Keeping on top of things

The weather was forecast to become more unsettled and damper later this week, which helped focus the mind on what needed doing on Monday, and that job was to pour the concrete base for the water solar thermal panel.

After walking Reggie out in the woods I headed out to make the first of two visits to Frateschi to load up with concrete - 10 bags per visit totalling half a tonne of concrete.

Almonds!!

It was a warm morning and, having unloaded the last of the bagged concrete by half 11, I decided to jump straight into the job to get it done before lunch, which would mean that when Helen emerged from the office after lunch she would be able to do something a little more fun.

250kg each trip, 10 sacks.

What I had hoped/imagined would not take much more than an hour actually took two hours. It took an average of 6 minutes for each bag of concrete to be mixed with a paddle in the drill and then carried (up the step ladders) to the terrace, poured and trowelled - so two hours and a lot of sweat later I broke my midweek daytime drinking rule and slaked my thirst with a very welcome cold beer with lunch.

After lunch, Helen and I went down into the veg garden together to continue our determined fight to stay on top of things there this year. With us having doubled the growing space this year it's going to be somewhat more demanding and definitely something that we can't afford to turn our backs on, even for a minute.

We carried down and spread out the 20 bags of compost we'd bought at the weekend, we weeded, and we built half the bean supports so that we could transplant out our first 40 climbing french bean plants before calling it a day so that we could get ourselves into a respectable state to host our guests, Ian and Angelica, for a glass of wine or two before dinner.

We always enjoy having the chance to meet and chat to our apartment guests - Reggie, of course, is less keen on such get-togethers, at least until everyone is seated, at which point he seems to feel happy enough to settle down for a snooze by the door.

We spent a very enjoyably couple of hours with Ian and Angelica, a lovely couple, great company, and we looked forward to having them around the place for the coming week.

During our evening Ian had expressed an interest in coming along for a walk around the woods with Reggie and me, so after breakfast on Tuesday I went and knocked the door of the apartment and the three of us went off up the terraces.

By the time we got to the gates at the end of the driveway, which is about half way around our usual walking loop, Reggie had vanished. He never goes far, but Ian was wondering if he was OK so I gave my usual whistle to call him back, and nothing... we descended the lower donkey track into the woods, whistling as we went, only for a young deer to appear right in front of us on the path. Not quite the animal we were expecting and I think it was as startled as we were! It froze for a couple of seconds before making a u-turn and bounding off in the direction from whence it came ... a few short seconds after which Reggie appeared from the very same direction, out of breath and with tongue lolling from the corner of his mouth - he had clearly been chasing this deer all around the woods.

After leaving Ian to get on with his day with Angelica, and seeing that the rain forecast for today had yet to arrive, I decided it prudent to make a start on burning the olive tree prunings that were lying around the place in three heaps. The burning is the final part of the annual pruning process and if it isn't done fairly swiftly, we know all too well that the grass beneath will grow up and through the piles of branches, making the job unnecessarily painful.

'Arrivederci' pile 1.

Plums doing well still.

'Ciao' pile 2

If yesterday's work had taken twice as long as I'd hoped, the burning of the olive prunings made up for it, taking only half as long as I'd expected, and I'd burnt the two large piles before lunch time arrived.

With the skies still dry, I decided to mix up a bucket of mortar after lunch, and pointed another section of wall beneath the pergola - it's proving to be a slow process, but once completed it will mean we no longer have to weed this entire wall a couple of times each year in an effort to keep the area looking tidy.

There is a point to all this pointing.

With that little lot cleaned up I joined Helen back down in the veg garden where we planted out flowers into the ends of the veg beds, a mixture of nasturtium, marigold and calendula, which should look lovely once they are all in flower and will add some much needed colour to the garden right through the summer - not to mention the nasturtium being a great addition to our summer salads!

Before calling it  day we collected a second harvest from our lettuces, another 350 grams just a week after the first harvest!

Second harvest of 'Cos' and 'Red Salad Bowl' lettuce.

Getting some inspiration from somewhere, I decided I wanted to create and steam some cabbage parcels for dinner, so we put our heads together to dream up a recipe and set the food processor to work on: carrots, cauliflower, garlic, ginger, celery, courgette, onion and some seasoning to make a filling for the aforementioned parcels before putting them into the pan to steam for ten minutes. A ridiculously simple and healthy meal, but incredibly tasty, especially with a side of sweet chilli dipping sauce!

