N° 4 Fruit Tree Pruning Booklet

This great find is I’m afraid not in very good condition. It is a text manual used for agricultural training, dated 1965 (fourth edition). By the title of “La potatura degli alberi da frutto”, roughly translated as “How to prune fruit trees”, it measures 15cm by 20,5cm, and has 166 pages. It has a 4 colour cover with black and white internal pages, 12 chapters and 66 illustrations and cost a whole 800 lire, that is 0.41 euros or 0.34 sterling! The illustrations are beautiful although very technical and precise and are all reproductions of original drawings done by the author, A. Calzecchi Onesti. It was very hard just to choose two or three of them to post here.

N° 5 Frog Money Box

This funny little frog moneybox is quite sweet in his own way. Made of papier mâché with a high glaze finish, 15cm tall, Made in Germany, and I think of late sixties design. He reminds me more of a Toad than a Frog, probably because of his size (I frequently see toads in my garden which are nearly as big!). He is very ugly and seems to be sulking but has lovely swirly designs on his tummy and back and flowers for eyes. In my book any animal which has flowers for eyes can’t be all that bad. My only criticism is his size, if he was a bit smaller and was just a frog instead of a moneybox as well he would be perfect. So with a little help from my computer I have created three little cousins for him, one orange, one sky blue and one purple, at about 7cm tall they are much more appealing.

Beware of spiders 2

The saga continues… we are now into the seventh week of the grand clear out! (It is also the reason for my extremely quiet blog.) The whole exercise has proved to be harder and more time consuming than expected. Now that all the spider-ridden black holes have finally been investigated the only remaining problem is disposing of all the rubbish in the correct recycling bin, easier said than done! 

No hidden treasures have come to light (unlike the amazing discovery made in London and sold at Christies) so we are almost resigned to the fact that our marathon will not yield any great financial benefit. The removal van is booked for Saturday so you could say we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. 

As mentioned in “Beware of Spiders” I have decided to post a TOP FIVE of the most interesting and/or useless items found whilst sorting through mountains of rubbish. Just give me a couple of days to sort out photographs and one by one the chosen five will feature under my NICE label. You will discover that they have nothing to do with spiders but are just objects which have caught my eye for some reason, it also means they have been saved from the recycling bin and will live a second life in my collection of cherished “interesting” rubbish at home!