From the Garden to the Table ,from the Table to the Garden

The first reason to move to the country is fresh air but the second is a vegetable garden.What they do not tell you is how hard it is to work the soil in a land like Chianti,how much you suffer when it’s not raining enough and when it’s raining too much.Then if you decide to have a organic garden you decide to share it with all the possible living creatures on Earth but…they do not dig with you.

Anyway when you just put a seed in the ground and then day by day you see the seed becoming a plant and finally you have your tomatoes, your salad , your eggplant to taste…….what a pleasure for soul and palate is to taste a tomato picked when perfectly ripe or to rub the sage to enjoy its great smell.

For this reason when we moved to Chianti in Tuscany, first our parents and then we and Alcide decided to have our vegetable garden. Most of what we use during Cooking classes is produced in our garden.

I still remember when the old man living next to us , smiling at our hard work for organizing a garden, said”Oh, you’ll see how down there the soil is “ .He simply meant that gardening is a lot of digging, bending, sitting on your knees.

And we learned to have certain flowers to keep bugs away from the vegetables or to hang CD on fruit trees to keep birds away from our fruits.And now the great pleasure is to go in the garden, pick the vegetables, the aromatic herbs and …cook

Then we get all of the unused cuts from the vegetables ,the egg shells, the used coffee powder and collect in the compost. Have your compost, reuse things.It’s a wide subject but we would like to limit it to a couple of suggestion.Living in town you cannot easily have a compost but you can dilute the coffee leftovers with water to reinforce your plants in vases, or cut the watermelon rind in smaller pieces and feed your plants which will receive a lot of liquid from it. Simple traditional reciclyng .