Rural Life

In praise of weeds

Of course pedants would say that a weed is only a plant in the wrong place, so perhaps this should be called a rather less provocative "in praise of wild flowers"?  Whatever, looking through the photos of the week, many of them are of flowers, not all in the right place, not deliberately sown or planted in most cases, but all looking too gorgeous at the moment.  Suddenly the weather has gone spectacularly nice, even those days forecast to be wet and horrid were only grey and mildly disappointing.  The forecast for the week to come is spectacular, so as soon as this is written and launched, we are getting the abri cover out so that sitting in the garden is a real thing and a pleasure.

Anyway, here is the first of this week's pin ups - probably a lady orchid, and the best it has looked for perhaps 6 years, as in 2020 it was deformed and lopsided and hasn't really done well since then.

An unsung hero of pretty weeds is the speedwell, often overlooked, but the intensity of this patch in the Orchard is really rather pleasing.

On Easter Monday, we made a pilgrimage to the One Acre Wood to admire the new leaves on the trees and see how the ponds were doing.  The upper one was alive with "things", probably baby newts, the lower one was quiet and neither had much water.  Up at the top, where we leave our car, there were lots of wood violets.

Further down in the Wood, the lily of the valley were up and in flower.  It is traditional to give sprigs of these lovely flowers to friends on the first of May, but I think most will be over by then, given the weather conditions.

There are some cultivated areas, with this bed full of non-flowering broad beans, young peas, onions and some rather slug damaged pumpkin plants.  I hope we will have food from some of them, but I am starting to despair with the broad beans.

That bed is overlooked by one of our bird boxes.  It is inhabited - I have spent a lot of time this last week watching two great tits flying a relay between any good sources of grubs and yucky things and the box, and today the babies were definitely screaming to be fed a lot of the time.  If all goes well, I guess they will fledge in a couple of weeks and perhaps then there will be a second use of the box.

We had a visitor in the courtyard yesterday - damaged, so probably dropped there by a cat or a bird, but still able to wriggle around and look threatening.  John got his litter picker out and took it over the road to the long grass, in theory so that our cats did not find it and play with it.  Rare and protected, but not from other wildlife or cats!!

So that is it for this week.  It has been challenging getting the photos to load up, I think all part of a cunning plan to get us to change our broadband line for a fibre one.  It isn't helped by the age of my computer or running a version of Windows that Microsoft would prefer I didn't, either.  A project for another month I think!

Have a good week!

 

Bells and cats and stuff - version 2

It had taken me half an hour to write 500 words and load up 4 photos, and then we had a 15 second power cut and the whole lot disappeared.  There should have been a draft saved on the server somewhere on the West Coast of the USA, but while it had three versions of last week's blog, it had nothing of today's.

On a rather dull Easter Monday morning, I have decided to try again - we'll see how it goes!

This stage of April brings bluebells dotted around the garden.  They all came from my parents' house in Kent.  There they were rampant, and once we had bought the house in France, if Mum was doing some gardening and found a few bulbs, she put them in a bucket for us to take away and plant here (you could do that pre-Brexit).  Here they battle with irises and brambles and chickens and are not so rampant, but are always delightful when they bloom.

During one of the less lovely days last week, I started to scan old transparencies I found in my Mum's desk.  Remember them?  It always took about 4 goes to get each one correctly oriented in whatever viewer you were using, and of course some were good, in focus, well composed and with a good balance of light and colour, and some were not.  They all date to before I was born - Dad gave up photography, and with his artistic talents with a pen or pencil, why bother indeed?  I did find some fascinating ones of the winter before I was born, 1963, and the snow surrounding the cottage where the bluebells came from and where I grew up.

To keep pretty flowers out of the reach of the chickens (a k a feathered vandals), we put things in pots and planters.  Sometimes the chickens get in and then they are all destroyed, but some things survive, including this rather pleasing variegated periwinkle.  We top up the soil with used tea leaves and tea bags, which is why the contents of the container look a bit weird, but only one chicken likes to eat tea bags.