Asian inspired vegetarian food. It doesn't always have to be pasta!

It was an early start and something of a shock to the system, for me at least, on Wednesday, as Alain the bee man was due to arrive at 7:30am with 36 of his hives (which sounds like a lot until you realise that Alain has 500 hives...), it being always much better to move bees early in the day.

As it was, they arrived 15 minutes earlier than expected, which meant I hadn't quite finished making the coffee for them when the buzzer rang, causing Reggie to start barking - something I'd wanted to avoid, with our guests below no doubt still asleep at that time of the morning. Oh well, life on a farm isn't all plain sailing!

I arrived at the end of the drive with thermos flask of coffee in hand to find Alain and his worker peering through tired eyes deciding how exactly to build the supports for the hives. They were extremely grateful for the coffee and after a brief chat with Alain I left them to it so that they could get finished as soon as possible as we had our Italian lesson with Johnny up in Vellano at 9:30.

36 hives of honey bees!

We have a 'posto delizioso' apparently.

We arrived at David & Sarah's about ten minutes late for the lesson and settled down with more coffee and an exercise sheet based around spotting errors, which was quite good fun but taxing at the same time.

It was a damp afternoon on Wednesday, and having been asked by Paul and Kathy for some of our free-range eggs that afternoon I got to puzzling over egg boxes. We have three or four boxes doing the rounds between us and the friends who regularly have eggs from us, as well as a couple in the fridge which are slowly disintegrating, but as we no longer need to buy eggs, getting new egg boxes had become something of a challenge.

After a bit of browsing on the web I found a couple of ideas on good old Pinterest that I thought I might be able to use, so while the rain made a rather pathetic attempt at dampening things outside I sat indoors and got all crafty. After a couple of attempts I had something of a working template that I can use to package up half a dozen eggs, using the template to cut new egg carriers from cardboard boxes. I didn't quite finish the project though, so you'll have to wait to see the first full working version of our egg boxes!

Not quite finished template but almost...

Paul and Kathy duly called in to collect the eggs they'd asked for, bringing with them a delicious selection of pastries from the new pasticceria in town, which swiftly disappeared along with a cup of coffee each. After they'd left, we had an hour or so of watering seedlings in the poly tunnel and pottering around before it was time to get ready for dinner, once again, out at our neighbours Valerio and Rosanna's. So, come 7:30pm, clutching gifts of a bag of lettuce leaves from our garden and some cantuccini biscuits made by Amanda, we headed down the hill in the car in the rain for what was promised to be an evening of pizza and beer.

We feel very fortunate to have such lovely, welcoming neighbours, and we chatted the evening away with them (in our stilted Italian), as well as being entertained by their sweet new dog, Alia, a little 12kg female mixed breed dog who seemed to love dishing out the kisses and made Reggie seem positively gigantic at almost 30kg.

Dinner was once again very generous - of course it was not just pizza! We started with a farro, tuna and olive salad, which was followed by a selection of salumi and home-made flat breads, before getting to the pizza, which just kept on coming in different flavours (anchovy and caper, pepper and garlic, aubergine and mozzarella...) until I raised the white flag of surrender knowing there was bound to be desert. There was. Or should I say there were? First, a large bowl of strawberries and cream arrived, which we duly ate our way through... and then came home made creme caramel! What a feast!!

Not only were we treated yet again to such a delicious and generous meal, but we also left the evening with a gift: another book to add to our growing collection based around growing veg and our first one in Italian!

'To produce healthy veg' The New Natural Veg Garden.

After a coffee and a vin santo, we finally wobbled out to the car to head home, hoping desperately that Reggie had found nothing indoors to spend the evening barking at with Ian and Angelica beneath, and hoping he wouldn't be too put out when he smelled the scent of another dog on us. Thankfully all seemed well, and clearly the smell of pizza masked the smell of the other dog and it was Reggie's turn to dish out the kisses when we got home!

In the rushed start to the day, and my usual morning routine having been thrown out of the window, I realised as I climbed into bed that night that I had forgotten to take my thyroid medication in the morning. It was an awful realisation - such an easy mistake, but one with horrible consequences.

