Back in May, I wrote about our vegetable plot. Now, belatedly, it's time to run the rule over the orchard.

The Italian word for orchard is frutetto. Nicer I think. The frutetto is about 250 square meters and like the veggie plot – or orto – faces due south.

English varieties predominate. Are they suited to a central Italian climate ? Only one way to find out…

Apples
Italian apples look great and taste of nothing. Modern hybrids engineered to provide huge yields capable of sitting on a supermarket shelf for weeks on end.

I'm growing four English heritage varieties: Laxton's Epicure; Egremont Russet; Blenheim Orange; and Ribston's Pippin. The plan is that these'll provide a continuous supply of apples from August through until about March.

Have absolutely no idea how they'll all stand up to the rigors of an Abruzzo summer – but so far so good.

Greengage Early Transparent and Damson Farleigh
I've grown both before. Again, both are heritage varieties. The Gage is a lovely translucent yellow-green and tastes wonderful; the Damson's for turning into jam and crumbles.

Because I can be a ham-fisted idiot, I recently split the trunk of the Gage while spreading out its branches. So I've screwed it back together. Should work. I once Duck-taped a wind-split trunk on a Cercis Canadensis 'Forest Pansy' and that bonded together just fine.

Redcurrant Laxton's No1
Produced four currants in its first season this year ! Next year – summer puddings and jars of redcurrant jelly !

Figs
One named variety – Brown Turkey – plus five others growing away merrily from cuttings I took from unnamed trees growing outside the rental property where we spent our first 18 months in Italy while Villasfor2 was being built. These produced excellent black and green fruit. Pruning these as bushes rather than letting grow into unmanageable trees.

Grape Italia
A muscat type being trained using the splendidly-named 'Four-Arm Knipf' system. Should get a bunch or two in 2011.

Apricot Reale di Imola
Good crop of a about a dozen large fruit this year. Sensational taste and texture.

Yellow Peach Flavor Crest; White Peach Maria Delizia
The yellow peach, cloaked in a deep red velvet skin, is of unsurpassable sweetness and lusciousness. There are about 18 fast-ripening fruit which I should've thinned a bit more but, being greedy, didn't.

The white peach seems to be a white nectarine. Hmmm… Then again it suffered badly from Peach Leaf Curl this spring so maybe the fruit went bald. About six rock-hard little fruit stubbornly hang from its branches. We'll see what develops.

Rhubarb Timperley Early
Bit of a challenge this as the dormant crown promptly broke into three pieces as I unpacked it. Our soil is too heavy and claggy even for rhubarb, so it's spending its first summer in multi-purpose compost in a 12" pot. Took ages to get going, but  it's developing nicely and in the autumn I'll transfer it into an 18" pot with some good soil and hopefully it'll produce a few usable sticks next year.

The one fruit I'd like to grow in our Abruzzo garden, but won't even bother to try, are raspberries. It's just too hot. Everything else I wanted is here.

The peaches, apricot and grape were sourced from specialist fruit-growers local to us in Abruzzo; the Apples, Currant, Rhubarb, Gage and Damson were shipped from Deacons Nursery on the Isle of Wight in England, arriving in very good shape and happily spending most of the winter heeled-in in a big bucket of peat.

Next: The Flower Garden  

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Our life in Abruzzo is taking a tasty turn with a selection delicious crops growing in our Abruzzo vegetable garden !

A chunk – quite a large chunk – of our acre of Abruzzo is given over to the vegetable garden and the orchard.

Another chunk – quite a large chunk – of our life in Abruzzo is given over to looking after them.

Our Abruzzo vegetable garden – or orto, to give it its more succint and evocative Italian name, is about 100 square metres. It's on an open, unshaded slope facing due south and the soil is heavy clay.

I probably should've already done a soil test to discover the ph balance, but I haven't. Mea culpa.

