Rural Life

Lockdown III, marginal release - seedlings and work

Finally - nearly mid-May and my chilli seeds are sprouting, along with some red basil seeds I also sowed.  The cool temperatures, the dry conditions and the really rather unpleasant April have all contributed to making this a challenging growing season.  I hope that these come to some good - they are certainly staying well away from chickens!

As we have rain today off and on, I am really trying hard not to complain about the weather, but it is hard not to.  And that is also the go to conversation topic for the British in any case - I did a phone interview for work this afternoon and we had a good 5 minutes on the difference between the weather here and the weather there.  It creates a sort of empathy.  We didn't do the new conversation starter - have you had your vaccination yet?  It wasn't appropriate, but as part of the interview we did discuss the challenges that Covid has brought to working life.

My correspondent and I compared the conditions in which we were undertaking the interview - he was sitting in his bedroom and still wasn't used to that as a workspace, even after a year.  I was in my "office", which has been my workspace at home for 16 years now, and very much my comfort zone.  What he missed was seeing people around him in the large offices of his organisation - people he didn't work with directly but would see at the water cooler, or walk past their desk and say "hi".  For those used to that volume of human interaction on a daily basis, and who liked it, this last 14 months must have been a nightmare.

For me, there has been little change to the work routine except that I used to travel and visit people and places at least once every three months.  My last such trip was the 2nd to 6th March last year, and was rounded off by visiting family.  My fake filofax (how dated am I?) bookmark is stuck at that point, as I've not needed a roaming diary since.  I can't see me doing a trip before September, which is a little sad.

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - bits and bobs

As I've been being a good girl today and working hard, and not getting distracted by "stuff", I've had to resort in the main to photos taken a while ago but not shared yet, but it's a good way of making sure I've not missed anything too important!  Curfew is at 7pm, but sunset isn't until gone 9pm so it is very difficult to get good evening photos due to the monstrous blob built in between us and our views to the west, however this evening sky was good in any direction (this one is due South), and worked well on my phone.

A few years ago, Aldi did a nice line in flower pots that are fixed to down pipes.  I've grown all sorts in them, from bulbs to lobelia (which worked really well), but following an impulse purchase at a car boot sale of a number of house leeks, they have been home to semper vivums for about 4 years now.  I took a whole load of sets off them last year, but clearly will need to do the same again this year.  But they look pretty good I think!

After yesterday's single asparagus as part of lunch (chopped up fine in baked eggs), today I went for a more classic approach as Mac and Jak are laying just the right sort of eggs at the moment.  So today's lunch was poached eggs with asparagus and mayonnaise (just a little) and jolly good it was too.  There is a mix of our home grown asparagus (fat) and the last bits from the market last week (small and weedy or in technical terms, sprue).

Finally, I was reminded yesterday by Mr S Clause that he hasn't been seen on a blog post for a while and really he is totally gorgeous and people will miss him!  So here he is.

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - weekend jobs

Having stood in a queue for 20 minutes this week to get fruit and vegetables, it really does bring home the value of growing your own sometimes!  We are in what is called the hungry gap between finishing what we grew last year - I had to buy spuds for the first time in 8 months yesterday - and being able to eat what we are growing now - I am hoping for a few broad beans next weekend.  I am relieved that the butternut seeds are starting to come up and there are signs that the chilli seeds are also sprouting, but without a decent greenhouse, things get leggy very quickly, so I will need to be on top of potting on or I will get nowhere.

As Father Mark was at the market selling tomato plants, I indulged in a few - he grows old varieties and things you won't always find elsewhere.  I got three cherry tomatoes which should have dark or black fruit and a couple of general culinary use tomatoes.  On Wednesday I hope to buy the bulk of my tomato, pepper and aubergine needs at the market, where the prices are about half what I paid on Saturday, but the varieties are a lot less interesting.  As we are due storms for about a week (according to Meteo France anyway), I planted the tomatoes out under paraffin bidon cloches.  We don't use paraffin as a heat source, but neighbours do and we recover the plastic containers for just this purpose.  The vegetable areas are almost looking serious now!

John can be seen preparing seed beds - he has carrots, beetroot and two types of radish sown, and carrots are coming up already.  The seeds are about 6 years old in general, so it is a bit of an experiment.  Less of a trial are the potatoes, and they are coming up now too - today I counted 24 out of the first 32 as showing some growth above ground, which is good to see.

Today's light lunch was very pleasing - eggs from Mac and Jak, baked in ramekins with asparagus from the garden at home.  OK so the splash of cream wasn't us, the butter was from Benoit (see yesterday) and the tarragon mustard was from Super U, but the main ingredients were down to us!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - raw milk and brooding

Sounds like a vaguely iffy 1980s lounge music combo, doesn't it? Raw Milk and Brooding.  Fortunately those days are over.  Anyway I said there had been debate on raw and farm milk with chums on the internet, so on Wednesday when I was at la Flèche market, I asked the lovely Benoit if I might photograph him, to share the glory with my blog readers.  He was surprised, but happy to oblige - of course sadly you are deprived the benefit of his face as we all have to keep wearing face masks, but here is Benoit, purveyor of milk, butter, cream and cheeses.

