Safety first

After the last hectic week, this week started at a slightly slower pace, or so it felt to me, but by mid-week the pace had ramped right back up to full tilt and it is once again with aching limbs and rosy cheeks (rosy from the fresh air as much as from the glasses of wine) that we finish the weekend in front of the fire.

Stuart spent most of Monday raking leaves from the driveway and the lower donkey track, putting them through the chipper and moving them to one of our leaf mould compost bins. By the end of the day he had a cubic metre of shredded leaves, with plans to experiment with making a 'forest floor tea' to try and speed up the composting process.

One cubic metre of leaves.

Meanwhile, once I'd finished in the office for the day I headed up to the uppermost terraces to do a little more raking of the terraces that I had cleared last week - there is a huge amount to rake and tidy and already the piles of cut bramble are so large we can spot them from the road below.

On Tuesday Stuart headed up to Vellano first thing for a morning's work with David while I spent the morning as usual working at my computer. In the afternoon, we had our weekly Italian lesson with Samantha. We usually have our lesson on a Thursday, but this Thursday was a bank holiday in Italy, so we moved things around to make it easier for Samantha. She and I spent a while reading newspaper reports about the Italian referendum that had taken place last Sunday (the result of which was a resounding 'No', reflecting the unpopularity of (now former)President Renzi, who had vowed he would resign if he lost the vote) and what the pundits think. I don't know which was harder for me to get my head around, the politics or the language, but I certainly felt frazzled by the end of the lesson!

While I had been bamboozling my brain with Italian words and politics, Stuart had taken the opportunity to start tidying up a bit outside the back of the house. Somehow the back of the house always seems to revert to being a general dumping ground - tools, random lengths of wood, off-cuts of fencing, pots of paint, buckets, old broken deckchairs... Admittedly there are worse places these things could accumulate, but a tidy up every once in a while doesn't go amiss!

Wednesday morning saw Stuart with the paintbrushes out. He painted around the newly rendered piece of wall around the hole where the flue for the office wood burner now comes out of the spare bedroom, as well as touching up a few pieces of ropey exterior paintwork around the apartment - we'd inherited an old tin of exterior wall paint from the previous owners of the house, which amazingly actually did turn out to match the colour of the rest of the house - one of the few useful things they left for us!

In the afternoon, after I'd finished up in the office for the day, we both headed to the upper terraces to spend a couple of hours doing some much needed burning. As I mentioned, the piles of bramble were so huge that you could see them from the main road below (in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you could see them from space...) so we decided to start tackling them in the knowledge that there is still at least twice as much again yet to be raked into piles. We each set a bonfire going, one terrace apart, and spent a couple of hours feeding our respective fires with piles of bramble and tree clippings.

About an hour and a half into things, Stuart said he thought he'd heard an animal rustling in the undergrowth above us. We both stood still and watched and listened, waiting for what we thought must be a pig to make its next move. The 'pig' then started wagging its tail... in a very dog-like manner... before disappearing into the woods. Suspicious, we whistled and called for Reggie and a few seconds later a very familiar face poked through the undergrowth and came running to join in the fun. Clearly tired of being left on his own in the garden below, Reggie must have managed to open the side gate by repeatedly hitting it with his paw until he managed to hit it hard enough for it to spring open just long enough for him to bolt through... and then he had made his way up the terraces to find us. Goodness knows how long he had been roaming around the woods on his own. Stuart's first job for the morning was to tighten the spring on the gate!

How did YOU get up here?!

The creative urge took hold of Stuart on Wednesday evening. For several years, going back further than our time here in Italy, we have kept and collected all of our wine corks. We have a lovely pin board that Stuart and Kerys & Ben made from our used corks a few years ago, and we have been storing up both corks and ideas ever since. This time, however, it was all about giving back to nature: Stuart spent the evening happily gluing corks together to create a designer bird house (Kevin McCloud eat your heart out).

"Make a little birdhouse in your soul...."

Stuart spent Thursday morning doing various chores and jobs while I was working in the office, then in the afternoon we both headed up to the terraces once again. Stuart took his chainsaw, secateurs and pruning saw to tidy up the edges of the terraces above the house. We are trying to clear all the terraces to their full width: at the left-hand (as you look up from the house) edge of the upper terraces there is a small, shallow gully between the end of the terraces and the old fence that runs around the perimeter of all the terraces, so Stuart spent the afternoon attempting to clear right into the gully, cutting a few trees down and untangling some of the olive trees that are completely tied up in bramble.

