Hello spring

In our last post we were about to embark on the preparation work for the reconstruction of the next set of terraces down below the house. As it happens, today marks the completion of the project. It has taken us two months to do, the most part of which (possibly the hardest part of the work - although that's up for debate) was the felling of around 10 trees, the cutting of them into 1m lengths, the stripping of the bark from those 1m lengths and in some cases the splitting of the 1m lengths into two halves lengthways. And taking delivery of 100 2m chestnut posts. And moving all of those materials down to the terraces. 

102 two-metre chestnut posts delivered to the drive.

10 tractor trips up and down the drive later, 102 chestnut posts stacked in the car park.

Around 200 (at this point) 1m logs with their bark stripped.

The "before" photo.

The actual terrace re-modelling/palisade wall building has taken "just" three and a half weeks of work - doing half-day stints almost every day.

We counted 350 one-metre lengths of wood (most of which we felled, cut and peeled by hand and all of which we carried to the terraces by hand) plus another 60 two-metre posts. 

The terrace below this one (which will be the last one that we plan to reconstruct/shore up) is a daunting prospect as it's even steeper and taller so will need even more materials. Hopefully we'll have forgotten how much work this one was by the time we start work on that one (which is planned for next year)!

As with the last set of terracing we did last year, while digging we unearthed countless pieces of broken pottery, some plain, some patterned, some shaped, some too broken to tell what it used to be - we really wish we had some way of finding where and when it came from!

The "find" that intrigued me the most in this round of digging, though, was this rather perished pair of leather gloves. Of course, it could well be that someone dropped them 10-15 years ago, but to a (very) untrained eye they appear to be finer and much more delicate than gardening gloves, and look like they belonged to a petite woman.

Of course, all of this work has been done during lockdown - just as last year's terracing was a lockdown project. While there has been no blanket national lockdown in Italy this time around, it has been operating regional "zones" according to severity of infection rates, with a sliding scale of severity of restrictions accordingly. Although the region of Tuscany has (so far) remained in the "orange" zone since early February, the province of Pistoia (in which we are situated) has been in the "red" zone for the last four weeks, with higher case numbers than elsewhere in the region. Officially that means lockdown, although this time around things have felt (to us at least) a lot less strict, with many more shops open than in last year's lockdown, fewer police checks, more traffic on the road and more people out and about. Unfortunately cases are currently still high in our local area - the more contagious Kent variant of the virus has unfortunately got a foothold, but perhaps the aforementioned less strict restrictions are also playing a part. 

For us, lockdown isn't a huge hardship. We know that we are very, very lucky in that respect. We are happy here at our property and we enjoy the lack of interruptions to our daily life that means we can get stuck into our work and projects without having to stop and start. Of course we miss seeing our friends, and we miss being able to go out freely (even in a place as beautiful as this we appreciate a change of scene from time to time), but overall our lives are not significantly affected.

So aside from lugging many tonnes of wood up and down hills and building palisade walls what have we been up to? (I have to think about that one as it feels as if we've been working on the terraces for a lifetime.)

Well, we've built on a small indoor project we started before Christmas: making soap. The batch we made before Christmas we mainly gave away as Christmas presents, but since then we have upped our soap-making game a little, learning about how the different essential oils behave and how well they hold in soap, developing different fragrance combinations, and coming up with a packaging theme.

We've sold quite a few to friends locally. For the time being this remains just a small project for private/personal use (we've learned there are many rules and regulations for selling to a wider audience), but it's something we aim to build on as time goes on (something to work on when the weather stops us from working outdoors!).

In the kitchen we've had a go at making sauerkraut, oat bread and buckwheat flour bread.

Sauerkraut pot.

Buckwheat bread

Oat bread

Toasted oat bread served with red onion, chickpeas,home grown kale, a poached egg from the chickens and drizzled with our own olive oil.

For the first time since moving here, we have had veg growing over winter (previously we just weren't organised enough to get it planted), so we've enjoyed being able to pick winter veg from the garden.

Fennels and garlic.

Rainbow chard and onions.

Broad beans.

Cabbages and broad beans.

We also had a go at making some bird boxes.

Stuart was brave enough to scale the ladder to put them up. Now we wait to see who moves in!

We had about a cubic metre of cut, chopped, split firewood stolen from our storage area near the gate - the less said about that the better! - shortly after which Stuart put his electrician/mechanic skills to the test and mended the electric gate.

We've had warm days, and eating lunch al fresco has become the norm.

Some days have already been too warm for Reggie.

But we also had a spell to remind us that winter hadn't quite finished, as this video of a local water wheel demonstrates!

Since mid January Stuart has been to-ing and fro-ing to the physio on a weekly (sometimes twice weekly) basis in an attempt to help fix the very painful elbow and hip he has been suffering with for over a year. Apparently he has a very severe case of tennis elbow and the same condition (also severe) in his hip (which makes it, what, tennis hip?). The visits to the physio seem to have provided some relief in that, while still in pain, he is now able to do things he couldn't do previously. However, the physio has warned him that, without a period of rest, he can't expect to make any progress towards recovery, so although the physio has been able to prevent things from getting any worse, he hasn't been able to move things forward while we've been working on the terracing project. In addition to which Stuart has spent a few weeks doing some work for a guy we know who has been clearing land at a property further up the valley - earning just enough cash to hand over to the physio to try to mitigate the damage the work was causing... So, a two-week "rest" period for Stuart starts from tomorrow, with only light physical duties allowed. 

We now find ourselves in that time of year when the fruit trees are in blossom, daffodils, tulips, crocuses, primroses, hellibores, hyacinths and even irises are showing their pretty colours. The air smells wonderfully sweet and spring-like and while the sun is warm there is still a lovely freshness in the air. 

