Photo by Rick Gush

In Italy, these last days of January are called Giorni del Merlo, or the days of the robin, and are usually the coldest days of the year. 

It’s cold here in Rapallo, about 0 degrees Fahrenheit last night, but at least we’re having mostly sunny days.  It’s raining and snowing in the rest of Italy, so we’re relatively well off here. And at least the days are getting visibly longer now.

Merlos are cousins of the robins we have in the states, but they do not have red breasts.  There’s another bird here called the pettirosso, or red-breast, but it’s much smaller than a robin, and more like a fat canary. 

The merlos are really smart birds, and have the same sort of spoiled rotten children that actually become larger than the adult birds.  It’s amusing to see the big adolescent merlos sitting in the trees squawking loudly while the two parents rush around frantically trying to find enough food to fill their offspring’s mouth.  

The news in the garden is that the broccoli harvest has finally started.  Italians seem to eat more broccoli that Americans, and I’m definitely eating more since I moved here. 

Photo by Rick Gush

My wife and I eat a lot of steamed broccoli, and sometimes we eat pasta with broccoli and sometimes my wife includes broccoli in the mix for vegetable pies.  These are all delicious recipes, but there’s something about the rich green color of lightly steamed broccoli that radiates healthiness.

I grow both regular broccoli that makes big heads and also a local variety that just makes little individual shoots.  The local variety is really popular around here and it is even listed among the market tax lists from 500 years ago in Genoa. 

The big head broccoli also produces a copious amount of secondary shoots once the central head is harvested.  The little shoots are the broccoli most commonly used in pasta dishes and we’ll probably be able to keep harvesting shoots until April, so there’s a lot of pasta with broccoli in my future.

Another plant in the garden that is ready to start harvesting is the black kale shown in the second photo.  This is unusual leaf vegetable is eaten steamed, in soups and in vegetable pies.  Eating black kale is reputed to have particular health benefits.  Me, I like it steamed and with mustard.

So, tomorrow is Feb. 6, and that means Valentine’s Day is a little more than a week away.   That still confuses me because for many years in California, Valentine’s Day was when I would plant my first tomatoes.  There’s no way I’ll have tomatoes planted this Valentine’s Day, because the ground’s still to wet to work and it’s still too cold to plant tomato seeds in the coldframe.  Phooey.

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Since the weather has been slightly above freezing here the past week, we’ve been spending some time in the woods.  It’s with purpose, though—much to my husband’s chagrin. 

When we had our ‘bigger’ farm (20 acres), I used to make enormous wooden tee-pees for our pole beans and peas to ramble on.  Now that we live on our ‘smaller’ farm (2 acres), I want to do it again, but on a more manageable scale.  And that, of course, requires that we collect all the materials now, while the leaves are off the trees and we can see what’s out there.

So, last Saturday we set off on the trail that runs out the end of our small road and into the woods.  As we walked, I had one eye trained on the woods looking for materials and the other eye on the massive boot-sucking mud holes my 4-year-old son was likely to get mired in if we didn’t encourage him to step carefully. 

We (well, mostly John) managed to collect 10 thick, straight branches about 2 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall, enough to make two good-sized tee-pees.  We dragged them out of the woods and into the back yard.  That was the easy part.

Getting the grapevines is always the hard part.  After I put up the tee-pees in spring, I like to wrap them with wild grapevines.  It gives the plants more to grip on.  My husband is NOT a gardener and tries his best to tolerate my crazy ideas.  Most importantly, he is generally willing to do whatever ‘heavy-work’ that’s physically above me.  Grapevine pulling fits into this category. 

Wild grapevines run rampant in Western Pennsylvania so finding them isn’t a problem, but in order to get them out of the trees, you need to yank the heck out of them.  If you’re lucky, they come down with little trouble; if you’re unlucky, they don’t come out no matter how hard you heave and you end up having to find a new vine to wrestle. 

Our first selected vine came down with a few good tugs.  I wrapped all 40 feet of it into a coil and John slung it over his shoulder to carry out.  The second vine took a bit more effort, Tarzan-style.  John put all his weight into it several times without more than a budge from the vine, then he hung from it with his feet off the ground and bounced.  Another budge.  With advice to my son to “Stay there and do not move,” I jumped onto the vine and we pulled together.  Eventually all 50 feet or so came down and it too was coiled and hauled home.

No injuries and all fingers still attached.  Phew.   

So now the tee-pee ‘ingredients’ are leaning against the back fence and waiting for spring.  Just like me.        

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Photo by Rick Gush

Today was an exceptionally fun day for me because it was the day that the big open air fiera (fair) came to Rapallo. 

The fiera, which includes almost 500 merchant booths, is strung out all along the waterfront, and several of the streets closest to the shoreline are closed to traffic and filled with booths.   Along the river there are about fifty agricultural booths selling grapevines, fruit trees and an assortment of different nursery merchandise. 

I was at the fiera by 8 a.m. and by 8:30 a.m., I had already purchased a new kumquat and two cherry trees and carted them home on my scooter.  By 9:30 a.m., I was back at the fiera taking a walk around with my wife.    At 11 a.m., I walked around a bit with Richard, my friend who has a small farm up on the hill, and then as usual I enjoyed a hot sausage and pepper sandwich at one of the booths that features enormous whole roast pigs.

