Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.
Expecting great things from my passion flower vine this year. Grown from a seed in Norcia, and one of the few things we managed to rescue in the last escape, it took a while to get going again.
We've had a very strange spring. Dry, cold and incredibly windy in February, that dried out all the soil, then the howling wind continued all through March while the weather became like June. Then the temps dropped in April and we got the rain we were supposed to have in Feb and March. Through April and May it's been raining pretty steadily, interspersed with a few warm days. The result is that not a great deal of the work I'd planned ended up being possible to do.
But the poppies seem to love it. And in fact, everything is looking amazing. This was actually over a week ago, and it's even more lush now, with absolute masses of poppies, and the calendula growing enormous.
Last year I saw that we had very little elder in the area, almost none compared to the small forests of elder we had in Norcia. But then I found out that you can make a fine Robinia flower liqueur that is almost as nice as elder liqueur. So here it is. You just pick a big basket full of the flower heads, strip off the florets and put them in the jar (no washing!) with a layer of sugar over each layer of florets. It "cooks down" in a few hours so they're all in the same jar now. After two or three days, pour in 1.5 L of vodka, seal the lid and let it steep for four months.
I managed to catch the Robinia at its peak. Cascades of flowers and the scent on the air, blowing in through the bedroom window every morning, rain or shine.
Silene vulgaris, "Bladder campion" is one of my favourite wildflowers and I'm so glad it has decided to take up residence on the terrace. The mass of green in the back is the morning glories that are just poised to start leaping up for the sun.
Still having a frustrating time with the nasturtiums. Normally as easy to grow as beans, the ones I've had just refuse to sprout. Even after a good long soak only a few have come up. They flower well, though, so I think I'll get a few more packets and see if it was just getting a bad batch.
How to propagate basil. You know those basil plants you get in the supermarket? You can make them turn into dozens of plants.
Choose the biggest ones with the longest stems, and cut them so there's plenty of stem, stick them in a glass of water and wait. Toss the ones that don't produce roots and then plant them out when they get to about this stage.
Heavy on the strawbs this year.
You can also do basil from seed, of course, but it takes a very long time. I soaked these basil seeds and a great many more sprouted than did last year when I just sowed them straight into a pot on the terrace. To the right are beetroot seedlings, starting late, I hope the coolish weather lasts long enough.
First year's seed experiments still going strong.
Basil, cosmos, hollyhocks and my two beleaguered wisteria - first the snails ate them, then the cutfly ravaged their new leaves, then Pippin decided the seed tray they were in would make a good litter box. Not sure they'll make it. (Cats!)
In the big pots are a combination of self-seeded dill and in the middle, little clusters of sweet peas that are only now really getting going after our weird, cold spring.
At some point I'm going to have to break down and at least buy one of those portable mini-greenhouse things, the kind that's basically just a shelf on wheels with a clear plastic cover. Part of the battle has been the danger of late frost all through April, and the forever-to-be-cursed snails. I have no idea how they get up onto the terrace, but I've been having a snail-pogrom every week. I've had to resort to taking all the seed pots indoors every night, and putting them all back out every morning. A bit tedious.
Today's desk flowers: calendula and love-in-a-mist (Nigella sativa) with a little sprig of thyme.
Been a busy few weeks. Much to write about, but must concentrate on some writing-for-pay... back later.
Everyone has a book that started some kind of lifelong interest. This is the one that really got me gardening: "Betty Crocker's Kitchen Gardens" by Mary Mason Campbell and with illustrations by Tasha Tudor.
I had forgotten where the mental image of exactly these illustrations came from until I was looking at a Tasha Tudor page a while back and it hit me like a weird ghostly echo of a thunderclap out of the past.
It's funny how an image can stay in your mind for a lifetime, and how much it can go to forming your inner mental world. I must have only been a child when I first found the book in the library. It seemed almost magical to me, and in some way I don't quite understand it still does.
Even though I must have been very young, I knew when I saw it that this is what I wanted my life to look like. This was the world I wanted to live in. And what an indescribably strange feeling it is to hold it in my hand again and see these pictures and remember how important it was to me so long ago.