Of course, this time of year also means the grass is growing like there's no tomorrow, so the first round of strimming will start next week. Stuart is banned from strimming (too much stress on the elbow), so I will start to tackle the job - it takes a total of around 16-18 person-hours to cut all of the grass, and cutting it into 2h stints means it ends up being like painting the Forth Road Bridge - so I will probably be strimming non-stop until the autumn!

While I'm strimming Stuart will be coming up with a plan for putting in some irrigation, re-plumbing our rain-water collection tanks (which are currently out of action as we removed them to swap them around with some new ones), planting more seeds and tending to the veg beds.

We also plan to plant around 6 more fruit trees, and it will soon be time to prune the olive trees, which is itself quite a major job. 

So, about that 2-week rest period?!

Flying through January

Already the Christmas festivities seem like an age ago and we are almost peering into the start of the second month of the year. A somewhat alarming prospect as we know that February can start to bring warmer temperatures and the wakening of everything all around us. Of course that's a delight to behold but at the same time we often feel panic stricken at the prospect of only having a short amount of time before we are faced with the barrage of jobs there are to do in the spring.

Winter has proved to be rather wet this year, and instead of being able to use our downtime over Christmas to get outdoors and get lots of jobs done, we were confined to the house for the most part thanks to two weeks of almost uninterrupted rain. A good excuse to sit by the fire, read books, watch films, but we did begin to feel a little stir crazy by the end of two weeks of it.

Soon after Christmas the weather also turned very cold - not extreme sub-zero temperatures, but cold enough to form a ground frost most nights and for us to make a fairly significant dent in our winter wood pile. 

A frozen pond.

Heavily frosted chestnut.

Beautiful frost patterns.

We were also treated to our first snowfall of the winter in early January. It only lasted a day here at our house, but stuck around on the ground for a week to ten days just a little further up the valley. The snow caused a fair amount of damage and disruption in the area, causing many trees to topple, the weight of the snow simply pulling them over and uprooting them in the soft soil. A lot of chaos due to roads blocked by fallen trees and unfortunately several people suffered damage to their olive trees.

We love this photo taken by our talented photographer friend Mara. 

Having had such a lot of rain and inclement weather we've made the most of every dry spell that has come along, and have been lucky to have had some stunning weather during those brief dry spells. 

As a small project to fill a short two-day dry window that lasted from 26-27th December, we finished cutting and washing out the 1000 litre plastic tanks that we'd had delivered some months ago, in preparation for turning them into raised veg growing beds.

In the next dry spell - which, thankfully, came as a run of a few days - we spent several days attempting to porcupine-proof the fencing around our upper terraces after having caught a porcupine on camera simply stepping through the pig fencing. 

For the porcupine it's as simple as stepping through the fence.

Porcupines seem to be particularly partial to a particular plant that we have growing all over our terraces and at the edge of the drive: Arum italicum. It would almost seem as if at this time of year their diet exists solely of the carbohydrate-rich roots of this species, such is the extent to which we find them dug up all over our land every morning. The plants grow wild, so that's not a problem for us, but their digging leaves sizeable holes (the roots are relatively deep) and destabilises the soil in the banks. For that reason, we decided to attempt to introduce some porcupine defences by running wire across the bottom section of the pig fencing, in the hopes of making the gaps too small for the porcupines to clamber through.

We hope this is sufficient to stop porcupine incursion.

We also caught foxes, a red squirrel and some form of marten (pine or beech, we're not sure which) on camera going about their business on the terraces.

Pine or beech marten.

Red squirrel.

Finally, we have finished dismantling the old shed below the lawn, and we have dismantled the rather wonky guest pergola (discovering that the ash poles we'd used to build it three years ago had rotted at the bottom) and reconstructed it using more robust chestnut poles.

All that remains of the old shed - we hope to use some of the lengths in the next phase of terrace reconstruction below the house.

The old, wonky pergola.

Ash doesn't like getting its feet wet, these posts even with gravel drainage beneath them have rotted to this degree in three short years.

Shaving down the ends of new chestnut posts.

A new, chestnut post pergola.

Sunny reflections

Our next major project will be to get going with the reconstruction of the next set of terraces down below the house. Having reconstructed the first set of terraces during the spring (full details here, here and here), we are keen to move onto the next set of terraces down - the eventual goal being to have all of the terraces below the house shored up and reconstructed in the same way and to be able to remove the ugly black weed fabric that covers the banks. It's a big project though, which will have to start with the felling of several trees - so we're hoping for another run of dry weather to enable us to get started!

Tanti auguri di buone feste

 

Wishing all our family, our friends both near and far, and everyone who reads our blog a very merry Christmas and a wonderful happy and healthy new year. 

As for many people this year, our Christmas has been quiet, with no visitors this festive season. Although we miss seeing our family and friends, we have actually really enjoyed taking things at our own pace and we have been making the most of the downtime.

A different Christmas this year. Wearing beautiful masks handmade and given to us by Helen's clever sister.

Christmas Day brought us a whole spectrum of weathers, from torrential rain and strong winds to hail and eventually sunshine - maybe not traditionally Christmassy weather, but quite spectacular nonetheless and we enjoyed watching the changing skies (from the comfort of indoors!)

To follow that, Boxing day has brought us more strong winds and much chillier weather, with a fair dumping of snow on the higher hills we can see at the top of the valley.

We wait to see if the wind calms down enough for us to venture outdoors to do some work - for now it seems pretty uninviting and the alternative - sitting by the fire with the dog and a book - is considerably more appealing.

Happy holidays to everyone, stay safe!