Rural Life

Between two events - apologies for the delay!

Last week I was a few hours early posting, before heading off to tend bar at the village Trout Fishing Day.  This week I am a day late after being one of a handful of stall holders at the village PTA car boot sale.  In between there have been all sorts of excitements with a poorly cat, a septic tank issue and wild orchids - it's hard to know where to start and what to include!  Perhaps at the beginning, with a picture of a lovely sunny day for trout fishing?

Yesterday was rather a contrast, dull skies, rain in the night, a third of the booked places not taken up due to the weather and few punters for all the goodies spread out for their delight.  We did alright during the day in terms of large and/or heavy items sold, as well as a lot of smaller stuff, but the heavy rain at lunchtime scared off buyers, and while we hung in to the end, we did little business in the afternoon, despite lovely sunshine.

There is nothing exciting about septic tank inspections, so I will gloss over that, other than to praise highly the integrity and helpfulness of the local inspector, who tried her best to approve things, but where they couldn't be approved, is helping us to find cost effective solutions for my client.  

Much more exciting is that the bee orchids are finally putting in an appearance, possibly stirred into action by a very small amount of rain at the start of the week.  They have mostly cropped up in or very close to the recently mown path through the orchard.  This kind of confirms my view that bee orchids need either grazing animals to keep the grass down or a simulation of that (mowing) in order to push up their flower spikes.  They don't much like competition and it seems long grass and tall weeds are not their friends.

Another orchid related excitement was the discovery of a new (to us and to the location) type of orchid, this time relatively happy in the long grass.  I've not had a chance to look it up yet, but it is some form of pink pyramidal orchid.  I've not seen any like it in the area, so I'm not sure how it arrived, and John says it is nothing to do with his mowers!

Early in the week I met the biggest caterpillar I have ever seen in the rough grass in the country - large, and on some level rather disturbing.  Way back in the 70s there was a Dr Who episode called something like the Green Death, which involved giant maggots, and I have been iffy about maggots and caterpillars every since, particularly that size!  The Peugeot key fob gives an idea of scale.  I hope it grows up into something nice!

As we head towards the end of no-mow May - something I rather disapprove of in general - I thought I would highlight how you can do it sensibly.  Make nice wide paths that are kept mown through the area you are interested in.  This has been particularly a thing with us this last week, as it is a bumper year for tics and we are picking off a good number each week from the Country Cats.  One of the cats has developed anaemia and the vet thought it was entirely possible that this was due to the number of tics he has picked up.  The blood tests to diagnose the problem were costly, although not as much as if we lived in the UK (expensive is relative I guess), and there is a prolonged course of medication and a long way to go until he is back to full Spooky Power.  

And here is the anaemic patient in his cat carrier at the vet's - Spooky the indomitable.

So keep checking for tics - you and all your loved ones! 

Well, that is it for this week, and it promises to be a quiet week so I should be back to the normal schedule next week.  Have a good one!

 

Flower Power

There is a rather lovely song by the French singer/song writer Laurent Voulzy called Le Pouvoir des Fleurs - basically it is an appeal to improve the world with flowers.  it dates from the late 70s or the 80s and while perhaps a bit naïve, it sums up my feeling for today as I went through the week's photos, to see what to put in today's entry.  At this time of year, it is all about the flowers, from the carefully bred black iris that has just snuck under the fence from our neighbour...

to the equally intriguing but absolutely wild and uncultivated spider orchid that crops up in a friend's garden in huge numbers.  I've not seen so many anywhere else!

Bees are having an absolute orgy with all the blooms - our rather trashy red hot pokers provide a smorgasbord for insects of all sorts.

The peonies, although I only have one in flower, but more generally, are the favourite source of sugar for ants I am told.

On Friday, and in perfect weather, I had a trip over to Chinon, and while wandering around the mediaeval centre, found Rabelais directing people to one of his wine caves!

And now I must sort myself out to start my shift at the bar (behind the bar) for the village trout fishing day.  Next week's blog could be full of photos of happy punters pulling trout out of a rather lovely lake on a magnificent sunny day, and hoary peasants supping beer and rosé at the bar, or I could be too busy to take any photos at all!  We'll see!

Have a good week!

 

More mundane activity than recently

The unseasonably hot weather has gone, leaving us with mild spring conditions, much more conducive to the French resident's annual May bugbear task of sorting out the tax return.  It is an existential grey cloud that hovers over you, with panics about declaring non-French fiscal instruments of all sorts, trying to decide which pensions are classed as private or public (not as obvious as it sounds), where to put that charity donation and have you got the paperwork to back it up if audited, and as a special for this year, how to do a tax return on 19 days pre-decease for my Mum. 

