Il Percorso Scenico: Localita il Piano: Week 3

I somehow managed to take almost no pictures during my last week at Localita il Piano..... but it was still an awesome week. We made some major progress on many of the things that we had been working on for the last few weeks. We finished laying hay in the new vineyard, and covered the kiwis, berries and currants as well. We also dug trenches and mulched most of the apple, pear, and fig trees that needed help. And we stacked more firewood. I realized that the posts from the past few weeks didn't really do justice to the firewood gathering/stacking process, so I thought I would include a more detailed description in this week's post:

Load the trailer with wood from the trees that Adolfo cut down near the olive grove.
I don't have any pictures of this part of the process, but some of the pieces weigh a hell of a lot more than Ben. Pieces that were large and straight enough were loaded into the trailer hole so that they could be used later as posts and such. This part of the process also afforded the opportunity to hurl large pieces of wood into the trailer to test our accuracy.... fun. When you get done, you have something that looks like this:

Got wood?

Take the wood out of the trailer and stack it in the storage room.
This takes a bit more time than loading the trailer (and sadly, there is no hurling wood in this part because you have to carefully stack the pieces so that they won't collapse on Ben, Darcy, or Adolfo at some point in the future). It's fun in a different way though; it's sort of like playing a game of Tetris, but none of the pieces are the same shape. This part of the process looks like this:

Yes. I've got wood.

And the end result looks a lot like this:

It's hard to tell, but the stack is on its way to three logs deep.

Why do they need so much firewood? You may be asking yourself right now.
Well, let me explain. No, there's too much. Let me sum up. Localita il Piano has an efficient central heating system that doesn't require outside power. Radiant heating in the flooring is used to heat the 1st floor and the 2nd floor agritourismo. During the summer and when it's sunny, solar panels heat the water used for the radiant heating system. But in the winter, there is not enough sun to heat everything, so they have a wicked awesome furnace system that burns wood to heat the water tanks. (The actual logistics of how the furnace does this are somewhat complicated, but it's super efficient. I can't really explain the whole process, but it's awesome.) The same system is also used to heat the water that comes out of the faucets and shower. Moral of the story: home heating and hot water while being totally self sufficient. Score.

Let's see.... What else happened this week....

On Easter, we dyed eggs by boiling them with onion skins while they were in old pantyhose with leaves (to give them a nice pattern). I don't have any pics of the final product. But here's what they looked like before boiling:

Darcy also taught me to make gnocchi.... hers looked very nice. Mine... not so much. But they all tasted pretty good.

While we are talking about food... I may not have mentioned it, but Darcy is an amazing cook. I don't have many food pictures (because I was usually so excited to go eat that I would forget my camera) but I think these will help get the message across: