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!

More things that go bump in the night

In  this case, perhaps it was less of a "bump" in the night and more of a "creaking slide" down the hill.

When we first moved here, at the edge of the garden there was a shed, which quickly became affectionately known as the sh*t shed. It was a pretty old, barn-like construction (decades old, if not more) with a corrugated tin roof, and it housed all manner of rubbish and clutter - when we arrived it was literally full to the rafters with rubbish that we had inherited from the previous owners.

The first of our many concerted attempts at clearing it out was in November 2014, when we had our HelpX friends Nick and Tess with us and Nick spent a grubby afternoon amassing piles and piles of rubbish that he had extracted from the shed.

The removal of some of the rubbish and clutter allowed us to use a small section of the shed as overflow storage for our own things - tools and various items that didn't fit into the other storage areas we had set aside. So the sh*t shed briefly became a useful storage space for us until, in late July 2015, we received the bombshell from our geometra (architect/surveyor) that we needed to take the shed down.

This was all due to the fact that we were applying for planning permission to build a new tool shed (as well as erect a pergola and erect a polytunnel), and in order for permission to be granted for these things, we would first need to be visited by an inspector from Florence, and... because technically one is only allowed to have one outbuilding (the shed for which we were applying for permission), the geometra advised us that we would need to dismantle the poor old sh*t shed (he didn't call it that), as well as the chicken house (which, at the time, was a goose house). The full story is here.

When we reacted with alarm at the news that we needed to dismantle the shed (and would need to do so in double-quick time, as the news came just a week before the visit from the inspector was due to happen), our geometra relented, and said that maybe if we just took the roof off it, it would appear as if we were in the process of dismantling it, and that would probably be sufficient. So we opted for the less destructive (and less disruptive) approach, cleared out as many of our own things from the shed as possible, and prepared ourselves for the roof-removing task.

New homes were needed for our items.

The shed was mostly cleared out.

And so it was that a week later, our friends, the Phillips family, came to our aid and spent the afternoon helping us to remove the roof from the shed (as well as the sides from the chicken house).

And thus the sh*t shed was rendered bare. The inspector from Florence was seemingly appeased by what he saw and didn't raise it as an issue, and so there the shed stood, and continued to stand, in skeletal form, for several years, a reminder of times gone by, a nod to the past history of the house.

The shed continued to gift us more finds along the way. In April 2017 we unearthed more, er, "treasure" from in and around the shed:

The gift that kept on giving.

And even in April 2019, there was still rubbish to be pulled out, as well as the rusty pieces of corrugated roofing to dispose of, until finally the shed was clear:

Over the years we came up with a few different thoughts and ideas as to what to do with the shed. We loved it as an old agricultural structure, and we considered putting the roof back on, shoring it up, re-building it, turning it into an indoor gym area, and various other ideas.

In recent months we noticed that the uprights were no longer entirely upright and a bit of a lean had developed on the whole structure and we realised that we would need to do something with it soon if we were to keep it standing.

Then, one morning a few weeks ago, Stuart said "OH! look!" and I looked and said "What?", completely mystified as to what he was trying to show me... until a few seconds later my brain clicked in and I registered that where once had stood the skeleton of the sh*t shed, there was now an empty space.

Peering over the edge of the garden fence we saw the sad collapsed heap of the old shed. It had finally succumbed to gravity and the elements and had quietly slid down the hill.

Something's missing!

A different view.

A sad heap.

We were saddened by the loss of the shed, but Stuart had already begun thinking of how we could re-purpose it to give at least the sturdier elements of it a new lease of life in a completely different form. So, chainsaw in hand, I began cutting free the flat beams and we began constructing a form of raised bed at the edge of the lawn (just outside the fencing), using the beams - held in place between pieces of rebar - as edging. We then added some wire fencing to the top of the edging (in an attempt to keep wildlife out), planted the cypress tree that Dean & Gavin had bought us back in August(!), re-sited the bird feeder to the new bed, then mulched the entire area with wood chippings.

And now, the view from the garden looks like this:

There still remains the large part of the shed in, shall we say, "flat pack" form, halfway down the hillside. We intend to rescue it all and sort through the pieces, keeping aside the sturdy beams to be used in future projects (let us know if you have any ideas!), while those in more of a sorry state will be added to the winter wood pile. 

So, a bit of a sad tale, but the sh*t shed lives on, just in a different form and different location(s).