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.

fresh compost going down before new plantings

the VERY early stages of new terracing maybe?

Salad season starts with wild sorrel from the garden

Found a monster spud in the cold compost heap

ALMONDS!

PLUMS!

FIGS!

and first out of the blocks...bracken!

Apricot!

Dead plum tree but rootstock seems happy

Japanese quince in flower, thanks Mara and Franco!

Me, and my... shaaaaaaadow! Oh, and a deer leg.

I LOVE my deer leg Dad!

Hmm, tasty.

Recovered cherry tree in bloom

Errrr... MY sofa, I think you'll find.

Inspiring idols - meeting the rock stars of the market gardening world

Last Wednesday saw us up and packing ready to depart after lunch for Umbria for our very first (and the very first, here in this part of Italy) conference on sustainable agriculture in the beautiful little village of Paciano.

We were close to not being able to make it to the event, having needed to find somewhere to stay that would be Reggie-friendly (Umbria is only the neighbouring region to ours, but it's still a 2.5 hour drive away so we needed to stay over for a couple of nights, and of course having Reggie in tow puts a more difficult angle on finding suitable accommodation), but at the last minute, Ruth, the organiser of the conference miraculously found somewhere in the neighbouring village of Panicale for us.

Just after lunch, the ever helpful Paul and Kathy arrived for a quick briefing on what they needed to do while we were away - namely, water our precious seedlings and feed our equally precious Florence.

After they left we threw the last of our stuff into the car and lifted Reggie into his crate in the boot (while he loves sleeping in his crate at night, he otherwise won't voluntarily enter it of his own accord) and headed off in the direction of the Autostrada.

Not entirely by design, we ended up taking the slightly more scenic (and slower) route to Umbria: East to Florence, South past Siena, then East again towards Arezzo before hitting Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, and at the end of a three-hour journey we arrived in Panicale and found our way to the house of Giuliana, our host. It turned out that, rather than being a holiday rental apartment, we were actually to be staying in Giuliana's own home - she had moved out of the apartment, where she usually lives, into the main part of the house above, to stay with her 91-year-old mother while we were in situ. We were slightly alarmed by the fact that all of Guiliana's personal possessions were in the apartment (Reggie is very good, but he's a dog, and dogs can be unpredictable!), that the tiny garden was unfenced, that there were two dogs living next door, and that Guiliana and her mother were just upstairs within Reggie-barking distance. Nevertheless, we made ourselves at home in the tiny, but pretty and beautifully restored apartment (which we later found out was the part of the building Guiliana's grandparents used to house the cow and the pig) as best we could.

So while Helen unloaded the car, I took Reggie for a long overdue stretch of his legs before carrying him into the apartment, as no matter how much we cajoled him, he wasn't going to enter of his own accord (this carrying was to become a bit of a theme the next two days).

We decided it would be best for us to stay in with him for the evening, and as such had brought food from home to cook for dinner so that we didn't have to leave that evening, so while Helen attempted to find suitable cooking implements in the kitchen, and Reggie paced the floor whining and whimpering, I decided it was time to open some wine.

Having snapped both of the arms off the only corkscrew we could find... the evening got off to less than a good start, but with the help of my trusty Swiss Army knife (but sadly not the one I'd left at home that actually had a corkscrew on it) I managed to dig out the cork so that we could at least enjoy a couple of glasses of wine in front of the open fire while Reggie continued to pace and whine.

By the time we went to bed I think Helen and I were both readying ourselves to pack up the car first thing and head home. Reggie's clear unease at being in an unfamiliar environment put the guilt trip on both of us, and we had no idea how we were going to manage the next couple of days. He refused to get into his crate at bedtime, and after having made him suffer the three-hour car journey in the crate and knowing he would likely need to spend more time in it the next day, we decided to leave him to sleep where he wanted - we'd put a cover (brought from home) over the sofa, so thought that if he settled there, all would be well. Helen and I each collapsed into bed and drifted off into an exhausted sleep - but just as we did get off to sleep, were woken with a huge spontaneous bark that must have woken Giuliana and her mother above us too. At that point Helen got up and managed to persuade him to go to bed in his crate, which soon led to a much more settled night for us all, and we both got off to a deep sleep - which sadly was interrupted by Helen's alarm at 05:50 as we had a lot to do before conference registration at 07:45!

With sleep barely rubbed from our eyes we headed out down the lane with Reggie strangling himself straining at the end of his lead all the way.

We managed to find a quiet road leading away from the village not far from the house so headed off up there for half an hour before turning back. Although it was a quiet lane we couldn't afford to let him off his lead (and indeed we passed not only a couple of cats but some free-range geese, neither of which would have ended well had he been free range as well!).

