The move to Tuscany : Raging torrents

With the chicken enclosure all ready and prepared with a sectioned off "introduction" area, the plan for Monday was to add an extra three hens to the farm - but first, Helen put in an hour or so's work in the office while I busied myself with taking Reggie for a romp around in the woods.

After a long route clambering through the lower woods below the house, I took Reggie back to the house and Helen and I got ourselves ready to head out to Pescia before Perondi (the "chicken man") closed for lunch.

As we were driving through the village, my phone rang - it was David and Sarah, who were in Pescia and had finished running some errands and were wondering if they could pop in on their way home. Since we were already heading their way, we decided to stop and meet for a coffee at a coffee bar at the edge of town.

After a round of coffees we headed back to the car park where we'd left the cars - only to find that our car was up to its old tricks again and wouldn't start. Thankfully there was enough flat space to enable David, Sarah and Helen to push the car out of its parking space and then gather a little speed along the flat so that I could bump start it. With the car running, we headed straight to the chicken man, only to find him shut - it had only just gone midday, so we were surprised to find he had already closed for lunch, but I guess he likes his lunch early.

We made an about-turn and headed straight home with Dave and Sarah following, as we had offered them a bite to eat for lunch.

Reggie was, of course, delighted to see them as it had been a while since their last visit and it wasn't long before he was demanding tummy rubs and dishing out kisses to our guests.

After lunch and an overdue catch up, our friends headed up the valley to do a few hours work cutting wood and we headed back to Pescia to revisit the chicken man, this time finding him open.

His wife arrived first and asked what we wanted: we asked for a pair of white Livornese hens and a single red hen as we find that our white one seems in general to be a much better layer than the reds. However, the Perondis were fresh out of Livornese so instead we plumped for three red hens. "Mrs chicken man" then headed off to the large shed/barn to fetch three hens.

Mr chicken man (Perondi) arrived shortly after and went to help his wife chase the hens around the barn (oh how I'd love to witness that spectacle!).

They soon arrived carrying three hens (upside down by their legs) and one cardboard box, expertly shoved all three hens into the box and weighed it - you pay by weight, as is the way for everything here in Italy.

We then loaded the car with a couple of sacks of chicken feed, then carefully put the cardboard box of hens in the back, paid for our goods and headed home.

Not really just a 'chicken man'

As soon as we got home we headed straight for the chicken enclosure, filled the food containers with fresh grain, added a bowl of fresh water, then took the box of hens to the temporary enclosure. We cautiously opened the cardboard box, expecting a blur of feathers as they scrambled to get as far away from us as they could, but instead all three of them just sat there in the box, blinking in the daylight... so that's where we left them... and I'm pretty sure that's exactly where they stayed overnight too.

On Tuesday morning I headed out to do a bit of work with David in Vellano, before coming home for a late lunch and to check on the new hens who were now out of their box but hiding timidly in the back of their shelter, this was clearly going to be a long process!

After a long hiatus, Wednesday was the first of a fresh run of "community days" - days on which we and our little community of friends all put in hard graft and labour on one property, taking it in turns to be the beneficiary or else prioritising those most in need. This time, Community Day was up in Vellano, the aim of the day being to help David and Sarah collect, cut, split and stack some firewood. Our friends Paul and Kathy joined the community group for the first time this time, although unfortunately Donatella couldn't make this one, but six pairs of hands certainly make light(er) work!

It was a very crisp start to the day, still only 2 degrees when we left home just before nine and as we climbed up the hill it got a little chillier.

This meant the initial chit chat was quite brief and we soon all got to work as a way of warming up.

After I'd fixed three pallets to the wall to make bays for sorting and storage of wood, Paul set to work cutting the uncut wood at the storage area, Kathy started a bonfire to burn through a heap of debris left behind after some terrace clearing, Sarah stacked the seasoned wood into the first of the bays and Helen, David and I went down into the woods to start cutting and splitting the wood piled up around the place.

Chief wood stacker

Choosing her weapon while Kathy gets the fire going.

