First seeds sown!

After a dry day on Friday that even saw me able to get out of the office and into the garden for a couple of hours after I'd finished work in the afternoon to cut and strim the grass, we were really hoping that the forecasters had got it wrong and that the weekend of rain they were threatening us with wasn't actually going to happen - but sure enough, as we sat watching TV on Friday night, the familiar sound of rain drumming on the roof window started up and continued intermittently throughout the night.

We awoke on Saturday to grey skies but without anything actually falling from the sky (so far), so after breakfast we headed straight out with Reggie for his morning walk. Like last Saturday, we went up the valley, stopped off at the Bistrot in Vellano for a quick cappuccino, before continuing on to the cava track. The track at the cava leads uphill through the woods and we've often commented on the fact that some days it seems as if it's steeper than others - no doubt this varies according to how much sleep we've had, whether we've been doing strenuous physical work, whether we've had a late night and so on. Today, for whatever reason, was a steep day. Reggie seemed relatively calm on the way up the track, making us wonder if he was finding it a steep day too, but he made up for it on the return leg, cantering off into the woods leaving us wondering where he'd got to, before reappearing further down the path and tearing back up to us. We encountered a few light raindrops while walking, but managed to get back to the car before anything of significance - the skies looked foreboding over the hills at the top of the valley though, and it felt as if someone had turned a light off.

By the time we got back after our walk it was 11am. Now came the tough decision: should we bite the bullet and go and get the supermarket shopping done, knowing that we would be hitting the busiest time of the day (week, even), or should we wait it out until lunchtime when we knew the shops would be quieter, but meaning that we had an hour and a half to fill - not long enough to get our teeth into anything significant. We kicked ourselves for not having got the shopping done on Friday night, and with a certain amount of resentment decided to get it over and done with.

This is not something we will be repeating any time soon - both Lidl and Esselunga were heaving and I sensed that we were each only just clinging onto our sense of humour by our fingernails.

Once home and the shopping had been unpacked, the mood lightened over a lunch of bread, cheese and salami - a bit of a cliché in this part of the world, but it's been a long time since we've had what our friends Paul & Marie have coined a "pick-n-mix" lunch. The cheeses we'd bought - tomino (a soft, brie-like cheese) wrapped in pancetta, which we warmed in a pan before serving, as well as a hard, cave-aged pecorino - were delicious, as was the fennel-flavoured salami.

After lunch we gave Reggie a bone to keep him occupied in the house while we headed down to the apartment as by this time it was wet outside and unless he has company or something to occupy him, Reggie has a habit of opening the front door and letting himself out - which would be fine if (a) he could close the door behind him and/or (b) he could let himself back in again!

The first task of the afternoon was to start the mammoth clear-up operation in the apartment. That is, round one of the clear-up operation - we started cleaning up knowing full well that we would only be making more mess very shortly.

With Stuart having taken the false ceiling down in the apartment bedroom on Friday afternoon, the floor and every surface was covered in dust, dirt, pieces of broken plasterboard and a certain amount of ... ahem... rodent waste. It seems that at some point the cavity walls/suspended ceiling have made a cosy home for small furry squatters - which I suppose shouldn't come as a great surprise in a house of this age in the middle of the countryside.

What happened to our beautiful apartment?

After an hour or so of sweeping and laying down old pieces of plasterboard on the floor to protect the floor tiles from things falling on them from above, Stuart turned his attention to removing the old waste pipe from the ceiling. We suspect that the main reason for there being a false ceiling in the apartment bedroom was to hide the waste pipes from the bathroom directly above it. Now that said bathroom has been decommissioned (and is now the utility room), there is no longer any need for the waste pipes to be there, so out they came. Meanwhile, I started to chisel out some of the old and crumbly mortar between the ceiling joists. As we now plan to open up the ceiling to expose the chestnut beams and the cotto tiles, there is a certain amount of repair work and beautifying to be done, the start of which is to knock out the old crumbling mortar and start again.

It wasn't long until we both ran out of steam - and with the rain now hammering down outside, along with an alarmingly fierce wind blowing, we decided to make a run for it back to the house to have showers, change, light the fire and turn our attention to less strenuous activities.

While I updated the blog, Stuart turned his hand to making a batch of marmalade - we'd bought bags of oranges for this purpose last weekend, but hadn't got around to doing it, so we spent the evening with the distinctive aroma of marmalade permeating the house as it bubbled away on the stove.

It turned into quite a late night in the end - largely thanks to the marmalade making, but we ended the night with 26 jars of marmalade for our efforts before retiring to bed.

We awoke early on Sunday morning to the sound of hail on the roof window, so we didn't rush to get up, knowing the weather was inclement. By the time we did finally get out of the house at around 9.30am, the rain had eased off, although the sky still looked threatening.

After a stop at Cafe Delice for a cappuccino and pastry, we took Reggie for a run out along the river at the chicken run. There was a distinctly chilly wind, and although we were spared rain for most of the walk, there was at one point a short sharp downpour which left us wishing we'd brought an umbrella out with us, even Reggie running back to us for shelter before realising we weren't carrying one of those rain-sheltering devices!

After our walk, we stopped off at Amanda's shop for lunch and to collect this week's homework before coming back home.

By the time we'd finished lunch, the weather had done a full turnaround and the sun was shining brightly. We'd earmarked the afternoon for finally getting some seeds planted so headed straight down to the poly tunnel. On opening the door of the poly tunnel we were hit by a wave of warm air - the temptation to just get a couple of garden chairs and settle down for a post-lunch doze was hard to resist, but with a whole tray of seed packets staring at us and the year marching on, we knew we needed to get on with the job.

We therefore spent the next two hours planting all manner of vegetables - we must have sowed over 100 individual plants of 26 different varieties, religiously labelling them and noting them down on a list so that we know what we've planted and when. We are hoping that we will be a little more successful at spreading things out this year, and will have a variety of vegetables ready to harvest at any one time, rather than having a glut of one thing followed by a glut of another. With that in mind, we plan to do another round of planting in a couple of weeks' time.

By the time it got to 4.30pm, the temperature had noticeably dropped, even in the poly tunnel, and with no more shelf space and rapidly running out of plant pots we decided to call it a day.

This evening we have been for dinner by our good friends the Phillipses - it's been way too long since we've managed to coordinate a get-together and proper catch up with them, so we are really looking forward to a social evening to round off the weekend.