The move to Tuscany : Spring has sprung and almost caught us out!

It's not that we haven't had ample warning that the seasons are turning, we've had 20 degree daytime temperatures for most of March, but it seems that since being away at the conference Mother Nature has flipped the "Spring" switch on us - not only was the change noticeable after just a couple of nights away, but things have seemed to gain momentum hence forth, and that's why this blog post is so late (a poor excuse we know, but this is the best (by a country mile) winter-into-spring period we've yet had, in that we've had no big disasters to deal with prior to throwing open the doors of our apartment for the holiday season, and we've been keen to keep riding the wave of progress until it no doubt breaks at some point upon the shores of problem-land).

So, we've had our heads down and have been determined not to let the weather get ahead of us.

After almost three full years here (expect sunny photos on the terrace with chilled Prosecco in the not too distant future), we have come to learn that life on a farm dictates certain patterns - that is if you want to stay sane. To race alongside the seasons is one thing, but to go head to head, well that's plain madness and we've learnt those lessons over the last couple of winters. To give you idea, once the vegetable garden stops producing in autumn and the weather cools sufficiently to work outside for sustained periods, we get time to turn our attention to other larger tasks, most of which up until now have been what we're hoping will be 'one-off' jobs, such as clearing terraces, planting trees, making new vegetable beds, putting drainage channels into the driveway, putting up fencing, building the chicken house, re-doing some dodgy plumbing, re-building the entire floor of a room in traditional materials just before paying guests arrive... you get the idea - all of which take us away from we 'should' be doing: growing veg, selling veg, and a multitude of other entrepreneurial schemes we have lined up.

As winter draws on, we need to turn our attention to collecting and preparing firewood for the following winter so that the wood has time to season properly - a very enjoyable and physical job but also time consuming, 'good wood warms you twice', as someone once said.

For us, this schedule is a little tighter this year as we have again agreed to allow our acquaintance Alain to put 36 or so of his 500 bee hives on our land to benefit from the abundance of what the locals call acacia tree, which is in fact false acacia, or Robinia pseudoacacia, known in America as Black Locust (sorry, I've been reading up on it).

The location for his hives will be down by the entrance gate, and possibly in the old quarry clearing where we currently have a nice little area for storing, cutting and splitting firewood away from the house. Once the bees are in situ, it will probably be wise not to go bothering them with a chainsaw, which means that we need to get the majority of our wood for winter 2017/2018 cut, split and under shelter before Alain arrives - which will be sometime before the month's end to coincide with the arrival of the sweet smelling flowers of the 'acacia'.

Recently, we've made a significant dent in this particular job: having estimated that this winter we have burnt in the region of 30 quintale of wood, or 3 tonnes, we now have 10 quintale or 1 tonne, cut, split and under cover, a further 10 quintale cut and split but in the fresh air (trees that were recently cut by the woodsman next to our veg garden), and we have started the third and final tonne, which we'll split and store down in the quarry until after the hives have been taken away.

So for the first time since being here we approach the end of wood-burning season with not only the next winter's wood in place, but also enough cut for the winter that follows that... which feels GREAT!

We've got this job done just in the nick of time however, as everything is growing - not only the grass on the terraces but the vegetable seedlings too. One we're more pleased about than the other, we'll let you guess which.

This signals a complete change for us now, and all thoughts of clearing terraces and ticking any further one-off jobs from our list MUST be put aside to turn our attentions instead to cutting the grass on all the terraces each month, watering seedlings in the poly-tunnel, watering veg planted out in the beds and keeping the weeds under control. Harvesting will soon follow, and with that comes the selling of the surplus and if there is too much surplus to sell then we must preserve. Having completely re-furbished what we call the utility room (previously the old downstairs bathroom) over winter (another one-off job), we're ready to get a large chest freezer in there to aid in preserving our harvests.

So this will form the mainstay of our routine for the coming months - that and welcoming a multitude of guests into our improved apartment for this year. Improved in that I've been busy on the rare wet days recently, fitting skirting boards, re-grouting the shower, skim plastering the bedroom and the bathroom ceiling, and a whole list of small but satisfying little finishing-off jobs - not to mention having built a new pergola outside, made from our own robinia and ash trees, a luxury we wouldn't have had the time to do before now, which gives a real idea as to how (just about) in control we feel at the moment, our own pergola having been made from no less beautiful, but shop-bought sweet chestnut posts.

So…how was that for going off-piste? Let’s get back to some familiar structure now that I’ve set a rather tedious context for it to slot into.

Monday I woke early still feeling inspired by our trip to the conference and the sun now shining brightly on the hills opposite makes it all the more easy to drag myself from my slumber. While Helen went out to exercise, I strapped on the strimmer and did an hour's grass cutting before breakfast. It felt good to be so productive before 9am in the morning - a pathetic remark, I know, but my combo of lazy thyroid and ongoing depression makes the mundane rather impossible sometimes, so today was good day… a very good day in fact.