Sleepy eyes - not used to being up and out at this time of the morning!

After getting back to the house we gave Reggie some breakfast and lured him into his crate for the morning, desperately hoping that his early morning exercise would be enough to let him relax and have a snooze for a couple of hours and that he would stay quiet until we got back at lunch time.

We were soon parking in the pretty neighbouring village of Paciano - coincidentally, the same village we stayed on the outskirts of 13 years ago on our only Umbrian holiday together.

We found our way to the Palazzo Baldeschi, where conference registration was due to take place, but we were clearly too eager and found the doors still closed, so made an about turn and went for a coffee and pastry in the local bar before going back to sign in.

Upon arriving we were greeted by Ruth, organiser of the whole event. By this time we'd been Facebook friends for many months, and had bought sweet potatoes from her before Christmas for everyone here in the valley, but other than a couple of phone calls we had not yet met in person, so it was great to finally meet her.

The three of us went straight back to a now buzzing coffee shop where Ruth - who clearly knows anyone worth knowing in Paciano - introduced us to a lovely guy in his 90's by the name of Dr Sidney Holt. Sidney is a local in Paciano these days and had been for many years - I later realised that I had read a little about his work in a book on the sorry state of our fish stocks. He was a mathematician who was hired straight out of university to help with measuring the state of Britain's fish stocks after the war. He and a colleague created a model that would monitor these levels so long as correct data was entered into his model by other scientists and researchers. So important was his work, that he is considered one the most influential marine biologists of all time. I could have sat down and chatted to him about his work all day long had I not had a conference to attend and he a timeshare in Cumbria to head off to!

So, after another quick coffee, and a while spent meeting and chatting with other conference delegates, we headed along the street towards the Teatro Antico Sipario - a lovely recently restored building whose inauguration was coinciding with the conference today. We later found out that the building had been restored by a couple of brothers from Florence, one of whom spends most of his time at the flower market in our very own Pescia - we were three hours away from home and yet Italy still seemed no bigger.

After the opening we all spilt into groups, heading off to one of three venues on the main street of the village that were hosting the presentations. We headed straight to the old cinema across the road, where we bagged ourselves front row seats to listen to the rock star of the market gardening world, Jean-Martin Fortier, who Ruth had persuaded to come all the way from Quebec, Canada to speak at the conference.

There was a typically Italian start to proceedings, during which I found myself attempting to help try to get the audio-visual equipment working (once an AV technician, always an AV technician), after which we sat down to a three-hour talk by 'J.M.' as he likes to be called (explaining that folks from the US normally pronounce his French-Canadian name so badly he prefers the abbreviation). 

I had bought J.M.'s book last year and devoured it, and Helen and I had spent several evenings watching YouTube uploads of talks he has given at other events - making us feel slightly star struck as we've come to consider him/his farm something of a role model. He is famous for having set up a relatively small farm that uses very little machinery, and a lot of hand tools, to produce $140,000 of veg produce annually with the inputs of just 4 people. His underlying theme is efficiency - in every respect, he's kind of like the David Brailsford of the farming world.

We had already seen a lot of his talk in the YouTube videos we had watched, but J.M. was all the more engaging in person, not to mention the fact that we had the chance to ask questions about things that pertained to our individual situations.

We were really buzzing after this first talk, we'd enjoyed talking with J.M. and with some of the other delegates (we quickly realised how valuable it is to meet people doing similar things to us, facing similar challenges and with similar goals and motivations), but sadly we couldn’t hang around for lunch as we needed to get back to Reggie and find out if his behaviour had already caused us to be kicked out of our accommodation.

We had no way of telling until we spoke to Giuliana - who was out when we got back - but when we got back to the apartment all was quiet inside and there was a very happy, waggy-tailed Reggie to greet us when we entered and let him out of his crate, so we set up a table and a couple of chairs outside the front door of the apartment, used the long tow rope from the car to tie Reggie safely to a post, allowing him enough freedom to wander about but without wandering off, and laid out the food we had just bought from a deli in the village on our way through.

Half way through lunch, we were greeted from the shutters of the windows above by Giuliana’s 91-year-mother who is house bound these days.

Despite Reggie barking at her, she was insistent on trying to talk to us, barely half of which we understood, although part of what we did catch was an invite up to her house to drink orange juice!

