Rural Life

Water, water everywhere!

It's been a wet week and tomorrow is due to be the same.  it has severely curtailed what I wanted to do outdoors - there are parsnips that need to be lifted and eaten, but frankly neither yesterday or today were conducive to anything other than a quick trot around to top up the bird feeder and check on the level of the ponds.  We've had a lot of rain.  The Couasnon - our local small river - is full and moving much more quickly than usual, while fields and ditches have sprung streams and ponds.  You can see sometimes where a helpful ditch has been ploughed over as it once again runs with water, heading for an ancestral pond.  

I'm not actually too upset about the rain on one level as the ponds are slowly refilling, particularly the upper one.  Today it was just an inch or so below the level of the overflow pipe, which is the best I've seen for a couple of years.  The lower pond is also refilling, and now we wait to see if the clay has expanded enough and there is enough debris to block where that one has been draining away.  Today for the first time in ages, it was at the level it was when we first found it three years ago.

Thursday and Friday we had Storm Louis, who came in with strong winds and left about 32mm of rain, and since then we have had unnamed depressions with abrupt sharp showers, or just interminable wet grey as per this morning.  Friday afternoon was occasionally dry, and when it was, the skies were dramatic.

This wet weather left me with too much time on my hands.  After a long drawn out and heated discussion with the suppliers of my (non-functioning) trail camera over whether I understood how to use it properly and of course it was normal that it heated up to 55ºC and batteries only lasted 8 hours, I got frustrated.  So I spent time looking for another camera not supplied by that bunch, but that met at least 75% of my requirements (taking photos, taking videos, using rechargeable batteries, working, and WiFi or Bluetooth enabled), I settled on a pack of three cameras which are quite basic and don't do WiFi or Bluetooth but do take rechargeable batteries, and with three of them I can cover two places and have one in reserve to swap in and out.  I hope they will arrive during the week, and then I can get monitoring again - the hares, the deer, the boar, the pheasants, the badgers, the pine martens, I've missed them all these last 4 months, not forgetting Monsieur and Madame Woodpecker.

A pine marten from last year to illustrate the point!

In my post Changes for the New Year, I shared a photo of one of the chickens (Jaq) suffering a particularly drastic moult.  It has taken a while, but she is now back to full featherhood and looking much better I am pleased to say.  Perhaps she might even deign to lay an egg one of these days!

The other thing that took a lot of my time and attention last week was preparing for and then submitting to my five yearly colon examination.  It's a boring process, a bit icky if I'm honest, and I craved food with crunch or crumbs or crust, and I did pay for a private room.  It is important none the less to do those regular cancer checks, because caught early, many things are eminently treatable, and the tests are likely much less invasive than the treatment!  There we go - sermon over!

So I leave you with an image of a fairly full second pond, and hope that your feet stay dry and unwebbed!

 

Too early for Spring

This has been another record breaking week for weather in France, with extremely mild, if not hot, temperatures further south, and even round here!  On Thursday and Friday it was up to 18ºC officially and warmer if you were in the sun and sheltered from breezes.  Yesterday I was able to enjoy the market in central Baugé without the bother of a jacket and needed to crack the car windows after leaving it in the full sun while doing the cat food run.  It is not surprising that nature is getting confused therefore.  This beautiful creature basked on laundry drying on the line for several hours yesterday.

I'm not too fussed about the elderberry having leaves out already - they are generally pretty precocious and also pretty robust so a sharp frost won't do any damage.  It will be a while yet before the flower buds appear.

The early and rather wild plums are even further advanced and now are starting to have fully open flowers on branches that are well sheltered from the wind.  Realistically if I get a good crumble's worth of fruit before the birds, deer and martins do their worst, I feel lucky, so again I'm not too worried.

I am far more concerned about the key fruit crops like the Victoria Plum (currently behaving), the apples (again behaving) and the quince.  For trees that have some of the last blossom, the quince leaf buds appear quite early but the flower buds are within those little green bundles, so yes, I am worried about these!

It is still too early to be thinking about planting anything - the next crops to go in will be the onion sets, but not for another four weeks or so, and after that, it will be the turn of the potatoes.  I aim for the traditional planting day of Good Friday, but never actually achieve it!  That is still a good 6 weeks off, and yet the seed potatoes are chitting away very nicely.

As it isn't time to being planting, and therefore is a bit early to start nagging about getting the rotavator out of the shed and making noises, I'm looking at a different project.  I'm aiming for a back fence for the flower bed that will provide some support when the wind comes up strongly from the south west and will also protect the bed. and particularly small seedlings, from the debris splurted out by mowers and strimmers.  So far the materials for making this fence have arrived by the bed, but some of them need to be cut down and have points added!

Well, that's all the excitement I can spot for this week, so I'll leave you with a picture of some miniature daffs that I bought last year for my Mum and once they had done their thing, planted in the flower bed.  They have come up beautifully this year and make me smile each time I see them.

Have a good week!