Anyway, I mentioned it all to a friend, how strange it was to have these exact images come back to me, and to find them on the internet, like seeing a ghost, and he bought the book for me for my birthday. It arrived in the post today.
~
First nice sunny day in a few days of rain and wind and chilly temps. Down to 4 C last night. I usually stick my nose out the door before going to bed to see what's happening, and if the kitties want to come in, and I could see my breath on the air. Extremely odd for May in Umbria, and especially after such a strangely warm March. It's as if March and May have changed places.
So much to do at this time of year...
Anna keeps telling me that the field poppies are just weeds, but I love them. I went out last year while they were just getting started and collected a bunch to transplant. Of course, they self-seed, and now they're all over. If you give them decent soil and enough sun they are really magnificent garden plants, though the flowers don't tolerate cutting. They just fall apart before you can even get them into a glass. But they're so beautiful. I love having masses of them all over.
There's actually a big block of tufa in there that he's sitting on. It's for standing on when you need to weed the bed.
The Big Round Bed is divided into three sections with these blocks. But it all turns into a big mass. Right now I'm sinking old bathroom tiles (beautiful blue... would have been awful in the bathroom, but they're nice in the garden) to create a bit of a barrier for the lemon balm in hope it doesn't just drown everything else... or get into a big fight with the white campion.
The Big Round Bed is mostly herbs, with three kinds of thyme, lemon balm, a pot of mint, big patch of sage, calendula (wild and cultivated), some kind of wild oregano that I found in the hills and brought down from Norcia, lavender, borage, garlic, and chamomile interspersed with flowering hellebore, daffodils, gladiolus, day lilies, thrift, dianthus. And now cosmos, which I seeded last year and didn't do anything and that have now come up all over, and is just about to start. I had forgotten I even put them there and thought they were stray carrots when they started. I'm hoping to see the blue corn flowers later too and the nigella sativa that I seeded last year but only got a few of.
Gardening is one of those things you either have to resign yourself to being disorganised about, or go completely OCD and make a list. I've never in my life made a list of things to do in the garden, but the other option means things are a bit disorganised and random. Today I was going to just fill the beet bed. I have a zillion beet seeds sprouting and I desperately need to finish their bed that I started a month ago. So I revved Gertie up and loaded up the buckets and spade and whatnot, and headed out. But we got to the end of the lane to turn around, and I thought, Oh, I need to cut some more canes for the pergola, because the grape vine is already starting to go nuts... So I stopped and got out and started cutting the canes... An hour and 40 canes later...
Now too tired to dig out the soil, so I just did four buckets worth and then went and sat down in the shade, all pooped out and read the Desert Fathers. Then was all... Oh, got to go put some straw under the strawberries... so you go over to the orchard to collect up some of the dried cut grass, and on your way you see the little bag of onion sets, the leftovers from the big onion bed you were going to put around about sort of randomly, just for fun, so you grab a stick to dig some holes and...
But at least nearly all the couch grass in Annamaria's iris bed is gone. For now, anyway. That was nearly two hours. I started it because I was too tired to lift another bucket of dirt.
Anyway, by the end of the day, the beet bed is still not filled. I did get nine buckets in the bed, but need at least that again. And every day the beet sprouts get bigger and more insistent about being planted out.
It all needs doing big and little, and battling the couch grass made me feel like I was fighting Morgoth. Found out why Annamaria's calla lillies aren't blooming. Damn couch grass has drilled into the rhizomes and used them as fuel... bastards. I dug up a bunch of dead and rotting calla rhizomes with very healthy couch grass seedlings growing up through them. I really went after them. Pulled up a bunch of the terrace tiles. Dug way down...Pull! Pull!!! PUUULLLLL!!!!
And then I made a fire and burned them... ha ha HAH! Take that, you jerks!
It's funny how it's so hard to stop, and then even when you're tired and grubby you find you don't want to go in. I remembered there was still a bunch of year-old firewood in the shed and thought, why not. A nice fire in the evening and a little sit-down with my magic book with the bats flickering around, at least until the light goes and the Night Bell rings at Sant'Andrea.
With the bucket of couch grass runners next to my chair. Grab a few now and then...toss em on the fire.