Despite my bags being in the way, there is not actually a lot to see in his van apart from a few bottles of milk and a couple of cheeses.  That's because for his regulars, their requirements are stashed under the counter.  It was a great day for me when I became one of those, and a block of salted butter appeared when I arrived at his van!  The milk is a more recent thing - I used to buy the odd bottle, but mainly bought from another farmer, but then I became inducted into the circle of those who provide their own bottles and again each week as well as my block of butter, I swap an empty Waitrose Orange juice bottle for one full of full fat raw milk.  Bliss!

Will you note the colour of the butter and the depth of cream on that?!

In other news, while we only seem to have red currants, black currants, strawberries, raspberries and Granny Smith apples this year in the garden, that is not the case in Chinon.  There the warmth and protection afforded by the tuffeau wall has meant that the black peach tree there has lots of fruit set!  There will be jam of one sort this year!

And finally, I thought it was a bit quiet yesterday evening when I released the chickens for their daily vandalism spree - no Bridie to be seen.  I wondered if she had been chased off by the naughty ginger boy next door.  I checked the shed when I put the girls away last night, but she wasn't there so I was a bit worried.  This morning she was not waiting by the run to peck me mercilessly while I put out food and water for her (she has a very sharp beak!), so I was even more worried.  I went for a good check in the shed, and finally spotted her, well camouflaged by chainsaw chains.  See if you can spot the freeloading wotsit, trying to hatch another batch of infertile eggs!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - visiting day

As today is Friday, it is also Visiting Day.  We are limited to an hour (-ish), but the whole day revolves round it.  First of all, I have to be up promptly and well scrubbed, and have to do my Covid test.  We currently have the added excitement of putting drops in one of Nibbles' ears - which requires military planning, full PPE, the various flushes and treatments and ear plugs (for us) as she howls like a Banshee and closes her ear like a clam shell.  There are no pictures or tapes of this unedifying (for all) spectacle, but there is evidence of my negative Covid test.

The garden at Chinon is taking on its late spring colour, with magnificent irises and the first roses coming out.  The roses look particularly lovely against the white tufeau wall.

The visit went quite well.  We shared an article about James Boswell with her, and discussed Wednesday night's repeated documentary on the Festival of Britain - weird to see pictures of my Dad on the TV!  We also had a bruising game of Sorry! and were delighted/amazed that she remembered the rules better than we did.  But of course the place isn't right in her opinion, not least as it is full of old people who are ugly.  If anyone knows of a similar residential home that only has beautiful people in it, please let me know!!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - weather and plants

Apologies for the lack of blog yesterday - I was going to do something about the market and raw milk, but didn't finish work until about 7pm and just couldn't face any longer in front of the computer.  I have a photo so I will do that story, but not today.

Today has also been busy, but winding down a bit now, as I tick off the urgent bits on my to do list (never shorter than 25 things at the moment).  We have finally had some rain - a gentle 8 or 9 millimetres on Tuesday which soaked in nicely but wasn't enough.  It was sufficient to push the red hot pokers into action as yesterday evening, I found these when I went to lock up the chickens!

It also brought on nicely the Dutch irises at The Shack, and helped some of the potatoes to start showing their heads!

We had more rain too today.  It started during the night and a chum said it was like someone running a hose on the roof at 6am.  I got soaked feeding the chickens this morning, by which time we had had another 10mm and more on the way.  It was a nasty run down to the Sous-Prefecture at Saumur to help someone with a Residency Permit interview, and we were pleased when he had trouble with the fingerprint machine, as it meant we could stay indoors during a particularly heavy shower.  By the time I got him home again, the sun was coming out as the depression passed on its way east and south.

It left behind a chaotic sky and a nasty wind - at the Wildflower Meadow, the roaring gusts and the noise of the wind in the poplars was almost deafening and very dramatic.  Interesting for a short while, but it can stop now!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - brief notes

Yesterday was a glorious day - sunny, hardly a cloud in the sky, and a nice temperature for doing things.  Occasionally there was a cool wind, but not too often.  The change came through overnight with wind, then cloud bringing finally some much needed rain.  Our lawn should not have yellow patches through dryness at this time of year - yellow patches where we left things on the lawn and didn't pick them up for sure, but not due to poor growth.

On Sunday evening, I stopped on the way back from closing up the chicken run to admire the song of this little fellow, serenading the beautiful sunset.  I think he was a nightingale, from the size of the bird, the volume and twiddles of the song and the time of the evening, but I could be wrong.  Whatever, it was very pleasant.

We have hardly left the house at all today, and when we did, it was the signal for rain to start - every time!!  Paranoid?  O yes!  The first time was this morning when I got the paper out of the post box, and stopped to admire the flowers on the red iris.  This year the flowers look more iris like as it has been so dry that the snails that usually munch them have been hiding - that'll stop this evening.  I can almost here them starting to eat their way through the flowers!

