Scacchiatura — also known as suckering or de-shooting, depending on local usage — is a form of green pruning consisting of the removal of the tomato’s axillary shoots, the small branches that develop where the leaves separate from the main stem. Locally, they are called cacchi, from which the operation takes its name. Still, they are also referred to as femminelle, suckers or side shoots: terms used to describe a shoot that, if allowed to grow, branches out and draws sap from the plant while giving almost nothing in return. Fausto Iezzi, a farmer in the Molino Vecchio district of Castel Castagna, explains this by showing the tip that bears the flower and the one that does not: the first must be left, the second removed, “otherwise it eats up the plant’s strength”, and the tomatoes remain small. The operation is carried out by hand, plant by plant, repeatedly from May onwards, and becomes an opportunity to tie the shoots to the cane supports as they grow.

Scacchiatura, however, is only one element of what Fausto calls the “control of the vegetable garden”: the careful and daily observation of plants in order to detect disease or pest attacks in time, often encouraged by drought conditions. In an area with limited water availability, where irrigation is carried out by bringing well water into a cistern and distributing it drop by drop using a siphon, knowing how to read weather developments and calibrate watering is therefore an essential part of the farmer’s craft. The vegetable garden must also be protected: for this purpose, Fausto Iezzi uses copper and sulphur — copper solution applied every ten days, always in the evening when temperatures are cooler, following withholding periods that he knows by heart and applies rigorously.

The vegetable garden is cultivated almost entirely with pear tomatoes, with a single row of San Marzano tomato plants, alongside melons, borlotti beans, courgettes and potatoes. Fausto, who worked in industry but has always remained a smallholder farmer, sows tomatoes in early May and produces mainly for family consumption: from wheat — a soft wheat variety called Bolero — he obtains flour for bread, which is baked continuously at home, once a week. To protect the garden from wild boars and porcupines, he has had to fence it in to limit the destruction of melons and potatoes.

That such a humble gesture as scacchiatura has been codified in agronomic treatises over the centuries — as, for example, in the Manuale di arboricoltura da servire pe’ proprietarii, agricoltori, orticoltori, ingegneri by the botanist Giuseppe Antonio Pasquale in 1876 — shows how knowledge of the vegetable garden combines two parallel and interacting domains: the one transcribed and elaborated in manuals, and its oral counterpart, transmitted hand to hand across the countryside. Around this practical knowledge, there still survives a rich universe of beliefs: the memory of those who “made hail” and of those who drove it away by waving a sickle towards the cloud and ordering it to leave; or the conviction that an envious gaze cast upon a flourishing vegetable garden could cause crops to wither. Care for the plant and its protection — both material and symbolic — are integral parts of the same way of inhabiting the peasant world.