Well, a whole week away in Rome and Santa Marinella! The glorious liturgy of the Church for Triduum, including the pre-1955 Good Friday (four hours that flew past!), Easter feasting and evenings with friends. It's more excitement than I'm used to, that's for sure.
Bertie is certainly glad I've brought the Lap home with me.
Getting started on a New Thing
But one big practical reason to go to the City from time to time is the presence of the art supply store that sells ALL THE THINGS!
Poggi on the Viale Trastevere, I learned, has all the things needed to do classical, original-materials egg tempera painting. Right down to the fancy-schmancy agate burnishers and stamping tools, Armenian bole and all manner of arcane sizing and finishing potions for gilding and to decorate the gold. I'm not quite at that stage yet, being determined not to bite off more than I can chew with this learning curve. Strictly going one step at a time.
But I did take one pretty significant step forward.
No more commercial acrylic gesso for me!
Pictured, left to right, are about 400 g of rabbit skin glue granules, 1 kg of "polvere di marmo" - Carrara marble dust - that has a completely different texture from the regular Bologna gypsum - and a jar of ready-made True Gesso (that I'm not too sure about). The marble dust has the highest recommendations from the experts who are doing all the research re-constructing this medium. The difference is quite pronounced; marble has a texture like extremely fine sand or even fine-granule sugar or salt, while the gypsum is more like the chalk dust that used to collect at the base of the classroom blackboard.
Egg tempera painters call the rabbit-skin-glue-marble-dust/gypsum kind, "True Gesso" (always capitalised) to distinguish it from commercial acrylic gesso. The difference is rather like the difference between egg tempera painting and oil painting in general. Acrylic gesso is Novusordo gesso, a profane, modernist outgrowth of Protestant gesso.
It's a bit of palaver to make and apply, but I think that really just adds the value of authenticity to the work. And there's nothing more fun than learning something ancient and arcane.
Lost arts are the best arts.
How the Protestant/Secular revolution really happened...
Koo Schadler, the recognised queen of traditional egg tempera research and technique - whose book a kind benefactor bought for me recently - says something quite profound about the transition in the art of Christendom in the early 1400s...
In one of her articles on her website, "History of Egg Tempera Painting" she notes that the transition from egg tempera to oils was one of the things that changed our civilisation from a Christian to a profane or "secular" one.
"Greater realism suited the less spiritually oriented, more scientific and humanistic culture of the Renaissance."
It wasn't merely the usual story we all know - that society was changing from other factors, that humanism was being born in Europe through the influence of ancient texts newly re-discovered at the Spanish Reconquista. It was the influence of northern European painters, using oils, producing artworks of a completely different - profane - nature brought down to Italy.
"Northern European painters were not as immersed in an egg tempera tradition, and their guilds were not as beholden to a particular school or working method. Northern Europe also had a history of an early form of oil painting behind it [Byzantine/Christian Greek]. Thus it was in the north that more experimental materials and methods began to develop. In his book on the lives of famous painters, the 16th c. historian Giorgio Vasari credits Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck with single-handedly creating the revolutionary technique of oil painting. In actuality the use of drying oils in easel painting can be traced back to a long and gradual development.
"Oils were used in decorative painting and as protective coatings throughout the middle ages, probably earlier. These early oils were generally dark, thick, and not well suited to easel painting. But by the 1400s texts began to appear that described how to refine drying oils to make them lighter in tone, faster drying and have better working properties.
"A commercial renaissance was taking place throughout Europe and with it came the distribution of the new materials, methods, and the paintings that resulted.
By the late 1300s to early 1400s, northern European painters were working partly or entirely in oil.1 Slow drying oil paints blend more readily than fast drying, linear tempera. This makes it easier in oil to paint smooth transitions and three-dimensional forms. Because of its higher refractive index, oil is capable of darker shadows than can be achieved in tempera. Whereas tempera must be applied in thin layers, oil can be applied thickly (impasto), which contributes opacity to lights and highlights and makes them “pop”.
"In other words, oil is better suited to creating natural light effects, atmosphere and more realistic imagery in general. Greater realism suited the less spiritually oriented, more scientific and humanistic culture of the Renaissance."
