Yes, I know this green guy isn’t a beetle, but at least he’s cute – even if he was probably eating my irises
We had a lot of beetles this year, I’ve never seen the like in Italy!
In May we had roses, oh how we had roses! I was so busy taking the close-up shots of them that I love:
…that I neglected to get any good pictures to show off the mass of blooms along our back fence. This is the best I’ve got:
Yes, Italians love their gardens, and so do I. I just wish it loved me back. Oh, it’s doing just fine, but it keeps attacking me with nasty pollens, so I’m a sleepy, red-eyed, sneezing, drippy mess. Perhaps I should spend next spring in a desert.
In spite of the confused weather, the garden looks promising this year. While I was away in Colorado we had a cold snap and rain so, after months of unusual warmth and dryness, we are now back to more or less seasonal weather, and the plants seem a bit more certain about what they’re supposed to be doing. The irises are putting up long stalks with lots of buds, the tulips are blooming (though not nearly as many as I thought I had planted), the daffodils are mostly past their prime, and the bush of margherite (daisies) is about to explode in blooms.
As are my beloved roses. One of our purchases a few weeks ago was a hand-pump pressured spray bottle for spraying them with anti-fungal chemicals (which probably goes against my organic gardening claims, but… we don’t plan to eat the roses!). This replaces the little sprayer I’d been using which was clearly inadequate, and the roses have responded with zest. They managed to stay fungus-free for a month, and are growing vigorously with thick red branches. In about a week they will be covered in blossom.
Last year the first to bloom was the yellow rose of Texas – bittersweetly symbolic as we had just returned from Rosie’s funeral. Let’s see who goes first this year.
The pink climbing rose that we planted to twine up our outside stair railing is a year younger and not doing as well yet – it appears that roses need a couple of years to acclimate and really start strutting their stuff.
Yesterday we went to the azienda agricola again. They’re now more prepared for the orto planting season, though this place is small and didn’t have everything I was looking for. I ended up buying six zucchine plants, because they are sold in sets of six – I really only wanted two or three. Six will produce far more zucchine than we can eat, but our neighbor will be happy to take some off our hands. When they get oversized, she slices them thin and grills them on the barbecue, then slathers them in olive oil, minced garlic, and parsley – yum!
I bought cherry tomatoes because they didn’t have the costolute (ribbed) variety I wanted, and the cherries did all right for us in the last couple of years. And I bought celery, just because it was there and I’ve never tried growing that before. Each set of six plants only cost about two euros, so it’s worth experimenting.
We’ll go to the bigger greenhouse one of these weekends to get the other tomatoes and eggplant that I want, and Enrico can choose something to fill the decorative round planters that sit in the corners of the lawn outside our front door, and probably some new geraniums to replenish the big round planter that covers the sewer hole in our back yard. Those are his particular spots to do with as he likes (he could do more with the rest of the garden if he wished, but he prefers to leave that to me, so you’ll frequently see me toiling away while he sits on the balcony, reading).
Here’s what the orto looked like in late April: apricot tree at the far left, rows of tomatoes, the big bushy things are broccoli planted last fall, the small things in the black in front are eggplant, the feathery stuff is fennel that was planted in winter.
They tell us that this past winter has been the warmest in Europe for 200 years. Certainly our plants are confused. Some of the bulbs I planted in October were sprouting by December. The mimosas bloomed before la Festa della Donna, which I’ve never seen happen before. Crocuses in Italian are called bucanevi – “make holes in the snow” – but they could only make pretty white spots in the grass. And now the irises are blooming, on unusually short stalks.
I’m as confused as the plants are, but I guess there’s nothing for it but to start the orto (vegetable garden). In spite of pollen allergies (also early this year) and a lingering sinus infection, I’ve been out toiling the soil. (Actually, the sun helped to dry out my respiratory system.)
Two weekends ago I cleared part of the orto (vegetable garden) of its winter weeds, and planted basil, parsley, one kind of lettuce, and spring onions. I weeded the flowerbed by the garage wall and planted coriander, dill, and arugula there. (Now if I can only get the neighbor’s cats to quit using that area as a litter box…) And I planted various flower seeds in some of the dozens of cinder block “planters” that form our retaining wall.
(This is what the wall looked like two years ago. I’ll take a more up to date picture when we have a prettier day for it. This picture was taken in May, when the poppies usually bloom at this altitude. It will be interesting to see how early they appear this year.)
This past Saturday I worked on the compost heap that occupies a corner of the bottom level of our terraced backyard. There’s too much wood in there – I need to break that into smaller pieces, and start mixing in more leafy stuff. But at the bottom, when I reached it, I found several buckets of decent compost.
I transplanted a mountain pine seedling that we had taken from the wild during a walk last year and planted in a pot. It lost all its needles over the winter and I thought I’d killed it, but now it’s sprouting new greenery. I planted it at the bottom of the retaining wall where it can, well, help retain.
We went to the azienda agricola (“agricultural company”) near home. I was hoping to get a jump on planting the vegetables, but they don’t have much yet – I guess the greenhouses weren’t expecting winter to be over so soon. But they did have, strangely, cranberries – not at all native to this region! 18 euros for six little pots of cranberry plants; we bought them on a whim. Checking my organic gardening book back home, I find that cranberries want to be in a boggy area with lots of sun. No such thing in our yard. Lots of sun, yes, but no bog – our soil is very clayey and dries out quickly. I enriched the soil in one corner of the garden with compost and planted them anyway; we’ll just have to water them a lot and hope for the best. It would be nice to have fresh cranberries for Thanksgiving.
We had a fairly successful orto last year, but I learned a few lessons to apply this year:
Enrico mutters that the roses aren’t performing as well as he had hoped when we bought them. I keep explaining that a grand garden takes time. Someday we, too, will have a wall of roses like this house in Milan:
top photo by Rossella
