FuoriBorgo

May wreath

A jasmine and lilac wreath this month, as a tribute to the magnificent sweet-scented flowers blooming everywhere these days: Spring is truly in the air!

Happy May!

I'll be making a wreath a month this year, using some spur-of-the-moment inspiration on whatever nature offers me at that moment.
February wreath
March wreath
April wreath

more rosemary

The great incentive for me to attack our compost bin the other week had more to do with aesthetics than with gardening.  Strategically placed in a location at the edge of the garden and close to the house, our compost bin was an eye-sore, in plain sight from the windows.  Beside my pretty garden, it seemed decidedly out of place.

So, as soon as I'd emptied the ugly thing, I moved it out of sight.  Now I'd gained a good view and also a nice, well-fertilized empty spot, where I transplanted our huge rosemary bush.  Despite the rainy, cool springs, and the long, freezing winters, in just three years our rosemary bush had grown too big for its place in the center of the garden (a while back, I chronicled two years in the life of our rosemary).  There was a chance that the rosemary wouldn't survive the transplant, so before moving it, I took cuttings, and planted them.

Propagating rosemary is very easy (here's how you do it properly).  I didn't do it "properly", though.  I took 30cm-long woody twigs, cutting just below where budding roots are, stripped the needles off the lower part, and planted the cuttings directly in soil, taking care to keep them well watered for a week or so.  Only when I was sure that the cuttings had rooted, I pruned, uprooted and transplanted the huge rosemary.

Now where the compost big was, our rosemary and his court of cuttings thrive, creating a nice edge and soon a hedge separating the garden from the wilderness: the perfect place for rosemary, and more rosemary.

This is the new view of the garden from my window:

oh, dear, there still seems to be something or someone out of place in my garden ...

unglamorous gardening

Digging in horse poo was a breeze compared to digging in our compost pile - a job that had to be done, but that I'd been putting off for, ummm, years.  Three years, to be precise, because compost piles have the amazing quality of suddenly compressing down to a quarter their volume, just when the bin is full and you begin dreading having to empty it out.  This weekend however I faced the task, and found that when you deal with composted organic matter, having everything passed through the digestive tract of a large herbivore first is a real advantage.  Instead, in our compost bin were an impressive number of creepy crawlers, still busy digesting three years' worth of kitchen scraps and garden waste.

Given that it'd been three years since I last emptied out our compost bin, here are a couple of things I had to re-learn:
-    I become very squeamish when chubby albino grubs roll out and plop down at my feet as I shovel compost, though they're totally harmless due to their inability to move at any speed.
-    Our egg shells take over three years to decompose: it pays off to crush them thoroughly before throwing them in the compost.
-    Unless you have big biceps and a strong back, it's not smart to shovel compost after the heaviest rainfalls on record - wait until after a drought, when the moisture content of your compost is at a minimum.
-    It's very satisfying to add your very own dark brown, rich humus to the garden.  I herewith promise to take better care of our pile, to benefit from it more frequently.

Now that I have the least pleasant of the gardening jobs done - the fertilizing plus the hoeing (yes, there was that too!) - I'm ready for the more glamorous & bucolic part: sowing, growing, tending and harvesting.  Hello gardening season!

April wreath

Oh, color, how I missed you!  Though things are off to a very slow start in this cool, wet spring, the hardiest plants are beginning to awaken, and there's finally a little color around us.

In the garden, the rosemary with its tiny light-purple blossoms is starting to bloom, and the daffodils are a cheery patch of brilliant yellow.  Slowly, petal by petal, flower by flower, spring is springing.

Happy April!

I'll be making a wreath a month this year, using some spur-of-the-moment inspiration on whatever nature offers me at that moment.
February wreath
March wreath

learning from tulips

It's been fascinating to watch my girl and the thirty tulip bulbs she planted over two months ago.  Last summer, she'd grown flowers - zinnias from seeds - with great enthusiasm, but I knew that growing tulips would be an entirely different affair.  Planting one season and not seeing the results until the next requires a patience and an understanding of the slow pace of gardening that I wasn't sure Rebecca, at 5-going-on-6 years of age, would have.  After digging holes and covering the bulbs with soil, as I explained and reminded her over and over as we worked, nothing would happen for months to come.   (Well, something did happen:  her brothers chose that very spot, nice and flat, to light fireworks at midnight on New Year's Eve.  But, I assured her, the bulbs were undisturbed under their thick winter blanket.  I crossed my fingers while saying it, with all the confidence I could muster).  

In fact, nothing happened from months.  She told the world about her tulips.  At first she checked her tulip patches for signs of visible growth every day.  Then every other day, then once in a while.  And then she stopped.  But she hadn't forgotten about them: March, she chipped in whenever the name of the month came up in conversation, was when her tulips would peek out from beneath the soil.

Rebecca was both ecstatic and moved when, this weekend, she noticed the first sign of growth: one green beak-like tulip sprout, poking out of the soil (can the jolt from the fireworks have accelerated its growth?).  Oh, what a reward for all the waiting!  Slow-paced tulip gardening, I see now, is one of the best ways to learn the value of patience.

purify

Last week a surprise present arrived in the mail from my wonderful sister-in-law: The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, by Edith Holden.  The book, reads the dust-jacket, is a "facsimile reproduction of a naturalist's diary for the year 1906.  Edith Holden recorded in words and paintings the flora and fauna of the British countryside through the changing seasons of the year".

