Rural Life

Never enough time!

It has been a whirlwind couple of weeks, with getting the draft report done for clients and then this week a presentation that could have gone a lot better, if IT had been on my side.  Then there was the house sale we were helping with, so last weekend was a flurry of moving "stuff", and in particular sofas, and the angst of returning the hire van full of diesel when the local petrol stations were empty!  The actual sale went swimmingly well in the end, so that was a relatively easy Monday - well until yoga, when the joints in my legs and feet really didn't want to play ball with various positions! 

Tuesday was taking a cat to her first vet visit in 10 years to be chipped and passported and vaccinated so she can go travelling.  I had had more nightmares about that than sofa moving or interpreting, and it turns out my subconscious was right, as she was a bit of a problem (other more pungent phrases are available).  In the end, we had to leave her with the vet to be sedated for the three required injections, and there is a prescription for tranquilizers for the return visit for the booster jab in a month's time.

Tomorrow, I head to the UK for over a week to do some evaluation work and see family and friends.  It should be fun, but I've still got loads of sorting, printing, ironing and packing to do before I am anywhere near ready to head off.  This is a long-winded excuse for not battling with YouTube to load the latest dollop of cute wild boar videos, but there are some photos!  If you are looking at this on a computer (and possibly a tablet), click on the photos to get the full joy and the right number of boar - the first one actually has 10 in it!

In In

In other news, we did get to the One Acre Wood over the weekend to see if there were any nice edible mushrooms, as this is supposed to be great weather for them.  Hmmm.  Well, I spotted the three below, but they were not numerous, not particularly edible, and not particularly inspiring either.  Perhaps it is just our bit of woodland, and we need to look about 300 kilometres further south?

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Some things are working as you would expect at this time of year - the badgers are doing some vital work on the summer love nest prior to moving back up to the main badger village a couple of fields away for winter.  All we see of their activity are the piles of bright soil added to the spoil heap around the entrance.  Other things are not as would be expected - the yukkas flower in April and May, not the second half of October!!

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So, a short missive this week and I won't be writing again until 1st November, but I hope to share with you some lovely photos from the Broads and Essex when I do write.

 

Piggie fun and other stuff

It's been a busy couple of weeks, with the report for the Marches Mosses BogLIFE last weekend and helping some people move out of their lovely maison secondaire this weekend, which included moving a lot of furniture, and not all of it ours.  We have had our much-loved DFS sofa and armchair for over 30 years, and while they started out stylish and comfortable, the sofa had become a lot less comfortable with time, while my beloved armchair was visually a thing of shame, if not horror when some of the innards splurged out.  The friends who are leaving had two smart small sofas and no desire to keep them and passed them to us.  My armchair went to the tip, but the sofa moved next door (!), and their sofa went to the tip as well.

We also have an embarrassment of storage units, shelving units, garden chairs and tables, extension cables and running blocks, chainsaws, rakes, spades, mowers, books, DVDs and bedding.  At least I know what I will do with the excess bedding...

Taking a breather from moving storage and shelving units around, we had a chat to the neighbour of the people moving out.  His garden is immaculate in general, although his front garden has too many gnomes and white stones for my taste.  There was a vine of some sort going along the fence and in passing I had tended to assume it was a form of bryony, but discussing it with him, it turns out I was completely wrong.  A tender but thug-like vine, the cristophine (or however it is spelt), is a semi-tropical or tropical savoury vegetable, which looks pear-shaped but knobbly, and tastes rather like salsify to my mind.   It makes a very nice gratin.  Here is a baby fruit, which was about 3 inches long.

We moved the trail camera to nearer where the boar were finding food, and frankly it was a bit of a disaster.  The camera was normally upright for at most 12 hours before they bashed it over, looking for food.  Instead, we strapped the camera to a suitable tree and a bit higher up than normal too and waited to see what we caught.  I had hoped that there might be some badger action, but I think they stay out of the way of the boar.  The following five videos were over the last week, with three during daylight hours and two at night.  It is a sizeable family group, with two parents, possibly a couple of young from the previous litter and smaller ones from this year's litter.  First the night time marauding, then the daytime playful ones - they seem to regard our orchard as a safe space - at least until the hunt come through the area (although they don't access "our" land).