...
- Panel paintings prior to 1400 are most likely pure egg tempera.
- Panel paintings from 1400 to 1500 can be either pure egg tempera, or a combination of tempera and oil, or pure oil. The later in the 1400s the work was painted, the more likely it is oil (although not necessarily). More linear brushwork indicates egg tempera; more smoothly blended, atmospheric work indicates tempera grassa or oil.
- By the early 1500s nearly all panel paintings were executed in oil (with the exception of icons).
I blame William of Occam for this too.
It really does explain a lot, particularly about why the northern Renaissance art of more or less the same period as the Italian art has such a markedly different tone or "feel". The subject matter is still broadly the same, since it is mostly the still-intact European Catholic Church doing the commissioning. But the northern painting of Jan van Eyck (c. 1390 – 9 July 1441) is already of a completely different nature - and obviously a completely different purpose - from that of Fra Angelico whose dates, 1395 – 1455, are about the same. And it's pretty significant, I think, that Fra Angelico has been beatified by the Church where his contemporaries, often much more famous and lauded to us moderns as "innovators," and later Italian painters like Leonardo and Raphael, are not.
It all rather hearkens back to what I was saying before about why modern "sacred art" - even when done by consciously devout modern Catholics for authentically Catholic reasons - fails in ways that we modern people have a hard time understanding clearly.
"This is why these modern "sacred art" paintings that try to "humanise" sacred persons using modern visual standards fail as sacred art. This is a function of Modernism, both in its artistic and theological expressions; the urge to de-sacralise the subject by naturalising it. But naturalistic visual language has become so ubiquitous - the photograph is now the only visual standard - that modern viewers of sacred art, while they may be aware that these works fail to do what they're advertised to do, fail to do what the art of Fra Angelico did, they often do not understand why."
...
The point with sacred art is not to depict the subject - the Virgin Mary or an angel, for instance - as looking like a particular person, but to depict a completely different order of reality, one that "eye has not seen..." and which cannot ever be fully grasped by the human mind in this life.
These details of paintings by the great transitional (late Gothic/early Renaissnce) sacred painter, Duccio Buoninsegna, (c.1255/1260 – c. 1318/1319) clearly show the development of Italian sacred art from its Byzantine roots. All the "canons" of proportion and form are present.
It is hard not to recall reading this article by Koo Schadler that the Protestant Revolution, that protocatastrophe that led us into all this modern misery, didn't start in notoriously secular and materially wealthy Florence.
~
It is good to be home
And there's lots to do. Going away for a week at the very moment the spring is making everything spring leaves you with lots and lots of work.
Beds to finish filling, things to turn over, cantaloupe, hollyhock, nasturtium and squash seedlings to plant out...
Home is best.
Now the question is, "Do I let him stay on the worktable while I'm gessoing and painting?"
On the one hand, Bertie has only just established this as his Spot. Poor chap has been a bit displaced while the other two are more assertive. But cat hair in the paint...
UPDATE:
I should have known. Poor old Bertram just can't catch a break.
One of the major challenges of gardening in Italy is the super-duper heavy clay soil. In the mountains the problem is pretty much no-soil; most farms up there look like they're growing rocks. But down here in the Tiber valley the soil is really deep. I've dug down to try to find the substrate but it's impossible with just a spade. We are in the flood plain of the Tiber river and the soil is really just silt. It's very good for growing, and has all manner of mineral nutrients, but though it's easy to work in the spring when there has been a lot of rain, it hardens into a dense grey brick in summer, and even in spring if there hasn't been a lot of rain (as there hasn't this year).
It grows the usual staple Italian things quite readily and hardly needs any amending. Aubergine, tomatoes, peas, bush beans, tomatoes, artichokes, tomatoes, finocchio, tomatoes and tomatoes do brilliantly. We have a lot of vineyards around here too, and the climate is good for olives. Also tomatoes.
Onions do well, but other types of less determined root veg really struggle. Carrots, parsnips, beetroot just can't push through the dense soil. So my solution is raised beds and hugelkultur, basically layering composted and fresh organic matter with the clay soil and the compost-soil that comes from Annamaria's 100-year old family compost pile. I also liberally seeded white clover, which is a good green manure and nitrogen-fixer.
