17 English

Plants  

Uncle Pepe is behind the house grafting apple trees.  With a razor he is working the bark to make a graft.  It is infrequent  that they do not work for him.  He has the land full of fruit trees.  Next to the house he has two fig trees and next to the wall he has three lemon trees that are protected from the cold North wind.  The pear trees are also delicate and infrequent is the year when all of them mature;  there are sticks in their branches that the boys throw up to knock down some pears. The cherry trees give a lot of fruit, the same as the  plum trees;  the cherries start to mature around June and they have to be picked by hand, not  like the plums which  fall  down to fill the ground just by shaking the tree.  Next to the walls of the orchard, there are Japanese plum trees with a scarecrow to frighten away the birds. But the trees that yield the most are the peach trees and the apples.  Even in front of the house there are two grape vines making an arbor which gives good shade during the summer.

Uncle Pepe  is lucky not only with the fruit trees. He cares a lot for the mountains, where there is everything.  In the enclosed mountain areas, where the furze grows, there are pine trees, even though  for some years he plants  a lot of eucalyptus,   trying to sell the oak trees which take a long time to grow and kill the new oak saplings; he doesn't leave them alone except in the forests where they are mixed with birch trees.  In the meadows, on the sides, he keeps ash trees to make axles and reeds to make baskets.

At the river's edge, he has a grove of chestnut trees, which must be watched during the chestnut season when the chestnut festivals  start. Therefore, Uncle Pepe doesn't cut the  brush from the walls and he tries to fill the open  entrances with hazel tree or willow  branches (cut at the foot). Not happy with this, he throws   a  bunch of pricker bush or of furze on top.

This coming week, he will have to go to the mountain, since he sold a pine tree grove and the sawyers will go there with their axes and saws to cut all day.  It is good wood; the cuts of the trunks will be almost all thick and there will be very little thin wood.  Along the way he will prune some branches of a bay tree which are shading  a neighbor's land.

His daughter-in-law, Rosario already has asked him to bring  pine cones to light the fire; he says that some  big splinters of dry oak are what is needed, because they  burn like resin and they maintain the fire. Or, better yet, some  stumps of logs.

Lelo thinks that the best thing is to put a few acorns in the wood storage place, let them grow, and then from there, to the fire.