Stefano was right, of course, about where to get my fleece which is, I noticed on the plastic wrapper, called felt not fleece. But the Italian version is tessuto non tessuto which is what I had been asking for all along. The builders’ yard in Chiusi Scalo where I found it was a veritable Aladin’s cave of wonders. Well, wonders if you like inspection pits and strange-shaped things in pre-cast metal. And huge. The girl at the cash desk said 100 people worked there. Even allowing for exaggeration, that’s a lot of people.
I had to buy a 50m pack when I had calculated that I needed about 30sq.m. But of course, even 50m didn’t suffice. There was long long skinny strip and one 1.5sq. m space uncovered early yesterday morning when the man from the little builders’ yard up in town came down with his first truckload of gravel. All my dreams of him having some kind of miraculous chute which would allow him to slide the gravel effortlessly down from the drive above, right into the orto were soon dashed. But he dumped it just at the top of the path. And I filled the gaps with the tessuto camping I hate so much, and made with shovel and wheelbarrow… the one with the spanking new wheel.
Two cubic metres of gravel. I’m looking at a site now which is telling me that one cubic metre of gravel equals 1.60-1.90 tonnes. Not possible. Hang on, here’s another one. It says between 1.2 and 1.6 tonnes, depending on the size of the gravel. Does this mean that I shifted 3.5 tonnes of gravel with my trusty wheelbarrow? No wonder my wrists are aching… I can hardly type. Anyway, I did. And spread it, and it looks somehow oriental in its pebbly splendour. And while I was at it, I planted three little bay bushes at strategic points around the orto, and made the top step up from the carpark to the garden.
This top step – ie not top step – has been driving L mad for months. It’s almost as bad as his problem with Maurizio (of which more later). Each time we find ourselves together in that general area, he muses “hmmm, top step still not made… strange.” I gave up long ago trying to tell him that the top step would have its day; that it would appear at the right moment, in the natural order of things. I think he thought I was just slacking. Well now that I know exactly what the relative heights of things are, and that I could slot a backing board for the step down behind the beam holding the gravel in, the top step is made. So there. In the natural order.
To make the orto complete, I weeded the empty beds, which are now clear of unwanted green sprouts and last year’s debris. And I tied up the three twigs of the damson tree, in the hope that next summer it will stay upright, rather than bowing down to the ground (or, nowadays, into my raised beds) under the weight of its own fruit. Or course, it could just snap, but that’s a risk I’ll have to take. And I watered my seedlings – still beneath thin white fleece – with neem stuff.
It said on the pack that the neem fertilizer (1) was liquid and (2) dissolved easily in water. In fact, it was thick and gluggy and hardly dissolved at all. I suspect this may have been because it is meant to be stored in something slightly further away from the sub-zero temperature inside the chicken house. Next time I’ll take a steaming kettle up there to mix it in before filling the watering can.
Then what? Oh yes, the fruit trees. One cherry, a Bigarreau Burlat which according to a wonderful French site I have just happened across – www.pommiers.com – was “bred from seeds that Leonard Burlat found by chance in Loire-sur-Rhone”. Which is fascinating, except that all I can find out about this Monsieur Burlat is that he has a street named after him in that very town. Nothing else.
And two plums. My Golden Queen Claudia, this same site tells me, has been around since the 12th century and is named after the wife of King Francois 1. Extraordinarily detailed as the site is, it doesn’t seem to have anything corresponding to Coscia di Monaca, which makes me think that maybe this really is an Umbrian variety as Perugia University maintains, and unknown even to French fruit fanatics.
Our watering system saga continues, but Maurizio (who had originally sworn he would be working on it this week) did eventually come down to look around again, and decide again what should where and tell me again that he’d be round any day to put the flags in. I’m not holding my breath. But I would so like to have the irrigation in so as to be able to plant half-decent grass over that side of the drive: lovely smooth green-ness around my pretty fruit trees.
If I didn’t get my compost bins made (and I knew, really, that I wouldn’t), I did order the wherewithal to make them. The necessary planks and stakes, I presume, are lying down in the woodyard in Chiusi Scalo. All I need now is to find another few days to dedicate to that.
But until this time next year (and who knows, even then) I guess I won’t be there long enough by myself to be so dedicated. It is quite incredible how much one manages to do when all alone. No one needs feeding, no one wants to watch DVDs or make conversation, no one needs your help elsewhere. You can focus entirely on the matter at hand, happy in the knowledge that you can then start in on inside things – such as all the terribly pressing work-related tasks that you’re trying hard to ignore – when the sun goes down. And for those outside hours, you can even pretend that what you’ve created for yourself is two complete parallel working days. Whereas by the time you get inside, you’re dropping with satisfied fatigue. How on earth will I ever get my real life back on the rails?
CdP
15 February 2008
