Here in France, Autumn is late, very late. I am happy to be indoors with my computer as the temperature in the garden is over 30ºC at the moment. Earlier, I was digging up potatoes - hard work in temperatures nearing 25ºC in the shade and the soil is pretty solid clay. I can't totally complain, as look what just one seed potato produced! They are huge and unblemished, and will take some baking later in the year.
But other, more autumnal signs are there - including my first bright orange, evil, jelly slug of the season, spotted mooching around between the raspberries and the wood store. They are deeply unpleasant to my eye, but also seem to be harbingers of mushrooms.
I saw this fellow yesterday, plus there was a giveaway headline in the local paper this morning that mushrooms were appearing, so we just had to go for a walk in the One Acre Wood before doing any work at the Garden. For once they were not wrong - there were mushrooms a plenty, but many had gone over or had bad slug or fly damage. We found three nice ones for lunch - a delicious cèpe and comté omelette, made with free range eggs from the garden.
It goes without saying that if you aren't confident about identifying mushrooms, don't pick and eat! We only eat what we know.
We also need to prepare to pay our rent for the Garden, Orchard and Meadow. The payment is in a number of forms - obviously providing all the necessary luxuries for Donald, Spooky and Monsieur Clause the cats is part of it, keeping the Meadow under control with an annual mow as per legislation is another part of it, and then there is the tribute of a shoebox of walnuts too. Knowing that the boar like the good nuts best, well they aren't totally stupid, we have to gather them as soon as they fall, before drying them so the inner skin isn't unpleasant and bitter. We think we have the required tribute spread out in the sun!
The Meadow got mowed finally this weekend too. Between Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and the LPO, it is difficult to spot at time when you can do this without being berated for being a vandal and putting life at risk. Seed heads, chrysalids, eggs, nesting time, flowering cycles, shelter etc. are all cited as reasons to not mow. The reasons to mow include seed heads (some things aren't supposed to be allowed to spread, including ragwort and thistle), brambles, old man's beard, not required saplings, improving conditions for low growing wildflowers and those that need a short sward to flourish (including cyclamen and wild orchids), and a legal requirement not to cause a nuisance.
I prefer to mow in September, but we didn't have a working mower available until now. It should also be noted that some bits of the Meadow didn't get done last year for no good reason. Anyway, it was jolly hard work in the hot sun, and at the end I was half human, half wild carrot seed, and it doesn't look good as the saplings didn't get properly trashed, so I will have to do some of it again during the week, but finally we can see across the Meadow again! There are large banks of scrub for shelter for my friends the hares and for any pheasants that the fox hasn't had too.
There are no new wildlife photos to share this week as last Sunday the hunt went through our land and the valley. They don't come into the Garden, as it is well fenced off but do treat the Orchard and Meadow as their own. While I recognise very clearly the need to control the number of boar, as there really are too many, what annoys me about the hunters is their sheer arrogance as they stalk through other people's property. Plus I don't trust them not to fire towards us in the Garden if they spot something interesting. We sang and whistled very loudly while they were close by. Once they have done a sweep through, we see very little large wildlife for at least a couple of weeks, until they find their way back to us.
I leave you with the flowers of autumn, the cyclamen that pop up everywhere it seems and spread gloriously through our gardens and the Wood. They always make me smile.
Have a good week!
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