 

 

Just an average February

February can be a rough month - if you are older than about 18, there is no real excitement, and certainly by my age, Valentine's Day holds no thrills any more.  The weather can be lovely, sometimes for longer than a couple of hours, and it can be vile.  We had some sunny intervals today, but it was blowing a hoollie and while it went some way to drying the laundry, things are now hanging all over the bathroom as there was a heavy shower.  We must have had an inch of rain in the week, and while that has done good things to the water levels in the ponds, we didn't actually need it.

During one of the nicer hours of weather, I managed to scramble round onto the deer path at the back of the second pond, to get a whole different view.  The pond is clearly leaking water somewhere, so while I had those lovely big fish in there last year, I can't see the pond ever being able to support 10 to 12 inch long fish again.  I'm not sure what has made the pond leak, but I'm sure the environmentalists will tell me when they visit in the spring.

With the longer days, the chickens have more time to consider their raison d'être, and one (I'm fairly sure it is Jacque the Ripper) has started to lay eggs again.  She is pushing out 6 per week, which is nice and enough for a meal and an addition to a pudding but I really need Mack (the Knife) to get back into the swing of things too before I can put away the egg box I take to the market on a Saturday.

I've decided we need to work our way through the leeks we have been growing, not least so the land can be prepared for other crops in the spring.  I lifted 4 rather nice ones and a runt - I could have done without the feline assistance, but Donald made it clear I had no choice.

I have a regular walk to check out all edges of the land and see what is going on.  There are little cul-de-sacs that I go down to check on the various ponds, that are like little spurs off the circuit.  One bit we always go past is a large walnut just uphill from the ponds that seemed to die last year.  It has a number of broken branches held up in the canopy - what the arborists tend to call widow-makers - one of which came down during the week.  While John tidied it up, I looked at another branch that appears to be long dead and needs to come off.  It was well festooned with rather unpleasant fungus.

Last night we pretty well finished this year's truffle fest - there is just the truffle infused camembert to eat up.  They were very aromatic, but the quality was a little patchy.  It was the first time storing them in rice and then using the rice in a risotto has really worked for me, so that was a real plus.  However the stuff going on in life in general has perhaps made me a little less inventive than normal.  It's been very enjoyable, but I hope to do much better next year.  Truffle and prawn risotto is always a winner though!

Anyway, that's all for this week - have a good one!

 

Truffle time again

January can be an OK month, with galette parties and AGMs for various societies and the hangover of Christmas bits to get through, but February, while shorter, seems to be more depressing.  Often overcast, often cold, often moist or even dank, there are a few signs of spring but most mean you end up worrying about frosts killing off blossom and new shoots. 

To lighten the mood, we tend to buy 100 grammes of black truffle and spend up to 10 days with a meal a day generously sprinkled with black gold.  The date varies - normally depending on the spot price and what John's suppliers are up to.  This year Truffle Arrival Day was the 1st February, and the 105g we received are very aromatic!

Obviously the first day we have the classic scrambled eggs with truffle, this year supported by local whole grain multi-seed bread that is delivered to our door every Wednesday.  Other meals have included poached salmon on linguini with truffle, emmental omelette with truffle and truffled mash.  Photographing food is challenging, not least when steaming slightly, so most of those meals don't have a good photo, but the scrambled eggs do and you will have to imagine the rest!

The signs of spring are there - we just hope there isn't a harsh and prolonged cold spell again.  The catkins are elongating on the hazel stands, puffing clouds of noxious yellow/green pollen if you brush against them - my sinuses are twitching already!  The less cultivated plum trees have very "pregnant" looking buds, so I fear that we might see blossom in the next couple of weeks - o so pretty, but o so vulnerable.

As well as being Truffle Day, the 1st February was also pompom removal day for our little kitten.  When I say little, he now weighs in at 4 kilos, while being whippet thin, so I think he is going to be a big boy in time.  As well as the main objective of the operation, the vets also sorted out an umbilical hernia he had.  It wasn't giving him any trouble and in relative terms was smaller than when we got him, but it seemed worth sorting now, rather than when it caused a problem down the line. So our little boy has been wearing the Cone of Shame - and perhaps because he is a boy, he has submitted to it, and lies around looking mournful, or bashes around looking like a grey Darth Vader and trying to cause the same amount of chaos.  Just another week of this to go!

I walked back from an appointment in town and took a footpath that leads past a garden I used to mow - the one with the lake.  I wanted to have a good look at what had been done before the screening trees and scrub get their summer coats.  It was sad to see that several trees had gone, and I would never have permitted the scale of mud on the grass walk around the lake, but it is their house now and nothing to do with me.  I also stopped at the stone bridge over the river and looked along to the village.  The river is quite full at the moment, and with the light in the right direction, I could see meanders and riffles in the current that should slow the flow and make the river more appealing to aquatic life.  I was delighted to see that.

We have a relatively quiet week ahead of us, apart from a post-Comice party, so hope to get more winter gardening done.  Today I planted the last of the garlic I overbought, and have also set to chit half of the monster packet of seed potatoes I bought in a fit of enthusiasm.  That means that we will need to prepare a bed for 54 seed potatoes, for planting on Good Friday or so - a task that should keep us off the streets a bit!

Have a good week!