ROME
25 SEPT 2007
25 SEPT 2007
Oh, I have plenty of things to do. I just don’t want to do them all the time. And it’s those in-between bits that are so difficult (for me) to fill in satisfactory fashion here in Rome. When my eyes glaze over, when my computer palls, when I simply need to get up off my seat and move, what I really want to do is nip out into the garden for an hour, breath real air, pull up weeds, do something that beautifies my surroundings and go back inside with satisfyingly aching arms and back. The city just doesn’t provide much opportunity for all that.
That’s the wonderful thing about a garden. It turns procrastination into a useful device, rather than a waste of precious time. There’s always something that needs doing. Something that's just as pressing as the work you are getting oh-so-tired of. So no guilty feelings – a rare enough state of affairs when you’re side-lining bread-earning.
But it’s not just that. Having a garden in which to while away your time saves you money: in the city, I tend to end up breaking out of the flat in fits of claustrophobia, then wandering the streets and inevitably buying something. Sometimes it’s a litre of milk. Occasionally something more costly. Often it’s something I absolutely don’t need… like cakes for tea, and that’s another problem with not having a garden/safety valve: health and fitness.
In the city, I rarely break a sweat. In fact, since we’ve been back I have been saved by the absence of my cleaning lady who has had to fly back to the Philippines, poor thing, for a death in the family. But it’s pretty pathetic that the only exercise I get is washing the floor – very infrequently. She’s back next week, so I’ve joined a gym, and I’m sure that will help. But it won’t be the same as leaping up whenever I’m bored or inspired or just in need of fresh air and digging in my garden. And aside from making me longer and leaner (we hope) it won’t produce anything now, will it?
So I feel I’m living a half-life.
But at least, while I’m here in Rome, I’m no longer tortured by the thought that everything is falling to pieces up there, the weeds reclaiming everything I’ve done, the lack of rain in this splendid, exceptional autumn (it’s 30 degrees today) spelling the end of my lawn and un-irrigated roses. Vittorio is proving to be worth his weight in gold. True, he still doesn’t seem to have grasped the rationale behind pulling weeds up with roots but hey, he doesn’t have to agree with me – the important thing is that he does it, right? He just gets on with things. And moves the sprinkler around while he’s going about his business. The gravel is weed-free, the roses are neat and sprayed, the fruit trees have all been treated now that I’ve picked the (very few) apples and (slightly more) peaches. The bank opposite the front door is immaculate. I suspect that, by the time I get up there next weekend, the whole of the long-forgotten turning-back-to-elm-forest bank that falls away from the well level will be pristine. Vittorio likes strimmers, he likes machetes. So if that’s what he’s good at, why not get him to wield them?
I think next up should be beneath the olive trees. Those trees are dripping with fruit this year. Who knows if we’ll ever get around to picking it? We’ve only tried one year, and then we only got half way through our measly seven trees, and then we let the olives rot before we got them to the press. And anyway what would we do with them? It's not enough fruit for a full press load. Give them to neighbours I guess – Maria would certainly add our harvest to hers, as would Jo and Mary Lou up on the hill. Knowing the generosity of our neighbours we’d probably get back far more oil than we deserved. It’s just that it’s such hard, cold work. Maybe we could somehow combine another Guy Fawkes party with an olive-picking party. But anyone who has been in Italy longer than a year or two is bound to have been taken in that way before. Olive picking sounds such fun – so rustic, so genuine. You bundle up and rush off into the clean air of the countryside, feeling like you’re getting back to nature. It only takes a couple of hours – maybe not even that long – before the monotony and the sore fingers begin to bite. The following year, you make damn sure not to accept any of those no-longer-alluring-sounding invitations. I think that if we’re going to do it, then we’d better brace to do it on our own. How long can it take to pick seven trees… big trees, admittedly, but still only seven? Can’t take more than a couple of concerted days, can it? Maybe it can…
In the mean time, I have scoured the RHS’ fantastically useful vegetable growing advice pages, and ransacked the on-line Organic Catalogue for some advice on how to keep my veggie garden going over winter. My ignorance on the vegetable-growing front never fails to astound me. I am utterly unaware of what can go into the ground when, and what I should do to it once it’s there. My few vegetables this summer suffered from scarcity of water and total lack of fertilizer of any kind. Yet my beet just keeps on coming and my tomatoes are a triumph. I think I’ll put this down to beginner’s luck. (Note I didn’t mention the beans which were not quite so splendid after an early burst of fruitfulness, nor my ONE courgette off my three stringy plants.)
I had a small moment of glory a few weeks ago when both Mario and Luigi expressed envious awe at the fact that my tomato plants were still thriving and bugless. I had never realised that the chevron-shaped bugs that stink so badly when squashed that invade our house about this time of year are the dreaded cimici… which in fact is just a generic term for bug but which, at this time of year, signifies “the tragic end of my tomato crop”. While I smugly watched Mario’s plants withering, I imagined that it was my magnificently raised beds that must have been fooling the critters. In fact, I think they just took a little longer to get to me, having dined out on Mario’s plants first. Because by the weekend before last, when I was last up there, they were all over the place, laying their nasty eggs in big holes burrowed through my luscious fruit. I had some very natural mineral oil that I sprayed them with. Now further research suggests that I should just have used Bordeaux mixture.
If it means we can eat straight-out-of-the-garden tomatoes next weekend when we’re up there, fine. But if those cimici prevent my feeling obliged to bottle up yet more of the fruit, that’s fine too. I really haven’t made many bottles at all… and I went for passata which I thought was easier than whole tomatoes. But even the 15 or so jars that I did I found endlessly dull. Labour intensive. Sweaty. I guess I’m a straightforward gardener, and not a true country housewife.
But I persevered valiantly despite this. All our peaches – rather tasteless straight off the tree but delicious just slightly cooked – have gone into bottles this year, to be savoured in the depths of winter. The damsons – 19kg off that spindly little tree in the middle of the vegetable garden: I thought it had reached its limit with its record 10kg last year – went into some jam and lots of delicious chutney. (What’s the point of filling the pantry with yet more jam, I thought, when we hardly ever eat it? There are still jars languishing there from 2005.)
Walnuts, my research tells me, should be picked sometime between the end of September and mid-October. With this year’s heat and lack of water, maybe ours are ready already. Another thing to think of picking soon. And this year I plan to do it properly. Picking them up out of the grass, shaking them down from the trees. Ours were so far superior to any others that I bought last year. Funny, though, that nowhere in any of the advice that I found on walnuts was the stink mentioned. Is this just some strange prudery on the part of the writers, or is it only our walnuts – combined with our ignorance – that manage to be so unpleasant? Last year, we picked a few and brought them back to Rome. For days afterwards, there was a stench in the flat that I would have thought was some decaying animal corpse under the floorboards… had we had floorboards, of course. It took me a while to realise that it was emanating from our delicious walnuts, which we had neglected to dehull. The hulls are full of tannin; does tannin stink? This tannin most definitely stank. So this year, the hulls come off – the process is called smallatura in Italian, which I think is a lovely word – the moment the fruit is picked. They’re scrubbed and left to dry as they should be, and only then do I get to bring our crop of smell-free nuts back to Rome and devour them.