Something I've noticed is that when I came the garden was a moonscape. I called it The Big Dry Patch, 200 square meters of compacted clay on which absolutely nothing grew but a few trees. Annamaria's family have worked it for a long time, most of the 20th century, and the standard contadina method is just roto-tilling and planting directly into the ground. This works as a temporary, that is single-season fix, but destroys the soil's natural substructure - all the little tunnels made by worms and beetle grubs and fungus mycelium. So when you till it and then let it settle down, it compacts into a brick, which the sun bakes hard.
When I started digging in it, I hardly ever saw a single worm and there was not a great deal of organic matter in the soil. Since then I've been building raised beds, the floor of which are just the native soil, and there has been an almost miraculous transformation. In just two seasons the moonscape is gone, and there is green everywhere. And everywhere I put a spade in, I'm not only finding worms, but those super-duper big fat ones. In one of the little round raised wattle beds, I was planting pepper plants from the garden centre last summer, and there were so many worms it was difficult to find a clear spot to put a trowel in.
I think I'm going to start vermicomposting next. I have to move next year, and I really want there to be a legacy here of greatly improved soil quality and useability. I'll be very sorry to leave it all, but having a really big garden has provided an opportunity for a kind of graduate course in organic gardening and soil management.
People often say, "Oh, I'd love a garden, but the work!"
The thing is, this is the wrong way to think about it. The work is the point. Americans have an odd expression: "yard work." And they use "yard work" as a way of punishing their children. This is not the English way of thinking of it, nor the Benedictine way. My grandparents regarded gardening as the supreme form of relaxation, and by this they meant relaxation of the mind. For the English, the garden, including the "work," was a place to escape to. The "work" - that my grandparents called "doing the garden" - is the purpose of it.
In fact, this is about a perfect summary of what we're all doing wrong in the world. We think the point is the goal. We think the purpose is to get the stuff with as little effort as possible. This is the "transactional" approach to life; the attempt to get as much as possible at the lowest possible cost. But that's not how anything real works. The point isn't the goal. This turns "the work" into a burden you try to avoid. The point is to do the work. It's the work itself that produces the reward.
For the Benedictine, manual labour is a great boon, a gift to steady the mind. While I was outside on the terrace all day yesterday, shoving pots around and building things, I found I'd created sufficient mental space to write, and finish the damn piece I have been working on for a week. I just can't write with the innernet buzzing away in my brain. I can't concentrate on anything, prayer, reading, thinking, while the world is shouting at me for my attention. A Benedictine abbess told me once, "Oh, doing intellectual work is the most tiring thing. You need a garden to help you rest."
Someone else asked me once, "How do I make the garden pay for itself in produce?"
I found this question incomprehensible. "You don't. That's not what a garden is for."
Someone posted a funny meme:
And it is funny, if that's why you're gardening. But I respond, as always, that I don't grow tomatoes because there aren't any in the shops. This is Italy, after all. We're not in the apocalypse yet. If I want carrots I can go to the shops and buy carrots. The garden is there for me. If it produces something I can eat, fine, but I need the garden itself a great deal more than I ever needed home grown carrots.
People fear work, and avoid it. This is the modernist mind. We are surrounded by "labour saving devices" that have started running our lives for us. So we have saved all this labour so we can... do what, exactly? Plato's idea that you need a class of people who do no work so they can pursue things like philosophy, art and science is a major theme in the utopian dreams of people like Gene Roddenberry - all the smarty-smart, "advanced" utopian aliens all do nothing all day but play Vulcan harps and write poetry. They probably eat bonbons. What a crashing bore! What a smug pack of bastards the Vulcans are! Don't you mostly just want to punch them and give them something useful to do? Did you notice something about Star Trek the Next Generation? These were people desperate for something real to do. What did they do in their off hours? They wrote poetry and played cards and mucked about in their simulators, playing pirates.
But like all these utopian ideas it doesn't work in practice because it fails to grasp that human nature is innate, and part of that nature is the need to work, to do things, particularly things with your hands and muscles. This is the great genius of the monastics; they fully grasp the subtleties of human nature in all its aspects, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.
