L'artista - Rachel

Rachel has been pretty busy lately up at the hay barn (see earlier post).

Having for many years not had the time or the facilities to practice her art she now has some of both. As any artist knows not everyday goes well and it is not easy to put what is in your head down onto paper with brush and paint. As Rachel tells me it is often better in her mind than is possible to achieve on canvas.

However, she loves the opportunity to paint and the above is just one of her works. There are more available at www.rkwilliams.com

I do I do I do

This shows the Casa Margherita company Fiat Panda covered with a layer of pollen from our olive trees. This year the trees, thanks to a very warm and wet spring, are full to bursting with flower.

Olive tree flower

The image above shows a detail of an olive branch in full flower and the image on the right shows one of the Casa Margherita olive trees in full bloom. The flowers in full bloom totally change the appearance of the tree. Normally they are a silvery green colour and now they are the yellowy white of the olive flower.

Monster Park

Met up with some friends today at the monster park in Bomarzo which is around 50kms north of Rome. It is a great park with lots of great stone monsters which were built by the Duke of Orsini - the literal english translation of his title would be Duke of little bears.

It's not a great park but full of shade from great pines and oaks and so a nice place to explore. Check out their website at www.parcodeimostri.com

Stuff

Went to our local post office today to collect a sample wooden box as we want to change how our adopt a olive tree scheme looks. It was closed as someone had tried to detonate some sort of explosive device in the cash machine to access the cash. This was foiled as the cash machine caught fire!

Quite some event in sleepy Borgo Trevi.


One of the Italian TV channels showed a reply of the 2006 World Cup final which Italy won. This is the last time it will shown for a while and I don't think they will be collecting this years trophy. Having seen Spain crush Poland the other night 6-0 then I think they will be in with a great change alongside England and the All Whites - New Zealand. Did you know the NZ basketball team is called the Tall Blacks!

Love it tough

This was taken locally from an area that has been cleared in preparation for the building of a community centre. As this photo shows, the olives are tough old trees and they only have about 30cm's of earth and then its rock. Yet they flourish in these conditions. This was a valuable trait as this meant the better lowlands could be used for more valuable crops but the lower hills slopes could still be put to olives.

Nowadays olives are grown in fertile soil and are irrigated etc etc. I don't believe this increases the quality of the oil that the trees produce but solely the yield of the trees.

Casa Margherita does not irrigate it's trees and they grow on the same hillside as the trees in the photo.

Olive flowers

As you can hopefully see here the flowers have just started to open. They are tiny - only about 5mm across but this year our trees are laden and so when they open en masse then the grove will change colour from its normal grey/green, or olive drab as I refer to it, to a white/yellowy hew.

The mercury is set to climb to 32 degrees by the weekend so I don't think they will be long opening.