The Italian autumn is a particularly suitable time for tidying up the garden. The searing summer heat has worn off, the forest’s changing colours provide a kaleidoscopic wonderland and the thought that winter won’t be too far off concentrates the mind, particularly as far as stacking up wood supplies is concerned.

At the rear of our house are two features worthy of note. First are the remaining rows of bee-hives left by the former denizen of our house, signor Pagni. Although the bees have long since departed and the hives are now regrettably rotting away we are still keeping them there as a feature.  One might ask why we didn’t take up bee-keeping and continue Pagni’s apiary line. We had thought of that but a special agricultural license has to be obtained and that license can only be got if one has passed a bee-keeping course. Moreover, Pagni unfortunately received objections from some Longoio villagers who thought his hives were too close to their house and they were in danger of being stung. (In fact, I don’t quite believe this was the case and that it was just another occasion where some villagers wished to lord it over poor Pagni because he was an outsider).

The other feature of the back garden is the water butt fed from the roof drain. We placed it there ten years ago and used its supply mainly to fill our little pond, especially when we kept Muscovy ducks there.

With help we have now managed to connect the three levels via a staircase build out of our sawn up trees. It’s opened up an area of land formerly difficult to reach because of its overgrown steepness. With this addition we’ve decided to make an extension to our kitchen garden and the vicinity of the water butt is proving most useful.

Our cats seem to like the new extension too!