Two empty bays... but not for long!

There was a real buzz around the place!

As David and I cut the wood to length, Helen split it and so the day went until Paul joined us in the woods to help finish the last of the splitting and Sarah and I wheel-barrowed the split wood to the store.

Not a bad view from the office!

Monte Lignana, beneath which is the lost village.

After a solid and very satisfying morning's work, we had burnt through a load of debris (and safely extinguished the fire afterwards) and had split and stacked all the wood from the one heap we were working. Everyone was feeling the warm glow not only from working up a sweat in the fresh outdoors but from having helped friends get a whole heap of work done.

We all headed back to David and Sarah's for a lovely lunch of nibbles, delicious onion soup, cheeses, fettunta and cheese on toast washed down with beer and wine before we all waved goodbye late in the afternoon and headed to our respective corners of the valley.

On Thursday morning we headed into Pescia to sign and collect a letter that our geometra had prepared for us to finally placate a neighbour who, since our electric gates have been fixed and closed, has decided to become something of a pain and a bully over what was his ancient right to access an old donkey track that runs from our gates a short way along the drive before heading up into the woods and eventually arriving at his property (that is, it would arrive at his property if the section of track from our land to his hadn't long been swallowed up and overgrown by the woods). Apparently if such paths/tracks have not been used for 20 years or more, the access rights lapse, and while we are quite sure he hasn't used the track for many years, we don't have the time, energy or desire to attempt to prove it, and giving him what he wants seems to be the path of least resistance - he claims he won't be using the track, and just wants documentation stating that he has access rights.

Thursday afternoon saw our usual weekly Italian lesson with Samantha - although this week I ducked out of the lesson as soon as my homework had been checked so that I would be available to help Mara and Franco who were coming over to administer a treatment into our beehive against the dreaded varroa mite that is wiping out bee colonies across the globe.

I ran a 50m extension cable up to the hive for Franco so that he could plug in their expensive bit of kit, and after he had donned all his bee-keeping gear plus a serious-looking gas mask, he headed up to the hive to do the deed - which took all of 60 seconds. The treatment is effectively fumigating the hive with formic acid (hence the serious gas mask), which kills the mites but as long as it is done in the right dosage, leaves the bees unharmed. We are very thankful to them for doing this for us - it might only take 60 seconds to administer the treatment but it's a 15 minute drive either side of the visit, so not an inconsiderable chunk out of their day, and, like us, they always have something to be doing around the home or land surrounding it. The hive will need another two treatments after this one to complete the course.

After sharing a coffee with me on the patio they headed home, followed shortly by Samantha.

Varroa mites in the hive.

Friday was a wet day, so while Helen tried to work in the office, I did so too - but with power tools.

As happy as we are with our new wood burner in the living room, the office remains the coolest room in the house and when Helen is virtually motionless for hours on end in front of the computer, she is still getting very cold. We have decided, therefore, to finally sort out (re-route) the flue for the small wood burner in the office. For those that don't know, this wood burner works very well so long as it's not too cold outside (which kind of defeats the object somewhat), the reason being that the majority of the flue (- around 6m of it, which is not insulated) runs outside the house. This means that when it's cold outside, the flue gases condense before escaping and wash filthy liquid creosote back into the wood burner (and then office), leaving a vile toxic-seeming smell and making it impossible to be in the room.

So our plan is to re-route the flue, running it through the ceiling of the office and into the guest bedroom above it - which will also then act as a radiator to heat that room - and then make a new hole in the bedroom wall for the flue to exit just below the roof line.

Job one in this project was to make a hole in the terracotta tiles that form the ceiling of the office and the floor of the bedroom.

A whole lot of dust and noise later, we had a snug hole for the flue. The next job was to remove the old flue from the outside and close the hole in the office wall.

Unlike the flue for the main wood burner, whoever installed this one had glued the sections of flue together, well of course they had, because it made my life harder - what else would I expect!?!

