May 3rd(Sat.)

Even I, enthusiastic as I am, would love to get away just for a day trip I have to admit. Since we moved in or actually way before that everyweekend has been devoted to getting the small holding up and going.
So with the 4 day golden week holiday upon us I guaranteed Yasumi, we’d do 2 days work and 2 day trips. It didn’t quite work out that way but it felt a hell of a lot better having made the plan.
Today however was a work day and a big one at that.

I had 2 tasks:
1) Mark out the olive grove, showing the position of the 12 trees for next year and also the drainage channels which will be dug soon.
2) Raise up the ridges in the vegetable field using the farrowing plough on my rotivator.

Quite enough to be getting on with.
There’s been a lot of talk of this year being a major blip in the evidence of global warming with record cold spells around the world. I don’t want to get into the evidence or lack of it here but on a purely anecdotal basis it certainly has been a cold year so far for us. Snowing countless times throughout winter and a now a noticeably cool spring such that I was quite happy to wear my fleece in the early morning until 8a.m.
Things heated up after that with it turning into the first day that hinted of the long stupifying heat of summer that would follow.
It took a good 2 hours to mark out the channels and the position of the trees on their 6×4m dais of earth.

A farming friend emailed me warning me to be wary of even attempting to plant fruit trees on a former rice field due to the drainage issues. It’s advice I’m going to seriously consider since he knows his stuff. Apparently should a Japanese farmer wish to plant satsuma trees on a former rice field the advice is to raise the soil level by a staggering 1 to 1.5m.
I do have a year to implement the drainage measures I’ve decided on,look at the performance of the soil in shedding water before I’m due to plant up the trees. If the site proves to be unacceptable, nothing is lost since it will have had a year under the ‘green manure’of clover and vetch that are nature’s great soil re-invigorators.

It was a strange feeling marking out an olive grove in this far flung corner of the world just as a yeoman farmer may have done with wood stakes and rope in some corner of the Roman empire, even Britain maybe, that they decided to call their home.
Forgive my romantic outpourings.

Sure was hot and Yasumi, knowing how to keep her man happy and cool, surprised me with the first ice cold drink thermos of the year.

Raising the banks was also about using the farrowing plough on the tractor for the first time. Now I know ploughing is not easy but after doing the first row with the farrower carving a channel through the soil like a boats bow and ending at the other end of the 24m long field with only a few slight ripples to interupt my first rows straightness I felt quietly confident and felt, ‘Well, this isn’t half as difficult as I thought’. Thing is though like wood grain going around a knot that slight ripple is amplified in the next row unless you’re careful such that it get’s bigger and bigger with each successive row until you cry out ‘Oh, my God, I’ve made some strange new age soil sculpture !’
No it didn’t get that bad but I could see the possibility was there. What did happen however was that I decided I’d make a slightly wider bed for my zucchini that like to spread themselves out. Unfortunately I started off at a width where one tractor wheel was down in the previous furrow the other up on virgin soil. Well such a situation cannot persist for 24m and so like a racing bike leaning into a curve the tractor kept pulling around making a horrible mangled mess in the centre of
the field.

‘Not to fear’ I thought I’ll just plough it out and start again, so the rotivator became like a giant eraser except that I used it like a kid with smudged up fingers and made just as much mess as I cleared up.

And so things proceeded until for the sake of my own composure I hit on the abstract logic to start at the other side of the field put in some more clean standard width rows in the virgin soil and that messed up centre row should come out right and can be tidied up with a rake. Which it was. Conclusion ? As expected ploughing isn’t easy.