It’s hot now and the rain has very definitely dried up. With a vengeance. From endless downpours and drizzle to sweaty, torrid stickiness. (Tomorrow, La Repubblica’s website tells me, the temperature in Rome will be 36 degrees but it will feel like 45.)
    What strange things this has done to nature. Fruit trees which at first looked like they were bearing bumper crops are now riddled with animals and disease, their greenery contorted with leaf curl and their fruit pitted with holes or rotting on the ground.
    Except, I should add, for a few strange cases.
    One of my little peach trees – one that I planted a couple of years ago – is leafless but full of fruit: small, dark-coloured and fairly tasteless fruit which is ripe right now, well before my apricots which were so numerous, then appeared to have shriveled, but now by some odd sleight of hand have come back but are not yet ripe. I must say, I’m truly puzzled by this. And peaches, ripe before apricots? What does this mean? Most disappointing of all, my miraculous damson tree is looking truly pathetic. I have never seen it sick before. But this year, the leaf curl has invaded there too, and there’s hardly any fruit hanging from its poor spindly branches.
    The good thing about all this is that I won’t have to spend my summer making jam that then clogs up the shelves for months – nay years – after because we’re not really jam eaters at all. The bad things, on the other hand, are manifold.
    Besides fruit, other things are missing in this odd summer. Small nibbling creatures may be all over, but I’ve hardly seen a bee: what on earth is meant to pollinate flowers if they’re not around? No wasps either, but I’m not complaining too much about that. The harmless, hornet-like muraioli that make a loud metalic buzz for weeks as they construct their perfect mud houses on our door frames and among the clothes hanging in our wardrobes are totally absent (much to the relief of C who flees shrieking from any room that one of these enters). Mosquitos, unusually for up there, are everywhere. Here and there thick clouds of little flies form, usually with a human head at their centre.
    Mario phoned the other morning, to tell me I should pass by and pick up some courgettes. In fact, the courgettes he was foisting on me were marrows – huge and rather bland: sudden bolters in his over-successful courgette bed. (My courgettes, on the other hand, did magnificently until their roots got past the little troughs of wonderfully rich soil I had prepared, to the barren rocky rubbish beneath, at which point most of them curled up their leaves and gave up the ghost. One, maybe, will survive.) We stood in his kitchen, very seriously comparing veg.
    His tomatoes are huge plants with no fruit. My tomatoes are huge and very overcrowded (why oh why do I put four times as much as I should of everything in small spaces?) and had no fruit either until about two days ago when suddenly lots of flowers and tiny incipient pomodori appeared. That gave me something to gloat about. He said he’d go and examine his more carefully. Mario’s peppers are doing not so badly. My pepper plants are remaining resolutely tiny, though there has been noticeable progress since I doused the whole contents of the garden in copious amounts of neem fertilizer. Or maybe it’s just the high temperatures that are making the peppers and chilis perk up. They don’t, apparently, like peaks and troughs but just good, consistent heat. He didn’t seem at all interested in my beans. And I glossed over my poor lettuces which took off so valiantly then started rotting from the insides out. Could this be a result of too much water in the early stages? I have planted more. They should be ready by the time the crowds descend.
    I was flattered, though, that I am now considered sufficiently able to be conversed with on such fundamental matters. Just as I was flattered the other day when I ambled up to the orto and found Mario peering across the fence, checking to see how everything was getting on. I suspect he never thought that my namby-pamby beds would produce much. In fact, I suspect that he feared my garden would be totally infertile. All those superfluous decorative plants he watched me putting into the earth in the early days of my garden building... useless things for city slickers. Now, with my veggie beds in full swing, I'm a force to be reckoned with. And a neighbour to be taken seriously.