Black Plastic and Hose Bibs
I finally got around to reworking the irrigation pipes in the lower part of the garden this weekend, and I now have two new spigots down there. More >>
Yellow Broccoli, Yummy!
This week we’ll harvest the first yellow broccoli in our garden.  This is a fairly unusual vegetable and seems to be grown mostly here in Liguria. More >>

Treasures in the Garbage
When I lived in the states I was a garage sale freak, and almost every weekend I’d be prowling around in other people’s old junk. More >>

Broccoli Weather
In Italy these last days of January are called Giorni del Merlo, or the days of the robin, and are usually the coldest days of the year. More >>

Fiera!
Today was an exceptionally fun day for me because it was the day that the big open air fiera (fair) came to Rapallo. More >>

The Neighborhood
I love Via Betti , which is the street on which we live.  It runs alongside the big creek that empties into the bay in downtown Rapallo and goes all the way up to the top of the coastal mountains. More >>

Garden Progress
This January marks the fourth year that we have been building the garden on the cliff next to our home.   When we started the slope was covered in thick berry vines and dotted with scrub trees. More >>

Pruning Time
It’s finally cold enough that all the fruit trees in the garden, including the apples, have dropped their leaves, so I pruned my deciduous fruit trees today.  I only have seven trees, and they’re all just a few years old, so it didn’t take too long. More >>

Sunny Italy
Lots of parts of Italy remained below freezing for two days this weekend as a cold wave came down from Russia.  Friday and Saturday were filled with snow in Liguria and the mountains above us are all covered in white. More >>

Italian Landslides
We had an unexpected visitor in the garden this week, in the form of a large rock that just appeared by itself on a small flat area near the northern edge. This rock, which I estimate is about 400 pounds, just appeared one morning. More >>

Italian Dogs
I’m crazy about dogs.  My cats don’t permit me to have a dog myself, but luckily, I get to play with a lot of dogs on the streets of Rapallo. More >>

Red Hot Pokers
Some of my favorite flowers, the Red Hot Pokers, are just starting to come into flower in our garden these days.  These hardy perennials native to South Africa were called Tritoma uvaria for several hundred years, but there was some confusion due to the fact that there was a genus of beetles that also used the same name. More >>

Green Pheasants
The big news in our neighborhood this week was the repeated appearance of a green pheasant in the creek.  I’m sorry the photograph is so lousy, but when I had my camera the bird was busy eating something on the ground and only raised his head a few times. More >>

The Cliffs of Cinque Terre
About an hour down the coast from our home is a group of tiny villages built on seaside cliffs.  The name of this area is the Cinque Terre, because there are five main villages along the coast. More >>

Chrysanthemums
As far as I can see, the two countries in the world that grow the most chrysanthemums are Japan and Italy.  Japan grows some spectacular mums, and my favorites are the cascading plants that can hang down 30 feet or more. More >>

Olive Harvest
The olive harvest has started, and all over in the hills around here people have unfurled their harvest nets and are collecting olives. More >>



Friday, October 23, 2009

Horseradish and Millipedes
It’s just about horseradish harvesting time! Yummy! Most horseradish growers wait until the first frost kills the leaves, but I like to harvest earlier, not just because I’m almost finished with the last jar of prepared horseradish from last year’s crop. More >>


Pumpkins
This weekend I picked my first pumpkin. I really like growing big squashes, but my space is so limited that I have to hold myself back and just grow a few plants. More >> Italian Rice
I took the train to Milan last week, and was as usual impressed by the enormous agricultural activity in the Po river valley. More >> 


Grapes!
It seems a slight bit early, but the grape harvest has started.  The one grape vine we have in the garden is a legacy from a little garden that used to be down near our neighbors on the ground level. More >> 


Figs and Ferragosta
It’s fig-picking time here in Italy, and I get a significant amount of my daily snacks from the fig trees that are all over the place here. More >> 

Wild Koi
The coastal mountains around here are famous for their vast network of hiking trails.  The trails around the Cinque Terre are the most famous, but there are hundreds of others, including a bunch right near our home in Rapallo. More >> 

Garden Trouble
One of the things that I dislike about gardening magazines and garden experts is that they always portray gardening as an easy thing.  If one just knows all the answers, gardening is easy and foolproof according to them. More >> 

Trombette and Melanzane
More of my favorite Italian vegetables are starting to produce nicely in the garden these days.  The most spectacular vegetables have to be the trombette squash. More >> 

Testaieu
This is the season full of local festivals where the locals gather and all eat together under big tents.  Usually there are only five or six hundred people at the smaller affairs, but the really big events, like La Sagra delle Pesce (Fish) ten minutes up the coast in Camogli... More >> 

Cucumbers and Candycanes
As the first photograph shows, the cucumber crop is doing very nicely this year.  I usually grow cucumbers on a vertical trellis, but this year I wanted to try a horizontal trellis because I think the sun exposure is greater horizontally, and the clean fruits hang very nicely. More >> 

Poppyseeds and Monbretia
The big news this week is the little jar full of red poppy seeds that I’ve collected. Even though I had to cut out huge swaths to make way for the trombette vines, there were a fair number of big red poppy plants remaining, and they all produced a crop of the odd little seed pods. More >>  Snake Time
This is the time of the year when we see the most snakes. I suppose that some of them come out of the forests that surround us here when the hills start drying out. More >> 

