Rural Life

Cats and Toads don't mix!

Our two cats have taken well to out door activities and I will publish their respective tallies of the local wildlife (excluding butterflies, dragonflies and baby lizards, which we have decided don't count) at the end of the year.

Maigret is particularly outdoorsy - her thick and lush fur protects her from scratches, other than other cats, her perfect form means she is well placed for hunting and she doesn't set her sights too high.  Poirot, on the other hand, is not well formed and her coat is much thinner.  She also has large expanses of pink skin under white fur which all kinds of everything finds particularly attractive.  Consequently she has had bites, eczema, scratches and fleas through the summer.  She is also rather ambitious when it comes to catching things - pigeons (three this year), chickens (not ours, the neighbour's and thus very embarrassing), other cats, and her latest attempt was the garden toad.

Now Toad is a very good garden companion.  He or his descendants have been getting rid of our slugs for the past 8 years at least.  He generally stays near the house now, since we started to keep chickens 3 years ago, and favours the heaps of stone as his dwelling.  Imagine his horror as he started to get his winter quarters to his liking when all of a sudden a white furry paw followed by a white furry face tried to get in there as well! 

We presume he squirted some secretion or Poirot got some secretion on her paw, which she then stuck in her mouth.  The upshot of it was that Poirot jumped off the rock pile and started whimpering and foaming at the mouth.  She carried on slathering at the mouth for a good half hour.  Initially we were really worried - we thought she had been stung - and then I checked round the rock pile and found Toad and realised what had happened.

Once she had been sick, we provided a wee morsel of tasty food to take away the taste and over the next hour she perked up, had a fight with Maigret, had her little lump of garlic sausage and then a bowl of crunchies and was fine.  She won't go near the rock pile though!

I didn't have the presence of mind or heart to photograph the wild killer cat in her moment of frothing at the mouth, so here is an aerial shot of her pretending to be a jungle panther.

Introducing a new bird

One of our Marans, Black, was never right from the day we got her.  While we managed to do something about the massive bald spot on her chest, her depression and other problems couldn't be sorted so easily and she died on the 19th September.  This upset White rather - she has always been a sensitive soul and goes broody by moon phases (so boring that) - and she produced 3 shell-less eggs in quick succession before getting back to her old form of over-feathery greedy gut-bucket.

This left us with a problem, as we like to have three as a social group, but we were also hoping to start letting them freely range in October to sort out the slug problem.  This meant that if we were going to replace Black, it had to be done quickly.

Bauge market is a good source of chickens, with two poultry vans each week so you can make sure you get the colour, breed, and type of bird you want (currently there is a run on quail and young guinea fowl).  We went along on Monday afternoon and sussed out the two boxes of Black Marans, and as both boxes looked good, went to the van with the shorter queue.

We gave our new girl a good looking over before we bought (learnt our lesson from last time), and had her ceremonially stuffed into the requisite cardboard box with holes, tied up with blue string, and took her home to introduce to the others (White and Spot).

Black 2 is a young pullet, probably about 4 weeks off laying, so she is quite small but fully feathered and with a short comb still.  It took her half an hour to find her way out of the box, and while Spot was a bit shirty with her, White ignored her as she was still in mourning for Black 1. 

They are still sorting out the pecking order in the run, but at night Black 2 is happily allowed onto the sleeping perch to provide extra warmth.  White is now out of mourning and is also keeping Black 2 in her place, but she is a bit crafty and has found a perch that neither of our plump girls can get on to while she puts on bulk and grows up herself.  While Black 2 gets the odd nip on the neck, it is not the wings out, feet up, fierce fighting that would mean we have a problem, so we think we have got away with it.

The one problem with these three pretty chickens, is that unlike the hybrids intended for the Battery Units, which I disapprove of, they do seem to be rather on the dim side, but that is a story for another day.  Anyway, below are Black 2 refusing to come out of her box, White doing what she does best (eating) and Spot doing what she does best (being dim).

 

Interesting Mushrooms

It was a bit of a toss up as to whether to categorise this posting as rural stuff or food and drink, but in the end I erred on the side of caution in case anyone takes this the wrong way.

As we head into a damp-ish September, the countryside around us is starting to produce things that can be consumed, and things that can't.  The season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is upon us here, and the hedgerows are bursting with things, some good, some not so good.

In the good category this year are hops, nuts (hazel and cob nuts, as the walnuts and chestnuts won't be right for another few weeks yet), blackberries (but hurry to get them before the birds, and before the start of October when the Devil gets them), a few wild medlars, apples, and the right sort of mushrooms.

In the bad category are wasps nests, bad mushrooms and giant red slugs.

Our wood can be brilliant for edible mushrooms, particularly penny bun and various sorts of bolete.  Currently it seems to be a little to dry and a little too shaded to produce much other than death caps and other, more insignificant, non-edible mushrooms.

The curiosity of the crop so far this year is a grey capped bolete, which grows to a good size, and turns blue the instant you cut it or tear a piece off it.  As far as we can tell it is a boletus radicans, which is one of the very few inedible boletes.  Another bolete that does this is the boletus erythropus, which looks a bit scary as it is quite red in places (in French it is a bolet a pied rouge).

Rather than risk it, we are waiting for the best of the boletes to sprout in the One Acre Wood - the boletus edulis - which is well worth waiting for.

Below is a boletus radicans showing how blue it can look when cut.  After the photo, it went straight on the compost heap.

 

Large scale pig roasts

DON'T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU ARE A VEGETARIAN!

That is the best I can do as a content warning!  If you go further and are offended, that is your problem.

One of the key features of rural summer French festivals is the pig roast.  We were impressed enough at seeing four done for our village summer dinner festival, but the Comice is on a totally different scale.  That was a 21 pig salvo!

Naturally the pig roast supervision was done by the same chap - Jacky.  When we first met him, we thought he lived a fine outdoor life and that was why he had such a deeply tanned skin.  Having seen him around a few places this summer, we actually realise that the colour of his skin is due to the fact that he has been hot smoked during the summer!

Each pig has many cloves of garlic pierced through the skin, and is kept moist by being swabbed at regular intervals with a mix of oil, garlic, harissa and herbs.  This makes the crackling inedible according to the French, but we find it is strong and tasty, but does induce rather odd dreams!

For a dinner starting at about 8pm, the pigs go over the fires at about midday and turn slowly on their spits while the fire pits are kept going with a fine pile of firewood (realistically enough to keep us going for a whole winter in the case of the Comice 21).  As each is required, it is removed from its fire-pit, then from its spit and chopped into delicious portions.

When we lived in Worcester, it seemed they thought themselves kings of the pig roast - sorry guys, but that is Jacky of the Baugeois!