What a beautiful present, and what a beautiful book!  The watercolors are magical, clearly made by someone in the pre-snapshot era who was used to observing nature, noticing all its details, and reproducing them exquisitely by hand.  They perfectly complement the narrative, which, in diary format, chronicles the seasonal changes of weather, vegetation, fields, animals and soil, as the author notices them.  

February
This month derives it's name from the word februare, to purify, or from Februa, the Roman festival of expiation, which was celebrated through the latter part of this month

Each month is introduced by a description of the etymology and the significance of its name.  "February" comes from "to purify", and reading Edith Holden's month notes, and looking at her watercolors, I could see in the verb "purify" a main theme of our month on so many levels.  In the garden this month, we're busy pruning, chopping, sawing, hoeing, burning ... getting rid of last year's vegetation to prepare for this year's, and removing the remnants of a derelict vineyard, to reclaim an abandoned terrace and expand our garden in the spring.  The promise of spring in the not-too-distant in the pure, fresh air is invigorating, and it feels good to be out even on brisk days - cleaning out the cobwebs from winter hibernation, and from the vestige of seasons past.  Yes, February really is a month to "purify."

February wreath

I spent the morning in the garden, with my sickle, pruning saw and shears.  It's gray and cool, this first day of the month, and I went out wearing all my warm layers, but after working a bit and sawing off two vineyard poles, I got hot.  So I stopped, sat down in the damp grass, and started planning my spring garden.  And while I was planning, I began playing with the pile of pesky ivy I'd cut back.  I got so absorbed by weaving and twisting it, that before I knew it, I'd made a wreath.  My first wreath ever, a February wreath.

Happy February!

planning spring

While I was shopping for a snow shovel, my girl had very different ideas. She scrutinized the display of bulbs and their pretty pictures, and selected three bags.  Thirty tulips are now planted in our garden, getting ready for spring.

(sorry for the brevity – we're still without Internet, but we've got ourselves a snow shovel and some tulips)

winterizing

I wrote this post about ten days ago, before the cold season crept in, and I never got a chance to publish it. I wrote it before we had to deal with some of the winter nuisances and complications that are typical of rural areas in the middle of nowhere, Italy – where entire hillsides and their river system are neglected, and basic services and utilities aren't always supplied or guaranteed. In the last ten days, in fact, this is some of what happened (and it hasn't even snowed yet!):

- Internet: gone (which explains my sporadic presence here – I'm told that the telecommunication guys are waiting for a repair part that must have been sent by slow boat or something, and I do hope we'll get our connection back soon, because work and life in general depend heavily on it);
- street lights: all out on our road (in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal, though it's very hard to hike up to the house in the wintery early darkness, not to mention find the keyhole to the front door!)
- landslides: had one already, fortunately a small one, which Tom and the boys cleared away in sideways rainstorm with their hands and feet, to be able to reach our village.

Well, ten days after I wrote this post, it's indeed high time to think about winterizing, because winter is truly here!

This year, I want to do a better job of winterizing my garden. “Better job” here is actually a pretty low bar, as in the past I've done next to nothing to protect the soil from winter ravages, and to prepare it for the next growing season. So this fall I've spent some time pulling up plants, and clearing away the remnants of the past season – which included a nice surprise crop of green tomatoes, and some pretty leaves with fall colors that Rebecca stuffed into pockets, to the joy of my washing machine.

I'm now wondering about further winterizing steps. A winter cover crop would be optimal, but I'm afraid I'm too late for that, so I'm considering mulching and using the grass I cut back in the spring, and which I've saved for this purpose. But I'm tortured by a doubt: what if this process spreads unwanted weed seeds throughout my garden?

How do you winterize your garden? Any suggestions?

a gardener and the wild

More and more, I've come to believe that the right place for a gardener to learn and to improve her skills isn't the garden center, or the library or with a bunch of seed catalogs, but walking around the habitat where he/she gardens, observing nature, taking notes, and asking questions of knowledgeable locals.  What thrives here?  When is each plant's growing season, and what are its companion plants?  Do I have the time, space and energy to experiment with and grow a new plant? 

I was thinking about all this throughout the year, as I watched the borage plants grow and flourish at the edge of my garden.  Last year, in fact, I sewed borage because, although it's a native herb to the Mediterranean, I couldn't get a supply close to my house.  I wasn't happy about my course of action: the borage plants grew gigantic, took way too much space, and rapidly invaded the whole garden, to the detriment of nearby vegetables.

I didn't plant borage again this year, but it'd self-seeded, and grew here and there all around the edge my garden.  It thrived in total neglect I gave it, which is exactly how a wild plant grows.

Now, in the middle of November, when my garden looks bare and empty and is swept by cold northern winds, it's lovely to see the cobalt blue of the borage still blossoming all around it - not to mention eating its fresh, green leaves, which we enjoy in frittata, a special November treat.