Last year, Charles Mitchell and Cynthia Fletcher retired from Cumbria to the region of Marche in Italy. Leaving behind busy schedules, their new life revolves around their old farm house and the creation of their garden, their orto. After neighboor Franco finally arrives to plough the terraces, Cinzia (aka Cynthia) can start planting out her veg...

We’ve been away from our new home in Italy for much of the spring; spending the first half of March in Keswick for the Words by the Water literature festival, and then rushing off to catch a flight for Sicily to celebrate Cinzia’s birthday as soon as the festival was over. Then April seemed to rush by with sequential visits from friends and relatives interspersed with too many short visits back to the UK .

Words by the Water was better than ever this year, and I got the chance to interview on stage the excellent and inspirational Raymond Blanc who was kind enough to sign and dedicate a book with a special message to our next-door neighbour Chantal, herself a great chef and, like Raymond, an exile from Eastern France.

Sicily, for Cinzia’s birthday was great. We’re terrible speedy tourists. Most ‘travellers’ would be horrified that we ‘did’ most of Sicily’s Greek, Roman and Medieval remains by tea-time on the day after we arrived, leaving us only the desire to eat more fabulous Sicilian food and circumnavigate Mount Etna on Cinzia’s birthday before we flew back to the UK to pick up our car to drive home.

After Sicily, the Marche at the time of the Spring equinox seemed very ‘northern’ when we got back. Winter seems to have taken a long time to go this year, and the blossom and first signs of Spring came later than we thought they should. Spring bulbs are not common here and it took us a while to learn to look out for the first flowers of ginestra as a sign of spring and, when the sun shone and we could get up the mountain, get immense pleasure from walking among the carpets of wild crocus, and gentian and violets that covered the higher meadows and the abundance of cyclamen, primrose and violets that we found in the hedgerows throughout April.

Wood anemonies and gentians

Our horticultural year really began when Franco, our neighbour and good friend announced in early April that he’d be coming subito to rotavate the area we’d cleared for the orto. Cinzia immediately set-to with her zappa to clear any remaining stones and half-buried antique household junk in the area ear-marked for planting. Cinzia and Franco are kindred spirits about orto business and I’ve learned that it’s my job to not make decisions, do what I’m told to do and focus on cooking or sampling the produce. This leaves me free to concentrate on the important business of clearing paths through the trees and playing with power-tools. I love it.

The orto-to-be lies on what might be termed the second terrace of our precipitous garden. The top terrace, which is where we imagine ourselves artfully arranged in comfortable chairs among exotic plants in giant pots, is still a builders yard on a heap of rubble and may well continue to be for some time to come; but the next terrace down has been cleared of trees during the late winter and an area of about the size of a singles tennis court is now ‘the orto’ awaiting Franco and his rotavator.

Subito is ‘soon’, but days passed and Cinzia did sometimes get a little agitated that Franco was busying himself with all sorts of other important tasks, but not arriving to turn over her orto. Franco himself was unperturbed. ‘Not ready. Not yet right. We must wait for the terre to be just so’ he’d tell her. Meanwhile, Cinzia was building up a collection of seeds, seedlings and plug plants bought from local markets and her enthusiasm for planting was growing by the day.

Then, ‘Domani’ announced Franco. But that night it rained and tomorrow became ‘Doppo domani’ as the earliest possible time we could rotavate. Cinzia spoke of turning over at least some of the ground with her zappa, but instead attacked a new area of near-vertical ground below the two-metre dry-stone walls holding up our builder’s yard. She made mini-terraces of woven branches from the weed trees we’d slaughtered and sifted the terre to make a series of raised beds in which she was able to allay her frustration by planting herbs, salad leaves, vegetables and small, low-growing fruits including rabarbaro in which Franco was very interested; it would appear he doesn’t know what rhubarb tastes like. Cinzia has promised him a rhubarb crumble once it has grown.

Cinzia's mini-terrace.

Then, one beautiful April morning at 7.00am, we awoke to hear not just the familiar early-morning throaty rumble of our builder’s lorry reversing on to the top-terrace, but a deeper, seriously mascolino throbbing sound from just below our bedroom windows.

Franco had arrived to ‘rotavate’ the orto.

Like most blokes, I do like to play with power tools; but Franco’s Landini trattore is a serious piece of horticultural machinery. I watched with joy and amazement as Franco ploughed the heavily impacted earth and turned our orto-to-be into a beautiful ploughed and levelled orto. He’d even managed to manoeuvre around the little bit of terre that impatient Cinzia had dug over with her zappa and planted with produce in the autumn.