The planning, which pleasurably occupied most of last summer when the plot was a weed-infested tangle, was to grow vegetables that a) we like to eat (obviously); and b) weren't readily available in our local shops.

Runner Beans. Variety: White Lady

We actually grew these last year. It took a while for Abruzzo bees to cotton-on to the fact that they were the key element in pollinating the flowers, but once they'd grasped this, we had the start of a promising crop. Then it was August and the heat turned all our beans into wood. A smaller crop in the comparative cool of September and October was delicious.

This year, I started early. The beans are already planted, twining up their poles and flowering and the plan is to get the crop over and done with by late July. When I'll already have planted the seeds for a second flush in the autumn.

Brussels Sprouts. Variety: Seven Hills

You can get imported Dutch sprouts, but they're not especially nice. This is a robust old-fashioned variety with a proper sprout taste. Love or hate. Pauline hates, so one plant will be more than enough. But I've put in two. Just in case…

Purple Sprouting Broccoli. Variety: Rudolph

Now of course this is a hugely popular autumn vegetable here, but what you see in the shops always looks…limp. Freshly picked just has to taste better. Gently steamed and finished with a drizzle of oil; a hint of garlic; and a fleck or two of dried chilli.

Celeriac. Variety: Diamant

I'd actually planted the seeds before realizing that celeriac was available throughout winter from our our local fruit'n'veg emporium. But I'm growing a few anyway – just to see if I can.

Sweet Corn. Variety: Indian Summer

This is an award-winning American variety with multicolored cobs and a wonderful sweetness, which is accentuated by cooking it on the barbecue or a cast-iron griddle. My twenty plants should provide 20-30 cobs – plenty for eating fresh and freezing.

Potato. Variety: Maris Piper

Italian spuds are terrific. Sweet and flavorsome. They make good mash; bake well; and if you can find ones that are young enough and small enough, they boil nicely too. But they disintegrate if you try and make 'proper' roast potatoes. It was toss-up between Maris Piper and King Edward as the two very best traditional English maincrop spuds. The former's a bit more disease-resistant and my two small rows, which should yield about 15-20lbs, look encouragingly good so far.

Tomato. Varieties: Golden Cherry; Brandywine Red; Costoluto Fiorentino; and 'unknown'.

More than any other vegetable, the tomato is an Italian obsession. But with the exception of the Italian heritage 'beefsteak' variety Costoluto Fiorentino, my crop, however bountiful and however delicious, will be be treated with suspicion and disdain because it's a known fact here that only Italian tomatoes of the type grown since the dawn of time are worth the effort.

Golden Cherry is Japanese (I think) and the essential ingredient of our own 'house pasta' – try the recipe ! Brandywine is an American Amish heritage 'beefsteak' of great reputation. Have never tried it before. The 'unknown' tomato came from our friend Ruth last year – yes, from an Italian market – and was simply the very best I'd ever tasted. The few seeds I kept last autumn obligingly came up like mustard-and-cress this spring and have grown into vigorous, good-looking plants. But I hope they've come true…

Pumpkin. Variety: Potimarron

In the autumn you'll find huge chunks of appetising-looking pumpkin on sale everywhere. All I've tried so far have been watery, fibrous and tasteless. More in hope than anything else, I planted a few old seeds of the variety Sunshine last year and was rewarded with a dozen or so scrumptious fruit.

I'm trialling a French variety this year which allegedly has a sweeter, denser, nuttier flesh with hints of chestnut. (Hence the name Potimarron – an amalgam of potiron – pumpkin; and marron – chestnut). Three plants should provide another dozen fruit.

