More spring sunshine

Monday was a glorious day to wake up to! 

Sadly, Helen was ensconced in the office for the morning and I busied myself down in the apartment to start the list of jobs to make it ready for the holiday season - this year we're determined not to have a drama that involves us working hard up until the moment the first guests check in!

So while I made a mess, Helen earned the money I was about to spend up until lunch time when I closed the doors downstairs and headed up to make lunch... which we had the joy of eating out on the patio... (if you find yourself turning a shade of green at those last few words then I suggest skipping the rest of this blog, it's sun and al fresco dining all week).

After lunch, Helen and I jumped into the car to meet David and Sarah down at Frateschi's the builders merchant so that we could load some pallets into our car for them and follow them back up the valley to their house.

With a boot full of the aforementioned pallets, we headed up to Vellano and unloaded them before carrying them a few terraces below their house.

At their new home, David and Sarah have inherited two 1,000 litre water tanks similar to the ones we have used to harvest rainwater. However, those at David and Sarah's house have clearly been there for much longer and have not had the benefit of sitting on concrete pads (as ours do), meaning that the wooden pallets they were attached to were not only buried but also mostly rotten, making the taps at the bottom of the tanks virtually inaccessible. The plan was to put the tanks onto nice new pallets so that David and Sarah can use water from them for their soon-to-be-created veg garden.

After a sunny hour or so's work we retired to their sunny new patio with amazing views of Medicina and Fibbiala to enjoy a cold beer before the sun dropped behind the hills.

After another enjoyable hour of chatting indoors, we headed down the hill back home to feed the animals and then ourselves, capping off a very enjoyable start to the week... Monday blues? Not here!!

On Tuesday morning I headed back up to Vellano to help David with some land clearing and burning while once again Helen toiled away for the ever valuable money that pays to keep the very old roof over our heads.

After lunch, however, we both headed across the valley to the hill opposite us to our friends Mara and Franco's house as they had asked to borrow our wildlife camera. 

Franco had recently found a few suspiciously large paw prints around the outside of the fencing that currently keeps their nano sheep, Cesar and Penelope, safe from predators. Mara and Franco have seen a wolf on their property once before some time ago, and suspected that's who the paw prints might belong to, but they wanted to try and catch their elusive guest on camera to see what evasive/protective action might be necessary for the sheep.

We were happy to loan them our camera and followed them down to the sheep enclosure to set the camera up for them.

After the camera was set we went back up to their house where Franco offered us a 'grappino' (a small grappa) to keep out the chill that had descended while we were out in the field on their shady side of the valley.

Knowing Franco had a special bottle of gold grappa hidden away we took him up on the offer and headed indoors to warm up and chat about various things relating to life in the valley.

Needless to say, one grappa turned into a second, and we left quite late having declined more grappa and a risotto in favour of.heading home to light the fire.

Wednesday was Italian with Johnny at ours and after the usual games with Reggie we all settled down to try and ram in the imperativo. At the end of the lesson, David offered to help me lift the old cast iron wood burner into the space Helen and I had made for it in the garden wall at the weekend. Not having to dash off anywhere today, as his next students, Paul & Kathy were away this week, Johnny offered to roll up his sleeves and pitch in too. So the three of us heaved the lump of cast iron into place in the wall - although it took a couple of attempts and a bit more clearing of earth from behind it before we managed to get it to sit properly in place.

Later on Wednesday I turned my attention to pointing between the stones surrounding the stove - in the fullness of time we will point the whole of the wall, but for now I concentrated on the stones around the stove, sealing it nicely in place.

Thursday saw more work in the apartment, this time plastering the bathroom ceiling and part of the bedroom wall, while Helen continued to work at her desk in the morning. The afternoon saw our usual weekly lesson with Samantha, this week covering more of the gerundio - the '-ing' in English!

