Rural Life

This late April is weird

Each of the last 7 months in France have been the warmest ever recorded for that month.  It is highly likely that April will continue that dismal record, and yet it doesn't feel like it.  While the first half of April was warm, extremely warm at times, it continued the wet theme from March, but then it went cold.  There have been frosts, although we've not noticed much (up too late to catch the signs I guess), but very limited rain and temperatures rarely over 12 or 13ºC have halted or limited growth for some things, while others have carried on regardless.  In 3 day's time it will be May, yet the canopy at the One Acre Wood is quite sparse - chestnut is always a bit slow and one of the oaks in the picture is dead, but it doesn't feel right.

The lower growth is coming on nicely and we have a crazy oak lawn situation in places, so there is a nice green haze at ground level however.

We are into orchid season, and while it is too early for the lizard orchids, the lady orchid is looking better this year that it has for quite a few seasons.  There are also magnificent early purple orchids if you know where to look (mostly road side verges unless they have been mown).  One garden we know also has what are variously called spider orchids or fly orchids - not as pretty as bee orchids but similar to look at.  These seem to be out earlier than usual this year.

Over the next thee weeks I will no doubt drive myself mad trying to get the best possible photo of a bee orchid!

John likes the unexpected, so he was quite happy when I looked out of the bathroom window on Thursday morning and went downstairs to tell him that there was a ****ing great duck wandering around outside.  Too large and too stupid to be allowed on the public highway on its own, Quackers the Doose (too large for a duck, too small for a goose) was herded into next door's garden and a suitable notice put on the community Facebook page for the owner to come and remove their livestock.  Someone clearly took notice as by Friday morning, Quackers was gone, leaving just a few photos and an intriguing memory behind.

In unrelated poultry news, the Economic Migrant shuffled off her mortal coil this week - we think she was about 4 years old and hadn't laid an egg in about 12 months.  I feel guilty we don't have a photo of her!

So I have been through the videos from the trail camera that came in last weekend prior to being re-sited.  I messed up in that when checking things were working in mid-March, I managed to turn off the video function, so there weren't as many files as I would have expected, and about half of them were of me walking past in one direction or another.  There were a small number where something had clearly run past quickly so that while there was a photo, there was no accompanying interesting video to enjoy.  Then there is a rather dull video of a badger walking away - once you have seen one badger's bottom wiggling as it wanders off, you have seen all you need!  The main antics of interest were the deer, so here are two daytime videos of a couple of does and a nightime video of a stag being a bit boy-like.

 

 

 

During the coming week I hope to do a pond dip in the upper pond to see what might be living in there, so next week there are bound to be fuzzy photos of disgusting small water things.  I will also have finished and analysed the April bird recordings, and hopefully I will have planted more potatoes!

Have a good week!

 

A day out and lots of garden work

We've had a busy and a social week, meeting up with people over to see their second homes, as well as getting a bunch of stuff done ourselves.  We declared Tuesday a Holiday, and once we had done the very important job of choosing a new mattress and ordering its delivery (we've had the current one for 25 years, a change is allowed!), we set out on a jaunt of frivolity.

Our first job was to find somewhere for lunch, and clearly in the tourist areas, Tuesday lunch is not a popular meal.  It took us a while to find the Quatre Saisons opposite Langlois Chateau in St Hilaire/St Florent on the south bank of la Loire.  It was worth the search.  While the menu on the board looked delicious and may have had too many choices to make life easy, the menu du jour was cheaper and excellent.  Pan fried sander fillet with salad, chicken supreme with rice and beans and a nice wine jus and the most amazing vanilla pudding that I still fantasise about.  All served in a nice room overlooking the Thouet and served by the chap doing the cooking.  We were very pleased.

After a brief retail therapy stop at Decathlon, we drove on to Turquant.  This really is a tourist village, but again the out of season Tuesday effect meant that people were few and far between, although I can imagine it is the seventh circle of hell on a sunny Sunday in July or August.  It is an arts and crafts centre, and while the gallery was nice enough, the shop set of caves were a better display of the talents around.  Even so, the delicacy and chichi-ness of it all were not really to our taste, so while we could appreciate the talent, we were not tempted to put paws in pockets.  Not least as there were no ants for sale - they are big on ants in Turquant!

From there, our final stop was with a friend and wine producer in Restigné to buy red and rosé wines and hear about the challenges of selling a nice little vineyard as a going concern.

Now we are trying to catch up on all the gardening work we need to do but the weather has not been helping us with.  On Friday I topped out the broad beans, as there were enough small beans set to make me feel the time was right.  I guess there are something over 100 plants and only one had blackfly on already, so I feel my timing was impeccable.  I had some assistance with this slightly back breaking task, as Monsieur Clause supervised while squashing a number of sprouting onion sets.