Actually that last one was so much easier than I had feared it would be, as naturally, the state was already aware of when she died and kept telling me it was just a 19 day tax return.  The only problem was the bit about "do you still live at the address we have for you" - I don't think the lawyer's office counts as heaven, hell or purgatory in the eyes of the French state.

The cooler, but still quite warm, conditions make it easier to get moving on the gardening tasks that are becoming urgent - mowing, planting, sowing, pruning.  We've done a lot of all that!

All bar one of the potatoes we planted are now up and the first ones are starting to think about flowering.  I am hopeful that we will have some new potatoes in June.

[photo of growing potatoes] - This photo just will not load - somewhere an AI bot has decided that it really is too dull, but the others are now there!

Last weekend I bought tomato and pepper plants and I have been able to get those planted now all fear of frosts has gone.  I regard tomato plants as the ultimate heart breakers, as I put them in so full of hope, and quite often by mid-July I am prepared to burn the wretched things as they are full of blight or broken and twisted.

While watering the peas, I noticed a bit of movement around my feet - a rather unsteady Red Admiral.  My Dad used to tell me lovely stories about a Red Admiral and a Painted Lady - I think they were very much stories on two levels as my Mum used to like to listen too.  Sadly he never wrote any of them down.

Once all the hard work had been done today, I walked round the grounds listening to birds and met a rather pretty damsel fly - it would be nice if this photo worked, as the only one to go on so far is of a boring vegetable bed!

So there she is!  I'm pleased that one worked, and perhaps tomorrow I can get more uploaded and the blog republished, but clearly the internet is clogged up with French people doing their tax returns on a Sunday afternoon and I guess I have to respect that.  Alternatively, I need to get signed up for fibre and then I won't have this problem (in theory).

Have a good week!

 

An aestival interlude

Actually I would spell it estival rather than aestival, but I think the American spell checker objects!  Whatever, April and the first couple of days of May have been a wonderful foretaste of what summer should be like, but wasn't last year.  We wait to see how this summer pans out - I have little faith in the long term forecasts peddled by the tabloids. 

We started the week with aperos in the garden with our elderly cat, and on Friday had a book signing on the pub terrace with a renowned Anglophone historian and writer (click on the Eighty Years Ago this Week link on the right of the screen when you have finished reading this for more information about Adrian Phillips, author of, among other titles, Winston's Bandits, the book being signed here).  What a week!

In between, there have been markets, a bank holiday with picnic, a final afternoon at the Mairie making paper flowers, and an extremely hot and sticky session in the Comité des Fêtes's hangar, taking down last year's cabin structure and building the new frame for this year's tableau - very hush, hush for the moment. 

The natural flowers are an absolute joy this year.  At the bottom of one of our downpipes we always have a good display of campanula growing out of the wall and a bit of tarmac, but this year is the best ever I think.  They should keep going for another week or so.

The peas I sowed in pots to keep them away from marauding mice all came up and those have now been planted into the vegetable beds, with columns of sheep netting to climb up.  The last three days have seen all of them pull away gratifyingly and I am hoping for tasty snacks of extremely fresh peas in early June.

Down among the ponds, there is one place where there is a large bank of wild marsh iris, and we have the best ever display we've seen of flowers on them at the moment.  Soon the other foliage will completely block the view of them for the rest of the summer season.

The unseasonably hot weather brought on the flowers on the false acacia rather more quickly than usual - I hope this doesn't adversely affect the honey harvest.  The trees themselves are awful - covered in sharp thorns, they spread by suckering and are a non-native invasive species, practically impossible to get rid of.  But for a couple of weeks in May or June they are coated in tumbling white flowers with a heady, honey scent, which makes them borderline tolerable.

The favourite orchid featured last week continues to flower beautifully despite being mugged by surrounding oxeye daisies, linseed and various meadow grasses.  While I tried to bash my way through to my favourite cultivated irises, I found a second example of the orchid, possibly more spectacular than the first.  Well, see what you think!

The weather has changed in time for the UK bank holiday.  We have another ourselves on Thursday, with Victory in Europe day, which will be full of reminders of the end of the Second World War.  Sadly it seems we are gearing up for the Third World War, but I will not pursue that line of thinking, this week anyway. 

Have a good week!