Last night here in the Northern Hemisphere, and more particularly Europe, the clocks sprang forward an hour. We lag behind the Americans I think on this, as they went earlier in the month and for the past three weeks I have missed Martha Quinn in San Francisco and her afternoon show that ends at 3pm, or midnight in our terms. It'll be good to hear her dulcet tones again from tomorrow!
Normally there are lots of stories on TV news about how changing the hour affects your health and how it will kill you in the long term. Although as someone who used to commute to the UK regularly and therefore went through the change of hour twice every trip, I think that is something suitable for feeding growing vegetables. What about those countries with multiple time zones - do their citizens die because they have to travel east to west and back again? Much more interestingly, we discussed the issue of summer time at the weekly flower making session on Tuesday.
I have to say that normally, what is discussed in flower making, stays in flower making, but this was an interesting perspective. Here in western France, in the height of summer, it doesn't get dark until 11pm, but it doesn't really get light much before 6am. The view among the group was that actually lighter mornings are preferable as there is so much to do and some are up at 5:30am so a bit more light then would be nice. Who, they asked rhetorically, wants to be up and outside doing stuff every evening until 11pm? This is a fair point. Getting children to bed when it is light is always a challenge (from my memories of being a child and difficult to get to bed when it was light), but they are still in school in June when we have the longest evenings and part of July too. It's great for holiday makers, but for this group of pensioners, it was a doubtful blessing.
Just to explain what you can see on the table there - I was cutting out circles of paper the size of a CD. You then take three circles, put a small button of some sort in the middle and secure it with an elastic band, then open up the resulting "flower". We will be making some 4,000 paper flowers, if not a few more, for the village float for the Comice in August. If you don't know what a Comice is by now, look through past blogs for August!!
On Tuesday, we went on one of our very rare visits to Angers to do a bit of business. Last time we went in was November last year, to get a train, driving in from a different direction. I'd not gone my old favourite route for a couple of years. The second tram line has changed the road system a lot, and accessing the familiar car park was a bit more of a challenge. John was convinced we were going to get mown down by a tram. We also could not find the entrance to the ground level car park so had to go underground. As we weren't there for long, less than an hour, it was free though, so one good thing! When we got above ground, we admired the law courts - Justice at it's most impressive!
Weather-wise it has been a weird week, with one day fine and warm, the next moist and dull (see above), but next week promises to be fine and dry and warm - we'll see if that is the case. The spring flowers are coming on most prettily.
It also means that I no longer have any good excuses for not planting the rest of the potatoes and even more onions, while waiting for seeds to germinate so I can plant them out and start the next batch. After last year's dismal failure at getting anything very much to grow in the vegetable garden, we have invested in over a tonne of high quality organic matter to feed the soil and break up the clay soil. Let's hope it works!
Another labour of love has been weeding and feeding the asparagus bed - frustratingly, we won't be able to eat any from here this year as the corms are yet to really settle in, but next year, it could be different!
It is therefore time for me to publish this and go and prepare myself mentally and physically for a week's hard graft in the gardens. Besides, it is taking ages to load each of these photos - too many kiddies playing computer games and taking up band width I suspect!
Have a good week!
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