You hold in your hand
The energy of ages,
Sun becomes sugar.
The full moon was last night, so we have now officially entered the Electric moon. And that means two things: Greg is returning from his business trip and it's TIME TO HARVEST GRAPES.
Fiorella shows us briefly how she wants the grapes harvested, then pops off to collect Greg at the train station in Ostuni. Evan, Jean, and I set to work in the field.
It's exciting, actually, to hold the grape clusters in your hand. Crazy to think that something like that is natural, and that we've been using it for thousands of years for our own purposes. I wonder what wild grapes used to look like... Evan comments that a grape cluster represents "nature's ad hoc sphere packing algorithm." I kiss him.
We work in the field for not-so-long before we realise that between the three of us (Evan, Jean, and I) we have filled all the buckets and baskets that we know the locations of. This is a conundrum, indeed, so we sit down to breakfast to wait for our hosts' return. They come back eventually, and we all set to the harvesting with new alacrity.
We learn about Greg! He's in the voice acting/dubbing script-writing business. He and Fiorella met originally at an academic conference about Mayans. He's from Los Angeles, and he was there for work (and to visit family). He's a much better source of information about the 13 Moon Calendar: the Cosmic History Chronicles are very long, and he can distill a lot of information into a few words, plus he can answer any questions we have directly without need for an index.
After the grapes are harvested (all 250kg of them!), we marvel at them standing in the driveway for a few minutes. After that, we sit down to a lunch of foccacias brought back by Greg and Fiorella. They tell us that there's a bakery in Ostuni where they make the best foccacias, and we believe them after eating these. :) Delicious spinach, tomatoes, and olives dot the breads, and they are AMAZING. Accompanying the foccacias is a salad made of edible herbs from around the Garden; many of which I have never seen before. But they're tasty, too, especially with a dab of the lemon yogurt Fiorella got from the local macelleria recently.
After lunch, we all relax a little and take time to shake out our joints from the picking. Shortly, it's time to weed the garden areas so that Greg can rototill them later. Certain weeds are too long and whippy to be chopped by such a machine; they simply jam its motors and kill it. So we pick them first. Unfortunately, they are full of excessively sticky sap. Sigh. Now we are covered in sap.
Covered in sap and tired out. It's the end of a long day of working out in the fields, and we're ready for bed. Learning about the grape harvest was awesome, and I hope we get to learn about the other stages of winemaking sometime. We've been drinking the wine that Greg and Fiorella made last year, and it's pretty good. We're contributing for next year's WWOOFers!