Tie with wicker

Cool! I didn't know the correct english word for it :P and thanks to mr.Gççgle Translate hopefully I got it right. So apparently "wicker" is the english for the italian word "vimini", a variety of willow commonly used for basketry and... tying stuff!

Willow wicker between two grapevines

Our elders here still do it, so I decided to learn it right away as soon as I could... and teach my son as well! He can do it now that he is 8 years old, of course! This is our homeschooling way, right there in our never-ending outdoor classroom.



This is one of the many many ties that had to do to rearrange the little family vineyard that I am managing since last year.

At the end of this post there is a short video clip showing how to tie with wicker.
The next sequence shows one of the grapevines before and after pruning and tying session. A lot of branches had to come down from this really impressive puzzle. 

Making room for mushrooms

It's been a few years now since last time I grew edible mushrooms at home. Today, making treasure of some maintenance cutting that I had to perform on a couple of willow trees, I prepared them into the medium base where to set some dry mycelium of oyster mushroom (pleurotus ostreatus).



Willow wood is the best kind to use for inoculating this type of mushrooms. In about two months time it should be ready to go in the ground; then hopefully in the fall of this year we should be harvesting the first batch. So this is what I did.

Miso making days

In these days, I've been directing an amazing collective effort, working together at "Tempo Di Vivere" ecovillage: cooking, measuring, fermenting rice, mashing beans and we ended up with a whole bunch of Ohmemade miso... about 58,5 kilos all together.
Those are the filled up containers: but here's is how it all started.
Check it out!