ROME, May 4 2008
Yesterday we ate our very first
artichokes. I picked them small, pulled off the tough outside
leaves, and stood them head-down in a pot with a little water
and a little oil, a crushed garlic clove and a sprig of winter
savoury from the garden. Ten minutes later, they were falling-apart
tender. We ate them with daffodil-yellow scrambled eggs, laid
that morning by Vittorio’s hens.
Today for lunch, I steamed a big pot of my own spinach. This
was not the first spinach by any means, but once again I wondered
at the fact that my leaves cook in three minutes flat, not
like the (really very fresh and delicious) ones I buy down
in the market from Marco, which take a good ten minutes.
As with the artichokes, it’s clear that nothing beats
produce brought straight in from the garden. It tastes better,
cooks better… and gives you the kind of smugness that
only the fruit of your own favourite occupation possibly could.
Anyone watching me with my goodies would have been torn between
amusement and disgust, I’m sure… with such good,
tasty things on your plate, it’s hard not to be holier-than-thou.
L and I took off Friday and spent two glorious days in the
sunshine. L continued with his huge clean-out of the lean-to
part of the chicken house. It’s a massive task, heaving
abandoned building materials from there to the hidden back
room. Left to my own devices, I would never have bothered.
But L’s perseverance means that I can see the point:
finally we can get to the woodpile without climbing over palettes
of bricks and toppling heaps of roofing tiles… and now
we're able to see whether we’re stepping on a nest of
vipers or a wasps’ nest.
I, too, did something that I had been meaning to do for months,
and though it was good to get it over and done with, it wasn’t
quite as satisfying as I’d hoped. I dismantled the unruly
heap of weeds chucked willy-nilly behind the chicken house
over the years. I was fully expecting to get half way down
the mountain to find that the bottom half had composted itself
down into wonderful, crumbly, rich black stuff to be used
to fill my one remaining empty raised vegetable bed, brimming
to the top. What I found, in fact, was a little bit of all-right
compost right at the bottom, beneath a huge pile of…
well, hay, basically: that’s what my weed pile seemed
to have turned into. But I made a kind of container out of
old palettes and one of our collection of abandoned doors,
and put the contents neatly back in, wetting it well in the
hope that I can get the process going again. And I trained
several strands of my exploding Rosa filipes ‘Kiftsgate’
around the thing in an attempt to make it look slightly less
improvised. This will remain a slow heap, I guess. But hopefully
a little less slow than it has proved to be to date.
After this, I moved back into the veggie patch. The hot days
between the rainy days – our weather pattern remains
the same – are getting truly hot now, and are too numerous
for my seedlings in the orto. So I went to work on
extending and checking that bit of my watering system. Extending
it, because I needed it to reach my asparagus plants, which
are tall and frondy despite Vittorio’s boots; and because
the little bit of compost I scraped out from behind the chicken
house sufficed to fill in the precarious beds I have created
up the sharp slope above the car park. What with that, and
a generous lining of organic fertilizer, I thought that my
little courgette plants might just be able to make a go of
it in there. They certainly can’t do any worse than
last year, when four plants (admittedly thrust into very rocky,
unwelcoming soil on a sharp decline) produced a total of three
really puny looking vegetables. Let’s hope they like
their compost-filled home.
Once again, I was reminded of the sense of giving oneself
a long run-up and doing things properly in the garden. Working
my way around that bit of the system, pipe by pipe, tiny tube
by tiny tube, I created something that really works properly
for all the plants that need it – or at least, that
was the way it seemed by the end of yesterday afternoon. So
much more elegant (and, hopefully, functional) than my usual
rush jobs.