Here comes the sun! Spring in Piemonte.

Spring veranda, lemons centre stage!

The enclosed veggie patch.

Return of the herbs!

The weather is like last August and yet it is only the beginning of April. "Is this normal?" I ask my neighbour, Giovanni, “Si e No, the weather here changes its mind like the weather.” he says. "Ah, I see, it’s like a woman then!". “Si”, he says, laughing his twinkly eyes and beaming at me.  It seems my Italian sense of humour is coming into its own with my small use of Italian words, which are slowly starting to form sentences, albeit short sentences and in less than a couple of seconds.  A vast improvement on a year ago.

Today a small white dog has been to visit, I spotted him running along the main road towards our house and then he bounded up the driveway.  I am not afraid of dogs, these days, but you just don’t know what a dog is like, particularly when you haven’t been introduced.  I am in the middle of cultivating the vegetable patch ready for planting and Andrew is nowhere to be seen, I call for him but these high 'Langhe' terrace stone walls have the habit of blocking my calls to him, or maybe he is blocking his ears to my frequent calls?  Anyway, the dog is approaching, he seems happy, his tail is wagging and he has earnest eyes, like he is looking for something, or someone, but not for me.  I ‘shoo’ him away and he shoots off on his little legs faster than a greyhound and runs off back down the hill.  How strange, I wonder where his owner is?  I get back on with the hard back breaking task of breaking up the land next to the 'lasagne' no dig veg patch.  Unfortunately, I had made the 'lasagne' patch too small for my veggie ambitions last autumn and realise that potatoes take up too much space and there isn’t enough space for the carrots, they turn out to dislike manure, which my 'lasagne' veg patch is layered with, so more land needs to be dug out from under the fast-growing grass and wild flowers.
 
Whilst digging, in the background, I can hear the mating calls of the toads around Giovanni’s very large pond, probably better described as a small lake.  They chirrup and squawk their way through the day and I’m sure are having a whale of a time down there flirting with each other and puffing out their slimy chests.  I wonder, absentmindedly, if they are edible like frogs are?  But the thought is too disgusting, I just can’t bring myself to imagine eating toad’s legs.  Last year we were concerned that this squawking noise would carry on all summer, not knowing the mating cycles of these tiny creatures, it seemed to go on for a good 6 weeks, drowning out the sound of the crickets in the fading daylight and for me crickets are the sound of summer, along with that classic chart hit ‘Baker Street’ by Gerry Rafferty, as soon as I hear that song I wish I was cruising along a coastal road in a convertible with seagulls calling in the air. 

We have bought a lemon tree, a beautiful specimen with three already grown lemons hanging from its thorny branches.  Yes, lemon trees have thorns, who knew!  I guess it must be for some sort of protection from animals needing a vitamin C hit.  It looks so pretty, sat in a large worn terracotta pot, in front of the balustrade, I think another couple are required and maybe an orange tree.  I sit here trance like in front of it, I own a lemon tree, a lemon tree for goodness sake.  Does the bounty of this spectacular place every become dull?  It’s no wonder Italians are the healthiest on the planet with all this food to eat and not a McDonald’s in sight.   The other day we drove through Imperia in Liguria and on to Nice in France and all we could see for miles through Liguria were rows and rows of long, industrial, glass green-house tunnels, some rotting away, others well-tended and stacked with all manner of vegetables, yet crossing over the border to France there wasn’t a single greenhouse, though the terrain was the same, what is it with the French?  Are the polytunnels a blight on their landscape, as the road speeds along past Menton, Monaco and Cannes?  I love green houses and polytunnels, they are a beacon of self-sufficiency, with a good sized one a family of four can be fed veg for a year.  I love imagining what gems are being grown in one and, I do myself, wish we had one here, but I still haven’t worked out where to put it.  With all our terraces and plans that change regularly, on what to do with all this land, it probably is better to sit it out and see before investing in a sturdy polytunnel.  In the meantime, we have established the temporary 'lasagne' bed and its position on the terrace below the balustrade means I can lean over and see if the zucchini has grown another inch over night, or if those challenging carrots have poked their greenery above ground. 
 
