Photo: All our olive trees received a serious haircut this spring.
Despite boughts of illness and the worst May weather for decades we’ve been busy in the garden at Casa Angeletti.
It’s all part of our big plan for the garage, cantina and garden to be completed in 2020. Maybe.
It started with Luigi, our olive tree expert. He spent three weekends cutting back the trees. Many of them had suffered over a couple of winters and were in need of serious surgery.
Whilst we didn’t have to do anything during the pruning, we were left with all the cuttings to deal with. There were a lot.
The first step is to recover all the usuable wood. We’ve been very traditional and left piles of wood at the base of the trees.
Next job was to remove all the old rosemary and lavender around the house. It took us less time than we expected but still quite a job.
We did manage to salvage some of the rosemary and re-plant them up by the cemetry.
Then a small matter of planting 110 new lavender plants to transform the bank from this:
To this:
Then dealing with all the cuttings from the olive trees. Do we burn them or salvage them somehow? We invested in a new toy. The shredder turned these olive branches …
… into mulch for the bay hedge:
We’re getting very green in our old age. We’re making our own mulch and now our own fertiliser in a hot composter:
This means we no longer leave a bin out for the organic collection once a week. The hot composter can cope with all food waste, bones and all. This is all in preparation for the small vegetable garden (orto) we’re planning. We’ve undergone a complete transformation from City guys to country folk. We’re even planning on attending a bee keeping course this winter so we can have a couple of hives next year.
We can’t do anymore development in the garden until we’ve built the garage.
But that’s another story.
Colin and Jan Fisher 