FuoriBorgo

an olive bough

Several trees in our valley fell or lost some limbs during the heavy snowfalls and strong winds of the past few days.  Sadly, many were olive trees.  For days, I looked out the window at Tom's olive tree - almost entirely buried in snow - and worried that its young trunk would be too slender to sustain the weight of all that snow, and would snap.  But although the tree bent, seeming to shrink and curl up in the bad weather, its branches disappearing in the snow, it never gave in during its fight against the elements.  It did lose a limb, though.

I couldn't bear to leave a bough from Tom's olive tree, all by its lonesome self in the snow.  So when the storm eased, I climbed through a meter of snow up to the terrace, dug it out, and brushed off the encrusting ice.

And I brought it back to the house with me.

snowed in

This is what our neighborhood and my car (in the last photo) look like when we're snowed in:

Do you know how much shoveling that means?

wood from the next village down

I was flabbergasted when our neighbor the wood cutter (and wild boar hunter) told me that he wasn't selling wood anymore.  What?!  And nobody consulted me on this?!  In fact, nobody had, and all I could do was ask if he knew anyone else in the area who'd sell us wood.  His answer was not encoraging: "Ahh," he said, shaking his head, "you'll never find anyone who sells wood as good as mine."

But I did find someone else, in the next village down.  The new wood cutter quoted a price per quintal that was slightly higher than what we've being paying so far, because, he pointed out: "My wood is so much better than your neighbor's!"

He delivered 13 quintals of wood, and this weekend we drove to the next village down to pay him.  He was chatty, showed us around his partly restructured house and garden, and insisted that we sit down to have coffee and the Genoa panettone that his wife had baked (though he didn't sit down himself, but went off to prune his peach trees).

We left two hours later, with heavy bags filled with fragrant lemons and oranges that his wife and Rebecca had picked in the orchard.

back to village life

This week, we caught up with the laundry (from before the trip!), got the car repaired, stocked up on groceries (it took four trips to the store to do so) and filled the wood box.  We said hello to the neighbors, to Ms Cat, to the sea and to the neglected, but still alive, garden.  We also said goodbye to Tom again, and although these goodbyes happen a lot, they never get any easier.  (If you are in California, here is Tom's event schedule).

We're back to village life!

Corner View ~ music

Corner View is a weekly appointment - each Wednesday - created by Jane, where bloggers from all corners of the world share their view on a pre-arranged theme. If you'd like to join in, please leave a link to your Corner View post in the comments below, and be sure to visit other participants too.

Thank you so much Dana for the theme today!

The chatter of people harvesting in the vineyards, the chugging of the little truck piled high with boxes of grapes, the hissing of the water as the casks are washed and readied for the new wine, the racket of the grape destemmer machine, the humming of the grape press, the soft bubble and simmer of fermenting juice ... all these sounds fill our valley, our village and the cellar of our house this week: a song with its own tempo and rhythm, the music of winemaking.

The theme next week is "the last thing I learnt" and comes from Sophie.  Kari, would you please choose a theme for the following week and email me?  Thanks!

Happy corner viewing everyone!

International chicken coop

Our neighbors got new laying hens recently.  Rebecca tried to call my attention to the matter several times.  "Mamma, there are some gray chickens, and some black ones!" she'd cry out, each time we parked the car by the chicken coop and started up the steep path up to our house.

Then one day, I put down whatever I was carrying up - groceries, supplies, beach bags, bits and pieces, or other different bits and pieces - stopped, and looked inside the coop.  And cried out, "There are new gray and black chickens!  Why didn't anyone tell me?"

Like all folks around here, my neighbors have always raised an Italian breed of orange-brown laying hens (ovaiola Italiana), which produce many eggs but aren't too friendly (they seem to spend their time either pecking at each other or "rompere le uova nel paniere", as the saying goes, "breaking laid eggs", i.e. being a spoilsport) nor particularly appealing (I'm afraid they perfectly embody another Italian saying, cervello da gallina - "chicken brain").

But now, the chicken coop had changed completely.  The feisty old Italian hens had been fenced into a corner of the coop, where they awaited their impending fate (gallina vecchia fa buon brodo, "an old hen can still make a good broth").  In the rest of the coop, a bunch of shy young hens were getting accustomed to their new environment, and to the strange human taking photos of them (I wonder what expressions chickens have about humans?!).  Among them were several foreign chickens together with the national variety:

Proud black hens from Germany (ovaiola tedesca).

And silver hens from Holland (ovaiola olandese).  I instantly fell in love with the Dutch hens - aren't they gorgeous?

