Rural Life

So many changes!

It's been an odd week, with a number of changes, so I feel a bit fuzzy with it all.  The weather has changed big time - from heat and sun to mixed, with rain, cloud, cool breezes, sometimes too cool, and unpleasantly sticky conditions from time to time.  In the past week we have had more rain than we did in the whole month of June I think!  As we are always being told to beware of providing conditions for tiger mosquitoes to breed and take hold, I was amused to see what could catch and keep rain!

Once the excitement and tiredness of the Diner Champêtre was over, I could no longer put off the day when my faithful old computer had to be turned off and the new one installed.  I procrastinated for as long as I could and hoovered all the nooks and crannies exposed by the removal of the old machine, but in the end, I had to get it out of its box and position it. 

That was when I found I had ordered a computer with a glass side!  No wonder they kept asking if I wanted to include lights in it!!  After rolling around on the floor pushing USB and other connections into the various slots at the back of the machine, it was time to press the on button. 

Quietly it sorted itself out, asked to be named, loaded up all the various updates issued since it was tested about 4 weeks ago, and tried to sort out my life in cyber world.  At this point I found I couldn't remember how to move my email files over, so had to set up the old machine again, borrowing a screen and cables from John's computer, in order to move things around properly, and find missing passwords.

I wish I could say it was all sorted, but it isn't, although most things are working, and the other issues, like loading photos onto blogs, are down to the internet connection I fear.

The change in weather has brought wind, which has done for the path between the Orchard and the Meadow.  The dead walnut tree by the gap is shedding branches which have brought down the hedge growth on either side, effectively blocking the gap.  In the autumn we will have to get in there with chainsaws and strimmers and clear it all out.  The wood will at least keep us warm this winter!

July is a funny time of year to be picking blackberries, but that is exactly what I am going to have to do tomorrow, to take advantage of the bounty of this year's crop.  It is an amazing year for fruit and it is rare to get enough blackberries to do anything worthwhile with them.  This year I will have to decide between jelly and liqueur unless we have a good, long season.

There are loads of plums around, although sadly my Victoria plums seem to have all been infested with bugs - I have yet to eat a whole plum without a bit of extra protein!  The quantities are such that we have two burping barrels going in the cellar, one for generic plums of any sort, and one purely for mirabelles.  It won't be a huge amount of product, but it is a rare opportunity to try for such a specific eau de vie.

Friday sees Vieil Baugé hosting Convivial'été - a local festival that over a period of three Fridays in the second half of July, goes around the villages.  The commune pays for a couple of reasonable and fairly local bands to turn up and provides a certain amount of kit, and the local Comité des Fêtes provides the food outlets and the bar.  Next week is our turn, for the first time in a number of years (it halted for Covid of course).  So that's going to keep me busy, before, of course, the final rush to get the float ready for the Comice in August.  It's all go!

Have a good week!

 

Standard July stuff - but still jolly good

July - the month where anything below 25ºC feels cool enough to make wearing jeans and socks an option.  Of course we do get cold, damp spells (today for example), but in the main, July is about watering plants, eating fresh produce and the Comité des Fêtes' Diner Champêtre.

Watering has taken on epic proportions this year.  The pots in the garden and on the terrace by the front door require doing once a day, some need twice a day when we have very hot temperatures, and with the second half of July, I sometimes wonder why I bother?  Except that the lilies that are now fading have bulbs that need to build up stocks of energy to put on another amazing display next year.  Among the annuals, the sunflowers tend to be the star performers.  This single flower specimen is rather fabulous.

From the same batch of seed (about 10 I purloined from an oil seed sunflower in a field by a friend's gite), another produced multiple flowers, so you never can tell!

The vegetable patches need more water in volume and nearly every day too.  The courgettes are producing 6 or 7 new fruits on average per day, and if I miss one, I end up with a marrow for the chickens in no time!  Today we ate the first of the yellow miniature plum/pear tomatoes, which I failed to photograph before we tucked in, and I picked the first ripe chilli of the season.  We even have a couple of small and nearly ripe pumpkins - I'll not pick them for another week or so to ensure maximum sweetness.

The middle of July also brings the village Diner Champêtre, food, music, dancing and fireworks on the first Saturday after the Fête Nationale.  While we have been planning it for months, the first signs on the ground are on the Friday when the first marquees, the dance floor and the stage are erected by different teams through the day.

During the day on Saturday, tables and benches, fridges and beer pumps, cooking materials and supplies are brought in so that when the volunteers start to gather at 5pm, there is enough to do while also reorganising what has been done to date, and having multiple goes at deciding who does what in detail (we are already divided into bar teams and food teams).

It will be jolly quiet for quite a long time, apart from the odd pensioner asking how soon they can eat, but not coming along with their ticket until about an hour and a half later.  Then it will get crazy as 250 people descend on the food line (rather more at the bar), demanding their dinners.

