Clarke Chronicles


The Clarke Chronicles

Gupole

April 21st - November 5th 2008 (with a few jollies elsewhere)

We had stopped in at Gupole for a few days between Phuket and Kenya during which time Gail had been once round the garden giving the weeds their marching orders. So there were no horrors awaiting when we returned towards the end of April from Nairobi via Heathrow's new Terminal 5 (which was a bit underwhelming as a terminal, but efficient enough).

During our absence at the beginning of the year, our friend Franco, who was looking after the house, had been busy pruning back the vines ready for the new season. By the end of April, the vines were already in bud and, vines being vines, growing fast. The three shots to the right show just how fast. I'd also asked Franco to tidy up the little patch of woodland we have beyond the new olive grove. He's never happier than when he's wielding his chain saw and he had done some good wielding in the wood. Clearing the trees and branches he'd cut - mainly dead stuff - is a two-man job so he'd waited for my return for that. One rather wet morning in mid-May he arrived with his tractor, which is equipped with a winch and metal hawser, and we set about hauling the logs up the rather steep slope to a point where they could be loaded onto my trailer for transporting to where I wanted the wood store. About half the cut wood was too far down the slope to make it worthwhile hauling. This half we pushed and threw down to the path below that bit of the hill and then headed round in the tractors to sort it out. At the end of a hard morning's work, we had a substantial log pile stack up for drying. Given our new lifestyle, it could last for several years.

Grapes

The whole area around Arezzo suffered this year from an infestation that affected all the vineyards. Ours was no exception and being new to the whole business, I was a little late spraying and when I did, I probably didn't do it frequently enough. It's not rocket science; you spray with a copper-based solution and also a sulphur one. The copper helps kill off the fungus and the sulphur upsets little insects that burrow into the developing grapes. It's quite hot work if done manually, that is, using a back-pack tank containing 12 litres of solution and walking the vines pumping the pressurising lever and spraying away. Bit like I imagine how playing bagpipes must feel. On spraying days in the heat of the summer, it was a 6a.m. start before the heat of the sun caused total meltdown - to me that is. However, with only 200 vines in five rows, it's not worth setting up anything fancier. All this effort had a fairly good effect on controlling the problem, but certainly it didn't cure it. However, I took solace from the fact that I certainly wasn't alone - a lot of the local vineyards really suffered.

Vines May 1st

Vines May 22nd - that's mist in the valley, not smoke

Vines June 9th. Also some of the olives & the log pile

The crop of grapes wasn't bad considering this was the first year of grape production for these new vines, although quite a few were munched either by insects or birds. In October, I asked around to see if anyone local might want to add them to their crop, but in the end, there weren't really enough. We hung quite a number of bunches in the garden shed to dry so perhaps when we return next year, we'll have some raisins! With the vines another year older, next year I intend to be a bit more systematic over their treatment; certainly I'll be spraying a bit earlier. That Gupole vintage will arrive eventually!

The Flower Garden

The real joy of the garden is the flower and shrub garden around the pool that Gail has been developing over the last year or so, advised by friend and Mediterranean garden expert Carole Cross, with the required grunt work sorted out by David. Last year's planting and nurturing, transplanting and pruning meant that by early May this year, the garden was a mass of spring colours. As spring turned into summer and then to autumn, the colours changed and the vista of the garden changed with them. But it was always a delight to the eye.

Sometime in June, not satisfied with the status quo, we took a long, hard look at the only bit of the garden that we were still not happy with - the 'grassed' area beyond the pool where the young fruit trees are maturing slowly and the grass struggling against a huge variety of weeds. We decided to create a series of beds flowing down to a pond at the bottom - a new home for the goldfish. The idea had started out as notion for a waterfall feature, but the technology and paraphernalia for this isn't big in Italy and so we settled on just the pond. Integral in the design was the use of a number of the old chestnut beams that had been removed from the house at the time it was renovated. These were used to separate the beds creating a sort of fan effect. One thing leads to another and while the main beds are now done, the inevitable extensions to the original idea are still a work in progress and will be completed in the spring of 2009 when we return from our winter travels.