When I first saw them, with their beautiful plumage in all shades of gray, and their fire-red comb and wattles, I thought of my gray felt wool coat which I'd always worn with a brown, black and gray scarf, and realized that I needed to make a fire-red scarf to go with it instead.  To achieve that stylish dutch poultry look.

my girl loves dolls

My girl loves to play with dolls.  She bathes them, swims in the sea with them, undresses and dresses them (sometimes with her own preemie clothing - what a good use for them!), takes them for walks, stuffs them into her bag and travels with them, puts them to sleep, carries them around, and talks to them with a special high-pitched voice that she uses only for her dolls.

It's such joy to see her huge enjoyment of these small companions, and how she creates wonderful stories, worlds and games with them.

But the most endearing thing of all, is to see how contagious her doll enthusiasm is, and how she manages to entice our elderly farm-lady neighbors into playing dolls with her - they help her make wonderful memories.

Natural supports for climbing legumes

A pea plant climbing a branch pruned from a peach tree, and re-used as support: I love how nothing is wasted, and everything has a use in the traditional agricultural cycle that my neighbors have taught me.  

I'm writing about "Natural supports for climbing legumes" at the co-op today.

Raw wool

At the end of our lane is a small rudimentary fountain with a spigot that my neighbor put in when they used to keep sheep and goats in the barn where we now store our wood.  When the water is turned on out there we lose our indoor water, and a loud CLONK comes that reverberates through our pipes.  For years, while the sheep and goats were still in the barn and our neighbors came up twice a day to feed and water them (here), our early morning wake-up call was that CLONK from the fountain.  

There is where I washed a first small batch of the wool from Signora M's sheep. 

My improvised equipment, which worked very well, consisted of our laundry basket (and Rebecca's bath tub on occasion - she still fits it!); the wicker basket where we keep the paper recycling, to drain the wool between washings; and one of the many sticks that make their way repeatedly to our front door.

Oh, and cold water from the spigot.  Lots of water, because sheep - as I learned - get really, really dirty in the months between shearing.  

My neighbor had told me to use cold water, no soap, and to find a spot outdoors to do the washing, because - she warned - it would be a long, messy job.  In fact, I had to soak and rinse this particular batch of raw wool four times, before the water ran clear. By then, the wool was much whiter, but was still full of bits of hay, vegetable matter and droppings that were trapped in the fleece.  Also, by then the wool had lost its original strong smell, which was pungent but not at all unpleasant, and reminded me vaguely of grass.  However, I smelled strongly of sheep, and if the wool didn't need soap, I certainly did by the end of the job.

I think that the smell may actually come from the lanolin, the natural wool grease produced by the sheep. Unprocessed raw wool is not only quite fragrant, but also very oily, and my hands were shiny after only taking a part of the wool and putting it in the backet.  To my surprise, the lanolin washed off easily in cold water, and although the smell didn't cling to the wool, it persisted on my skin.

I drip dried the wool on our line - white, fluffy wool hanging from pegs among our clothes, swaying in the breeze - and whereas I've never noticed that the sun bleached my clothes white, it did bleach the wool considerably in the time it was hanging there.

I can't tell you exciting and moving it was to see this first little batch of wool drying on my terrace.  I felt almost as proud as if I'd raised the sheep myself.  True, just as my neighbor warned me, washing unprocessed wool is a bit of a long and messy job, but I didn't mind it in the least.  In fact, I actually found it fascinating, and it left me more eager than ever to start the next step, and to eventually make - after shearing, washing, spinning and crocheting - some real village homespun, entirely from scratch.

Shearing with Signora M.

Signora M, who lives just up the hill from us (here), is a shy, wiry woman in her early 70s.  She was more than a little taken aback when I asked her, a couple of weeks ago, if I could join her during the shearing this year, and even asked whether I could have some of the wool.

The wool?!  She hadn't used it in decades!

She agreed.  Nonetheless, that evening she asked her son, the man of the house, whether it was alright to give me the wool - which she told me while we were chatting, as she sheared the sheep with a firm grip on them, and I stood very still so as not to frighten them.

Signora M hasn't always discarded the wool.  Back in her youth, she used to spin some and knit socks, though the main use for wool was as a stuffing for mattresses and pillows, which was popular until quite recently.  Every year, for a month or two after the sheep lamb, she uses the milk to make fresh cheese.  But today the sheep's biggest value lies neither in their wool nor their milk: it's in their manure, the meter or so of precious fertilizer that pads the floor of the barn.  A barn which happens to be the ground floor of her house - the way things were done in the past, when people lived just upstairs from their animals.  "I've always lived with sheep and other animals," she added simply.

In fact, tradition guides her life in many ways.  She calculated the right day for the shearing by looking at the moon - the moon had to be waning, she told me - as the village elders had taught her.  Because even if she doesn't use all the gifts her sheep offer her these days, she's still living her days by the teachings of the elders.