Photo by Rick Gush

The joke among the locals is often about how the fiera is a good place to get new underwear.  There are in fact an amazing amount of underwear booths selling everything from styles from the nineteenth century to considerably more frisky wear.

The fiera is pretty crowded, and the swarms of wandering people clog the aisles make it difficult to walk around.  There are a lot of people talking loudly, kids shrieking, dogs barking and dozens of the booths are occupied by salesmen equipped with microphones who are enthusiastically and loudly demonstrating the latest food slicers, cooking pans, window cleaners, and even fancy pruning shears. 

It can be either exciting or exasperating, and the scene is generally one of an orgy of consumerism.  I did my part and found a couple of swell knapsacks for only five euros each, but I did not find the big booth selling work gloves. 

Unfortunately, my wife and I also learned that the Tuscan factory that makes the old-fashioned rustic pottery that we use in our home has shut down, so we were unable to replace our broken dishes from this year.  I suppose we’ll have to start looking around in some of the interior valleys to locate some stores that still have stocks of these charming dishes.

My wife and I ate lunch at 3 p.m., and I received the news that my mother-in-law had expressed a desire for a potted kumquat for her own terrace garden.  That’s great news for me, because I usually have trouble thinking of appropriate gifts for her.  So, I hopped on my scooter again and made yet another trip down to the fiera and brought home another tree.  What a fun day!

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Photo by Rick Gush

I love Via Betti , which is the street on which we live.  It runs alongside the big creek that empties into the bay in downtown Rapallo and goes all the way up to the top of the coastal mountains. 

On one side of the road runs the creek and the other side of the street is filled with buildings.  Many of the buildings have shops on the ground floor with apartments above.  About three quarters of a mile up the creek, the businesses stop and the density of the buildings lowers. 

The last business on the street, about a hundred yards below our home, is a charming little food market called Adele’s.  The photos this week are both of Adele’s, which is a real breath of quaint air for a Californian accustomed to shopping in huge supermarkets.

There are a bunch of other food markets on the street as well, and when I first moved here I would pass eight little food markets during the fifteen-minute walk along the creek to reach my office in downtown Rapallo.  There are a lot of other stores along the creek too, like butchers, bakeries, tobacco shops, newspaper stands, pharmacies, pet stores, fresh fish stores, dry cleaners, hairdressers and bars. 

One of the things I really like about Rapallo is the proliferation of all the various business types in a town with a population of 30,000 people.  I’ll bet there are twenty butchers, fifteen fresh fish shops, and maybe a hundred different little general food stores, not counting the four or five actual supermarkets.

Photo by Rick Gush

The creek has a lot of history behind it.  Just today one of my neighbors was telling me about how when he was a child, the local kids would swim in the water and the local women did their laundry in the creek.  There are still the visible remnants of two of these communal washing areas. 

Further up the mountain there are still the ruins of several old water wheels that powered mills that ground grain for the locals until the beginning of the twentieth century.  Somebody once showed me where the old Etruscan bride was near our house, and on the other side of the bay of Rapallo there is a bridge that Hannibal built to cross the larger river that flows into the bay there. 

All along the top ridge that is the edge of the watershed for the creek one can still see the sites of the German lookout stations leftover from the Second World War.  The street itself was renamed Via Fratelli Betti (Betti Brothers) in 1946 to honor the memory of two Rapallo brothers who lived alongside the creek when they were young and were killed in the war.

Today the quality of the water isn’t perhaps what it once was, but it’s still clean enough to host a huge fish population. 

The big Cephalo in some of the ponds are two and three feet long, and once in a while we see big eels that have come up the creek.  The strip of greenery winding up through the tall buildings acts as a nice park, and we particularly enjoy being able to hear the splashing water at night from our bedroom.   

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Photo by Jessica Walliser

I’m beginning to think we will have snow on the ground until the end of March!  I can’t remember the last winter here in Western Pennsylvania that we’ve had such consistent snow cover, though it’s good for all those perennials I planted very late in the season. 

They’re prone to heaving with all the freeze-thaw cycles we usually have around here during the winter.  Hopefully this year they’ll stay nestled in the ground with no heaving and root freeze to speak of.  Only time will tell.

There are very few perennials left standing in my gardens; the rest have toppled under the weight of all the snow.  The buddlea is still upright and the branches are covered in peanut butter-birdseed-pinecone birdfeeders made by my son.  The tri-lobed coreopsis is standing tall and my ornamental grasses continue to look quite nice. 

Looking out my living room window, I can see the tops of my hellebores and some of my Echinacea seed heads.  Not much else is sticking above the snow.  I guess it’s a lean year for all the birds around here. I’ve been trying my best to keep the feeders and suet cages full. 

The deer have been frequent visitors throughout the winter thus far (surprise, surprise…).  I’ve covered the boxwood and hollies with netting (lesson learned last season on that one!).  There’s a cage around the pink buckeye tree that was a gift from some treasured friends at the local Horticultural Society and I even covered my redbud tree just incase the deer decided to have a little taste of something new.  Better safe than sorry.      

What I haven’t protected from the deer, and it appears that I probably should have, is my oakleaf hydrangea.  It’s one of my favorite flowering shrubs for its 4-season interest (oak-like foliage, white conical flowers, glorious autumn foliage, and interesting bark and form).  The deer have nipped off the ends of all the branches and I suspect they’ll go even further during February if all this snow sticks around.  Perhaps a trek in the snow with some more netting is in order for the coming days.    

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