Storms of summer 2019

What a summer full of adventures, pretty stormy too, in many respects eventful to our Old Stable project. It’s been hectic and yet again when I sit down to write about it, it all looks as if time has slipped so quickly in between our fingers: so much has happened in so little time.

From an upsetting visit of a hungry fox, through a mini tornado with ghastly winds and political engagement. We had a busy summer even though we didn’t have plans for building projects (finally, we had a summer’s rest from that!). However, I did really want to clear up some of the mess we’ve accumulated in the last two years and free some of the spaces we so wish to use with the people who visit us. But it’s only in the past two weeks that we finally got to do something about it. So let’s start with a general overview and hopefully I’ll add some pictures on the way. This post will include:

• The joys and dramas of having animals in the countryside
• Crazy storms and their effects on the garden (and my dear hops) including a few trees that needed to be cut down. more dead animals.
• Elena’s political activities: from volunteer to list member and finally commissioner. Completely un-planned yet so obvious it would happen eventually. This summer was a lot about that and the adjustments we need to make for it
• ‘Io imparo da solo’ , Elena’s book about unschooling in Italian just came out in print.
• Gearing up for next year teaching activities

Joys and dramas of having animals at The Old Stable

The idea of coming here was to be closer to nature (and family) and to enjoy the ability to produce at least some of our own food. This, at first, involved just creating a vegetable plot but animals started coming very soon after. At first, finding mice running up and down the stable (remember that Autumn of cyclists visiting?) called for a cat who did the job well and changed my initial thoughts about cats as a pet. Soon after mining the cat, came the chickens with just a few ex-industrial hens. The joy of collecting your own eggs and having your chickens follow you like pets is enormous. So is the joy of cuddling a cat on an early morning beside the fire place and having him follow you as you go to collect wood. We also collected a random rabbit, that’s a different story. However, there is a lot of drama that comes along too. As I wrote earlier in a post, we also got some 10 chicks later on to realize we’ve added three more males to our flock, resulting in: a cock fight, a badly broken leg and finally, my first attempt at wringing a cockerel’s neck followed by preparing chicken broth.

Late spring come fox and pretty much killed all our chickens but one. It was quite devastating and I felt guilty for weeks for not making sure the chicken pen was closed properly that night. Feathers all scattered around the yard and around the fence, a hint of what might have happened the previous night, and only one survival walking carefully between the debris. I found only one dead chicken in the field outside our house. The rest must have been dragged to the fox’s den. It took me around a month before I headed up to Spilamberto animal market to get a few more chickens only to discover that during the empty period a rat has decided to occupy the nearly empty chicken pen and thus the new flock had strangely refused to go in it to sleep. I dreaded another fox visit and found myself another month trying to catch the rat with: traps, glue and even poison so that I can finally put the chickens in the pen again and close carefully against another fox visit. The chicken saga hadn’t finished yet… our friend the pharmacist has brought over a hen with all her 10 little chicks under her wings. She heard about our fox’s visit and she had too many to take care of and so we got mummy and children as a comforting present. We were very happy observing how mummy chicken takes care of her little ones. Mummy hen and chicks were of a different type called here ]french chicken’ (francesina): short, small and somewhat round.. they can fly and lay eggs pretty much everywhere. Little did we know that a family of falcons had nested that time in our barn

In fact, this year we noticed that the number of pigeons nesting in the barn has dropped considerably and it took us a while to figure out why. Eventually we noticed that mummy french chicken has been loosing chicks everyday and their numbers went from 10 to just 2-3 in a weeks time. Funny thing is that the chicks seem to have disappeared during the day time. One day our middle child told us she saw a big bird looking over the chicken pen fence.. ah ah we understood , here comes our falcon. Mummy french chicken had only one chick left. A little yellow cheeping chick. His story is not over yet and you’ll find it in the next part about our summer storm and the havoc it created in our garden.

