It has been a while! We enjoyed our first Christmas with a lovely traditional lunch at our local restaurant and welcomed in the New Year quietly at home watching everyone’s fireworks on the stroke of midnight. January gave us some heavy snow, two days off school, sledging in our garden, down the roads and across the farmers fields. I’m not really sure what happened to February but we enjoyed our first Carnevale, a lovely Sunday afternoon in Montegiorgio with everyone dressing up in costume and so much confetti, silly string and streamers.

 Here we are in March already. It is great to see so much blossom and spring flowers. Time to make sure our fruit trees and olives are pruned after a few years of neglect. The olives trees which were already looking very overgrown in the autumn and sustained quiet a large amount of damage from the heavy snow fall were looking in desperate need of some TLC. We felt this year confident and competent olive pruning was beyond us so got in the professionals. To save money, it seemed like a good idea at the time, we asked them just to cut we would tidy up the branches. Little did I realise what 3 years of neglect looked like laying on the ground. It will though give us plenty of logs for next year and we now know olive branches and leaves burn really fast on a bonfire.