After a morning doing odd jobs while Helen got some work done, the afternoon saw us running a list of errands. First, we did the usual weekly supermarket shopping, split between the two local supermarkets Lidl and Esselunga. Having headed to the supermarket to coincide with the lunchtime sweet (quiet) spot, it was still too early by the time we'd finished our shopping for any of the other, smaller shops to be open after their lunch break. To kill some time, therefore, we headed out towards Chiesina and stopped for a post-lunch caffe corretto (literally, a corrected coffee - an espresso with a shot of sambuca). Feeling suitably invigorated and warmed from the inside, we paid up for the coffees (€1.50 each) and made for the nearby garden centre. Here, we bought a couple of bags of compost for our planned planting of seeds at the weekend, as well as a few packets of some of the seed types we knew were still missing from our collection.

We then stopped off at the vet surgery to call in and make an appointment for Reggie to have a booster jab next week, before calling in a the wine shop to stock up on some boxes of wine, and finally heading back up the hill to unpack everything and start the weekend.

Saturday morning started with a phone call from our neighbour Valerio. I wasn't quite sure what he was asking/telling me, but I thought he was inviting us to call in and possibly take some plants... or wood.. or something. We had seen over the last couple of days that they had had a lot of work done in their garden and around their house. There had been the sound of chainsaws going all day, we'd seen a bonfire burning all day and we'd spotted a large tractor in the garden - it seemed they were having a lot of trees cut and tidied. Anyway, I told Valerio we would call in later in the morning on our way back from town.

So, after having given Reggie a run around in the woods, we headed out for a cappuccino and a breakfast pastry at the Delice cafe on the other side of Pescia. From there, we went to the large pet shop on the road towards Montecatini in order to buy a large tub of dried chicken - expensive, but Reggie loves it and, with no additives, it's a treat we feel happy giving to him. 

We then called in at Amanda's shop to collect bread, something for lunch, and our weekly homework from Samantha, before heading up the hill and pulling in at Valerio and Rossana's house. Valerio greeted us outside, where the woodmen were still working away with their chainsaws and while Rossana dragged Helen inside for a chat and a coffee, I chatted to Valerio and the main guy doing the work. Turns out that what Valerio was getting at earlier on the phone was that he was suggesting I might like to ask the same guys to come and look at the couple of trees that we need taking down - which I was very happy to do! The woodman (boscaiolo) took a quick look at a couple of trees that are way down on the bottom of our land and very close to the road (their position is such that, should we have another big storm, and should they fall, they could come down on the road, so it seemed prudent - as well as being our responsibility - to do something about them). He seemed confident about being able to easily take those down, and said he would come up to the house later in the afternoon to have a look at the others we need cutting.

Happy to have that under our belt, after a chat and a coffee with Valerio and Rossana we headed back home where we heated through the food we'd bought from Amanda's (farinata di cavolo nero and a breaded fish with fresh tomato and olives) and sat in the gorgeous sunshine under the pergola to enjoy our lunch.

We spent the afternoon in the polytunnel. To be accurate, we spent the afternoon melting in the polytunnel, such was the intense heat in there with a bit of spring sunshine. We planted a whole range of seeds including onions, artichokes, beetroot, leeks, spring cabbage, brussels sprouts, broccoli, aubergine, celeriac, coriander and chives. A satisfying afternoon's work!

The boscaiolo duly returned mid afternoon to have a look at the trees that stand awkwardly right between the power cable and the telephone cable. He was a bit flummoxed, but thought he would be able to work a way around it and promised to come back on Monday to do the work!

After showering and changing, we headed up the road on Saturday evening to David and Sarah's house - our first soiree there since they moved in. We had a lovely evening with a delicious spread of Polish themed food and whiled away the hours talking and laughing (and of course eating and drinking).

After a late start on Sunday morning, we whiled away the morning taking Reggie out for a walk and pottering around before having an early lunch and then turning our attention to work. On today's agenda was olive tree pruning. It was the perfect weather for pruning - blue sky, brilliant sunshine, a lovely temperature, and we happily stumbled our way through the pruning of in the region of 12-15 trees between us. Sounds like a fair number but it hardly even scratches the surface of what we have left to do!

When the light started to fade we came indoors and began an evening of cooking - we'd invited Samantha and her partner Mario to dinner on Monday and decided it would be a good idea to make a head start on the cooking and preparations on Sunday night, so we ended the weekend in the kitchen cooking up a Tunisian lemon cake and individual leek-topped cottage pies, leaving just a bit of assembly to do and a pear and gorgonzola salad to make on Monday.