Melon. Variety: Charentais-type

Too early to say yet as the seedlings are still being nurtured. A demanding plant to grow, but like celeriac, trying it to see if I can…

Shallot. Variety: French 'long' type

Can you buy shallot sets here ? No. So these were supermarket-bought and the smaller ones planted out. Two rows of 10 have sat and sulked for three weeks with just one boasting a rather half-hearted green topknot. Failure could be looming here…

Parsnip. Variety: Guernsey Half Long

It came as something of a surprise to discover that Italians – or at least Abruzzese – regard most root veggies like parsnips as animal fodder. If you want parsnips – grow them yourself. Our clay soil is way too heavy and impenetrable for impressionable young roots, so I'm growing these in a big tub of multi-purpose compost and will sow the seeds just as soon as it brightens up a bit.

Into every life, a little rain must fall. Even life in Abruzzo…

I'm also toying with Swedes. (Now there's an image…)

But I rather think there's enough already happening in our Abruzzo vegetable garden for this year.

Next – news from the orchard…

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It's a trade-off. When it snows, it's scenic. But it doesn't do too much for the garden – especially when the apricot and peaches had been lulled into a sense of false security by temperatures in the mid-60s last week and started flowering.

And of course sod's law dictated that while snow flurries whirled merrily up the drive, the last-but-one consignment of mail-order plants arrived.

It's a strange thing with some Italian delivery drivers. Give them clear skies and warm sunshine and they'll find endless excuses for ignoring you. But the first flake of snow inspires a kind of mass Pony Express mentality that sees them battling through the elements to bring you a package that's been sitting in the back of their van for a week.

It snowed. Then the sun came out and melted it. Then it snowed again and the cycle's been going on like this for about a week, while I've been dashing out in the sunny intervals to finish off the garden.

The picture on the left was taken at about 7 in the morning. By noon, the snow had gone. Down at the bottom of the garden, the pool's still under wraps (and will remain so until the end of next month).

The trees in the foreground are a couple of our new magnolias, which in the summer have fragrant white flowers the size of dinner plates.

The garden's now about 90% finished and all it has to do now is grow. We'll finish the remaining 10% in the autumn.

Last job to be done now is to sow the grass seed, which'll be done sometime in April. Putting the cart before the horse, I've already bought the mower.

All the autumn and winter tree, shrub and rose plantings seem to have come safely through. But we've had one casualty.

Or rather two, because the bouganvilleas that grew outside Villa La Majelletta and our own front door decided that 1200 feet up was rather beyond their tolerance.

Faintly surprising, because just down the hill, bouganvilleas grow with exhuberance. And having planted them last spring – and had a wonderful display all last summer – we thought they'd come through what until now's been an exceptionally mild winter.

We're auditioning replacements.

Maybe I should head up into the Majella National Park and see what grows in the villages there.

On the left of the picture – is how the natural feature known as il anfiteatro – the amphitheatre – looked like from the top of our drive last weekend.

At the far right of the picture, peering over the top of neighbouring mountains, is the snow-capped summit of Monte Acquaviva – one of the three Majella National Park peaks after which we've named our our Abruzzo villas for two.

Snow cover on the heights of the Majella persists until late May/early June – but these are also the best months for mountain walking. Fantastic scenery and banks of alpine flowers.

ps. Sun's out again !

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Ever wonder what happens to the leftovers once olives have been turned into olive oil ?

Villasfor2 is bang in the middle of a big olive growing area. Our land's bordered by olive groves, (producing the oil that you'll find waiting in your Abruzzo holiday villa), and we own a few trees ourselves.

Olive oil production is big business. For most of the local farmers, it's their main source of annual income.

Once the harvest starts each November, all the frantoio – olive presses – in our area work round the clock for five or six weeks to turn the local olives into oil.

Some of olive residue gets re-used as animal feed and there's a fledgling industry recycling olive stones as pellets for wood-burning stoves.

But most of this organic waste – plus all the leaves and twigs that get sorted out in the cleaning process before pressing – just goes begging.

Our nearest frantoio is delighted to give us this wonderful natural resource for free. You'd be amazed how much accumulates at just one press from one harvest. It took our friend Rocco, hauling his very biggest trailer behind his tractor, four trips up and down the hill last Sunday to clear it all.

