Rural Life

Cool for cats

After one or two stutters earlier in the month and in May, summer has finally arrived in Anjou.  This is wonderful, although it does bring its own challenges at times.  If you are covered with fur, however silky and lovely that fur is, when the sun is beating down and it is 28 degrees in the shade, you need to find somewhere cool to hang out.  Inside my car in the garage (on the parcel shelf - or cat lounger) is one good place, but Maigret doesn't do indoors if she can help it during daylight hours.  Well - you never know what birds, shrews, mice and lizards, not to mention bugs and butterflies, you might miss!  So she is here - somewhere!

I didn't really need the scarlet pimpernell to tell me that it wasn't going to rain, but it is nice to have that reassurance!

And finally, after the excitement of that first egg from Salt, I can confirm that she is up to four eggs produced, while Pepper is behind the game a bit with two (and I haven't checked yet today).  Salt's eggs are slowly increasing in size as can be seen by the row of three paler eggs (we have already eaten the first one), while Pepper's are tiny but a lovely chocolate brown colour.  That dark colour will fade as the eggs get larger and she gets more mature.  Incidentally, although they are tiny, Pepper's eggs are unlikely to be wind eggs (ones with no yolk) as they are egg shaped.  Wind eggs generally look like pingpong balls!

 
 
 

Fruit and eggs

Today is a great day - after weeks of no eggs of our own, indeed having to buy eggs - I found an egg in the hen house.  You can see it in the picture below (left), and I am pretty sure that either Salt or Pepper is responsible as it is a bit of an odd shape, as would be the case of a first offering.  It takes a few days to get the shape just right and even then, something can happen and affect it.  Looking at it (the one on the left) against the market bought egg, I suspect it was actually Salt who produced it, as she is a hybrid Light Sussex like White was and they seem to produce quite light coloured eggs.  I thought Pepper was nearly ready to lay, as I was putting her back in the run after one of her escapes on Saturday and instead of running away, she squatted and "assumed the position".  Billy next door would have been delighted I'm sure!  Anyway, they are both getting near maturity.

The weekend has been spent picking blackcurrants and making jam - 26 pots of it!  What I picked is shown below - about 9 pounds in total.  John went to admire the stripped clean bushes and came back to enquire as to whether someone had given me them as I didn't seem to have made much impact on the bushes.  I must pick more shortly but think I will try making cordial this time - we still have two litres of cassis we made in Worcester, so I don't think I want to go down that route, although it is very easy to do.

The final picture is pretty shonky, but gives you an idea of what I am keeping an eye on each day at least once a day!  I love fresh figs and while one of John's clients has a fabulous tree, clients come and go and cannot be relied on to supply our needs in the long term.  About 4 years ago I bought a fig tree at the local garden centre and last year in September it thought about having its first fig, and then changed its mind.  In March it had another go, and then got fed up of that too.  Those little nodules at the base of two of the leaf stalks could be more figs trying to come through.  There are loads more of them too.  If only the weather would warm up, the tree might start to get a move on and put me out of my misery of not knowing!  I'll keep you posted anyway.

  

Rendez vous in the garden

For the first weekend in June, the French have a festival.  Well it wouldn't be France without something to celebrate every week or so through the alleged fine weather.  This year the weather was mixed for the weekend of the 5th and 6th of June.  The Friday and Saturday were extremely hot - on the Saturday it reached 30 degrees in the shade in our garden by 11am and didn't start to cool down until 6pm, so we weren't that interested in going walking in exposed gardens.  The weather broke overnight with storms, and Sunday was cool, cloudy and dank - again not completely ideal for enjoying going round gardens.

We had received a programme for the Rendez Vous aux Jardins in one of the local free papers.  The offerings are a mix of gardens that are usually open, which are either free for the fete or have something going on - plant sales, demonstrations, guided tours, music, and gardens that are not usually open to the public.  We find these ones more interesting I must say.

For the past 10 years as we head to Auverse and Tours we have admired a house set in a park on the side of the road.  The house was often shuttered up and didn't look anything more than large and splendid and dating from about 1820 or so.  The grounds were interesting as they were very familiar in a funny sort of way, even allowing for the odd avenue of lime trees.  As this one was open for the fete, we decided to find out more.

We were met at the side door of the chateau by the lady of the house who took our money, gave us a map of the walks on offer and told us a bit about the place.  The reason it was familiar looking was that the park was designed to be like an English park - she mentioned a French designer from 1840, but he drew inspiration from Capability Brown.  We then set off to explore.  The first surprise was that this was not an estate dating from 1820.

As this image shows, with the remains of a moat, a fortified tower and old castle walls, the domain actually dates from about 1150 or 1200.  The park is designed to give views of each facade of the chateau, showing the different epochs of building.