Getting the potatoes in is slow work.  Through all of March and the first week of April the ground was too wet to work.  Then John got the cultivator out and cleared some space, but also pulled muscles nearly everywhere, so had to rest up for a couple of weeks.  Yesterday he felt up to giving it another go and I was able to plant another 18 chitted potatoes.  We now have half the available spuds planted, although I think we might not get them all in this year.

After some 6 weeks in place looking along a much frequented path, I brought in one of the trail cameras to see who is around.  After some quick copying and editing of the SD card, it is now back out again, in a different location, with the aim of admiring boar having mud baths.  Anyway, a trundle through the files reveals that we have just as many boar and deer in the zone as ever.  That the badgers are still knocking around, as is the fox and a hare and a probably pine martin.  It also revealed that images and videos of us walking away from the camera are beyond unflattering, and that goes for the boar and the deer too!  I have deleted all evidence for us, but the animals don't have those editorial controls.  Here are some of our neighbours.

The new cameras are less intrusive but still need to be checked out closely!

Have a good week!

 

Technology let me down!

Apologies!  I knew I wouldn't be able to write anything yesterday, so on Friday I spent time carefully honing a short but interesting piece on nature playing catch up (I think), and programmed it to publish yesterday.  It didn't and the whole thing has gone.  I'm sure it was great, but I haven't got a clue what I wrote, although I do have pictures which may help!

Why couldn't I do the blog yesterday?  It was vide grenier day in Echimiré, so we had to be there by about 7am (dawn is very pretty but way too early for me at the moment) to get in and set up.  Even arriving when we did, it was too late to be able to use the van and trailer as part of the staging as our two neighbours had encroached on our space with trailers, tables and a cast iron barbeque, so we had to dump everything, move vehicles and then see what we could do with what we had available.  It worked OK as you can see, until...

Someone bought the stepladder!  We didn't make our fortunes, but could afford Rosé and chips each, and we got rid of a lot of stuff.  I think I sold perhaps 8 vases, 3 salad bowls, 2 bedside lamps, decorative plates, and a load of other small stuff, allowing more space in our storage lockup.  It was a beautiful day and the lovely old parasol from Worcester days was much needed as the sun was very powerful.  I have a sunburnt elbow!

On Friday I was very excited as my tree peony flowered.  I've had it perhaps 8 years and have never repotted it.  It is in a very exposed spot by the front door and yet somehow keeps going.  The fact it only has one flower this year says to me that once that has faded, I really better had treat it a bit kindly with some new soil and perhaps a bigger pot!

On Friday I also spent a bit of time (when not preparing for the vide grenier) admiring the broad beans which are well in flower now.  I am waiting until I see a set bean or two before I take out the growing tips to discourage black fly - could be a job for Wednesday or Thursday I guess.  Not least as this magnificent masonry bee has spent a lot of time with the broad bean flowers!

I think I said a week ago that the cultivated cherry blossom was magnificent so thought I had better include a photo to proove it.  Today much of the blossom has faded or been blown away.  I'm hoping the bees had a wonderful weekend with it, as it was warm and sunny.  Unlike the blousy pink cherry blossom, individual flowers are single, so easy for pollinators to get into and do their thing.

Apologies again for the delay - honestly (or rather honesty - a lovely purple flower and our bank of them increases year by year as they self seed)!

 

Nature presses on regardless

The headline floods of last weekend are subsiding slowly, despite the continued rain through the week, but it hasn't been as intense or as much - just 18.5mm through the week. The rivers and streams are getting back to normal while the ponds remain well charged.  One evening I went to look at the sunset view, and heard the water oozing and sinking in a field nearby, which was rather unpleasant, but notable.

Nature is doing her thing now, and with every day, the veil of green and white spreads through the hedgerows and woods as new leaves are unfurled and cherry, plum, crab apple and quince blossom all open.  Some orchards are also full of blossom, but most commercial apple varieties will be a bit later.  it is the quince blossom I love the most - it is simple, but the flowers are large and generally tinged with pink.

At a distance, the wild cherry blossom is magnificent, but close to, the flowers are small and meagre, nothing to compare with the cultivated varieties, which have more and bigger flowers.  But when you get a run of wild cherry down a hedge line, it is magnificent.

Irrespective of how we might feel about working in this weather, the kitchen garden plots need to be sorted out and planted up or any crops will be too small or too late to be of much use.  I pulled up the matting that has been suppressing weeds  on this year's potato bed, so that John could get the rotavator on to it, and met a small helper.  They are very good at keeping slugs under control among other pests, so I am always pleased to see slow worms, and particularly baby ones.  This one can't have been more than five inches long or so.