Water

Late spring rains were followed by summer drought and after mid-June, there wasn't a lot of rain in the area until September - it came with us to Ireland! We were luckier than some of our friends in the Val Tiberina who literally didn't have a drop, while we at least had the odd shower. We seem to be lucky at Gupole in that there is a lot of water in the hill and even in prolonged periods without rain, it's always there.

A good indication of how things are going is an old spring that used to be our water source for the house - we now have a bore hole that goes down 85 metres. Years ago, someone sunk a holding tank that holds about a thousand litres below the spring. If not used, this finds its own level and the water then flows on down the hill into the valley and the Torrente Cerfone which eventually joins the Tiber near Città di Castello in Umbria whence it flows on down through the Val Tiberina to Rome and the Mediterranean.

In our early days at Gupole, we had to pump water from the holding tank up to another tank buried in the ground on a terrace above the house and this water flowed by gravity into the house. Not the best system in the world and it froze in the pipes in winter. I still use water from the holding tank below the spring for irrigating the vegetable garden, which again means pumping it up to yet another tank even higher up the land. Normally when there's plenty of water around, the holding tank refills in about 24 hours, slowing down a bit in the summer. However, even in dry spells it's never taken more than 48 hours to refill, so I guess there's plenty of water in that hill.

Bugs

The other infestation that we've had over the last couple of years is of a very hungry type of caterpillar that eats just about anything green. These things hit the valley like a plague three years ago, hung around in force for two years and did a lot of damage to the wild oaks the make up most of the woods. The larvae develop in a particular type of fir tree, one that has long needles. We have quite a number of these trees and so we had a fair number of larvae. They grow in cocoon-like nests that look like candy-floss. Each cocoon will contain literally thousands of larvae and the only thing you can do to stop them is cut down the cocoon and burn it before the larvae have matured. However, the cocoons are carefully sited way up the trees, and these are not trees you can climb.

You can buy seccateurs on extension poles with a rope and pulley arrangement to snip away. but these typically are only about three to four metres long, which gets you nowhere near most of the cocoons. Enterprising hunters round us offer their services to shoot them out of the trees, but it seems to me that this might only spread the problem. I needed something longer and the answer was the extending pole that the pool net and other pool bits attach to. It happened to be just the right diameter for the pole of the seccateurs to slip into. With the two poles bolted together, and by reaching up high, I could now get just over twelve metres up into the trees.

May 1st

May 22nd

May 22nd

May 31st

May 31st

June 9th

The sheer size and unwieldiness of this arrangement provides its own problems since a pair of seccateurs on the end of a 12-metre pole develop a will of their own. Locating them on the right branch and then getting the rope to work without snagging or looping around a branch can be exciting. However, with a bit of patience and with Gail overseeing the guidance with cries of 'up a bit' right a bit' etc., we have managed to gather over 30 cocoons in a session, all of which have been given diesel-assisted send off.

Caterpillars aside, there is a huge number and variety of insects and spiders industriously working away throughout the garden. The ants seem to enjoy just being everywhere, while the bees love all the flowers as do a wide variety of other pollen gatherers. One of these is the amazing humming bird moth of which there seem to be several types.

These chaps love lavender and they spend their time darting from flower to flower, flicking a proboscis that is out and recoiled in a fraction of a second, and then moving on. I have spent many happy hours capturing photos of these insects, some of which are in the image collection, and one here.

a

Social

Life isn't all gardening, indeed we have declared that we do not intend to be slaves to the garden and have engineered things so that we can leave it for protracted periods. While at Gupole, we have many visitors, both family and friends, together with of course numerous get-togethers for lunches or dinners with local friends. Gail is a member of a book club that meets monthly at the houses of members and last year, at Gail's suggestion, a summer festa was started which was held at Gupole. This was so successful that it was decided to continue it and since we were all set up for it, we continued with it this year. At the time, late July, Gail's sister Caroline and kids Alex and Katie were visiting, as was Daniel, so there were plenty of extra hands for getting it all ready. We still have the original 4-metre long dining table from the house that is now normally stored but can be pulled out for such occasions. This, together with a couple of other tables means that some 25 people or so can easily be accommodated in the shade of the cedars and firs on the gravel outside the house. All we need is a sunny day - and there are plenty of those - and we have the perfect Tuscan setting for a long lunch.