Andrew, now a force to be reckoned with in DIY, has kept his latest skill, taught by the wily Giovanni, on how to ‘cement in posts’ for this very project, building us an enclosed veg garden to keep the critters out.  It’s the simplest thing ever, we dig out 6 holes around the veg bed and fill them with simple to mix cement and pop the posts in, then we wrap some green garden wire fencing around the outside and tie with plastic straps.  Then we pop some netting over the top to keep the birds out and hey presto an enclosed veg patch, which from the inside looking out appears to be more of a veg prison but I am selfish with this project and no critter is going near this patch.  Not coincidentally, I am woken in the middle of the night, after we finished the enclosure, to the sound of bellowing outside the house, a deer has stumbled across the enclosure and sounds like it is crying!  I am sure it had lined up this veg patch, as a new trendy ‘pop up eatery’ in the area and was looking forward to many midnight feasts but now, alas, this is not to be.  How strange the timing of this visit, I imagine he was stopping by regularly to see when this ‘pop up’ would be open for business and he would get the first table and the pick of the crop for dinner and now he has found that the rules have changed and, no, he is not on the guest list and will not be going in! 

The little white dog keeps returning. This morning, I am out watering the flowers and roses along the driveway when a gentle woof comes over the top of our upper terrace, from our neighbour's, Gianna’s, holiday home, who is currently absent.  Startled, I look up and there he is, his little head with the cutest black droopy ears, looking at me like I am about to burgle the place.  ‘Basta’ (enough), I shout at it and he sprints away.  I am starting to feel a bit sorry for him, why is he hanging about the place and where is his owner?  I pause over wrapping up the lamb bone scraps from dinner, we normally give these to a grateful Giovanni for his dogs, should I give them to the little white dog instead?  It’s such a difficult decision but I am firm and will not, after all, he could keep returning for food and never go home.  He certainly isn’t a wild dog, he looks well maintained and is not aggressive in any way.  We decide to go up by car to Gianna’s at night to see if he is there, and lo and behold there he is, perched up on a box under the outdoor shelter, bright eyes shining at us, is there hope in his eyes?  We drive back down, the problem is we don’t know what the rules are in this area, do we report it to the police, or the council, would they take him and put him down, or say it’s our problem, as we found him?  Too many questions.  We decide to leave things as they are, surely he will trot off home soon?
 
I am in the vegetable prison looking at my juvenile delinquents, to see if they are behaving themselves and growing into hard working, behaved, adults.  So far, they appear to be sulking.  After hardening them off outside the greenhouse but tucking them in warmly back in the greenhouse each night, I am sensing petulance and bottom lips stuck out at this alarming state of affairs, as they are now being left out all night in the elements.  Please grow I beg them, please show my neighbours I am not a lunatic with the no dig ‘organic lasagne bed’ experiment.  I can’t bear to fail at this, they will all look at me with an ‘I told you so’ look and wonder why I am so lazy as to not furrow the ground and fill it with chemical fertiliser.  Please grow.  I am contemplating piping in some classical music to cheer them up while I speak to them quietly and lovingly.  I am in this state of contemplation when a car pulls up and a woman, older than me, shouts out ‘Buongiorno’, I look up surprised, and see a little old red car with the lady in the front and, is it right, it can’t be, in the back is the little white dog!  Huh!  She asks me if the dog is mine! Oh no, I shout ‘uno momento’ and I scamper down the terraces to her car.  There he is in the back shaking like a leaf, probably at the sight of evil me.  I greet her with astonishment and explain my limited English.  Earlier, Andrew and I had been driving back to the house when we passed the dog lying on the road a few bends away from our place, he was lying next to a baseball cap.  This was weird, as there is no reason for a baseball cap to suddenly appear on the road and surely the dog knew this was not a good place to lie, although we barely get two cars an hour on this road.  This kindly woman had spotted this too but, with more heart than me, she had stopped to pick him up and put him in the car, without the hat.  I explained that ‘no this is not our dog’ and with great hand gestures, circled the area, to demonstrate he has been running about all over the place for the last couple of weeks.  She thanks me and explains she is on holiday at our neighbours to the left of our house, adjacent to Giovanni’s, and sets off down to the house with the dog.   I am so happy for the little fella, at last a home!  I am yet again gardening the next day when there he is, being walked along the road, without a lead by the woman, the dog is bounding around her feet, as she walks along, and he is not letting her out of his sight, his little white tail is wagging non-stop and I am sure he is smiling.  I could nearly cry with the relief, as I see him bounding down the lane to their house, turning every few seconds to make sure she is following.  Home sweet home.

See what May holds in store here.