The Fruits of My Labor

Besides the regular bounty harvested mid-November ...

There were these delicious heirloom tomatoes!

Happy Thanksgiving

Joy of Pruning!

Ten minutes after the posting "Joy of Wire," the muffler fell off our ancient Fiat on the way to Sunday lunch with friends. I walked 10 feet away from the car to search in a freshly plowed field for something to tie it back up with temporarily, and found, I'm not kidding, bailing wire. Ten minutes later, we were on our way to lunch.

But pruning. I've just finished all the fruit trees on the property, about 40 of them, not counting our 92 olive trees. This is the last round. After this, I will no longer be restoring the suffering abandoned trees that had once been covered in blackberry vines and were being winched to the ground by the dreaded vitalba (summer clematis) vine. I will be maintaining them. No more cycles of trees exhausting themselves with pears, plums, peaches, walnuts, cherries and figs, then being fruitless for 2 or 3 years. No more broken branches overladen with too much tiny fruit. No more fear of falling as I harvest from trees that grew too tall and lanky as they struggled to break through the smothering canopy of vines. Now, I can go out with a small saw and a pair of Falco shears in my belt holster and climb into the tree and reach the limbs and fruit without fear of overreaching and blowing a rotator cuff. I do not have to carry a ladder around. The trees look right, now, like grown-up bonsai. All things considered, they will be happier next year than they have been in 20 years. Mission accomplished; the farm has been restored.

Speaking of pruning. These are the last prunes Sally preserved by the age-old and greenest of methods, air drying. Real prunes, from real reclaimed prune trees. Real tasty. In fact, the exclamation point at the end of this sentence doesn't do my reaction to tasting them justice!

Joy of Wire

It's called the contadino's friend. Baling wire. Trellising wire. There are a thousand uses and re-uses for it.

As I clear the farm I still have to be careful I don't stoop to reach into brambles or weeds and get an eye poked out. In kinky strands, curlicues, and abstract cattle brand-like shapes it lurks everywhere, holding split trees together, anchoring things to the ground, waiting to spring up like a booby trap and zap. I keep finding it. And saving it. And using it. I have re-trellised the vineyard almost entirely with the old wire I have found, splicing rusty lengths together because it looks better among the gnarly trunks of our 40-year-old vines than shiny new galvanized wire would.

To my eye it looks like the raw material for art. Perhaps this is what Calder saw in it too.

Hot Times,Part IV

The plaster coat! Actually ours is stucco, the same breathable yellow stuff coating part of the house.

The dome's rosy glow is from a dusting of terra cotta dust I saved from cutting our sconces and outdoor pavements from the old roof tiles [pictures].

Have I said I am trying to use EVERYTHING on the property? The sill under the oven door is broken bits of hand made brick, the walls of leftover porotone (extruded terracotta brick) will be faced with broken brick and stone left over from construction and demolition of the old shack.

Did I say that the fuel will be grape vine and olive and fruit wood from all the clean up of the property? Did I say how much the sugars in these woods flavor the cooking? Stay tuned for the first "fire up."

Hot Times, Part III

The insulation coat. It will hold in the heat. It's 4 inches thick. Clay, sawdust, planer shavings, wild oat straw, and the rest of the Thermite left over from the construction of the base. It's looking more and more like a mud igloo. Just the way it should.

Handmade Things

Fatto a mano. Italian for handmade.

Speaking of handcrafted things, we harvested the malvasia grapes, the first to ripen in our vineyard, and began to make our first hand-crafted white wine.

Wine, as I do it, is a handmade thing.

Hot Times, Part II

One thing is certain, a forno is a handmade object.

On Saturday, Sally and I drove Nathan to Rome to catch his flight home just in time to make his connection in Philadelphia, just before Hurricane Irene hit. Unfortunately, that meant he and I didn't have time to pack the clay over the sand dome, or to get the oven to the point where he could bake the pizza he'd hope to make. That will have to wait until his next visit.

Since the oven wasn't going to build itself, I went to work. By foot, in big rubber boots, I mixed clay with sharp builders sand, then I packed it by hand over the wet sand dome Nathan and I had sculpted, to create the 4-inch-thick cupola that forms the oven body. This is the oven's thermal mass. Along with the fire brick floor, it will collects and hold the heat from the fire and radiate it back into the cooking food.

After it had dried for two days, I scooped all the sand out from under the hardening dome. To speed things up a bit, I lit a drying fire. If I'd wanted, I could have cooked pizza, but since the oven will work better with another coat of insulating clay, and will look better and last longer with a final coat of finishing plaster, I'll get things a little more finished before I throw that dinner party.