The visitors started this year with Stephen Clemes, the ex-music teacher from the German Swiss International School in Hong Kong where Gail used to work. Stephen came for a few days in early May which was wildflower time in the hills called Subaseo above Assisi. Next were Caroline, Alex and Katie who along with Daniel were introduced to the Stone Circle Club, our little cocktail hour venue in the garden below the pool. With our being away, it was September when the next lot came - Gail's cousin Michael and wife Sarah from New Zealand for a couple of days - also pictured at the Stone circle Club - and then at the end of September, old friends from Hong Kong and the UK, Robin and Wendy Whalley for a week. Just before we left for our winter 2008 sojourn, another dear friend of nearly 30 years from Hong Kong and the UK, Sarah Barnes, was over for a week recharging the batteries after her first half term as a house mistress at Benenden school in Kent.

Other Stuff

Beyond the garden, visitors and socialising, other little things that occupy our time are, for Gail, teaching English, which at present is on a very part-time basis to a couple of long-term students in Arezzo. An ex-student, Domenico, who is a Carabiniere, got in touch in the early summer wanting a few lessons. This resulted in his inviting us to the annual Carabinieri celebration in Arezzo at the Convention Centre. This was a hot summer's evening of marching squads of Carabinieri, present and former, speeches and presentations, all followed by a huge and rather chaotic buffet meal after which the great and good of Arezzo law enforcement and legal fraternity ended up performing karaoke on the stage. Even given the Italian penchant for singing, this was remarkably high quality stuff.

Another spin-off from Gail's teaching was an invite to a glitzy fashion show in the quadrangle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence from her student Diletta, who is a girl's fashion designer in her family's firm of Monna Lisa. This was the 40th anniversary of the company, so it was a big one, with lots of kids strutting their stuff on the catwalk showing off next season's collection. Another equally chaotic buffet meal followed - you'd think that some of the guests hadn't eaten for a week - but it was a great evening.

A couple of years ago, David did a 20 lesson course over six months on art restoration, after which the little studio where it was held was happy to have him working on a very part-time basis, gaining hands-on experience with a number of renaissance works - gilded picture frames, statues and the like. More on this elsewhere since it's worth writing about more extensively. This year, with all the traveling and commitments at Gupole, there has been less time for what Gail calls David's Play School. A bit of work on a very damaged 15th century wooden bust of the Madonna that is still a work in progress, but not much else. She - the Madonna - will still be waiting for him when we return at the end of April.

And then there was Halloween!

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We had stopped in at Gupole for a few days between Phuket and Kenya during which time Gail had been once round the garden giving the weeds their marching orders. So there were no horrors awaiting when we returned towards the end of April from Nairobi via Heathrow's new Terminal 5 (which was a bit underwhelming as a terminal, but efficient enough). During our absence at the beginning of the year, our friend Franco, who was looking after the house, had been busy pruning back the vines ready for the new season. By the end of April, the vines were already in bud and, vines being vines, growing fast. The three shots to the right show just how fast. I'd also asked Franco to tidy up the little patch of woodland we have beyond the new olive grove. He's never happier than when he's wielding his chain saw and he had done some good wielding in the wood. Clearing the trees and branches he'd cut - mainly dead stuff - is a two-man job so he'd waited for my return for that. One rather wet morning in mid-May he arrived with his tractor, which is equipped with a winch and metal hawser, and we set about hauling the logs up the rather steep slope to a point where they could be loaded onto my trailer for transporting to where I wanted the wood store. About half the cut wood was too far down the slope to make it worthwhile hauling. This half we pushed and threw down to the path below that bit of the hill and then headed round in the tractors to sort it out. At the end of a hard morning's work, we had a substantial log pile stack up for drying. Given our new lifestyle, it could last for several years. Grapes The whole area around Arezzo suffered this year from an infestation that affected all the vineyards. Ours was no exception and being new to the whole business, I was a little late spraying and when I did, I probably didn't do it frequently enough. It's not rocket science; you spray with a copper-based solution and also a sulphur one. The copper helps kill off the fungus and the sulphur upsets little insects that burrow into the developing grapes. It's quite hot work if done manually, that is, using a back-pack tank containing 12 litres of solution and walking the vines pumping the pressurising lever and spraying away. Bit like I imagine how playing bagpipes must feel. On spraying days in the heat of the summer, it was a 6a.m. start before the heat of the sun caused total meltdown - to me that is. However, with only 200 vines in five rows, it's not worth setting up anything fancier. All this effort had a fairly good effect on controlling the problem, but certainly it didn't cure it. However, I took solace from the fact that I certainly wasn't alone - a lot of the local vineyards really suffered.
	Vines May 1st