We needed to stop off at the One Acre Wood to get a couple of logs from a stash we have there (we shouldn't still need log fires in May for goodness' sake!).  The rain got quite intense then, but as the trees are mostly leafed up now, we were fairly sheltered.  I took the opportunity to look up an oak tree we don't often talk to, but who is really rather magnificent!

And now I am going to find a glass of wine and put supper in the oven.

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - living life on the edge

The two selective hornet traps are still in place, and we have 5 and 10 corpses of Asian hornet queens in them.  This is good as they haven't started on the big nests that produce hundreds of bee chomping progeny, so we like to think we have done our bit for the honey bee. 

The selective traps are mostly doing what was intended and not getting much else trapped, well until last week that is.  Now each trap also has a European hornet queen in it, and if the Asian ones are nasty close up, the European one is really scary.  As we don't really want them around, eating us and what little fruit might grow this year, we are not too fussed about trying to release them either!

More scary than either type of hornet however, is an enraged Nibbles.  This morning I took her for her annual vaccinations and M.O.T. and happened to mention that she seemed to have trouble with her left ear.  That provoked one of those nice ear torches, then a brain scrape with a cotton bud - which produced a glob of the most disgusting black goo.  The vet seemed really pleased and went off to look at it under a microscope, during which time I worried and Nibbles tried to see what was going on in the laboratory next door.  Anyway, the vet came back to announce that it was just black yukky stuff, which needed to be rinsed out...  Twice a day... With a cleaning serum and then drops and then dry the ear out...  I tried to explain that Nibbles, who was looking cute and fluffy like this:

was in actual fact a Wild and Untamed Thing, who had taken 8 years to learn how to sit on a lap for longer than 20 seconds.  The vet relented and now we only have to wash out the ear, put in drops and dry it out once a day - for 10 days!  We may not survive!

 

Lockdown III, Day 29 - sort of coming to an end

The President briefed the press during the week about his path out of lockdown restrictions, with the first relaxation tomorrow - I show below the actual different phases, but realistically there will be very little change tomorrow as the curfew is still there from 7pm, only essential shops are open, you are still meant to keep away from people if you can and work from home.  The only difference is that you can travel anywhere during the day (6am to 7pm) without having to have a attestation.  It really is no change for me.

May 19th will be much more interesting, while the 9th June means that we know by what date everyone will want their lawns mowed!!  

Anyway, we continue with getting the vegetable plot at The Shack developed - I think there needs to be a manual on how to garden with cats as they can be absolute vandals, while thinking that actually they are really helpful and gorgeous.  Well the latter might be true, but the former isn't!!

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Anyway, after a struggle and a lot of sweating and pulling out of roots of perennial nasties, the sweetcorn has finally been sown.  I have recovered the bed with weed suppressant mat, partly to keep the cats off, and partly to protect the seeds from the cold temperatures we are due over the next few days.  While the maize is coming up in the fields around, I suspect that sweetcorn for human consumption is a bit less robust.

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While I was doing that, John did a bit of mowing in the wildflower meadow, not least to check that the new drive belt on Ginger the ride-on lawnmower is working as expected.  Now I know people are going all goofy about No Mow May, but here things grow about a foot to 18 inches in May (assuming it ever rains again), and hay is not an easy thing to mow.  We were pretty careful to identify the area on the meadow that needed to be addressed as it was mainly shoots of bramble and old man's beard with attendant horsetail and thistle, while leaving the massed ranks of oxeye daisies, pink clover, linseed and orchids to do what they do and look lovely (but impossible to photograph to best effect).  I found two bee orchids that had been caught, but close inspection showed that as the cutters were nice and high, they should still flower.  We can also walk round the meadow without too much difficulty.

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Once all that was done, we went for a walk around the One Acre Wood.  There we have a different sort of lawn - an oak lawn!  Very pretty, but they will not all survive, because that's not nature's way.

 

Lockdown III, Day 28 - is my mother a weather god?

Yesterday I signed off in a slightly petulant and disgruntled way, before settling down for the evening with a mojito made with Caribbean rum.  As I sipped, the sky grew darker and the cats came charging in.  Too good an opportunity to miss, we closed the back door, to signal the end of cat external adventures for the day.  Then we heard it - hail stones!  The trusty Meteo France weather app showed us the enormity of what we had to sit through.

OK, so they called it heavy rain, but it was hail and lots of it.  After dinner, I went out to close up the chicken run and see what had happened - I think I have found a way to get the photos to show side by side, so you can see that the tree peony flower got rather slashed about.

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Similarly the snow in summer was now snow in hail!

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It was a veritable winter wonderland outside - and these photos are a good half hour after it all stopped.

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Even before yesterday evening, we knew that we had no plums, no peaches and no pears to look forward to this year.  We are still optimistic that there will be apples and quince, but the quantities remain to be seen.  The apple tree leaves have been damaged by the hail, but there are still nascent apples and a bit of blossom on the trees, so we live in hope!  There are holes in the vine leaves, but there are still bunches of flower buds on the grape vine, so that may have got through too.

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All day there has been a flow of water from the roof drain, as the drifts of hail stones slowly melt in the sheltered gap between our house and next door.  I suspect the moral of this story is to always be respectful of your mother!!

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