The expert: "this was the rainiest spring in at least two centuries in northern Italy; May, the coldest since 1991 ... " we both agree on that. I had never seen Mount Ramaceto whiten with snow in late May, the snow that lasted at least a couple of days. A splendid spectacle to behold, but the campaign?
This year we were really in trouble because it is pretty much from April rains almost every day, inhibiting us to work the land, not so much for the risk of getting wet that - right - would not in itself a great misfortune , but because working the wet soil means compact and make it feeble, rather than aerate and feed it as it would need.
So we just finished planting onions in late April, potatoes in mid-May, and most of the garden is still waiting to be dug and sown or planted.
But thanks to the constant Brunella looking for new solutions, we have found a way to prepare a vegetable garden even without working the land. It is a permacultural metode that we had already tried before, without satisfactory results. But now we found we had made some mistakes, a little due to inexperience, and a bit due to the inability to do things differently at that time, which might have given the scarcity of the result. For this, given that it was impossible to do otherwise, we decided to try again.
We measured the beds of equal size to those used for deep-bed (width about 120cm so you can work with ease across the bed without having to trample). We laid some sheets of cardboard from packaging waste, recovered from the shops, on the grass grown in the garden, we removed the grass and its roots around the beds, but only in the passages between a bed and the other. On the cartoons, we then added an even layer of manure thickness of about 10cm. Above the manure we laid a mulch that was supposed to be about 20cm, made mostly from sheep's wool salvaged from old mattresses thrown away, and a mowing grass without seeds.
For the moment we left the beds so created at rest, waiting to accommodate the seedlings that we will put at abode, creating a small little hole in the mulching, filled with ground. To do this, however, we will have to wait until the temperature rises a little to prevent the seedlings sown at home by Brunella and kept in a protected environment until today, get cold and suffer from it.
In the meantime, we are dedicated to other tasks as the maintenance of the house (paint stripping and repainting of two old cupboard), the finishing of the garden's fence (hash), the cleaning of blueberries from the weeds and the first unexpected crop of Siberian blueberries (few but good) and many other tasks and jobs that have been waiting for time to be taken into consideration. We are also dedicated to the new guests of Nun t'adescià farm, the bees, whom suffer from the delayed arrival of the heat.
In short, there's just to bored and then ... “Pacienzia ci voli a li burrasche, cà nun si mancia meli senza muschi” (patience is token in the storms, you do not eat honey without flies).