My Uncle Mike, who gave up the kind of job you do wearing a tie to turn to the more satisfying work you do wearing gloves, put it very simply: "People like us need to work." And the big secret is that everyone - all humans - are the same in this way. And Modernia proves it for us. What do most of us do when we've "saved" all the labour? We're not reading great books. We don't write deathless poetry. We don't all create symphonies. Now that we've created a world where you mostly don't need to do anything at all, what do most of us actually do? Mostly we surf the net, and say nasty things on Twitter. Well DONe, humanity!
As for the simple fear of the labour in a garden tiring you out (when you get to a certain age, this is no longer a mere theory) I answer that, as my friend Janet said: "Two buckets a day."
The trick is not to let the thought of the work intimidate you to the point where you don't do it for a long time. This makes it inevitable that you'll have way more work to do when you do work up the nerve, and that makes you exhausted and want to not do it again. If you go out and do two buckets a day, or divide the big jobs into lots of little jobs that you take in steps, it becomes a joy, and you see steady progress. This is they way my landlady Annamaria does it. It's just a normal part of her life, this daily visit of the garden and farm, the doing a little bit every day of every job as it comes up in the great cycle of the year.
And I find that once I'm actually out there doing things, it's incredibly hard to make myself stop.
For people who balk at the work, the answer is mostly just slow down. That you can't get to a mature garden in a single year. The answer is time. I wish it were possible to just buy a garden in a jar and pour it out and have it look like Bag End, but the main factor that can't be replaced with anything, not money, not labour, not nothing, is time.
Watching the "making of" videos of LOTR, Peter Jackson, after having scouted the perfect location for Hobbiton, got the greens department working on it, and then let it sit and mature for nearly two years before starting filming.
This really is why I want a place of my own. More and more I find that the thought of moving and shifting everything every four years (the normal length of a lease in Italy) is just increasingly unbearable. There's barely been time in three seasons here to get anything even started. In fact, it's only two really, since I wasn't able to get started on my patch until the end of the first growing season, and now will have to leave next April. Gardening gives you a different understanding of time. To the urban non-gardener, time is portioned out in minutes and hours. To a gardener, as to a monk, time is portioned out in seasons. I've been here since April 2017. That might seem like a long time to an urban person. To a gardener that's a paltry three growing seasons.
The older and more hobbity I get, the more I find it is simply contrary to my deepest nature to be continuously on the move. Renting is akin to homelessness. But as a freelance writer, it's hard to imagine that I could ever have any hope of owning a home.
Now, with all that, it's clouded over a bit and is supposed to rain tomorrow, which means it's exactly the moment to go out and dig a few more buckets' worth of the carrot bed. And I found a little stray morning glory seedling starting in one of the pots, which means its time to seed them all over. No shortage of these. I've got two big jars from last year.
~
Don't you love before and after pics? This was the general mess of the terrace at the end of the first summer here, after a hasty and not very well organised retreat from Norcia. Fun and colourful in a chaotic way, but quite a mess.
Here it is this morning.
Strawberries and starter pots of sweet peas ready to go downstairs, pansies and herbs.
Sweet peas for the terrace, with their trellis, all ready to get going. The Sweets will only last until about the end of June, and then we just collect the seeds and replace the dying plants with marigolds and nasturtiums, which can be seeded now.
All the snap dragons are from seed last year. They lived quite uncaring through the winter ("winter") and started growing again in February. While they're amazingly robust growers, they're structurally incredibly fragile; just brushing by them carelessly will snap off the flower spikes. And I've learned that they don't like a small pot.
Neither do the morning glories. They did all right last year, producing lots of flowers, but they didn't get anything like as dense - and crucially, as shade-producing - as they did in the garden with similar light conditions. So no more small pots and little planters for them. I'll seed them in the back row of big pots and we'll see if there's a difference.
My last surviving rose from Norcia. It nearly died, and didn't respond well to being pruned in the autumn of 2017. It barely made it through last summer, hardly producing any new growth and not even a bud. But this spring in early February it started putting out leaves, so I hope it's finally over the moving shock. The trellis is for the passion flower vine - also a survivor of the move - that needed a good deal more support last year.