With spring comes all the rutting and flirting and hormones that Nature uses to ensure species continue.  The bird song at the moment is incredible for example, and in the evening the cuckoo is incessant.  The local feral cats are also around posing and trying it on with anything that moves.  We had two boys in the next garden over singing the Song of their People very loudly until we went to throw something at them.  So a timely reminder - if you have cats, please ENSURE THEY ARE NEUTERED.  These boys are likely to end up under a car while in thrall to their hormones, and also make a horrid smell.  The photo of the two boys in question is not very clear, so to illustrate this bit, I offer a photo of a neutered male cat, Monsieur Clause, one of the Boys in the Country, suitable edited to cover his shame, because he does like rolling around on his back on any surface.

The weather broke rather on Thursday evening and we have had perhaps 8 millimetres of rain since then, as well as grey skies and colder temperatures.  We have also had the amusing phenomenon of pollen rain.  The colza (or rape) is currently in full bloom.  It is dramatically and almost artificially yellow, and produces an awful lot of pollen, as any allergy sufferer knows.  When it rains, the pollen gets stuck on rain drops and then falls to the ground, where it accumulates as the water runs away or evaporates.  This is in the centre of town so some 4 kilometres from the nearest field in full flower.

While the unbroken sunshine we basked in for 10 days was lovely, for a really interesting sunset, you need cloud as something for the sun's rays to bounce off as it sinks into the west.  This was a rather lovely example from earlier in the week.

Well it would appear that America has woken up and it is now taking ages to load photos and they take a few goes to get right.  So it is clearly time to stop, and go and have some lunch, and hear about a nice old man, who died after meeting an American...

Have a good week!

 

 

Full of the joys of Spring

Back in early March, I introduced my upcycled planters for tulips.  You could see early leaves poking out of the top and I was seriously excited to see how they worked.  They are now in bloom, and while I am a bit upset that the two types of tulip were out of synch for flowering, overall I think I am happy with the result.  Next time I do bulbs in them, I shall ensure that they have the same mix in each I think.  Still, a hit I think for the whimsical wellies!

Another sign that spring is here is that we have got the garden sculpture out again and he is on his plinth under the birch tree.  We bought this heron, created using a chainsaw, at a Comice (although they call it Ruralities) in the village of Beauvau some 10 years ago now at least.  It has had some surgery, as it got hit a couple of times by branches, and fell and broke its neck on each occasion, but the wonderful Olivier, a local craftsman in all things wood, has done a fix.

I have been getting a bit depressed about local markets recently.  The biggest and best near us is at la Flèche and was a lifeline during Covid lockdowns as you could go there and get real food, rather than what the supermarkets felt you should want to eat.  The town councillors seem to think that the market is a Bad Thing however, even though they make money out of it, but perhaps it is too much competition for their personal businesses?  Who knows!  Anyway, they have removed all the parking spaces within easy reach of the market, and have set up a shuttle bus, which few people take as it is never where you need it to be.  I caught it once, and found it too cramped for comfortable seating and was lucky I had no shopping with me, as there was no space for that either.  Last week my lovely fishmongers said farewell - I was in tears!

On a much happier note, Baugé market on a Saturday seems to be well supported by the local council and over the past month has acquired a fresh pasta stall, a stall selling food inspired by Guadeloupe, another selling Thai specialities, and my personal favourite, there is a new butcher too!  Long may that last!  The photo was taken by, and from, the Facebook group supporting the Saturday market.

The excellent weather over the past couple of weeks, albeit a bit unseasonable, has meant I have had absolutely no excuse not to get the potatoes all planted.  The final batch of 16 went in this morning and I can feel it in my haunches!  With the coverings (two of which are on their seventh season now), we don't need to draw up soil around the shoots as they come up, and it provides exciting habitat for toads and slow worms among other fauna, which keeps the slugs under control.  There is some protection too from cat bottoms, although not from cats rolling around in the sun and dust.

