Il cuore verde

Cari and I rode the overnight ferry from Corsica to Savona, Italy, on Wednesday night last, and have been at the current woof farm since Thursday.  This is the first real farm that we have wwoofed at.  We have spent our days since picking tomatoes, hazelnuts, squash, and chili peppers.  Most days one of our hosts drives a van filled with produce (they grow much more than we have picked so far) into different farmer’s markets to sell. 
http://www.ilcuoreverde.net/
I will never again think that tomatoes are expensive back home.  Maybe its because it is an organic farm, or maybe they are a little behind in picking them, but I would say that easily over half of the tomatoes are bad and never leave the field (when I first went out to the garden it looked like there had just been a tomato rainstorm).  Then, some of the tomatoes are not sold and go bad in the crates.  They save what they can by making tomato sauce, but this causes the tomatoes to boil down to tiny little things.  If I ever have my own farm, I am growing easy things like squash, cabbage, and potatoes… or turning everything into sauce/preserves immediately. 
Hazelnuts are harvested by waiting until they fall of the tree and picking them up one at a time.  This would be very efficient and entertaining if done by squirrels, rather than Cari and I.
The reason that we chose to come to Piedmont is because we both read and love Umberto Eco, many of whose books are set here.  We were led to expect a million tiny valleys and steep hills and a lot of fog, and so far it has been exactly as advertised.  Although it has been hot- around 80 degrees- and dry, it is still foggy every morning, and sometimes it doesn’t really burn off, but just lifts up to become haze.  They also tell us that in the winter there is usually about 3ft of snow on the ground.   It is very scenic- every hill top has a little hamlet on it, and a lot of these have castle or church towers on them.  Just taking the ~25 minute walk into Morsasco, the nearest town, we go by 3 buildings from the 11th century.

I took this picture with my iphone while jogging in the morning- it was foggy enough that you could look right at the sun and see the circle.  We walked to the castle shown on our day off (Sunday).  It couldn’t have been more than 2 miles, and our hosts said it would be a 20 minute walk over the fields (hah!).  The little valleys are very steep, and we got there 1:45 minutes later.