At the moment, four big dark brown heaps are sitting in the sun. Walk past and you get a rich and fruity scent – rather like a good Christmas pudding.

Over the next few weeks, this wonderful mix will be used as a soil conditioner to improve the heavy clay in our garden, vegetable patch and orchard and to mulch – and so conserve water – around our newly-planted fruit-trees and roses.

Any left over will gently rot down over the summer and be dug into the soil in the autumn.

First to be mulched were the roses in front of your Abruzzo holiday villas. Next it'll be the turn of the Oleanders planted round the swimming pool; the areas of trees and shrubs that it's more practical to mulch rather than grass-over.

Then our orchard and vegetable plot will get a generous supply to be worked into the soil.Over the summer, the leaves will turn from their current dark brown into an attractive silvery-grey.

By autumn, virtually everything will have been absorbed into the soil and the cycle starts over.

This'd be good practice in any garden; but in our Abruzzo garden – which on our arrival was basically not much more than an acre of weeds – it's not only a crucial source of nutrition for the soil, but a fantastic way of recycling a green, sustainable, (and free !), organic material.

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It was our summer guests Sarah and John from England who first got us thinking about whether it really was possible to travel from Villasfor2 for a day out in Rome.

Bearing in mind Rome's notorious traffic problems – not to mention the driving involved – taking the car didn't seem like a good idea. The train's worse. Even the fastest journey takes well over four hours.

The only way you're going to spend a day out in Rome – and have enough time there to enjoy it – is to go by coach.
Di Fonzo Autolinee run a terrific service from nearby Lanciano to the Tiburtina bus station just outside Rome's centre.

Catch the 8am service and you'll arrive at 11am. A 100m walk to the Tiburtina metro station and you can be at the Vatican; the Colosseum; or the Spanish Steps about 20 minutes later. It's a no-brainer.

We went in early December, planning the day around a visit to the Pantheon and the Christmas market which runs daily in the Piazza Navona from December 1 to January 6, the traditional date in Italy on which Christmas festivities end.

The Piazza Navona is an easy 30 minute stroll from the Spagna metro station at the Spanish Steps. A walk easily made longer as you amble down Rome's premier shopping street, the Via Condotti, which is so smart and swish it makes Rodeo Drive and Bond Street look like slums.

Think of a designer label – it's here. The prices induce nosebleeds. You need to be super-rich, super-cool, or super-confident just to go into one of these glitzy emporia. The Via Condotti is probably where window shopping was invented.

The Christmas market is a bit more approachable. It's part-market; part-funfair. There's an awful lot of tat on display, but enough stalls selling merchandise of genuine quality to more than hold your interest.

And if you're not in retail mode – or it's outside the Christmas period – you can always admire Bernini's stunning 'Fountain of the Four Rivers'. An hour or more slips by quite effortlessly.

Though momentarily tempted by L'Arcano (06.67.86.929), We lunched at Antonio di Pantheon (06.67.90.798), a proper Roman trattoria that stands out like a beacon of gastronomic honesty in a sea of Pantheon restaurants where a fast turnover and maximising profits seem more the order of the day.

Both L'Arcano and Antonio di Pantheon are in Via dei Pastini, a restuarant-lined lane that links the Pantheon to the Via del Corso.  

At Antonio's, we shared a starter of deep-fried courgette flowers stuffed with mozzarella and anchovy; some pasta; Scallopine al Limone and Polpettine with borlotti beans; a bottle of house red, water and coffee, which came to €71. Expensive by Abruzzo standards; cheap when compared to other Pantheon restaurants.

A short and satisfied waddle later had us admiring the Pantheon. Built in 125AD by the Emperor Hadrian, it houses the tombs of Italy's first two kings, Vittorio Emanuele and his son Umberto, and the Renassiance artist Raphael.

But the real show-stopper is the Oculus, a 27-foot hole at the top of the dome that's open to the elements. When rain or snow cascade through the Oculus down to the marble floor 142 feet below it's reckoned to be the best bad-weather sight in Rome.

Incidentally, take a moment when you're outside the Pantheon to walk around the back for a glimpse of a few surviving fragments of the Basilica of Neptune dating from 25BC.

By a happy accident, almost literally across the Via del Corso from the Pantheon is another of Rome's must-sees, the Trevi Fountains.

Follow tradition and throw a coin (over your shoulder) into the fountains to ensure you'll one day return to La Citta Eterna and try not to get too annoyed with the touts and conmen offering with monotonous regularity to take your photo.

Perhaps the sheer romanticism of the Trevi Fountains makes it so popular – even on an early evening in December. It's spectacularly and satisfyingly big and the fountains and gushing water are loud enough to drown out the crowds.

We made it back to the Tiburtina bus station in good time for the 9pm bus, which pulled into Lanciano at 1155pm.  We were back at Villasfor2 half an hour later.

Couldn't help but feel smug that while the weather in Rome had been beautiful, it had rained all day in Ascigno.

We travelled by Di Fonzo Autolinee – www.difonzobus.com – and paid €61 for two return tickets. But you can travel for as little as €10 return at quieter times of the year.

Recommended ? Unhesitatingly. A day out in Rome could be one of the highlights of your Abruzzo villa holiday !

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An Abruzzo festa features music, food, wine – and line dancing ! Villasfor2’s annual local festa in Ascigno follows the time-honoured pattern.

Each year, on the first Friday and Saturday in September, our little home village of Ascigno puts on a festa in honour of its patron saint San Gabriele.

Arrive about 8.30 and grab a table. Buy beer and wine. Ponder whether to go for the arrosticini or porchetta. Pauline decides on arrosticini. I make a last minute decision on a pannini salsicce. A humble sausage sandwich.

Up strikes the band. Up gets everyone to dance. Did you know line-dancing is a way of life in Abruzzo ? Babies learn how as soon as they can walk.

But our loyalties are divided here. Our favourite band 'Terre del Sud' are playing in Casoli. A little after 10.00, we sneak off. In Casoli, in front of a huge crowd, Terre del Sud play an absolutely electrifying set.

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If you're searching for an Abruzzo villa, you'll quickly find the Villasfor2 website – the starting point for a great Italian holiday. But it wasn't always like that…

We reached something of a milestone on September 1, when our website registered its 6,000th visitor.

That piece of news isn't going to cause mass panic in the corridors at Google, MSN and Yahoo, where they get that number of hits every nano-second, but it's highly significant for a little fish in a big pond like villasfor2.com

For a while after we started, it would've been easier and probably cheaper to have gone round knocking on people's doors and asking if they'd like us to read bits of our website to them.

On a few of those early days, the site attracted the dreaded 'zero hits'- which is a bit depressing when you think that of the 6.7 billion people in the world, not one felt like getting info about an Abruzzo villa holiday. Or if they did, it wasn't from us.

There wasn't a single turning point.The numbers just started edging-up. And as more people found the site, the more they started browsing through it to the point where we've registered well over 22,000 page hits in our short existence from people in 85 different countries around the world.

Of those countries, three account for the lion's share of visitors to the site. 30% from the UK; 24% from the USA; and 19% from Italy. And sure enough, people who've booked Abruzzo villa holidays with us so far have come from the UK, the USA and Italy !

Number 4 in the visitors hit parade is Canada – and our first Canadian visitors arrive in early October; number 5 is Australia – but so far it hasn't been a case of 'Advance Australia Fair'. More like 'Just looking thanks..'

And what's the most popular page on the villasfor2 site ? The 'David's Abruzzoblog' section you're reading now – but that's been around longest. Otherwise – pretty much as you'd expect. If you're searching the web for an Abruzzo villa, your first contact with us will be the first page of our website. Then you'll want to know what your Abruzzo villa's actually like; and about prices, booking and availability. 

After that, your own individual preferences kick-in – Where to go ? What to see ? Where to eat ? What to eat ? (And drink !); and the weather (of course !) The site provides most of the answers.

And if it doesn't – hit the tab that says 'Contact Us' and ask !

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We've shown you how our Abruzzo holiday rental villas turned out. Time now to look at how our own new Abruzzo house was built in just under a year.

Here's what we first found in May 2007. Think it was just short of the 100th house we'd seen.

If you've just begun your own Abruzzo property hunt, take a look at our experiences – it'll stop you getting too downhearted !

A ruin standing in about an acre in the tiny abandoned hamlet of Cinonni, just outside the old hilltop town of Casoli.

In March 2008 it was ours. In May 2008, we got planning permission for our new house and our Abruzzo holiday rentals.

Then we knocked it all down and started again. We salvaged – as you'll see when you stay in our Abruzzo villas – huge quantities of old tile, stone and wooden beams and recycled them throughout our rebuild project.

June was a dampener. Literally. Two weeks of nonstop rain at the start.

Then the sun grudgingly put in an appearance again and that allowed us to get the foundations down. 

Work in the early stages was pretty equally divided between our own house and the villas.

Once the basics had been completed though, we prioritised our house. Reason ? If we'd finished our Abruzzo villas first, you'd have been holidaying amid a building site while work continued on the house. Not an ideal scenario…

Come November and our Abruzzo house was starting to look like – well – a house.

It was weatherproof; the underfloor heating had gone in; and the first electrics and plumbing fixes were underway.

By the time Italy shut down for the Christmas amd New Year festivities, the big, traditional, curved 'coppi' roof tiles were starting to go on and the external plastering was finished.

Early 2009 saw work revert to the Abruzzo villas. Yes, we wanted the house finished first – but we didn't want a huge gap between our completion – and the end of work on the Abruzzo holiday rentals. It all called for a careful balancing act.

And it worked !

We moved into our new Abruzzo house on March 30.

And our Abruzzo villas were finished on April 15, well in time. (Well…in time perhaps…?) for our opening on May 2.

On time. Over budget. (But only a bit). 

We're told that to build not only our own house, but the villas too, from scratch in under a year is a record in the Abruzzo property market.

Is there a secret ? Having permanently relocated from the UK in October 2007 and living only about 500 yards from the site helped hugely, as did being lucky enough to have a great local builder and a great designer/project manager.

We saved a lot of money sourcing tiles, windows, doors and bathroom fittings for the entire project ourselves and – perhaps most importantly – sticking absolutely rigidly to the design of both house and villas. It's deciding you want to change the position of a window that costs time and money.

And it's all finished ! We're thrilled. And your Abruzzo holiday rentals are great too. Come and take a look !

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Considering we opened a week ago, I really should've got my act together and written this earlier. However Week 1 in our new career of providing Abruzzo holidays for couples was designed as a kind of 'roadtest', with all three Villas occupied to make sure that everything works. And with a sigh of relief, I can tell you it does. Aside from a leaking kitchen tap in Acquaviva, (each of our three villas is named after a mountain in the nearby Majella range), which Domenico the plumber is going to fix tomorrow.

The weather was utterly fantastic. A week of unbroken blue skies, temperatures in the mid-70s and gentle breezes. But that was honestly nothing more than we deserved, because April was pretty dismal, inflicting the one irritating casualty on the building schedule.

We'd earmarked March and April to landscape and plant our Abruzzo property. We made a good enough start to the area around the pool and the Villas but then it simply got too wet to work – and now it's too hot and too late in the planting season. So the gardens have to remain unmade for a year. Such is life. Gardeners are good at being philsophical – and I guess I can try passing off the non-garden as the ultimate in minimalism…

Luckily, we can borrow the stupendous views around our Abruzzo Villas. Take a look at the panorama spread out before you from the big sun terraces by the pool and right outside your own doors.

Not the worst of places to pass a day or two – or three – of your Abruzzo holiday – under a sun umbrella, sipping something cool, and slipping into the pool every now and then…

Like to take a look inside ? Our Abruzzo villas have tiled floors and are topped by a big beam of reclaimed chestnut wood from the ruined buildings that were originally on this site.

There's plenty of room to sit and relax. A proper kitchen to fix yourself something to eat – and a place to sit and eat it. Plus a clean, modern bathroom with a walk-in shower. 

And so you can keep cool on those hot summer nights and warm in autumn and winter, each of our Abruzzo Villas has its own air-conditioning and central heating.

TV ? No, no TV. (Have you ever actually watched Italian television ?) Instead, if you fancy a night in, each Villa's got its own multi-region DVD player. Bring a couple of your own favourite movies – or borrow one from the Villasfor2 DVD library.

Up the stairs, you'll find the wood-floored, galleried sleeping area, with a choice of a Kingside double – or two single beds. Plus plenty of space for all your holiday bits and pieces and a small personal safe.

Browse through the Vf2 site for more info about Abruzzo holidays; our Villas; how to get here; what you'll find when you arrive – and of course how to book. 

Next time – soon, I promise – we'll round-off the Abruzzo property saga with showing you how our own house turned out.

Less than a year ago, we started work on two old ruins. Villasfor2 is now up-and-running. And as for our own home…

Join us next time and see !

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Some day very soon I'm going to have to sit down and start thinking about how to turn our acre of Abruzzo into a garden.

And to do that, I'm going to have to un-learn most of what I know about gardening in England and develop an instant knowledge of the right plants; and the right planning; and the right water-saving techniques that are all needed in a Mediterranean garden.

In the wake of building our new Abruzzo home, the garden budget has shrunk to the point where it now comfortably jingles around in a pocket, so like all good gardeners everywhere, I've been adopting the 'plants for free' principal and have been taking cuttings from around the house we've rented for the past 18 months.

Principally – figs. 

A previous owner had the excellent idea of choosing varieties that ripened in sequence from June through to October. That's given us a wide choice of cuttings material – a choice made even easier by the wildly-varying size and quality of the fruit produced by the the dozen or so trees around us.

Not that we have the remotest idea of the varieties involved – but it's the taste first – and the size of the crop second – that matter most.

The first choice was easy. A tree bearing luscious gold-flecked, dusty purple figs in abundance during June and July. But when to take a cutting ? And how ?

With the gardening books all still packed away, the internet produced conflicting answers. Autumn or winter ? Thin or thick cuttings ? But all were agreed that growing figs was easy.

So in mid-October, just as the leaves were starting to turn yellow, I cut four pencil-thick twigs, each topped by a leaf-bud; dunked them into some rooting powder; and stuck each in a deep pot of multi-purpose compost.

By December, three had died. But one hadn't.

The survivor was the sturdiest and stubbiest, which on December 12 prompted me to take two more sturdier, stubbier cuttings from the same tree and two from a tree which in September and October had given us translucent green fruit. Not as sweet as the ones we'd eaten in summer – but an autumn-fruiting fig is to be cherished.

And they're all just fine. As is a thin sprig – a pruning by-product actually – from a pot-grown 'Brown Turkey' variety bought with us from England and subsequently stunned by Italian heat into producing a small bowlful of fruit last summer.

That cutting was taken in February and seems to be romping away. But what's more exciting – and perhaps only gardeners will appreciate and understand this – is the sight of a curled-up, crinkled lead just starting to emerge from the surviving October cutting. 

I'll tell you if growing figs really is easy once they've been transplanted into the new Mediterranean garden of our Abruzzo home and are producing figs for you to pick and nibble – still warm from the sun – with a slice or two of prosciutto (nice) or ripe, creamy gorgonzola (even nicer) on your Villasfor2 holiday.

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