Mad trellis-woman goes nuts! Quite a difference from the before pic.
Going to have to go cut some more canes before the grape vines start. The fort-building part of my brain has been working out how to build a proper grape pergola, and I think I've got it.
When you just can't figure out what to do first, leave the house and putter about in the garden, where being disorganised and forgetful isn't really a high-stakes problem.
Re-arranging the terrace garden, to try to give as much coolth and shade to the sweet pea seedlings and pansies as possible...
...and as much sun as the sun-loving snap dragons and aquilegia want.
Sticks in the pots for the morning glories, that I should start seeding around about now.
They do very well as long as there is a deep enough pot.
They don't really have deep roots, and no tap root, but they didn't do well at all in the little hanging planters, so didn't produce the wall o'shade I was hoping for last year.
The little white flower is a wild bulb, called Star of Bethlehem, that grows all over the place, but I have no idea how this one ended up in my terrace sage pot.
Gathering sticks and canes ready for the morning glory trellis. Too hot to do the work on the terrace in the mid-afternoon. You don't live in Italy long before you figure out why everyone does their outdoor work in the late afternoons and early mornings. In the high summer, Annamaria comes over at dawn and is gone by nine am. I'll wait until the sun swings around to the west side of the house to put it up.
The terrace always spends a few weeks in spring being a big higgedly-piggeldy mess, a pile of seed pots, soil bags, starter trays... I notice that Annamaria does her seedlings in the shade so I think I'll move it all down to the garden this afternoon.
Midday is for hiding indoors.
Reading Tolkien...
And maybe doing a little baking.
A good Lent thing for tea: egg and onion tarts. (If you're not Ortho. If you're Ortho, I don't know what I can do for you.)
They're so easy. Take:
1 packet of ready-made puff dough from the supermarket.
1 onion, sliced into thin strips
tablespoon of butter of a bit of olive oil
2 eggs
1/2 cup of milk
dash of balsamic vinegar
handful of chopped herbs
salt n pepper
~
Caramelise the onions in a pan with butter. This just means letting them cook over a low heat until they start to turn a golden brown. Onions, surprisingly, have quite a lot of sugar in them naturally and they caramelise beautifully. While the onions are cooking, chop very fine a handful each of thyme, marjoram and a little sage, and throw these in with the onions when they're about half done and add a little balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. While the onions and herbs are cooking, cut out circles of dough and put them in your tart tin (like a muffin tin but with not such high sides). Place a little - very little - of the cooked onion mixture in the bottom of each tart. Whisk up two eggs and some milk as if you were making an omelette, and pour only a couple of tablespoons into each tart over the onion mixture. Bake at 200 C. for 15 minutes or until the pastry is turning golden.
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Some pics of the garden so far, and works in progress.
The plum. Always the first to get started, it had been flowering for a few weeks when friends came over a week ago, and was getting past its peak. All in leaf now.
Tea in the garden last Sunday, and after tea the last of the rosehip liqueur
Blue carpenter bee, Xylocopa caerulea, that are the first to wake up in the spring. Saw the first one in early February.
Added about 30 more daff bulbs this year.
Annamaria's hyacinths. She cuts them and takes them to her mother's grave.
Butterflies everywhere now.
Rosemary flowers mightily early in spring and they are an important early food source for our bees. The rosemary hedge has been doing much better since Anna and I trimmed it way back the first summer. You have to get in there and cut away all the dead and dry stuff.
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These pics are not by me. Neither I nor my camera-phone are anything like this good. I'll have to invite Marc and Becky back in each stage of the garden's season to get decent pics of it all.
Always more work to do. The day will never come when there's nothing to do in the garden.
New onion bed. Onions coming up pretty nicely now, and I think I'll add some sunflowers, because, why not.
Cutting canes. This was in February, so there are quite a few more now, and the ones that were too short are now big enough, so I think we'll go get some this afternoon. A massive issue in Italy is shade. You do everything you can to create as much as possible, so I think more trellises are going up. And besides, it's fun to build them.
