April Showers Bring May Flowers

The weather here is either been freezing cold and rainy or beautifully sunny.  For example, there was this hailstorm a few weeks ago.

I’ve seen hail before, but only a few pieces of hail, not a storm.  It was pretty amazing being inside and hearing the loud drops of ice hit the roof.  In the two minutes I went outside to take this picture, I got a good amount of hail in my boots.

The good thing about weather like this though is that we get to stay inside to work.  These are Fukuoka clay balls.  Fukuoka was a Japanese man that developed a specific to cultivate vegetable with the goal of bringing back how nature likes to farm.  The idea is to mix a bunch of different seeds together with clay and compost.  Then we throw them where we want them to grow and what needs to grow will. 

Always after a long stretch of horrible weather, we have really nice weather.  This is the stone path that I have been working on with another American/Danish volunteer.  I hope I get to finish it before I leave. 

Some other outdoor work I got to do was to transplant a bunch of strawberry plants.  This was a good day of walking up and down the hill, bring the plants to their new homes on the permaculture mounds. 

With such great weather, I got a chance to go to Porto Fino on one of my days off.  I made some friends who live in the city of Chiavari, so they took me around the area.  I guess Porto Fino is pretty famous (although I haven’t heard about it until then), with the rich of the rich inhabiting the fisherman town.  It was pretty beautiful.

Now that it is spring, everything is starting to grow, including the insects.  I’ve been noticing an increase in months. 

For the last two weeks there were three other volunteers here, besides myself and an Israeli family.  The mom and son are from Denmark, but have been living in the States for the last 10 years, and have been traveling with the mom’s boyfriend for the last three months.  They left the farm a few days ago and we had a really nice dinner and send off for them. 

Ok, kind of a scrambled post, but I finally got to put up some pics.  More to come soon!