Having originally intended to have another bonfire and get through a bit more burning, by the time I'd finished my office work, time was marching on and there wasn't really enough daylight for me to start a fire... instead of which I did the complete opposite and created yet more bramble and mess for burning - by taking the hedge cutters back to the top of the terraces and continuing to clear the uppermost ones. I didn't go any further up, but instead worked on widening the ones I'd started clearing last week to their full width. We now have a total of 20 terraces clear above the house. We estimate that there are another 15 beyond that, all covered in bramble but with many, many mature olive trees stuck in the midst of all the bramble.

The old fence at the edge of the terraces, which we eventually hope to repair and reinstate.

By the time darkness fell, the terraces were clear to their full width, I was covered in all the usual bramble scrapes and scratches, and we both came in feeling weary as well as somewhat apprehensive as to how our aching bodies would cope with what was to come the next day - a community day.

Friday morning thus started bright, cold and early, and while I was showering after a short (blink and you'll miss it) exercise session, Stuart was taking Reggie for a frosty early morning run around in our woods. After a quick bowl of cereal each, it was time to grab our coats, wave goodbye to Reggie and hop in the car.

We arrived at Donatella's house just as Paul was walking down her drive and David & Sarah were already at the house. After a quick coffee, it was straight to work to try and work up some internal body heat!

Paul started a bonfire to burn through some piles of prunings, while Stuart started cutting up some logs with his chainsaw and splitting them, Sarah and I tackled a large pile of enormous chestnut logs that had already been cut and needed splitting, and David and Donatella took their chain saws to some other piles of wood that needed cutting.

Sarah and I worked for a good couple of hours on the monster (both in height and diameter) pieces of chestnut until we'd finally got through all but the three knottiest pieces, then switched around jobs. Paul had had to leave temporarily to dash home to meet the plumber, whom Kathy had been waiting in for, and who had come to fix a problem with their heating system. Stuart had taken over charge of the bonfire from Paul, but then handed the reigns to Sarah while he went to chainsaw some more tree trunks while I wheel-barrowed split logs from where Donatella was now splitting, over to the wood shed.

After a little while more of that, I switched my attentions to Donatella's terraces and did an hour's worth of strimming - not my finest strimming work ever, and I barely managed three or four of the short terraces that run parallel with Donatella's drive, but hopefully it will have made some difference.

Paul returned once the plumber had left, bringing Kathy back with him, and while I was strimming, Paul and Kathy were back to tidying and burning, while David, Sarah and Donatella stacked wood and Stuart split some more logs.

Come 1.30pm, we had all worked up a hunger and a thirst, and it was a blissful feeling to sit down at the dining table in the knowledge that we had worked hard and achieved a lot. What followed was an amazing feast of cavolo nero crostini, breads, cheeses, spicy salami sauce, caramelised onions, a lovely zingy salad, a delicious lasagna and, just in case we hadn't eaten enough calories to replace those we'd burned off in the morning three times over, the meal was finished with one of Donatella's amazing tiramisus. I swear it's the best tiramisu in Tuscany!

We took our time over lunch, eating, drinking, chatting and laughing the afternoon away - days like this one really are my favourite kind of day: some serious hard work in the fresh air in a beautiful place, getting lots achieved, and above all, being amongst such a lovely group of people.

Come 4pm, we really did need to hot-foot it back home though, as we could only imagine poor Reggie waiting at the door with his legs crossed. He was indeed very pleased to see us when we got home and even more pleased when we decided to head straight out into the woods with him for another quick stretch of his legs before darkness fell.

Saturday was always going to be an indoorsy/admin type of day, not least because we were determined to get on top of our Christmas shopping, and with aching backs, necks, shoulders, arms and legs from the previous few days' activities, we were both immensely relieved to have the day off!

It was no less of a busy day though - we started the day with something of a treat in the form of a coffee and pastry in the Delice cafe the other side of Pescia. While earlier in the year we were in the habit of having regular morning coffees and pastries at the weekends, it has been a long while since we did it, so it felt like a treat.

Coffees dispatched, it was time to head to the large agricultural supplies shop on that side of town. We were heading there in search of some olive netting with which we were planning to cover over the top of our chicken enclosure.

We are somewhat removed from regular news here (partly by choice), but by chance I'd noticed a couple of days previously that one of the top search terms on Google was "bird flu". Of course, I checked it out and read the news reports about there being an outbreak in mainland Europe and that in the UK DEFRA is insisting poultry birds be kept indoors for a 30-day period. Feeling somewhat anxious, I first printed and laminated a notice for the gate to the chicken enclosure to remind us that we need to wear protective clothing when cleaning their house out, before thinking about how we could try to lessen the risk to the birds themselves.

Of course, the biggest risk to our chickens is spread of infection via wild birds, and their enclosure is open to the skies above, allowing other birds to come into the enclosure at will. An olive netting over the top of the enclosure would, we decided, be helpful in preventing unwanted visitors.

On arriving at the agricultural supplies shop, the guy immediately recognised Stuart and announced that they had a new stock of safety boots. We have both been working without safety boots for a while now as our previous pairs disintegrated more or less simultaneously about two months ago. We'd earmarked a model that we wanted to replace them with (which looked slightly more robust than our previous pairs), but they had been out of stock for weeks. The shop assistant looked slightly confused when Stuart asked for two pairs at size 43, but I wasn't going to let on (or allow Stuart to let on) that one of the pairs was for me, the wife who 1. does what is generally considered in these parts to be mens' work and 2. has feet the same size as her husband....!

Two pairs of boots procured, we asked about olive netting, and after a brief discussion we came away with a roll of 40 square metres of plastic netting - more robust than olive netting and sun resistant too, which, we hoped, would do the job nicely.

After an early lunch, we waited in for a visit from Paul, Kathy and our mutual friend Kelly. Paul and Kathy had just driven Kelly into Pescia for a hospital visit and on their way back home were due to call in at ours to collect our old freezer, which Kelly was interested in taking off our hands. We hadn't seen Kelly since some time in the late summer, so it was nice to catch up with her again, and of course it's always a pleasure to see Paul & Kathy. After a coffee, some biscuits kindly brought by our visitors, and a good chat, they headed off with the freezer in the boot... which meant we could put off the inevitable no longer and it was time for us to do the dreaded supermarket shop.

The rest of our day was spent supermarket shopping, followed by sitting in front of our computers getting increasingly frustrated as we battled against a mood-killer combo of a patchy internet connection and the uphill struggle that is Christmas shopping. In the end, we threw the towel in at about 8pm and fell onto the sofa exhausted from the tension.

After having had the day away from physical outdoor work on Saturday, it was time to get back to it on Sunday. After a late breakfast, we put our (shiny new) boots on and headed up to the chicken enclosure. The first job was to give the olive tree in the enclosure a good pruning, after which we started the process of lugging the roll of netting over the fence and unrolling it, attaching it to the fence at the sides, straightening it, putting posts in the middle of the enclosure to hold it up ... and that was just the first 3m. It soon became clear that this wasn't going to be a quick job.

Safety first!

The last time we attempted to prune this olive tree we were being attacked by angry geese!

Poor Reggie had a miserable morning, with a group of hunters on the hill directly opposite our house. The shots that rang out every now and then were deafening, and the sounds of the hunters shouting and the dogs barking were the non-stop soundtrack to our morning. It didn't make for a happy dog on our side of the valley! Thankfully, they moved a little further away after lunch, so we decided it was safe enough to take Reggie out for a run around in the woods without the danger of him dashing off to try and find the hunters/their dogs and give them a piece of his mind.

Spot the hunters in orange hi vis.

After we'd safely installed Reggie back in the garden for an altogether quieter afternoon, we returned to the chicken enclosure, hooking the next section of netting over the roof of the chicken house, tying it to the first section, and securing it to the fence. It soon became clear that we didn't, actually, have enough netting (or cable ties) to finish the job, so we rolled out the final section as far as it would go before getting the tape measure out to work out exactly how much more netting we need. We'd managed to cover around two thirds of the enclosure - not the completed job we'd hoped for, but a good start.

With no more we could do on the chicken enclosure until we have more materials, and the temperature starting to fall, we came indoors at about 4.30pm to light the fire and settle down for a quiet evening in preparation for the week ahead.