Our adventures in gardening on our sovereign homestead continue....

We got stuck-in this week, @vincentnijman and I, to the ‘garden’ around the house. We have one very small – relative to the 11,000 m2 - actually-fenced area to the south of the house, plus a large lumpy area to the east side. The former is entered via a side gate, and some dysfunctional steps, which I’ve been transforming piecemeal.

Tuning into the gardens is a little different than tuning into the land as a whole; the further-out parts of it constitute another kind of zoning, whereas the closest areas are all about what we can attend to on a daily or even hourly basis.

I love this aspect of permaculture – or commonsense! - gardening: putting the things that you need and which you use the most, nearest where you spend most of your days.

And this will be even more interesting and dynamic later on, when we have una casa diffusa rather than a central structure with all the rooms in one place! We very much look forward to the changing of the seasons, with the walk through the wilder parts of the land to get to a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen or a workspace.

We'll be ‘designing’ around each space according to what the activities of that room are: aromatic herbs near the toilet and bathing spaces, cooking herbs and greens near the kitchen, and e.g. chamomile for a relaxing tea near the sleeping shelter. I love the idea of particular spaces with nature between them.

Our land being mostly very very steep for now, the few horizontal-ish parts are being used to house our outside work and play. The ‘terrazzo’ is most used, in front of the house – to its west side – and as ugly as it was when we first arrived, we’re beginning to soften it, looking forward to some flowers and edible greens being situated there. For now it is still quite compacted ground, and I’m figuring out where the more appropriate paths could run, rather than us just flattening all the soil.

The mulch we have is like the most perfect compost we could’ve bought! It is a rich, dry and friable humus – which comes from the stables below the house: who knows how many decades of animal poop, left laying there for sufficient time that it has all become wonderfully ready-to-use terricchio - enrichment for the earth, a protective layer to keep moisture in and sun out: the optimum preparation for whatever we do next, which we can also easily push a fork through, to aerate the soil beneath.

Slowly, slowly, we’ll change this small area from cement-like floor, to fluffy dark earth that we can flourish some blooms in!

Our clearing out of the old stables is essential too, as we may need to use them at some point as a temporary (winter!) sleeping space. We do have an aversion to living under a non-wooden roof and between brick walls: our instinct is to be outside and in fresher air for our reposing periods… But until we bring the elements together to construct a nature shelter – a more outdoor bedroom – we will need to weather the cold months in a drier and warmer spot. This means removing all the old crap (literally!!) from our lower, half-underground rooms, one of which appears to be the least humid place under this roof.

The removal of the historic dung is fiddley work, as there is much detritus between shovel-fulls. Much rubble. The stuff we take out mostly can be used: shaping a kind of a slope down to the east side of the house, and rebuilding the steps better into the south side.

The east side has this extraordinary amount of ancient animal waste too: it appears to be a mountain of mature manure, which has moved slowly out of the stables and onto the land. We’re forming some steps down this cacca-hill, and trying to remove the immense amounts of old man’s beard/ vitalba from its flanks. This may take some time….

But when it is done, this will be a magnificent growing space! All the crops that require a rich soil; this will be their bed. So long as we can find an accordo with the wild boar that roam around, we hope to fling all kinds of seeds - zucca, melon, roots and greens - into it. We already found a very nice amount of nettles, and then some bietole/ beet greens – all of which we love to eat and drink: this morning Vincent made a smoothy with bietole and peach from our wee mini-peach tree that we saved from the brambles!

The east flank is also our outdoor showering area (as we do not have an indoor one!) though we’re not entirely sure how private this is! We’d prefer to have a barrier of some sort between us and the lower road – even if it is highly unlikely that someone would be looking so far up the hill through the trees at the precise moment that we are showering, a very minimal window of time, whilst our solar shower is emptying its wee sack o’ water on us. Hehehe!

It is very liberating to shower outside, after the claustrophobic years of being in a house with a shower room on a balcony over a street. The latter is private visually, yes, but not in terms of sound or energy... Being out in nature is markedly more enjoyable and fun for us both! It also provides watering for the trees where we bathe, keeping the soil moist all around. We love to perform tasks that solve multiple problems!

So there we go: initiating the organic formation of a garden space, out of a fairly gnarly abandonded house-surrounding. There’ll be plenty more for us to share in the near future, as we begin mulching around existing plants, feeding them (even more!) natural nutrition, and sacred-tweaking around the edges of everything. Stay tuned, friends!

With Love to you all in your gardening endeavours!

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