Monday, May 05, 2008

visiting camera woman, #@*! rose eating beetles, Buon compleanno a Fabio Diu






5 maggio
Happy Cinco di Mayo everyone. We have had a full weekend with guests from all over. After the americans came italians from the north, 2 Dutch who now live in France and today 2 more americans. A different kind of work for a change.
We were happy to see our old friend Rebecca even for a short time and as an expert behind the camera, she took some candids of life around Nascondiglio di Bacco. Not all are necessarily complimentary, but...
The pictures show Raffaele with Chloe, his lovebird (a gift from his love-Elisa), #3-a yawning me collecting flowers for our breakfast tables, and the 2nd is of Raffaele, our local sage farmer and the new kid on the block explaining how things should be done :-). Next is Raffaele with the laundry heading to the delivery truck and finally i took a foto of one of the bastards who is eating my rose blooms.
I have blasted these pests with some natural product I found at the coop and then a soap spray as suggested by friend Larry Houston, my KC rose expert. So far, mixed results; it is difficult to tell if they are still causing damage as I have cut off all the susceptible rose blossoms.
Back to Rebecca; we hadn't seen her since graduation from UNISG, so it was way past time to catch up with our friend from Venezia. She has a job that must have been designed in the USA as she rarely gets any vacation time. She is working with a firm which helps coordinate the docking of the really big, expensive yachts into Venice and then helps with all the arrangements for the folks disembarking. I see other grand things for her in the future in the realm of enogastronomic tourism, but for now, she is gaining great contacts and experience.
We had our land tilled to try to get ahead of the army of the weeds which was growing faster than one hoeing american could extirpate. Hopefully, tomorrow an army of Pakistanis will come to help us get caught up. As an example, yesterday hoeing just one row of our Pecorino in the valley took over 2 hours and we have a couple of hundred rows, although not as bad as that one.
Pool construction begins again today and hopefully tomorrow the final excavation and grading will be finished and all will look a lot different! Of course the 3 weeks until finishing which we heard 10 days ago has not changed. Still 3 weeks!
I am off to Rome for next weekend prior to catching my plane for Denver and hope to see their rose garden. I may ask their experts as well how to kill this nasty beetle using biological products.
PS check out the nascondiglio di bacco blog for a cute pic of my and the growing giant baby, now 10 months old. There is a link from my blog above to the NdB blog.
ciao

dds

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