Less welcome visitors are the Asian Hornets, and for a number of years, I have been part of a local observatory group, that catches and records the numbers of Asian hornet queens captured in Baugé en Anjou, with the aim of reducing the damage they do to local and native insect life.  It isn't only their predilection for eating the heads of honeybees like candy, they have also been found to reduce all insect life by 40% around their nests.  In addition, they have a really nasty sting.  Yesterday's warm weather had them out and looking for food, and my trap caught 3 of the brutes, and I am very happy about that.

Finally I managed to get the onion sets planted, while the shallots that went in a couple of weeks ago are now starting to show.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed with the wet weather though.  Back in Worcester, we couldn't really grow any alliums as onion white rot is endemic through the Vale of Evesham and into Worcester, and there is no real cure other than not growing any of the onion family for at least 5 years.  I get very twitchy and hope that we can stay free of it!

During the week I moved the trail camera that had been in the One Acre Wood back to the Orchard, and put it where I got film of the water rail.  The new and unsophisticated cameras don't use much battery power, so in theory I can now leave that one in place for the whole of the summer and will only run into problems if the memory card gets full.  During the time it was in the Wood, the camera got 54 files, and when I reviewed them, they were all of John and/or I moving about the wood, nothing else.  Given it was by a clearly used wildlife track, it was disappointing, as in 24 hours it captured 26 files of wildlife at the bottom of the Orchard. 

But that is the wonder of our land in the country - the mix of habitats means it provides a marvellous corridor for things to move along, as well as the food sources and shelter for a huge range of birds and animals.  My Merlin bird song app tells me that there is a skylark or two in the zone, and a nightingale has just arrived too.  Very few of the bird species convincingly identified are considered particularly endangered (mostly in the Least Concern category), but it is the wealth of species and the density of the birdsong that tells me it is a rich area in the best sense of that term.

So I finish with a photo of some tulips that I bought cheap at a discount supermarket, planted late as I had other concerns, and that have rewarded me with a magnificent show of flowers that I hope will be repeated in future years.

Have a good week!

 

Nature is in charge

Apologies for being a day late with the update - Easter visitors and fun took over yesterday and I hope you consider the wait worth it, as we are dealing with national news in a bit.

The week started fairly quietly, with a magnificent view of a full moon from the garden when I went to close up the chicken run.  This isn't to keep the wee darlings safe, as they sleep 4 foot off the ground on a suspended perch, but to ensure that they don't roam around the garden from first light, killing my plants more than they have to.

A couple of days later, we were treated to a magnificent sunset, with rich colours.  This is normally an autumn phenomenon, but we enjoy them whenever and aren't going to complain!

Spring has sprung and the cowslips and oxslips are looking fabulous in the Orchard, with the red and orange variants adding vibrancy to the mix.

So given all that mellowness, Storm Nelson was a bit of a downer, with winds whistling around the corners of the house and one of the sheets of metal on the chicken run roof deciding to submit to the forces of nature!  John had to miss a hot cross bun party in order to fix it and shelter the chickens from the worst of the rain.

But the big story is the flooding.  Not so much around us, although people did get caught out in Saumur as they foolishly left cars overnight on the quayside.  Yesterday was spent keeping an eye on a red alert on the River Vienne - a tributary of la Loire - running through Chinon.  Some reports were getting quite scary, and although the worst didn't happen, a few hundred people had to be evacuated from the part of the town to the south of the river.  As we were returning our visitor to Chinon, we had to go and have a look (it would be rude not to!).

The speed of the river and the height (5.3 metres at lunchtime) were dramatic, particularly by the old bridge in the centre of town.

In the direction of the Eifel bridge (yes, that Eifel), there is a "low road" to a village called Cravant.  Walking through the park by the river, it wasn't immediately obvious, but the river had taken the opportunity to sneak through a gap and fill up a road, blocking access to a community centre (not the one taking evacuees) and a driving school.

Back in early March, I wrote about flooding in Chinon here, with a fine photo of a Stop sign up to its waist in water.  Well the Stop sign itself was completely submerged, but the top of the higher sign just by it can be made out sticking out of the water here.

The height of the flood has now passed at Chinon and is heading for la Loire, where the peak is expected at Saumur at about midnight.  The Loire valley is so wide, it shouldn't cause too many problems now, but I saw that two further departments are on red flood alert, for tributaries of the Seine, so no doubt Paris will have a big flap about it all very soon. 

The moon will change in the next week and I hope that brings less rain, a bit of warmth to dry things out, and a chance to get into the garden and get the onions planted and the potato bed rotavated.  Things are starting to get a bit delayed!  Have a good week.