| CdP | ||||||
| I was jumping the gun there somewhat, forecasting the End of Damp. A couple of days over Easter, a sunny hour here and there. But this spring has certainly been the dampest I can remember. People’s faces reflect the gloom. Everyone is at their wits’ end. This morning, both Mario and Vittorio were predicting the imminent arrival of summer-with-a-vengeance. I stopped up the lane to pick up mail from Mario’s, and we compared disconsolate notes on our vegetable gardens: broad beans that won’t grow, peas that refuse to climb, roots rotting away before our eyes. There’s simply not enough sunshine. And far, far too much water. I dread to think what’s happening to all my garlic which looked so flourishing. If it doesn’t all mould, it’ll be a miracle. Vittorio never seems to be able to get down here to prune our olive trees. Then again, he says he has clients all over the place with unpruned trees. He doesn’t like doing it when they’re damp. Which is the whole time. It’s never sunny for long enough for them to dry out. It’s a bit like my lawn, which is knee-high again, and my rampant jungle of weeds (the only things which seem to be growing faster than ever in the gloom) which are always too soggy to pull. On this count, though, we’re luckier than some. I was called in the other day by CF, whose garden I made over near Cetona a couple of years ago. “Mi mette tristezza,” she said – it makes me sad to look at it. Which considering that it’s situated in one of the most beautiful places, possibly on the whole globe, is saying something. I went across one day last week to talk to her gardener Giancarlo to see what we could do to make it more cheer-inducing. Well, for a start, she still hasn’t had a gravelled carpark made at the entrance as planned, so you arrive to find a broken-brick-filled mud bath welcoming you. And dear jolly Giancarlo, though he’s very chirpy, is a contadino rather than a gardener… which means that the idea of getting out a little fork or a trowel or even a hoe and rooting out weeds (rather than just taking a strimmer to them) is totally foreign. The garden is unspeakably weedy. But poor bloke, to be fair to him no tool would have made his task any easier at all under these conditions: that area there in the valley below Cetona is thick, viscous, completely unworkable clay. In winter it’s a sticky quagmire: in summer it’s concrete. I complain about our stoney ground up here, but give me ours over that any day. Quite different again from the soil in a new garden I’m working on, way over on the Tuscan coast below Capalbio. It’s metres from the beach, which naturally explains why it’s so sandy-textured. But it doesn’t explain why it’s such a rich dark black colour… and hardly a pebble in sight, never mind a stone. The odd thing, though, is that the clay beds around CF’s burst with crops year-round, whereas there’s something rather bleak and barren looking about the huge, barely undulating fields between the sea and Capalbio. The property where I’m working is an ex-pig farm. Let’s just hope that the ex-pigs didn’t leave any viruses about. | ||||||