At this point we were looking at the back of the 1820 wing, across meadows and copses.  As we admired the view a rather large hare lolloped along the path next to us.  We carried on round to see what the 1600-ish facade looked like, going past some magnificent London planes actually surrounded by other trees - in their natural habitat so to speak.  That sort of thing is impossible to photograph - you can't get the size and majesty well enough or the required definition - a phone camera is useless in these circumstances.  Instead enjoy the rather fine copper beech.

Not really the same house is it?  At this point we turned away from the house and walked along the remains of an oak avenue through more hay meadows.  We disturbed two fine red deer does, who charged off into the shelter of the woodland.  You could see where they were damaging the rather overblown hay crop, but I don't think the people at the chateau mind that at all.  The final view is of the front of the house with its French parterre and lime avenue, but much closer than you would see from the road. 

Anyway, we are very grateful for the chance to enjoy the park and understand more about the chateau itself.  I wonder where will go for the Rendez Vous aux Jardins next year?

 
 
 
 

Vine pruning

Before taking advantage of the weather to go and do the lawn, or at least the bits my little electric mower will let me do, I am taking a well earned rest with a cup of tea to recover from vine pruning.  We look after two rows of vines for a chum who isn't around often enough to do it himself, and in return, if we do it right, we get loads of grapes for making juice in the autumn.

In our experience, vines are not a low maintenance option for the garden.  For a start, there is the pruning, but indeed before you can start on that, someone has to clear the track for you to see what you are doing - this is more a strimming job, unless you go for the chemical approach and remove all competition for a few yards on either side.  So this is what faced me this afternoon.

John had been through with the strimmer last week, and if I wanted to catch the gap and assured dry weather, it had to be today.  Until I got up-close and personal with the vines, it was difficult to know whether they had flowered yet - if you see what I mean.

However once I was in there, I could see that most of the flowering was over and that some tiny grapes had started to form.  In this second pruning of the year, every growing shoot needs to be cut back to the flower bunch (and to ensure better fruit, I was mean and kept most of them to one flower truss per stem, rather than the two they wanted), while those shoots without flower trusses on need a bit of thought.  If the vine is less robust and well covered, then the leaves on such shoots will help to source food for the root stock, if the vine is vigorous, they need to be removed to ensure that the maximum effort goes into the fruit.

This gives me a vine that looks rather like this.

While the finished row looks like this - much less wild and woolly and more professional somehow!

And you are right, different row!  I did the photos to give me a breather after doing the first row and before tackling the second and then tidying up.  Each row is about 50 meters long and we have been working with the vines for three years now, after they had been neglected for about three years.  Last year we took about 80 kilos off for juicing, and we were a bit picky as to which grapes we chose.

I prune this lot four times a year - once in March to remove the old growth, once in May/June to get the early growth off, once in late July to get rid of another flush of growth and any late flowers, and at the end of August to let the sun get to the ripening grapes and allow air to circulate in those final important few weeks until harvest.  The grapes here are mostly small, black, full of pips but very yummy.  The juice is almost too rich to drink on its own and is either diluted with water or with other juices for a non-alcoholic cocktail.  Black grape juice is supposed to be one of those super foods.

 
 
 
 

Watching the weather

I think I was scarred mentally by the awful summer we had here in 2007, when we had no days with temperatures over 30 degrees (normally we reckon on about 10 per year), so much rain it wasn't true until September when the wild mushrooms should have flourished at which point it stopped raining for 5 months, and the general unremitting murk.  If I am promised fine weather and it doesn't happen, I start to sulk.

For the past five days the chaps at Meteo France have been promising a mini-heatwave starting today, Wednesday.  You can imagine how unimpressed we all were - including cats - when this morning was dull and overcast and indeed it rained for a bit once we got back from the market.  Harrumphes came from the garage, as it doubled as John's workshop, while he built a ramp for getting his mower into the van more easily, along with libellous statements about weather forecasters that I would not contemplate repeating.  However as I was rather optimistically starting to put the laundry on the line, I noticed the sky was changing colour over the church, from an ominous dull lilac to proper turquoise blue.  In the few minutes that it took me to find a camera, the blue had won half the sky, and as I type, the sun is beating down on the garden from a cloudless sky.  The change took 10 minutes in all.  Here is the transition line!

 

The latest chicken news (apart from about 120 visits to the blog site over the past week for information on broody chickens - other sites are available for this and may be more knowledgeable) is that feckless Joel has got another two including one that I call Billy, but I am sure should have a much more dignified name like Chanticleer.  He is a bit camera shy at the moment, but he is truly magnificent (when he hasn't been rained on for 24 hours non-stop), you get the idea from this.  When I can persuade him to do a more formal sitting, there will be a better picture.

The bad weather hasn't really helped the cherries that much although they have plumped up a bit, but the sun will now get them turning nearly black - unless the blackbirds get there first.  They are also getting sweeter, and our chickens still think they are fabulous!  Chicken faces will  turn black with cherry juice over the next three weeks - not the prettiest sight and one that lasts a surprisingly long time.  Again I will try to document the phenomenon.