We politely turned down the invitation, explaining (or attempting to) that we were lunching, and after a while and a few more attempts at inviting us up for orange juice, Guiliana's mother gave up and went back inside. As soon as we had packed our lunch away, we headed out for another walk with Reggie. This time, we took the car and parked a little way further along the same lane as we had used that morning, and with Reggie now on his extra-long military grade leash (tow rope + dog lead) we traipsed the length of the lane and back, until his tongue was lolling from the side of his face in exhaustion!

On returning to the apartment, we sat outside once again in a just-warm-enough garden until Giuliana arrived home around 6pm, when her mother appeared through the window once again, issuing us with another invite up for orange juice. Despite Giuliana's pleas to her mother to leave us in peace, her mother was insistent, and not wanting to disappoint, we decided we would indulge her and accept her hospitality. So, after putting Reggie back indoors, went upstairs for a glass of orange pop and a tour of the upstairs part of the house with Giuliana's mother - she was a lovely funny old dear, she insisted on showing us every room in the house, followed by lifting her skirt to show us her bad knees, and would not let us leave without an orange each. Poor Giuliana followed us round with a pained look on her face and thanked us for our patience with her elderly mother, but in reality it was a charming, if slightly bizarre interlude. We found out that Giuiana's mother was born and grew up in a farmhouse within spitting distance (and view) of the now family home, which is where Giuiana's father lived, and the two met, fell in love and married in their 20s. The whole building had been in the family for many years although it was split into two parts between Giuliana's father and his brother, and Giuliana has recently refurbished the former animal stalls on ground level, where she now lives while her parents have the upper floors.

Feeling on something of a roll after having had a surprisingly successful first day despite the rocky start (no complaints about Reggie whatsoever), we decided to head out for dinner together - something we have only done (just the two of us) twice since moving here. By this stage, Reggie had taken to hiding whenever we opened the door to his crate, and really didn’t want another spell in his ‘bed’ again so we decided it was probably OK to leave him on the sofa for a couple of hours, and off we went back to Paciano to grace one of its three restaurants with our hard-earned money.

We ended up in La Logetta, just inside the village walls. We were first in… and last in as it turned out, and had the restaurant to ourselves which meant a bit of banter with the waiter from time to time who it turned out had moved to this part of Umbria from Rome for a quiet life (although I suspect he would like it a little less quiet than it was this evening in his restaurant).

The food was lovely - traditional ingredients but nothing like traditional recipes, which made this rare treat even more special as we find that the lack of variety in our local traditional trattoria can be a little uninspiring. With a lovely meal dispatched we headed back to our dog and shortly after that to bed, Reggie having to be man-handled into his crate yet again at around midnight after having gone through the same rigmarole as the previous night: starting out with him sleeping "free range", but waking us all up with a volley of loud barks just as we were drifting off to sleep.

Despite the conference starting slightly later on Friday, it was another relatively early start for us, as we weren't going to leave poor Reggie in his crate for another morning without him having a good walk first. We headed back up the same road in the car, parking this time at the start of a marked footpath.

We found a lovely walk through the woods, which took us to a fishing lake seemingly full of carp. The woods were full of juniper and flowering broom as well as other things that are less familiar to us in our valley but were here in such abundance as to make it feel like we were all of a sudden much further away from home.

After a good hour-long walk and a belly of breakfast, we encouraged Reggie back into his crate for the morning and headed out for the car.

Just as we were getting into the car we bumped into Giuliana, who told us that last night Reggie had barked a lot and had frightened her mother. Our hearts sank. We apologised and explained that he had been out of his cage while we were out last night but that this morning he would be back in it, and hoped that would fix the problem. We also explained that we would be back at lunchtime for another walk, and hoped that would help make things calmer all round.  

Feeling a little subdued, we headed back off to Paciano, where we were soon cheered by the sight of the other delegates and speakers, and after a quick coffee and pastry, we were dragged away by Ruth as she was after some technical help for the speaker we were going to listen to this morning.

Charles Dowding is a market gardener and a pioneer of "no-dig" gardening in the UK. We have been following him online for a year or more since learning of this method of gardening, and had subsequently bought one of his books to help with growing this year.

While Charles' setup (in Somerset, UK) is on a smaller scale than J.M. (yesterday's speaker), he produces £20,000 of produce a year from his garden plot with only one other pair of hands to help and his veg gardens are a thing of real beauty. And while J.M.'s is a ‘minimal tillage’ operation, Charles' is a 100% zero-tillage, or no-dig operation.