The bright dots are eyes in the infrared light.

Daytime feeding is more amusing to watch.

And watching playtime, I am glad that this is as close as I ever get to a live one!

 

 

I'm hoping for a more tranquil week now, when I can concentrate on getting crops in and doing a lot of paperwork!

 

A few autumn photos

I'm sorry, I'm going to keep it brief today as I am trying to get a report done for a client for tomorrow and it's not going easily. 

As you may have spotted - it's autumn!  Leaves have been turning colour and falling since August, but we are now starting to see some good colour, including Red and Amber maples in town.  In the One Acre Wood, the colour is provided by Common Service (also known as Chequers - yes, the same as the PM's country mansion or many pubs).  Here is a bit looking particularly fine!

The pheasant shooting season will open soon in the UK, I'm not sure when it is here.  They aren't native and they aren't bright, but they do seem to like the Orchard and the Meadow.  Here is one fine fellow.

I also spotted a garden helper late one night after I had locked up the chickens, in the guise of Timid Toad, although actually he wasn't at all timid, he just sat and glared at me until I took my torch away.

The boar have been back to have another go at the walnuts and have also attacked the trail camera more than once.  There are videos, but I'm afraid today, that would take too much time to sort out, so how about a few photos instead?

So now I'd better get back to my report, but before I go, you can read up on the project here and if you like what you read, please consider voting for the Marches Mosses BogLIFE in the ICE People's Choice Awards!

 

Autumn harvests and who gets what?

First off, an apology - I was unable to do this blog yesterday as the Typepad system was down for renovation (always worrying), but today it is back, so here goes!

We have had rain - not the torrential amounts seen down south, but enough to encourage some things to really put on a spurt - the red cabbages have huge leaves, the size of dinner plates, so I am hoping that we will soon see a heart developing.  Of course, I ask why I only bought 3 plants, but previous attempts have been disappointing at best.  The cauliflowers are also looking quite fine, so I hope for a few decent heads in the spring.  The agony of trying to grow a decent cauliflower is why they should be expensive in the shops!

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The chillies I set off from seed in the late spring are now covered in ripening fruits and I have already frozen 30 or so, which should deal with our need for spicy curry and chilli con carne for a year.  This time I grew two varieties, cayenne - the long thin ones, possibly from French Guyana, but a good solid favourite, and Jalopeno thanks to a free packet of seeds from Kitchen Garden magazine and probably about 5 years ago (they no longer provide seeds to European subscribers, so I no longer subscribe).  These have been a bit of a revelation, at least in the kitchen.  They take longer to ripen but the fruits are reliably hot and a bit juicier and plumper than the cayennes.  I may have to try to save seed for next year!

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The rain has also brought on the autumn flowers nicely and it was a real treat to see how the cyclamen in the One Acre Wood are starting to spread.  It seems to take four or five years for a cyclamen corm to go from a seed that produces a small leaf or two, to one that can support one or more flowers, and this patch have been tantalising in that I seem to have waited well over four years for these ones to flower, but now they have!  A real joy!

Autumn is also the time of nuts.  October 1st is generally the official start of the walnut harvest, as ancient wisdom says that those that fall before that aren't good.  This year that doesn't really work as the weather hasn't been "right", but the nuts are now coming off the good tree as well as all the others.  We really need to be on war footing with that tree as it is the one with the tastiest and plumpest nuts and other "people" also like nuts. 

When I went to check the trail camera yesterday, it was on its side - I thought perhaps a gust of wind had taken it, or a cat had been sitting on the log.  So, I righted it and then checked the photos and footage.  A first look at a daytime photo before the camera went over showed that there were visitors.

The five videos below show the marauding hoard and give an inkling as to what it is like to be investigated by a boar!

 

 

 

 

 

Something else has been getting the sweet chestnuts before me too, but that is a whole other story and not one I can comment on as the camera is too far away!

How long the boar will be in the zone, I don't know.  I suspect that will be determined by the hunt and when they decide to clear out all wildlife, but for the moment, we continue to enjoy the spectacle.