We’re locked into the same no-rain pattern as last year. When did a single drop last fall? It must have been two months now. I can’t bring myself to spend my days moving the sprinklers about the lawn. I’m letting it go brown. That’s the colour grass is meant to be in summer. It’ll come back.
The exception is the bit of lawn which I rather foolishly planted up on the levels above where the caravan used to be. I sowed seed early in July, after Vittorio had turned over the existing weed field with his rotovator and I had spent several exhausting days raking over and over, removing great piles of the small-to-medium sized stones which had come to the surface. For days after I sowed, I found great piles of my precious seed – a blend of tough grasses meant for orchards, eventually located way over in the corsorzio agricolo in Sarteano – around the entrances to more ant-holes than I had ever noticed existed. The little beasts were so numerous, and so industrious, that they carried away too much to be able to get it down where they wanted it. So I squirted the holes with ant poison and redistributed the seed.
The day when you go out to turn the resource-wasting sprinklers back on and see that first hint of green haze over the surface of the earth always brings a little heart-leap of joy. In this case, it was short-lived though, as all the weeds that had previously occupied that somewhat rocky impervious zone quickly showed through: the thin grass shoots are far outnumbered by baby mallow plants and creeping catmint. The bind weed here – as everywhere this year – would make you weep if you thought about it too hard.
Summer sowing is a strange thing.
When I did the lawns around the house, at the end of the hot hot July of 2005, it was with low expectations. I had to water to keep the dust down. So why not chuck in a bit of grass seed too? The result was astounding: a real, live, healthy, grassy lawn, and quickly. All right, so there are patches now which are pure achillea, or clover. But I never intended to have a prato all’inglese – a perfect English-style lawn. I reckon that if it’s low, and green, and uniform, then what the hell.
When late last June I twisted the arms of the vivaista who was planting for me in Tarquinia, he predicted disaster. In the event there was disaster, but only in that the grass grew so thick, so fast, that when he sent a different team of workers back a month later they couldn’t see where the lawn finished and the flower beds started, and so strimmed the tops off a host of just-established shrubs. All right, the lawn wasn’t without its infuriating euphorbia eruptions, but it was definitely a thick, healthy lawn.
In Fregene last week, after a fruitless two-hour drive to repeat the same information imparted many times before in a garden which I often despair of ever finishing, the equally frustrated nursery man refused point blank to sow, saying that he would have to poison the whole area with repeated sprayings of weed killer to get anything going. I scoffed at this idea – though agreed that sowing a lawn around a house where a family is already staying with their five children who wouldn’t be able to set a foot on it for at least a month was sheer folly…. better to water the scraggly mess that was there already and make it green enough to mow and play on.
I scoffed and yet here I am, some secret part of me wishing that I hadn’t sworn long ago that I would never pollute my land with weed killer. Because my July-sown lawn is a mess. I can console myself thinking that my only aim was to flatten those two layers out sufficiently to be able to pass over it with a lawn mower, rather than having to struggle through with the strimmer. But it would have been very pleasant to have a greenish sward up there after all my stone-removing efforts. Hey ho.
Where I really can console myself is in the veggie garden. We are at the stage where shopping for staples is a rare occurrence… an exaggeration of course because fruit is scarce on our property. Mario’s figs have gone into some fig jam; two kilos of wild strawberries painstakingly collected and frozen over weeks are now strawberry jam; each day a small handful of large strawberries and L’s delicious raspberries go into our breakfast fruit salad – but that’s it for fruit. (The tiny regina claudia plum tree produced about 20 of the most exquisite fruit, almost all of which I ate while working in the garden up there.) But the beans are blooming, the tomatoes are triumphant, and the spinach is superb. What more could you want?
In fact, there’s quite a bit more I could want.
Like lizards that didn’t spend their days grazing on my little fennel plants. I thought lizards were insectivores, not fennel-guzzlers. It’s war between me and the lizards.
And like ants that didn’t install blackfly just about everywhere, even deep down in the leaves of the aforementioned spinach. Pests. It has taken me a while to get my head around the idea that ants herd blackfly. But in this extra-anty summer, the symbiotic teams are everywhere: the artichokes were crawling with aphids being lovingly tended by their honeydew-guzzling ant minders and now they’re all over the spinach (most of which is, in fact, Swiss chard). I think I’m going to try one of those funny old chili/garlic/soap recipes tomorrow and see if I can get them to leave me in peace. And I’m watching my beans like a hawk to make sure the aphid/ant combo doesn’t decide to move on. All very annoying.
But most of all I want some nice heavy rain – preferably between the hours of two and four in the morning – to restore my grass to its former glory. And I’d like a little less heat, so that going out to work in the garden is just slightly less draining. Then again, it’s summer.