Italian Adventures – We Bought a House in Italy!

October 2022

The garden on the day we viewed the house for the first time in June 2021 was a hot mess, but you could see the potential. To make it better, many dead trees and unhealthy bushes need to be removed.

The upper garden area outside the kitchen is very rolly and slopes downhill quite a bit. It would be great to level it out as much as possible and create a stone patio area for dining. The orchard area is the largest part of the garden and is overgrown with more bushes and dead trees. If we can smooth it out, we can install another stone patio area for a firepit. Ideally, we’d like to keep the 4 hazelnut trees, clear everything else out, plant jasmine along the fence to create a screen, and then plant some fruit trees…3 olive trees to separate the upper area with the firepit from the lower orchard area. Then plant 2 fig trees, a plum and an apricot tree.

The side garden near the back gate is rather small and doesn’t need a lot of work. We will smooth it out later when we get ready to plant grass. The pictures above are what it looks like in the spring, around May.

Adriano and crew arrived early one morning, with Adriano driving the mini tractor / backhoe to pull out the dead and unwanted trees and bushes. Daniel built a fire in the upper part of the orchard to burn the debree.

I cheered when they dug up the palm trees and tossed them in the fire!

Flattening the upper garden area for the new terrace outside the kitchen.

Creating a ridge for the new retaining wall to smooth out the downward slope and create a flat garden area in the lower yard.

It’s looking SO much better already!

(Notice my pile of rocks from opening the wall are still here)

Fast forward to January 2023, time to pour the concrete for the two new sitting areas and then the flagstone will be laid.

What will soon be the upper terrace, with a path outside the kitchen. It’s a 4×4 square.

What will soon be the firepit area…a 3×3 circle.

With the garden dug up, we planned on installing irrigation and landscape lighting. I have a well and we discovered in August that it is FULL of water…YAY!

I traveled to Italy for a few weeks in January so we could do a walkabout throughout the garden and determine where the lighting and electrical outlets should be installed. This type of decision is too hard to do over Zoom or Whatsapp video.

The light fixtures I chose are the same throughout the garden with one exception. They are lower around the two new patio areas, low around the steps going down from the upper terrace to the lower yard, and tall along the front walkway from the house to the front gate.

Adriano built a retaining wall to separate the upper terrace from the lower garden area, which I now call the Gaming Yard since it is completely flat. For Jessica, he planted strawberries in the retaining wall.

This was not cheap but such a great investment for decades to come. We truly enjoy our outdoor space and have so many nice places to sit, entertain, and enjoy the outdoors.