	Vines May 22nd - that's mist in the valley, not smoke

	Vines June 9th. Also some of the olives & the log pile

The Flower Garden The real joy of the garden is the flower and shrub garden around the pool that Gail has been developing over the last year or so, advised by friend and Mediterranean garden expert Carole Cross, with the required grunt work sorted out by David. Last year's planting and nurturing, transplanting and pruning meant that by early May this year, the garden was a mass of spring colours. As spring turned into summer and then to autumn, the colours changed and the vista of the garden changed with them. But it was always a delight to the eye. Sometime in June, not satisfied with the status quo, we took a long, hard look at the only bit of the garden that we were still not happy with - the 'grassed' area beyond the pool where the young fruit trees are maturing slowly and the grass struggling against a huge variety of weeds. We decided to create a series of beds flowing down to a pond at the bottom - a new home for the goldfish. The idea had started out as notion for a waterfall feature, but the technology and paraphernalia for this isn't big in Italy and so we settled on just the pond. Integral in the design was the use of a number of the old chestnut beams that had been removed from the house at the time it was renovated. These were used to separate the beds creating a sort of fan effect. One thing leads to another and while the main beds are now done, the inevitable extensions to the original idea are still a work in progress and will be completed in the spring of 2009 when we return from our winter travels. Water Late spring rains were followed by summer drought and after mid-June, there wasn't a lot of rain in the area until September - it came with us to Ireland! We were luckier than some of our friends in the Val Tiberina who literally didn't have a drop, while we at least had the odd shower. We seem to be lucky at Gupole in that there is a lot of water in the hill and even in prolonged periods without rain, it's always there. A good indication of how things are going is an old spring that used to be our water source for the house - we now have a bore hole that goes down 85 metres. Years ago, someone sunk a holding tank that holds about a thousand litres below the spring. If not used, this finds its own level and the water then flows on down the hill into the valley and the Torrente Cerfone which eventually joins the Tiber near Città di Castello in Umbria whence it flows on down through the Val Tiberina to Rome and the Mediterranean. In our early days at Gupole, we had to pump water from the holding tank up to another tank buried in the ground on a terrace above the house and this water flowed by gravity into the house. Not the best system in the world and it froze in the pipes in winter. I still use water from the holding tank below the spring for irrigating the vegetable garden, which again means pumping it up to yet another tank even higher up the land. Normally when there's plenty of water around, the holding tank refills in about 24 hours, slowing down a bit in the summer. However, even in dry spells it's never taken more than 48 hours to refill, so I guess there's plenty of water in that hill. Bugs The other infestation that we've had over the last couple of years is of a very hungry type of caterpillar that eats just about anything green. These things hit the valley like a plague three years ago, hung around in force for two years and did a lot of damage to the wild oaks the make up most of the woods. The larvae develop in a particular type of fir tree, one that has long needles. We have quite a number of these trees and so we had a fair number of larvae. They grow in cocoon-like nests that look like candy-floss. Each cocoon will contain literally thousands of larvae and the only thing you can do to stop them is cut down the cocoon and burn it before the larvae have matured. However, the cocoons are carefully sited way up the trees, and these are not trees you can climb. You can buy seccateurs on extension poles with a rope and pulley arrangement to snip away. but these typically are only about three to four metres long, which gets you nowhere near most of the cocoons. Enterprising hunters round us offer their services to shoot them out of the trees, but it seems to me that this might only spread the problem. I needed something longer and the answer was the extending pole that the pool net and other pool bits attach to. It happened to be just the right diameter for the pole of the seccateurs to slip into. With the two poles bolted together, and by reaching up high, I could now get just over twelve metres up into the trees.
	May 1st