As such, I wasn't able to drag myself out of bed until gone 10am the next day and was feeling very lacking in energy and clarity of thought. As Helen had done the morning walk with Reggie for me, I was free to wake slowly with as much coffee as I dared until I finally found the energy to get into the car and go on a shopping trip for various bits and pieces: hose connectors, a hose, buckets, a watering can and wood from the timber yard were amongst the boot load of goodies I returned home with.

That little expedition conveniently took us up to lunch time, which gave me another hour to consider what I felt up to tackling in the afternoon.

I decided on working down in the veg garden, potting on various things, sowing a few others for succession planting, thinning the first sowing of carrots, before rejigging the hoops over the bed to accommodate a new insect mesh to protect the carrots, celeriac and parsnip from the dreaded carrot fly. With Helen's help we got the 12 metre length of fabric onto the hoops and weighted down after weeding and watering the bed.

Nice new insect mesh in place.

All beds now mulched with beautiful fresh compost

Artichokes being transplanted outside of the electric fence.

Re-potted these perennial Kale plants that arrived from England,
a rare Victorian species, hope it picks up soon after its journey.

Stunning sage.

They may be tiny, but the beetroots are coming!

Friday was a bit of an odd day, in which we seemed to be busy all day, but didn't have much to show for it except a full fridge after the supermarket shopping and our first five fly traps being hung in the olive trees after having been given building instructions and bait recipe from Paul and Kathy.

Fly bait...Wine, vinegar and sugar.

Plastic water bottle spray painted yellow (to attract the flies) with holes drilled around the top...

...filled with the bait then hung in the tree.

It was a matter of minutes before the flies arrived.

We'd invited our friends Mara & Franco round for dinner on Saturday evening and had duly planned a menu and done the shopping for all the required ingredients on Friday - except that, while brushing my teeth on Saturday morning, I realised we had forgotten to buy fresh chillies, a somewhat integral part of the recipe for the main dish. Feeling thankful that we'd made the realisation then, and not when we'd started cooking, we headed out for coffee and then to acquire some chillies, thinking that the enormous IperCoop over in Montecatini would see us straight.

After sitting in traffic for ten minutes on the approach road (due to a four-car fender-bender), we walked into the supermarket, which was rammed with Saturday shoppers, only to leave with just a packet of shallots - they didn't have fresh chillies, and we remembered then that this was the second time that IperCoop had let us down for chillies!

Next, we tried pulling over at a Sicilian roadside veg vendor, who also had none. We then tried the new Eurospin supermarket on the outskirts of Pescia - no joy - before finally conceding to a trip into our own Esselunga, where thankfully there was a happy basket of fresh green piccante chillies.

By the time we had then stopped to get our bread from Amanda, it was lunch time by the time we got home - something of a frustrating waste of a morning, coffee excluded of course.

After lunch under the now returned Tuscan sun, Helen headed out to do some strimming of the lower terraces while I lit the bee smoker and got into my protective clothing to go and inspect the bees. We had been waiting all week for the right weather (dry, not too windy) to do so, and with the acacia now in full flower were keen not to miss out on our first attempt at a honey harvest.

I was a bit nervous, having not been to check the bees for quite a few months, having them over winter to keep their warmth in the hive where, during the cold months, they form a ball in the centre of the hive to stay warm.

All went well though, and they seemed not to be too bothered by me, so I was able to fully inspect the hive, finding larvae, male drones, drone cells, worker cells, although not the elusive queen - however with larvae in the cells I hoped she was amongst the 1000s of bees in the hive somewhere and put the hive back together. This time, for the first time, I placed the as yet unused 'super' on top, which is where the honey will be collected, with the queen excluder between it and the main hive body (this means that only worker bees can access the top part to store honey, leaving the rest of the functions to continue down in the main hive body). All we need now is a good run of weather to coincide with the flowering period of the acacia, and we might have our first honey harvest soon!

Busy bees, the 'super' now in place on top of the main hive.

After the hive work I spent a while pottering while Helen continued strimming below the house, I tidied the grape and jasmine on the archway between the lawn and the guest garden before going and collecting a third harvest from the lettuce - a whopping 930g this time, meaning we've harvested almost 1.7kg of lettuce leaves from them in around three weeks with many more weeks of picking to come, why have we not grown lettuce before?!

Rustic eating grape very happy this year.

Jasmine growing well after a stagnant year last year

Harvesting the larger leaves from the lettuce

930g!