After breakfast I went up to Vellano to relieve Donatella of a car load of old tyres that she no longer wants. This year, they’ll be what we grow our potatoes in, but more on that later in the season.

Potato land.

After lunch out on the patio I headed into Pescia with a list of bits and pieces we need to re-instate the irrigation system to our new bed layout, a job that couldn’t wait any longer.

When Helen emerged from the office into the bright daylight she spent the afternoon moving straw from our enormous roll in the car park down to a terrace below to mulch the ground where we’ll be planting a dozen or so artichoke plants in the hope that it will protect them while young and keep the other vegetation down while they grow. Having struggled to keep up with the productivity of just two plants last year we should soon be selling globe artichokes to anyone that wants them!

Artichoke land.

While Helen sweated away the afternoon I messed around with the collection of taps and fittings and hose until we had a nice new efficient system in place ready now to just add a dripline where needed and open the appropriate tap, all in the name of making our harvested rainwater last even longer through the summer.

The option for three driplines for each 75cm bed

All beds setup for the same three line option

This job did also take me into Tuesday if truth be told, during which Helen went up to the upper terraces to try and put an end to the tidying and raking up there so that henceforth all we will need to do is strim, forever claiming these terraces as ours, rather than lose them to the bramble as we have done in previous years when we’ve not quite got our timings right… well NOT this year, Mother Nature.

Wednesday morning saw our first foray together into the murky world of the Italian ‘congiuntivo’ with our teacher Johnny. I know from Helen’s lessons with Samantha on the subject that I wasn’t going to enjoy it, but needs must and apparently if you want to express doubt, it needs the congiuntivo, and who are we to re-invent the language (as much as we’d like to some weeks)? So demanding is this topic of expressing doubt that we spent the whole lesson just reading the bloody rules, not a single exercise! Those we were promised for next week, I could tell that it was going to be one of those subjects that rocked the foundations of our learning to the point of wanting to push the whole damned thing over, but we survived the ordeal with copious amounts of coffee.

In the afternoon, while Helen toiled away in the office, I set my sights on making a start, albeit a tiny one, on making a nice new how home for the tractor. This will eventually look like the wood shelter, but before any of that lot can happen we need to apply some levelling to the ground so that the tractor doesn’t roll away down the hill after being parked.

This, I decided, was going to be done with tree trunks to make a low wall, staked in place with more bits of tree and then back-filled with the rubble from what we'd taken off of the utility room walls (old plaster and the like), swiftly killing two birds with one stone, hiding a pile of rubbish and levelling the ground.

It wasn’t quick work felling a couple of trees, cleaning the side branches and then towing them down the drive into place with the tractor, but by the time Helen and I retired for a cold beer in the last of the evening's sun we had indeed moved a pile of rubble into a somewhat less offensive place beneath the tractor - one small step for one of our remaining one-off jobs.

The tractor park - a bit of work to do yet!

On Thursday I reluctantly headed off to Pisa after breakfast. I don’t like leaving our little hill at the best of times, but this was for good reason. I had been contacted by a lady from Alaska, who is now living in Pisa with her husband. She had seen me posting on one of the gardening Facebook pages I frequent from time to time and had got in touch. She was looking to swap or sell a composter with spinning barrels that she had shipped from the States but which she could no longer use due to back problems, and I was immediately interested.

Having considered the dimensions, it seemed that it would fit into our car with an inch or two to spare, so I told her we’d take it off her hands for €70. These things retail on the internet for £200-250, so it was a deal not to be missed, and since I was looking for a better and quicker way to compost our kitchen scraps than dumping them into a cold heap, this seemed worth the punt.

So, after strapping my phone to the dashboard with a couple of cable ties to use it as a sat nav system, I set off to find my way into the Pisan suburbs. Being an advocate of the usage of good, old-fashioned maps it’s hard for me to admit to using sat nav, but without the technology or a navigator by my side I may still have been driving around the streets of Pisa. Anyway, after finding Julie's house, having a chat with her, and somehow managing to squeeze this new magic composter into the car, I made it home for lunch - a morning well spent, I decided.

The new composter with spinning barrels.

After lunch it was yet more congiuntivo with the ever patient Samantha - a lesson which was no less painful than the day before's with Johnny. I’m starting to wonder if we can by without using the congiuntivo and just deciding to be certain about everything instead... although we're yet to be beaten and I’ve no doubt we’ll soldier on for a while yet.

To end the working week I had a bunch of errands to run in town, leaving poor Helen behind to stare at her computer screen. First was the farming organisation I am now a member of, ‘Coldiretti’, whose office is near the new flower market just south of town.

As a registered farmer, it was that time of year when I needed to present them with my receipts and invoices for 2016 so that they could submit them to the tax office for me for a ridiculously small sum - one of the services they offer to members, clearly subsidised by the membership fee although that was only €25 last year and as yet I’ve not been asked to pay for 2017!