There is one group of people who every year are the last to come forward for their meals, making a joke of it quite often.  However, as the volunteers can't eat until all guests have been served, by which time the first served are bringing back their trays and demanding their deposit for their dinner plates, it is beyond annoying.  This time they also took all the chairs for the volunteers, so we ended up perched on crates and boxes, as we ate our late meal.  Having said that, it is always a great atmosphere, although this year my patience with the Late Diners did wear rather thin!

If you are looking for a tip on how to time your dinner at an event like this, I would say an hour after the advertised start time at the earliest, and a good hour and a half or more before any fireworks!!

The fireworks were very good, but my photos aren't.  I will have to try to get a video stream onto YouTube but as it is taking a good 5 minutes to load each photo today, I'm not going near that!

We now have about 10 days off community volunteering, until the next event in the village, Convivial'été.  A very clever play on words there.  The commune provides a bunch of material, a couple of pre-vetted groups and a bit of support, while we provide the food, drink and ambiance, but not until 1st August.  So now we can concentrate on vegetables, fruit, burping barrels and what to do with the 30-odd courgettes I have in the kitchen.

Have a good week!

 

 

A Day at the Tour

Well that was a day out!

Yesterday was a pretty memorable day.  I've seen a Tour stage end (underwhelming, but it was a sprint finish), and a couple of passages when the Tour has come close to Baugé and I've been on the side of the road, so a stage start was a bit different.  The organisation of the Tour is a huge and well oiled machine.  Hotel rooms had been booked solid for nearly a year, and in any case, Chinon does not have enough rooms to cope with all the teams, organisers, media, sponsors and other aspects of the Tour.  So our first impressions as we were still on the motorway over to Chinon were of being overtaken by team vehicles and a batch of motorbikes in formation, all doing a steady 115kmph, and squeaking "oo look, UEA support staff" and similar!

Our second impression was disbelief at all the cars and the challenges of finding somewhere to park!  In the end I took an illegal turning off the bypass, parked on the edge of a field near a bottle recycling point and we walked up and over into the town.  It might only have been a kilometre or two, but it was 30ºC in the shade, so quite an effort.  Fortunately there was an Aldi half way, doing a massive trade in drinks and snacks.

Then you arrive in the main area of town and the largest town square is taken up by the rather exclusive race compound that you can't get into unless you are friends and family, media, or a sponsor.  We could just look at the outside.

Sadly a combination of Typepad, Microsoft and Norton do not believe that you are allowed to see my photo of the official compound for teams, sponsors and media.

Once we were past that, it got more interesting.  There was of course the official merchandise stand - 130€ for a cycling jersey in yellow, or 30€ for a yellow t-shirt, plus all the other official colours of shirts.  I was tempted by a t-shirt with red spots, but not enough to stand in the queue for 10 minutes!

I tend to think the Tour is more about the freebies you can get and we missed the publicity caravan, so didn't get any.  We could see at a distance the screen and podium for introducing the teams to the public, but couldn't get near enough for a sensible view.

As you can see, it was all very crowded, but luck was on our side as a friend of my brother's has a house overlooking the official teams paddock, so we were able to go and lean out of his first floor windows and get an excellent view of various riders doing their warm ups.  Yesterday's holder of the red spotted jersey went past a few times.

Pogacar, the holder of the Yellow Jersey, also made a few turns along the road, much to everyone's delight.

These professional cyclists are tiny compared to normal people!  Narrow shoulders, not an ounce of spare flesh on them, and they look so frail!

Anyway, eventually it was time for them to line up for the race start further down the road, so batches of cyclists went past doing weird things, like adjusting their clothing, drinking, stopping to chat to friends and family and the like, in advance of the day's race.

And then they were off, followed by a long cortege of cars with loads of spare bikes, motorbikes, team coaches, medical teams, support vehicles and police outriders.

While the town of Chinon kept activities going for the rest of the afternoon, once the race was away, the Tour organisation swept into Pack Up And Go mode, and an hour after the departure, much of the official enclosure was already down and being packed onto lorries, to go to the next Stage Start town.

Sadly a combination of Typepad, Microsoft and Norton do not believe you are allowed to see the amazing transformation after an hour of the official enclosure for teams, sponsors and media - I've tried for 15 minutes to load the photos and it just won't happen.

After some refreshments, we headed back to find the shuttle bus that would take us to near where I had dumped the car.  We stopped to admire a structure across the river made of barrels.  We thought it was some sort of game for the clients of the guingette, but in fact if we could have seen it from above, it was a bicycle wheel in wine barrels for the benefit of the TV helicopters and drones, set up by the wine producers of Chinon.

