The move to Tuscany : New territory

After the wet weekend we were looking forward to a clear sunny couple of days Monday and Tuesday, albeit a bit chilly.

After breakfast on Monday I took Reggie out for his daily run around in our woods - we're tending to avoid going out on walks further afield these days, thus avoiding such hazards as other dogs, people, bikes, joggers, and of course at this time of year, hunting parties. We made a loop from the house to the uppermost (clear) terrace then turned left into the woods, crossing over the old fence that encircles the terracing and then going off-piste through the trees and undergrowth until we reached the donkey track, then wound our way down to the driveway, from where we picked up the lower donkey track and headed back through the woods towards the lower terraces and veg garden.

As I had brought a pair of secateurs with me I made a right turn half way down the lower track to investigate what seems to be a fork in the track. As Reggie charged around in the woods I snipped my way slowly along the new piece of track for about 15 minutes until I arrived at a more open but bramble-covered area. As I was doing so, the weather forecast for the day completely let me down and hail started pelting down from the sky, leaving me and Reggie running back up the track and along the drive for the house. We reached the house more than damp and found that the hail had left puncture holes in the polycarbonate canopy above the door!

After the wet weather had subsided mid-afternoon, Helen and I ventured onto the upper terraces to start rolling all the latest piles of bramble and debris down towards the drive and eventually to the chipper for it to all be chipped and added to our compost piles. It's a lot more effort than simply burning it on the terrace in situ, but instead of releasing carbon into the atmosphere we're sequestering it in our veg garden, and in doing so feeding our veg.

On Tuesday I headed up to Vellano for the morning to join David in tinkering yet again with the water supply in the woods that supplies the house of our friends Paul and Veronica, before heading home for lunch. Shortly after lunch, the lovely weather we'd enjoyed all morning turned once again to hail, forcing us to stay indoors for a few hours - but around mid afternoon we decided to layer up and head out for a couple of hours of work before the light faded.

Helen yet again raked leaves from the driveway - not only to provide yet more compost fodder, but also in an effort to stop the leaves turning into their usual muddy, slippery, slidey sludge on the ground. Meanwhile, I busied myself with the chipping of the bramble and related detritus before shovelling it down the chute to the composting terrace so that we could build up bin number three.

Midweek was spent finishing the chipping that I left unchipped Tuesday evening while Helen worked in the relative warmth of the office. After a busy few hours' chipping (which turns out to be an excellent deltoid, trapezius and latissimus dorsi workout) we had a full third compost bin!

3 bins full, one to do..then we need more bins!

Cooling down after a few days, will need more nitrogen soon.

The rain made a return in the afternoon, which saw me joining Helen in the office, while she busied herself with the joys of the computer anti-virus world I was trialling some vegetable garden planning software from www.growveg.com, which seems like it could take away a lot of headaches over the coming months as we plan how much of what plants to stick where - it doe, however, come at the cost of a subscription fee.

On Thursday and Friday we busied ourselves with clearing more terraces up behind the house and making ready for the arrival of three new hens by fencing off a section of the current chicken enclosure and making them a temporary home for the period in which they need to be separated from the others in a bid to ease the introduction in a week or two.

The introduction enclosure.

On Friday evening we were indoors and showered at a reasonable time as we were off yet again to our friends Franco and Mara's - this time along with our flat screen TV and laptop so that we (along with Mara, Franco, their neighbours Silvia and Fabio, and three other friends) could enjoy a presentation given by the very nice guy - Andrea - who taught Mara and Franco about bee-keeping. The presentation was about Andrea's 6-year-old vegetable plot which he created after having converted from 'traditional' growing (by which I mean digging, chemical fertilisers and pesticides) to a no-dig system inspired by the Japanese Masonobu Fukuoka who rose to fame with his (in the gardening/veg growing world) 'straw revolution' in the 70s.

It was a nice evening, but an incredibly demanding one, as we tried to follow a very lively debate between the 10 people in the room about permaculture, no-dig and other growing systems, and then were asked to take our turn to try and explain our two years here and how we were approaching our own growing.

By the time midnight came, and after packing up the TV, laptop and cables, we were exhausted and headed home and directly to bed - the weekend promised to be dry and sunny and we wanted to get some work done outside.

On Saturday morning we walked Reggie in the woods, taking our time to photograph some of the fungi around at the moment and allowing Reggie a really good stretch of the legs, almost running into a deer as we did - thankfully Reggie was busying himself elsewhere at the time and the deer had disappeared into the woods before he could notice.

Mushroom season!

As yet unidentified...friend or foe?

After lunch is was back up the terraces behind the house to make more mess - you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, after all!

Sunday was a perfect day much like Saturday: lovely weather, a long walk (or stumble) around in the woods and then lunch in front of the fire before a physical afternoon out on the terraces.

We're now at the point on these terraces where we have clawed back the space we cleared last Autumn (finally) and have actually headed into new territory - terraces that we don't believe have seen the light of day for possibly as long as 60 years. We assume this based on a terrace survey map of the area that was done in 2002 (and previously in 1954), as well as the fact that the olive trees hidden up in the undergrowth up there are tall and mature and don't seem to have befallen the same fate as the trees on the terraces closer to the house (which were cut and used for firewood some years ago). We are now beyond what was shown as in use on the terrace map in 2002, and we can see the huge olive trees towering amongst the chaos of green - tantalisingly close to being freed.

Bite me!

We retired for the evening feeling quite pooped but thrilled by the new progress, with still a few months of clearing work ahead of us we're excited to see just how far back we can push the advance of the bramble before stopping to concentrate on the veg garden in Spring - not that the veg garden doesn't need a good few man hours putting in before then, but that's for another blog...!

..and in other news!