It was now time for one of those experiences that thankfully have been reducing in number since our first year here: a total nightmare with the language - although in my defence, this particular misunderstanding was misunderstood over 12 months ago, and I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since then.

So to try and keep it short, as a small-scale farmer (i.e. selling less than €7500 of produce per year), I qualify for an exemption scheme, meaning I do not need to pay into Italy's equivalent of the social security scheme, effectively reducing the tax I’m liable to pay by about 25%.

Now this scheme, means I do not need to produce invoices, or even receipts, for anything I (we) sell - sounds too easy, doesn’t it?! Well... it turned out when I presented the nice lady (Sandra) with my three carbon copy invoices of what we’d sold to Amanda last year, that I’d done bad. My paperwork immediately elicited a tut from Sandra and she proceeded to explain at approximately 100kmph (they don’t do imperial here) what the problem was.

Apparently, not only am I not required to produce invoices or receipts, I’m actually not allowed to! What should have happened is that I should have asked Amanda to produce an ‘auto-fattura’, an auto invoice, for me!

All very odd, and while it makes my simple life even simpler, with this news I’m now more convinced there is a bomb waiting to drop around the corner - can it really be that small-scale farmers are so well catered for here in Italy?

For the time being, I went away with the knowledge that I needed to get my own three invoices replaced by Amanda with auto-invoices - assuming she hadn’t already submitted my invoices for her own tax return, in which case I’d have no choice but to take the hit and pay a higher price to Coldiretti for submitting my affairs. #EPICFAIL

Next it was off to the wood yard to see the lovely Elena. It had been a while since I'd called in and I was preparing myself for questions about our wooden castle that she was convinced we were building, but thankfully they never came and I was soon to talk through the bits of wood I needed to repair some wooden shutters for someone up in Vellano. Having been given only one of the six shutters last week, I could do no more than establish that it wasn’t a stock item, it would need to be machined by the carpenter to the exact size and thickness, and that for a guestimated amount might cost €25, so I left to return the following week with a firm idea of costs.

Being so close to the Phillips household at this point, and being the wrong side of the sweet spot in Esselunga to do the food shopping (which was next on my list), I decided to chance my arm for a coffee with Chris and Sue, having not been down to theirs for some months now. I found Chris on the patio with his nephew, Rory, but Sue was out on errands, so Chris and I sat and drank coffee for an hour, catching up with our respective rural lives before I headed off to the supermarket to do a trolley dash for our weekly supplies.

After a late lunch, and with David now being in Singapore with Sarah, Helen took David’s place as my co-worker this week and we both headed up the valley to our transient friends Paul and Veronica’s house to do a bit of work - strimming, raking and burning for the most part - before heading home for a chilled beer on the patio to welcome in the weekend.

After much consideration, and due to aforementioned bee timelines, we decided to spend much of the weekend processing firewood. There was a lovely weekend of weather forecast (I can count on one hand the number of times I said that living in England), so we decided to crack on and get ourselves ahead.

Working in the 'wood yard'

We love our tractor!

three quarters of a tonne stacked

1 tonne! (Piu o meno!)

The 'wood yard'

The final tonne will fill this..we hope.

After a busy morning with the tractor, chainsaw and splitting axe we had made a real dent in the first of three tonnes of firewood we needed, stopping for lunch yet again on the patio (apologies for labouring this, but it really does up our quality of life to have lunch together during the week and in the sunshine). After lunch we went back to work only to be interrupted (a welcome interruption I should add) mid-afternoon by the weary travellers from Singapore who had called in to say hi and to collect their own seedlings that had spent the week having their own little holiday here with us in our poly-tunnel in Pietrabuona.

After an all too brief catch-up, we waved our friends goodbye and got back to all things wood before retiring for the evening (see, I left out the bit about drinking a cold beer on the patio in the sun).

Beer + sun = :-)

Sunday had the potential to be damp in the afternoon so after a trip out for coffee and pastries we got straight back to wood working and by the end of the morning we had our first tonne (more or less) of firewood stacked to start seasoning.

After lunch (bet you can’t guess where), we headed down to the poly-tunnel for another round of seed planting and some potting-on as the brassicas in particular were getting somewhat carried away and as yet we don’t have the required protection to plant them out.

We had a productive afternoon amongst the tiny beginnings of what we hope will be the majority of this year's food - spinach was sowed, as were half a dozen other vegetables, celeriac was thinned out as were the cantaloupe melons and some of the second sowing of leeks that were hurriedly heading for the sunlight.

So a busy week and a long and late blog for which we’re sorry (in case anyone is still reading). We can’t promise the next will be either as we will be welcoming our great friends Mr and Mrs Smith (Paul & Marie) on Saturday for a week's holiday. We’re looking forward to seeing them after many months, their last visit being in June last year. This will be another new season for them to experience life on our little hill, so we're hoping they enjoy their time and that we get the lovely weather that is forecast.