Slugs, the Coldframe and Fungus
We’ve got some cool looking slugs here in Italy. This first photo is one of the dark ones I saw in the garden this week. I’m pretty sure he’s in the Arion genus.  More >> 

Tomato Explosion
Well, the garden is officially out of control now.  The vegetables are growing so fast that it takes an hour a day just to tie everything up and pull the most obvious weeds. Watering takes an hour at a whack and there’s so much semi-wild arrugula that I can’t pick it all.  More >>

Taccole: My Favorite Green Beans
Some of my favorite green beans are just now showing up in the markets. These are the green beans with larger, flattened pods that are usually called Romano beans when American seed companies sell them. In Italy we call these fresh beans taccole (tack-o-lay). More >>

Italian Red Poppies
Late May is when the red poppies are blooming all over Italy, and I’m very happy to report that my garden is now participating in this colorful extravaganza. Perhaps I should say finally participating More >>

Italian Hand Tools
I love my hand tools. When I moved to Italy, my largest packing crates were filled with tools ... Excellent tools, made to last a lifetime I thought. Well, so much for that theory. More>>

Building New Garden Beds

See photos of Rick's newly evolving garden beds ... "made on the southern border of the garden. The top bed was made by pounding stakes in a semicircle, weaving branches between the stakes, and packing with cut weeds before backfilling with dirt. More >>

Fave Harvest! One of my favorite things to do is eat things from the garden while I’m working. I’ve been eating fave (or fava beans) from my fave harvest for weeks now a few pods at a time. I also have great edible pod peas to snack on at the moment ... (What's next for Rick's fave patch?) More >>



Soil Sifters
Recently, Italy celebrated the Festa Della Liberazione in honor of the day in 1945 when Italian partisans finally liberated Milan and Torino from the Nazi and Fascist troops. Me, I’ll be busy today liberating another piece of my garden from the Rock and Stone troops. More >>

Useful (But Ugly?) Trellises
I use the river bamboo canes to build several trellises in the garden every year, but I’ll admit that I’m not crazy for how the trellises look when I first build them. More >>

Friday, April 17, 2009

Edible Nettle (And Other Uses)
It’s high season now for harvesting nettles here. When I was a kid this weed was sometimes a problem when I was tramping around in the woods in shorts, because it can really sting ... But now I think of nettle as a tasty plant. More >>

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Ain't Spring Great!
Well, we’ve arrived at that moment finally.  A bit late this year, but Spring is finally here. As I write this, I am for the first time since November, not wearing my long underwear. Ahh! What delicious freedom. More >>
 

Friday, April 10, 2009

Fennel: Shoots, Seeds ... and Memories

In the foothills of California where I grew up, wild fennel is widespread. When I was a kid I often ate a bit of the green shoots during my wanderings in the woods.  It was just like having a piece of licorice ... So, fast-forward forty years, and I just harvested a few cultivated fennel from my garden in Italy this week. More >>

Friday, April 3, 2009

My Ligurian Cliff Garden
A thin strip of coastal mountains that plunge steeply down to the shoreline, Liguria is the land of heroic farming; to make cultivatable land, Ligurian farmers have been piling up rocks to make terraces since about 600 BC when the Ligurians migrated down from the Alps. More >>

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Italian Farmers on Television
One of the features of the agricultural system in Italy that I really like is the enormous amount of television coverage that farmers receive. That’s fun for me, because there is always some ag program on somewhere, and I find these much more entertaining ... More >>

Italian Recipes
Italian recipes are different from American recipes. American recipes might typically describe how one can make a delicious casserole from ground beef and a can of soup. Authentic Italian recipes ... More >>



The First Tomato
Too early! I regularly push the spring season, andI enjoy the machismo of having the first tomatoes in town. I transplanted some dinky tomatoes and some Tromba di Albenga squash seedlings into the garden a week ago, and as the photo shows... More >>



Italian Fairs ... and Salami
While we’re waiting for it to stop raining, what we farmers in Italy do is go to the various fairs. Last week there was one in my town of Rapallo and I went with my friend Richard, who is a retired English submarine officer. More >>
Fava Beans are Blooming in Italy
Hooray! It’s the seventh day of March and my fava beans have finally started to bloom ...now that I live in Italy, and my neighbors are almost all Catholics, I go to festivals on saint days, and I use several saint days as planting days. MORE >>

Crazy for (Italian) Rabbits
I’m crazy for rabbits, and I can’t imagine anything sadder than keeping rabbits in tiny wire cages. For a while I was a crusader, and wrote a few magazine articles about how to build rabbit enclosures that the rabbits would enjoy. MORE>>

Friday, February 27, 2009

Italian Farm Trucks 
My blog is off to a bad start.  I realize I’ve already lied about trucks. As cool as my Vespa “farm truck” is, I must officially retract my previous statements. MORE>>

My Farm Truck

I don’t really have a farm, just an obsession with my Italian-style vegetable garden, and as much as I once loved my various cowboy trucks and cool sports cars, I don’t even own a car or truck anymore. More »

My Hanging Garden Today was cane-cutting day. I use a lot of tall stakes in my garden, and no matter how many I already have, I always seem to need more.  MORE>>

Festival Market: A Bunch of Baloney?

Saturday, January 17, was the festival of Saint Antonio.  In honor of Anthony, the town of Chiavari (a half hour down the coast from us) holds a two day festival every year in mid-January. More »