Gotta Love That Internet

What a superb year for the garden!

We’ve gotten just enough rain right when we’ve needed it (I have only had to lug the hose into the veggie garden once this season!); my harvests have been exceptional; no diseases have struck; no insect plagues (so far anyway); and, best of all, no deer, no groundhogs and no rabbits.  Something must be up with my karma.

Whatever the reason, I’m not going to argue.  I was discussing my good gardening fortune with a friend.   While early blight has struck her tomatoes, she agreed with me that this has been the best year for onions we’ve ever had.

The cabbage heads are nearly 18 inches across (!) and even my kid likes the carrots this year – they’re super sweet.

It’s a good thing that such excellent fortune has struck this season.  I read an article this spring quoting research from The Burpee Seed Company that said if you invest $50.00 worth of seeds and transplants into the garden, you can get up to $1,250.00 worth of produce as a result.

I’ve never kept track of what my garden produced and naturally I wondered how close my own garden would get to those research numbers.  So, I’m keeping track to find out.

I’ve added up my veggie gardening expenses (seeds, plants, soil amendments, etc) and now I’ve got a paper tacked to the fridge listing all my harvests by weight or volume depending on what’s picked.

When the garden is put to bed this fall, I’m tallying up the value of the produce I harvested using supermarket prices as a base.  I’ll post my results in the autumn.  So far I’m on the right track.

<< More Dirt on Gardening >>

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. 

The photo is of a plate of figs from our own tree that I’m going to try to dry.  One can see the sugar covering the outsides of these really sweet fruits.  I also find a fair amount of other figs free for the taking as I walk around Rapallo.

It’s sort of a Ligurian tradition to have a fig tree growing out of a rock wall in one’s garden, and there are hundreds of walls around here that have figs growing out of them.  Very seldom does one see a fig tree growing on flat land here, as flat land is too valuable to waste by letting a fig grow on it.

Our figs are little black ones and are really sweet.  I get them all to myself because my wife and mother-in-law don’t like the little black figs and instead prefer the huge green figs that appear most often in the markets. 

I find plenty of the big green figs too, and I eat both types equally eagerly.  My wife delicately peels all her figs before eating them while I just wolf down the whole figs skin and all. 
 
August 15 is a big holiday in Italy called Ferragosto.  This ancient holiday is attributed to Emperor Augustus, and represents the end of the hard spring and summer seasons’ work.  The Italians take this break very seriously, and this date finds almost all Italians on vacation. 

Driving around cities like Milan and Rome is amazing in August because the streets are all empty and the shops, bars and restaurants are all shuttered.  This is because all the residents are at the beach. 

In August, the population of Rapallo swells to ten times its normal size when what seems like all the residents of Milan come to enjoy their vacation apartments here on the coast.

Of course, the Catholics try to put a religious face on the holiday, and they celebrate the date as the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, or the date on which Mary ascended into heaven.  There are lots of religious processions involving carrying the huge crosses followed by food festivals and fireworks. 

I regret to admit that I’m so jaded that I didn’t take my wife to the fireworks this year because by the time they started the show I was already in my pajamas as usual at that hour, thinking about how I should graft some big green fig scions onto our fig tree one of these years. 

All in all, I’m a pretty exciting guy.

<>

The ladies have finally arrived!  We have 6 happy, young hens – and one happy little boy. 

If you recall in a previous post, I was supposed to get our chickens from a farmer friend, but that fell through.  It was very frustrating. 

As a result, we had an empty coop for months just sitting there waiting to be filled.  For a brief moment, I considered getting a rabbit instead!  Then, on a whim one night, I googled ‘Pullets in Pittsburgh’ to see what I would get. 

I ended up on Craigslist (which I had never used before) looking at a listing for 10-week-old pullets being sold by a young woman a mere 45 minutes from where I live.  Of course, I emailed immediately and we had a chicken pick-up scheduled within the hour.  Two days later I had my ladies. 

Two days after that, all the hens had names assigned to them by the resident 3-year-old.  Hammy and Cobby are Barred Rocks, Bock-Bock is a Rhode Island Red, Boo-Boo is a red sex link, and Flower and Buffalo are Welsummers.  The Rocks are a bit older and are laying already – gorgeous, plump brown eggs.  We couldn’t be more pleased.

And so now, every night, I do a quick scan of Craigslist’s Farm and Garden listings.  The neighbor across the street got himself two young turkeys from a listing there. 

Who knows, maybe someday I’ll get that rabbit after all…

<< More Dirt on Gardening >>   

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.  Most of these trails are the old pathways that people used for transportation back in the old days. 

The steep trail closest to our home leads up and over the mountain to the interior valley known locally as the “entroterra,” which just means inland. 

Up until a generation or two ago, this trail was the main highway between the coast and the interior valleys, and the farmers who lived in the entroterra would haul their products up and over the mountain to get to the market in Rapallo. 

These days the climb takes about three or four hours for a one-way trip.  I’ve heard stories of entroterra families who would send their children into town to sell a dozen eggs.  By my calculations, that’s about an eight hour round trip.  Boy are we spoiled these days.

One of our favorite hiking trails is the one that goes up to the top of the promontory above the super-chic town of Portofino.  The views are great, the forests are marvelous, and there are a number of surprises to discover among the dense growth, including a whole bunch of old water wheels and stone buildings that used to be water powered mills. 

People used boats to get here and then climbed up the mountain to one of the mills in order to grind their grain into flour.  At one time there were something like fifty mills on this little mountain, because there are a lot of fast moving little creeks here.

One of the surprises hidden in the brush is a little concrete dam that someone built years ago on one of the little creeks.  The dam is solid and still holds water, so there is a good sized pond behind the dam. 

The first time we discovered the dam the water was full of brightly colored fish. A closer inspection revealed that they were all young koi, maybe three hundred in all!  Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera. 

Later that summer, we returned and saw that seagulls and herons had eaten almost all of the little fish, but we also noticed the two large koi that must be the parents.  Over the years we’ve returned a number of times, and some springs there have been a few young koi again, but never anything like that first amazing scene.

Photographing the big koi is difficult, because it’s impossible to get down to the water except by going through a muddy overgrown mess to get down there.  The two big koi, almost three feet long, are also fairly shy, and disappear whenever I do crawl down there. 

Nonetheless, the pond is still a magical place, and we enjoy taking friends up there to show them the wild koi.  It’s a long hike to get up there, but nowhere near as daunting as the prospect of hiking up and over the mountain and back just to sell a dozen eggs. 

<>