	May 22nd

	May 22nd

	May 31st

	May 31st

	June 9th

Social Life isn't all gardening, indeed we have declared that we do not intend to be slaves to the garden and have engineered things so that we can leave it for protracted periods. While at Gupole, we have many visitors, both family and friends, together with of course numerous get-togethers for lunches or dinners with local friends. Gail is a member of a book club that meets monthly at the houses of members and last year, at Gail's suggestion, a summer festa was started which was held at Gupole. This was so successful that it was decided to continue it and since we were all set up for it, we continued with it this year. At the time, late July, Gail's sister Caroline and kids Alex and Katie were visiting, as was Daniel, so there were plenty of extra hands for getting it all ready. We still have the original 4-metre long dining table from the house that is now normally stored but can be pulled out for such occasions. This, together with a couple of other tables means that some 25 people or so can easily be accommodated in the shade of the cedars and firs on the gravel outside the house. All we need is a sunny day - and there are plenty of those - and we have the perfect Tuscan setting for a long lunch. The visitors started this year with Stephen Clemes, the ex-music teacher from the German Swiss International School in Hong Kong where Gail used to work. Stephen came for a few days in early May which was wildflower time in the hills called Subaseo above Assisi. Next were Caroline, Alex and Katie who along with Daniel were introduced to the Stone Circle Club, our little cocktail hour venue in the garden below the pool. With our being away, it was September when the next lot came - Gail's cousin Michael and wife Sarah from New Zealand for a couple of days - also pictured at the Stone circle Club - and then at the end of September, old friends from Hong Kong and the UK, Robin and Wendy Whalley for a week. Just before we left for our winter 2008 sojourn, another dear friend of nearly 30 years from Hong Kong and the UK, Sarah Barnes, was over for a week recharging the batteries after her first half term as a house mistress at Benenden school in Kent. Other Stuff Beyond the garden, visitors and socialising, other little things that occupy our time are, for Gail, teaching English, which at present is on a very part-time basis to a couple of long-term students in Arezzo. An ex-student, Domenico, who is a Carabiniere, got in touch in the early summer wanting a few lessons. This resulted in his inviting us to the annual Carabinieri celebration in Arezzo at the Convention Centre. This was a hot summer's evening of marching squads of Carabinieri, present and former, speeches and presentations, all followed by a huge and rather chaotic buffet meal after which the great and good of Arezzo law enforcement and legal fraternity ended up performing karaoke on the stage. Even given the Italian penchant for singing, this was remarkably high quality stuff. Another spin-off from Gail's teaching was an invite to a glitzy fashion show in the quadrangle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence from her student Diletta, who is a girl's fashion designer in her family's firm of Monna Lisa. This was the 40th anniversary of the company, so it was a big one, with lots of kids strutting their stuff on the catwalk showing off next season's collection. Another equally chaotic buffet meal followed - you'd think that some of the guests hadn't eaten for a week - but it was a great evening. A couple of years ago, David did a 20 lesson course over six months on art restoration, after which the little studio where it was held was happy to have him working on a very part-time basis, gaining hands-on experience with a number of renaissance works - gilded picture frames, statues and the like. More on this elsewhere since it's worth writing about more extensively. This year, with all the traveling and commitments at Gupole, there has been less time for what Gail calls David's Play School. A bit of work on a very damaged 15th century wooden bust of the Madonna that is still a work in progress, but not much else. She - the Madonna - will still be waiting for him when we return at the end of April.