We retired indoors sometime around 4pm to make a start on dinner for Mara and Franco who were arriving at 7:30 and we'd set ourselves rather a lot to do: a starter of bruschette topped with a pea and broad bean mash, accompanied by a salad of grilled courgette with toasted hazelnuts and fresh basil, and then a main course of fried tofu in a sauce of soy, garlic, onion, ginger, chilli and peppercorns along with a lettuce parcel variation on the cabbage parcels we'd invented a couple of days before, and finishing with an adapted version of the Scottish cranachan fruit and cream dessert.

Chillies, onion and ginger!

As always, we had a lovely evening catching up our friends, they really are great company and so patient with our Italian. As opposed to our neighbours, who are lovely, but with whom we seem to understand around 50-60% of the conversation, we really feel comfortable with Mara and Franco and as if we are at close to 100% understanding - at least we can reach 100% with a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between us all. We laughed a lot at Franco, who enjoyed the spicy main course so much he was frantically waving cold air into his mouth whilst helping himself to seconds ... and thirds. After having cooked curry for them twice previously - and having warned them to expect it to be spicy - we all agreed that the main meal this time around was actually hotter and spicier than either of the curries we'd cooked for them previously! Absolutely delicious though, thanks to the recipe from the Ottolenghi cookbook Sarah & David bought Stuart for his birthday - we look forward to cooking lots more recipes from it!

After a lovely sunny walk on Sunday morning there was still time free in Reggie's diary for time to play with his collection of tennis balls, although he still hasn't mastered the art of sharing.

They're all mine!

We had a much-needed lazy morning Sunday while waiting for Ian and Angelica to pack their car before coming up for a cup of tea and a chat before they headed off for their second week of holiday somewhere nearer Arezzo. Yet again we have been blessed with lovely guests who seemed to thoroughly enjoy the apartment and the surrounding area, and another set of guests that we were genuinely sad to see leave.

Having given away half of our lettuce harvest yesterday evening to Mara and Franco, we decided to ask if Amanda would like to try some, with a view to her buying some for the shop, so we hopped into the car with a crate of lovely lettuce and dashed down before she closed. She took the lot from us, making us the princely sum of €4.50, and she said she would be interesting in having more each week! We may have to make a second planting soon...

A sweet smelling sea of acacia in flower around the pergola.

 After lunch on the patio and then much deliberation, we finally decided to make start on clearing the area behind the old shed we inherited so that we can see exactly what usable ground is there and how we might reinstate the old old fence that ran along the perimeter of the terraces amongst the bramble somewhere.

We have had the idea of fixing this old fencing, or maybe even replacing it, on our to-do list for some time but we had always intended on prioritising the fence that encloses the terraces above the house first, as the veg garden below already has an effective electric fence. That was until this week when what we believe to be our 'potato thief' of previous years returned, digging around and making a real mess of the terracing all around the the outside of the electric fence and its perimeter.

The mystery digger has not only been making holes in the banks of the terraces but also all along the edge of the veg garden area.

While working down in the veg garden earlier in the week I was puzzled for a while about some large rocks (bigger than my head) that had appeared in various places. Had they always been there to hold netting down? Or were they new? The penny finally dropped when I saw that one had flattened a large clump of sage, and I realised that our mystery digger had been digging in the bank above the veg garden, dislodging these stones as it did so, which then rolled down the bank, through the electric fence and into the garden. Thankfully most had stopped short of doing some serious damage but we have lost a handful of onions and garlic that were in the path one large stone. The potential for disaster is still quite large and in playing some kind of twisted version of Donkey Kong with our rocks we could lose a lot of our precious veg plants! Therefore, for this reason we've not only added reinstating the fencing around the lower terraces to our to-do list, but moved quite a long a way up. It won't be a quick (or cheap) job to do, sadly, but we've decided to work at it a bit at a time when we have the window to do so.

So, we duly both took a pair of hedge trimmers down to the awkward area alongside and behind the old shed and did battle with brambles for a couple of hot and scratchy hours. We also pulled out a fair amount of rubbish from the undergrowth - three years on and the rubbish keeps coming!

A different view.

Fighting bramble.

Is there no end to the "treasure" we will find?

After a couple of hours battling brambles it was time to down tools and retire indoors for much-needed showers and an evening relaxing at the end of a busy weekend.

Large visitor into the house Sunday evening.