This meant I needed to chisel out a fair amount of stone in the wall so that I could yank the flue out of the wall - so yet more noise, in the form of hammering and falling stone, followed as the afternoon disappeared into a slowly receding light. Thankfully the forecast rain had not yet arrived.

Not conducive to office work i'm told.

Letting the outside inside...it's all the rage on Grand Designs.

As the light faded I managed to get the old flue off the wall and mixed up a bucket of mortar so that I could close what was now a gaping hole in the office wall. I managed to do so just in the nick of time, as along with the darkness came the rain, which got progressively harder and harder as the evening went on, and didn't abate for the next 24 hours.

The next morning we were amazed to find that the bucket I had used for mixing my mortar - which I had cleaned out the previous evening, had been filled over night: something like 12 inches of rain in 12 hours!

Filled bucket overnight

Saturday morning started with Johnny's arrival for our second Italian lesson of the week - this week it was just Helen and me again, as David and Sarah had an important meeting to try and secure a new house for next year.

We had a very productive lesson, flitting between combined pronouns, imperfect past tense and translating paragraphs of English into Italian.

Johnny told us that the river in Pietrabuona and Pescia was very full and that the last time he had seen it like that was more than 15 years ago when he was still at school - so we couldn't resist going to have a look. We could already hear the roar of the stream that runs along the edge of our land which is usually more of a trickle, and in the distance we could see a section of the main river in the valley bottom that looked like white water rapids.

We later found out that while we were sleeping that night (well I was sleeping, it turns out that Helen didn't find the sound of rain pelting down on the roof window as soporific as I did) that Pescia and the surrounding low-lying areas were in chaos, with roads flooded and impassable for several hours.

Our own mini-raging river. Seems we need to sort out some more drainage channels in the drive.

After we got home, the rain started up in earnest again, so we busied ourselves indoors with cooking - or Helen did at least, she made a batch of chicken liver paté, then a batch of carrot and lentil soup followed by dinner of Indian spiced vegetables before we finally sat down to eat some of the latter followed by an hour in front of the TV.

Sunday proved to be an altogether different prospect: it was dry and mild, reaching a humid 19 degrees during the afternoon, which made for sweaty work in the veg garden. Before that, we had a lazy start to the day, then mustered up the energy to walk Reggie in the woods so that I could show Helen a couple of large chestnut trees that must have come down on Friday night, before securing Reggie indoors and heading over to Montecatini.

That's a load more firewood nature has felled for us!

Our first stop was the pet store to stock up on dry food for Reggie, before going into OBI to get another couple of sheets of plasterboard so that I can get on with building the wardrobe in the bedroom the next time we have a wet weather day.

Once home, we sampled some of Helen's chicken liver paté for lunch, along with a little more of the Indian veg in tortilla wrap,s before heading outside for some work in the veg garden.

As tempting as it is to head back up the terraces behind the house and continue clearing, we had a kilo of garlic in the shed that was overdue for planting, and being mindful that we need to get the veg garden ready in good time this year, we headed down the terraces.

After reading my latest book on gardening I had decided it prudent at this stage to standardise the size of all the beds - not only does this make the planning of what to plant a whole lot easier, but it means that any insect or bird nets can be used on any bed interchangeably.

So, with a tape measure and some lengths of steel re-bar we headed to the veg garden to work out the length of the beds that would be optimal. The width has been dictated by a new set of hand tools on the market and used by a lot of market gardeners in the states.

Soon we had marked out our first two beds at 10 metres long and 75cm wide in place of where one much smaller bed had been.

We spent the rest of the afternoon rearranging the landscaping fabric and digging over the new soil to remove any bramble roots before raking over to remove stones and other detritus.

Finally in the veg garden.

Re-jigging the first bed

All beds will be 10m x 75cm

As darkness approached we had completed the first two of what we estimate will be 22 beds of this size ready for next year's growing season. It felt good to finally be getting some work done down the orto and we retired indoors filthy to light the fire and wash off the day's toil before settling into an evening of blogging and dinner in front of the fire.