Another new arrival that brought us, unexpectedly, a lot of joy is the bee hive. Elena got this as an exchange for English lessons she gave to a daughter of our friends. I’m being taught how to treat the bee hive and how to collect honey in the summer season, I think at the end we got highly paid and we’d be happy to have more of these fun exchanges. Yes, I do most of it… Elena bring the ideas 🙂

On the drama side again, Mining the cat died this August probably from eating some poison from a different field but as I used a bit of rat poison myself in the chicken pen the month before, I still have fears and guilt feelings that it could have been somehow me that caused it. That was definitely a heartbreaking event for us and the kids. But yet again our pharmacist friend came to the rescue and brought us all the way from the south of Italy three new kittens! However, within less than a week from their arrival three kittens became two as one was attacked by either a stray dog or a fox and was found dead in the next morning. Looking back I should have kept them from the beginning indoors until they are bigger (now the two remaining stay in the stables during the night). This just adds to my guilt feelings. So all in all a summer full of dramas around the animals in our Old Stable. The rabbit btw, decided it’s all too much and has escaped. I saw her nibbling here and there in the yard together with a hare that hopped by… but since that black kitten has been found dead I haven’t spotted the rabbit and hare either.

Crazy storms and their effects

Whether it’s just the fact that we are now living closer to nature or that we are more and more aware of how the climate is changing globally from media and from being more active in the area, we feel that the weather lately is going crazy and that the consequences are grave. The month of May was a very strange one with a big dose of rain nearly on the verge of flooding. The worst day was at the very end of May with a frightening storm composed of 115 km/hr winds that shaved everything on ground and showered hail as big as tennis balls. The storm only lasted 15 minutes or so but the effects were horrendous. The aftermath looked like someone cleared up the garden and combed the grass vigorously to one side. branches and leaves were scattered everywhere. It was so shocking that I dared take no pictures. My glorious hop plants that looked like they’ll be giving me endless fruit were torn from the bottom of the vine stems. It took two days to see the effect as they turned brown and shriveled on the ropes. The willow at the back had one of it’s major branches split in two.

The willow at the front (that was way too close to the building) showed a big fracture along its trunk. Eventually, we had to take it down and now the front patio lays empty.

The chickens were hit the most with three dead, probably from the hail hitting them hard. It’s how I get back to our little chick story. Mummy french hen got killed by the hail but her one and only chick that survived the continuous falcon attacks was found shivering and cheeping under a bush. We took him in and let him stay indoors for nearly a month before letting him out again.

He and the cat became the children’s best friends. The cat sitting on their lap, the chick on their head. He got the name of Tempesta – meaning Storm. We could have been hit harder and many around us lost windows and even solar panels. Our roof stayed intact. However, since that storm every time the winds start getting stronger or the clouds begin to darken I feel the shivers and run to close all the shutters. In July we escaped to Switzerland to see our relatives, we paid a visit to a glacier in Mt. Titlis … all I could think of is how this might be the last time we get a chance to see a living glacier and how the climate is definitely changing. Man’s fault or not.

Elena’s political activities

Summer offered us another type of storm (at least in my opinion): entering politics or worst still, the local administration. We’ve always wanted to get involved more in the community and push for change (from cyclability to reducing waste, education reforms and welcoming immigrants). Elena has taken things seriously. It started with giving a hand writing a political programme for a local list that ran for the local elections somewhere early spring. Elena got very active in the environmental debate and tried to formulate a programme that will include building the long awaited Nonantola-Modena bicycle path among other things. Within a span of a few months we found Elena being selected as the commissioner for: environment, mobility and urban development in the newly elected administration which was formed by a coalition of the democratic party (PD) and the new list (Una mano per Nonantola). It’s a storm because it shuffles the way we have to approach our projects. It minimizes the amount of time we have as a family and separates Elena, in some way, from developing our teaching activities at The Old Stable. I’m restricted in writing about our experiences as a family with Elena being part of the administration as I might be accidentally giving some sensitive political information… I can only say that it’s not easy for Elena or me… and the frustration in working in the adminstration is immense. I started understanding why things don’t move much in Italy. I’ll let Elena write about it.. she really should. She says she’d write a whole book. which brings me to…

Io imparo da solo – Elena’s book about unschooling

Just before the election time (or was it in between), Elena sat down to complete a book she always dreamt of writing: a book for parents who want to know what led to our decision to unschool our children. The book has come out (in Italian, of course) and is printed by Tera Nuova. I started reading it, as I never got the chance before, and I find it quite a good read. The right humble pitch it deserves. A link to the book you can find here.

Gearing up for the new academic year

With all the storms behind us, or simmering down, at least, summer is also a good time to regenerate and pick up the enthusiasm for improving on last year’s teaching activities. This summer I had the pleasure of meeting some enthusiastic teenagers that are keen on trying new things such as role playing games and theatre activities. We are coming up with some new ideas and hope to get more enrollments this year. More about this hopefully soon (and in Italian !)