Charles is clearly as passionate about educating as he is about gardening, and we enjoyed an intimate and interactive three-hour presentation from him in which he covered all aspects of his work. Helen and I even got to bend his ear at coffee break about his composting experience (and he ours about our life here). It was really amazing to have such intimate access to these people that we couldn’t quite believe it was happening - and in a sleepy corner of Umbria too! It was a real privilege and it was great to meet Charles and his partner Steph, with whom I have had regular useful exchanges on the no-dig Facebook group.

Once again, we had to forgo lunch at the conference and instead headed back to the apartment to release the hound, who we hoped had been quiet for the morning! We once again tied him to the post to restrict his trouble causing ability while we sat outside and finished off the cheese and salumi that we'd bought yesterday, before again loading Reggie and his long lead into the car for another lengthy walk along a different marked footpath from the same road.

It was warming up as the day went on, and by the time we were halfway through our walk - which afforded us some lovely views of the enormous Lake Trasimeno in the near distance - it was so warm I was putting my t-shirt into my pocket and I was mightily relieved to see the car come back into view at the end of the walk!

Back at the house we tied Reggie up in the garden and made a start on packing and tidying, before putting Reggie back in his crate for a final stretch and heading back to the conference in Paciano.

There was one final talk I wanted to hear, which was given by a guy who I had not come across before: Iain Tolhurst. His talk was advertised as being about composting with ramial wood chip - a topic I couldn’t miss, having discovered a little info on this since reading Will Bonsall’s book on self-reliance but then struggling to find much else around it on the internet. In his talk on Thursday morning, J.M. had also mentioned that he was starting to use these wood chips on his farm. With both an abundance of wood and a wood-chipper available to us, we are very keen to utilise what is supposed to be the very best of soil conditioners available.

It turned out that Iain (or Tolly) farms very close to Pangbourne - not far at all from our old home in Oxfordshire (for anyone interested, he does organic veg boxes delivered to the local area).

Tolly’s set-up is different again from those of the previous two speakers we’d seen, with a 20-acre farm and the use of a tractor and other mechanised machinery. The one thread that connects the three is that they all minimise as far as possible the disruption to the soil to preserve the soil fauna and funghi.

The focus on his presentation was again different, it was largely about building biodiversity and locking in carbon with the aim of becoming a carbon-neutral farm. The composting was touched upon, and I was happy to be able to ask him a couple of questions about the ramial chips during the presentation, but was also fascinated to hear that though his building of biodiversity (he has 350 species of beetle living in his ‘beetle banks) he has no brassica pests and doesn’t need to cover his cabbages - neither does he have slug or snail problems!

It was also interesting to hear him talk about carbon, but I won’t go into detail as this is something you need to care about to find interesting.

With the conference at an end, we dashed back to the apartment to load our things into the car, lift Reggie into the boot, say our farewells to Giuliana, and head off into the countryside between Panicale and Paciano to find the large villa where the speakers had all been staying for the duration of the conference, where Ruth had organised an apericena (drinks and buffet) to draw the whole event to a close.

We were blown away by the beautiful stone villa - 7 bedrooms, perfectly manicured lawns, a pool, open-plan living area, and a stunning view - and pleased to have the a chance to mingle again not only with the speakers, and the by now exhausted Ruth, but with some of the other delegates we had met, including Ray, a Canadian guy trying to get a business selling micro-greens off the ground near Orvieto.

Despite wishing we could stay for longer - in different circumstances we could have happily whiled the whole night away chatting with people, exchanging stories and experiences, and enjoying the company of like-minded people - we soon sloped away, knowing that we had a long drive in the dark ahead of us, and a less than thrilled puppy-dog waiting (im)patiently in the car.

We took the less scenic route home, using the autostrada most of the way, and we made the journey home in just two and a half hours, returning home to find a happy, well fed cat, and with a dog who was over the moon to be back in his own surroundings. Feeling exhausted from what felt like a lot longer than a two-night trip away, we opened a bottle of wine while we talked over the events of the past couple of days, before retiring to the comfort of our own bed.

For both of us, attending the conference was a fantastic experience, and we are very grateful to Ruth for organising such a great group of presenters. We learned lots, we loved meeting some of our market-gardening heroes, we loved meeting other people doing similar things to us, and we returned home feeling exhausted yet with freshly renewed enthusiasm, motivation and even more determination to get out into our veg beds and get growing!

Over the weekend, we managed to plant out our beetroot, chard and lettuce, and sow carrots, and we spent most of Sunday honing our woodcraft and wattle fencing skills - building a new section of fence and a gate to close off the guest patio area and give a feeling of a little more privacy. We are pleased with the results - all materials (bar the screws and hinges) having come from our own land.

And so there you have it - a productive week of learning and feeling inspired, followed by a productive weekend!