The onions are all in now, and I started peas off in old modules that we acquired with geraniums in them over the years.  I like to reuse these when I can and when they aren't too battered, and peas are vulnerable to mice and birds and mould when sown direct, so it seemed like a good idea.  Now they are nice looking seedlings, but need to go into the ground as the roots are starting to come out of the bottom of the modules, even though they are quite deep.  A job for tomorrow I think!

Next week there should be wildlife content, all things being equal, as I brought in one of the trail cameras today - it's been by the badger set for a couple of months, but the grass and weeds have grown up around it, so something needed to be done.

Have a good week and be nice to the Easter Bunny!

 

Blossom, videos and mystery packages

The week before last, the weather yo-yoed a bit between fabulous sun and dull and a bit moist, but this last week, the weather has settled into a sunny, dry and mainly warm pattern, although an occasional and rather vicious wind from the east blew part of the chicken run roof off.  That would have been the opening photo, but I just could not resist this cherry tree in full bloom.  It was humming with bees and the scent of the blossom was heady and gorgeous.  It's a pity that the resulting fruit, when not stolen by birds, is pretty well inedible as it is just a wafer thin coating of red on a pip.  Still, if the birds like it, and the bees like it, who are we to complain?

Most of the plum blossom is over, there is still some peach blossom around, but that is also mostly over.  The pears and cherries have taken over, with early apples ready to ping, and more apple and quince blossom for later in the month.  It is a beautiful time of the year and the leaves are unfurling almost as you watch, so each day the scenery changes a little bit.  The daffs are pretty well over but the tulips are coming into their own.  Next week i should be able to show off my whimsical wellies, but today the frizzy edged tulips we planted 6 years ago are putting on a display.

Before we get into Spring videos, I thought I'd better share the videos I took off a trail camera that had been put on a crossing point between two ponds.  I thought I would get some interesting coypu footage and perhaps a few ducks.  The coypu footage was really very dull - generally a tail disappearing in one direction or another, or a coypu sitting in the dark, thinking.  In some animals, that might be visually appealing, but in coypu, it isn't.  There were a few ducks towards the end of the two month installation.

I hadn't expected to see any badger activity down there, but they were around, including this bit from January.

These two deer were around in February.  The one closer to the camera looks like it might be pregnant with a couple of lumps around the belly area, but the other one looks like a fawn from last year.  I welcome thoughts.

Naturally there were boar doing the rounds in February - after dark so moving between areas of cover, I think.

They were back again in March and in force - they didn't leave much of a mark in the pond they were heading for bottom right of the screen.

The final segment is of the fox, living as it should and not raiding dustbins.  The pine martens were around too but didn't stay still enough in that area to give anything more than a quick sight of a fluffy tail disappearing in any direction.

There is a phenomenon over here in France for selling off undelivered and misdirected packages - I'm sure it is the same anywhere where there is a flourishing home delivery service and drivers who aren't given enough time to do their rounds.  They are "blind" sales in that you can generally have a good feel of the packages, but you can't open before you buy - it's a grown up lucky dip, but instead of a fishing rod with a hook on it and a bucket of parcels, you have a number of tables heaped with all sizes and shapes of packages.  In general, you pay by weight - today it was 3.50€ per 100 grammes.  It is important to remain sensible and not spend more than you can afford to lose, and we steered clear of anything that could have been clothes or shoes as they would have been unlikely to fit, but we came away with 3 mystery packages each as a sort of Christmas stocking (many months late I know) for the princely sum of 18 Euros.

These were my three packages.  The flat one bottom right, which I thought might be a lipstick, was in fact some jollop for thickening eyelashes - not really me.  The cylindrical one to the left was some highly concentrated car wash liquid - might be useful at some stage.  The box style one at the top was a no blue light click light, presumably for use in a bedroom or office setting, which might actually be useful, if it works, and is rechargeable too.  It was a lot of fun, but I have to emphasise, a complete lucky (or unlucky) dip and never pay out more than you can afford to lose.

Next week is set to be lovely again, so I must work in the garden, getting the other half of the potatoes planted and weeding and pruning and cutting back and preparing beds and sowing seeds and all that good stuff.  Have a good week too!