed your brood. And
the great thing about spinach is, of course, that you hack
it off and it just keeps coming back, and back, and back.
I wonder if I’ll manage to keep it going all winter
too.
I snipped off such a tiny proportion
of the broad beans that were weighing down the plants. (Who
knows how many more are waiting for me now?) These are the
ones that I put in in November, snuggly under fleece, hoping
that whatever was eating my other remaining produce wouldn’t
eat those too. I think Vittorio and Mario were skeptical that
they would see the winter through. But they did, and they’ve
prospered and those big goody-bags I was spreading about had
huge armfuls if broad beans in them too.
(The one thing I regret not
planting more of, I should say here, is peas. In fact, if
I remember correctly, I did plant more. But not all of them
seem to have survived. The ones that have, however, had produced
just enough pods for C and me to indulge. But I’m planting
more now. I noticed that one of the various packs of pea seeds
that I have here in Rome claims to be a species that can be
planted into late spring, for mid-late summer eating. We shall
see.)
All of which leads me to wonder
about quantities in general. Am I overdoing it? Far from producing
too little, are my very few square metres going to produce
far too much? I think the mixed-species tomato plants in one
half-bed are more numerous, possibly, than the ones that provided
us with far more tomatoes than we needed last year. They’re
certainly better watered (I’m rather proud of my watering
system this year) and hopefully won’t start off being
small and dry and and brown at one end. And I certainly have
more, larger green beans than last year... though last year
they were only around in any number for a very brief time.
I have been very assiduous about planting lettuces from time
to time, though I fear that in the end, it would work out
about two a day for the next three months; and we won’t
eat that. If all my seven or eight courgette plants take,
then we’ll be buried by a courgette avalanche.
On the other hand, I keep trying
to get carrots to sprout and they won’t (yet). My fennel
plants look tiny and sad. My peppers seem to be determined
to shrivel up and give up the ghost. Is this an illusion?
Are they just hanging fire, awaiting their moment, ready suddenly
to leap to life and ambush me like my superabundant spinach?
And should I keep on putting
seeds into my little roottrainers here on my Roman terrace?
I’m trying to be very rational about it. I’m trying
not to produce more seedlings than I’ll need. I try
to think of how much of any given thing we are actually likely
to consume and stick seeds in accordingly. After which I generally
think ”yes, but half those may not come up” so
I then stick double our needs in, just to make sure.
It will take some seasons,
I realise, before I really get the hang of this. In the mean
time I can draw comfort from the thought that my little vegetable
patch is far from being too little. And I could always, if
things get out of hand, take the advice of my friend Julia,
Roman recipient of my spinachy largesse: she says to don a
big straw hat and set up a stall on any roadside where Brit
holidaymakers pass by. All-organic vegetables raised lovingly
in one of Umbria’s most beautiful spots could make my
fortune.
***********************
In the mean time, we have a smart new gate. And my roses have
exploded.
It’s a shame, really,
to have a garden full of roses in Italy if you can’t
be there in May for their first flush of glory. But 24hrs
breathing in the perfume of my Felicias (and bringing great
bunches of all my roses back to Rome) will have to suffice
for this year. The torrential rain that has fallen since then
has probably polished off my blooms. Even that, though, was
pretty paradisiacal.