She’d wandered off to do an errand in Pergola market one day in October while friends and I were waiting for our lunch of pasta with wild boar sauce. She came back with garlic, fava (broad beans) and peas to plant. She was quite excited because she had never planted broad beans or peas in October before in UK although we know some people do. Franco looked askance – he doesn’t plant fava and piselli in the autumn. Apparently it was ok to plant the garlic . So we planted peas, fava and three sorts of garlic (red, white and French). And now, in the Spring, they were all growing strongly and Cinzia is especially proud of her fava because, as she proudly announces as she sticks her head over fences and observes the plants of others, hers are bigger and have more flowers than every other gardener’s around here. Franco recently admitted that his fava planted ‘at the proper time’ in December have not yet flowered.

A couple of days later Franco returned with his rotavator and turned over the ground again leaving it almost ready for planting. As soon as she was allowed to do so Cinzia finished off everything by going over the whole area with her zappa and making paths between where all her plantings were going to be.

She’s been ready with tomatoes (six varieties), aubergine, courgettes, peppers, potatoes for weeks now. Melons too.

Keeping an eye on the weather during this uncertain Spring she asked Franco ‘When can we plant? ‘Not yet’ he said, ‘You must wait for the moon to be ready’.

So we waited, and waited. It rained and rained and we continued to wait. We gave up hope. Then Franco appeared – the terre was right, the moon was right. Plant the potatoes he said – he dug a trench in the heavy clodded soil and stuck them in. We couldn’t believe he was planting in such uncultivated earth but we did as he instructed. A week later he arrived with chick peas. Would Cinzia like to plant them? Of course – another trench was dug and the chick peas buried.

In early May Franco gave permission to plant our 36 tomatoes in the orto, and without permission we have planted melone, zucchini, melanzane, and pepperoni . Franco appears to have been correct as the cocombre looks particularly unwell although the others are surviving. The nights can still be cold and Franco has advised us to cover the more delicate plants.

While Cynthia and Franco have been waiting to plant the orto, I’ve been clearing space at the other end of the terrace for an open area of grass where, until the builders have finished with the top terrace, we can put a dining table and have comfortable seating. Cinzia’s been busy collecting sample wild-flowers from the wilderness gardens of friends and wants to make a small wild-flower garden here too. The terre here was full of household rubbish and fallen-down stones from the dry-stone walling too, so many April hours have been spent picking out the rubbish, digging up the roots of brambles and nettles and preparing the soil for seeding.

April has not been a sunny month here but it has been warm enough for plant growth, so we decided to sow the grass and, between visitors and visits to the UK, try and keep it moist enough for germination so that we might, by the end of May or June, have some grass in which we could wriggle our toes. So we seeded and we watered and we watched. Cinzia, one morning, on one of those rare occasions where she decided that watching the grass grow was exactly what she wanted to do, was surprised to see the grass seeds moving in an orderly fashion across the terre.

Thieving ants

One of our many colonies of ants were delighted that we’d given them so much to eat and were busy moving the seeds to a nice easy distance outside one of the entrances to their nest. We grabbed back what we could and damped down more frequently after that and now, in early May, we’ve got inch-high grass.

We’re starting to get our first produce from Cinzia’s mini-terraces with the woven walls, which look as though they’re a success. We have salad leaves ready and the herbs look as though they’re very happy in this location.

Herbs and salad leaves ready to eat.

Spring has brought the frequent pleasure of visiting friends and family. One of our domestic delights is that our children all make the effort to come and see us, even though the house is chaotic at all times and we never know how many rooms are going to be usable or needed for urgent attention by builders, plumbers or electricians. Paul and Helen have brought their brand-new baby for his first visit to Italy and their bigger kids provide all the excitement and stimulation we need when they’re here. We’ve got our residency status now and Cinzia surprised me with a brand-new Vespa for my birthday. It’s the colour of Cinzia’s eyes.

This week we’ve got Holly and Andrew here, though Andrew’s been renamed Angelo by our neighbour Rita and it looks as though he’s going to have to be Angelo all the time now.

The builders have gone home, and Cinzia, Holly and Angelo are on ant-duty watching the grass grow. I’m in the house by myself and I’ve tuned the radio to my favourite music channel while cooking supper and heard the first strummed chords of a favourite but half-forgotten song from thirty years ago. I just felt a little shiver. That one that older blokes get in the knees and the shoulders and that might actually be a little dance. Only for a second, but it felt good.

We’ll eat supper on the terrace, under the White Mulberry tree where the fruit is just beginning to show with its branches laden with lights made as a birthday treat by Holly and Angelo, and Cinzia has just given me the first fava bean of the season – a good luck charm here. Perfetto.

Charles Mitchell, May 2011