So we headed home, and about 8 kilometres from our house, the heavens opened and the temperature fell by some 10ºC with the rain, making life a lot more comfortable for watching the stage end on the TV at home.  The Yellow and Red Spotted jerseys stayed the same.

Clearly I was not well positioned for photos of the race start or classic views back towards the chateau, so I have borrowed photos that were shared today by the town of Chinon.  The first is a screen grab of the riders lined up ready to start, while the second is with the Race Director in his red car, as they came off the bridge, heading south towards Richelieu.

 

If you can, it is worth going along to the Tour, but don't underestimate the challenges and the number of people who also want to be part of it - the France TV estimate is 10 million spectators during the three weeks of the Tour.

Next week, we have our Diner Champêtre to celebrate the Fête Nationale, which should be fun for the punters, but will be very hard work for the volunteers.  I'll still try to share some interesting photos and anecdotes though!

Have a good week!

 

Respite!

This photo was taken (not by me) in our garden on Tuesday afternoon at about 4:30pm.  This was the height of the latest heatwave and I have to confess to being slumped on a sofa, in front of a fan blowing air over 3 5 litre cannisters of ice.  The weather was uncomfortable, the Heath Robinson air con worked!

I finally went outside at about 10pm to lock the chickens away and do a bit of watering, as well as my regular stroll to the top of the hill in front of the house.  I was rewarded by a lovely sunset.

Today that all seems like a distant memory, with rain, soft, gentle, wet rain, and much cooler temperatures.  It won't last but today we are enjoying the change!

Yesterday we were in Chinon for dinner.  Next Sunday morning, the town will be the focus of the cycling world as the Tour de France sets off from there, for its ninth stage, heading south towards Chateauroux.  Naturally we will go along and see the spectacle, although how much there is to really see will be interesting.  We saw a stage finish once in Tours, and it was 2 to 3 hours of standing around for 10 seconds of whoosh!  The town is festooned with yellow bunting, flags and other decorations, and a line painted on the road for the official start line when the four jerseys line up behind the lead car.  The real start is about 10 kilometres out of town, but it is all about the spectacle in town.  One of the pharmacies had a suitable window display.

On Thursday morning, a bunch of us braved the metal convection oven that is the Comité des Fêtes storage barn to crack on with the float for the Comice.  My illness and successive heatwaves had slowed progress considerably, but we are on a deadline and fortunately a strong team of 7 were able to do all the panels that were prepared.  I have checked the photo and I'm not giving away any secrets when I show our admirable team at work.

One more session is all we need to get the panels finished!

A combination of heatwaves and the arrival of a new computer have encouraged me to deal with a trail camera - down in the corner where the Meadow meets the Plantation.  I was delighted to see that the hare uses this corner quite a bit, or was using it in March anyway!

It is very much an area where deer like to hang out - it provides cover and food and yet also allows a good view in the "vulnerable" directions.  This stag had a pretty impressive rack of horn in April and used his antlers to trash the trees and greenery a bit.  They are a menace when you have young or vulnerable trees, it has to be said!

By June, the results of a previous rutting season were around.  When very tiny, the fauns are stashed in long grass or cereal crops, but as they grow, they follow Mum around learning to feed themselves, and being left in slightly more interesting places, like among the trees that edge the Meadow.  These were learning to feed.

There is a water source nearby, which is also an attraction for the deer at the moment.  Some of the ponds are looking very dry, but two are fed by tiny springs that don't seem to fail, and keep the local wildlife going.

Next week may be all about the Tour, depending on the next bout of heatwaves and the speed of my internet connection (we will soon go over to fibre, but there are Things to be Done before that can happen), so may be a day late.  All very conditional I know!  Anyway, have a good week!

 

 

Normal service is resumed!

This latest Covid variant is a doozy, so if you have the chance to get vaccinated, I heartily recommend doing so.  The razor throat gave way to a debilitating cough, which turned into a lung infection, all of which was during the first heatwave.  Now I feel better, we are slap bang in the middle of a second and worse heatwave!  June has not been my favourite month!  Still, my Poundland lily has been putting on a fine display and will go on for a few days yet, so not all bad!  I bought it over before Brexit really kicked in so it has been going in that pot for some 5 years now!

The weather is crazy.  May was so much drier than normal, and June has been the same - just 16mm of rain in the month to date and I don't expect any more between now and Tuesday morning.  At the start of April, we had 2,500 litres of rainwater stocked in our giant cubes, but to keep the vegetables going, we have had to pump a further 3,000 litres from the well to put into the cubes, and we will be topping them up soon, as the farmers are going to start pumping and irrigating big time shortly, so the level in the well will fall.  The fruits of the water can be seen in the impending courgette glut - they are delicious when small, but let them get to 8 to 10 inches long and they become less enticing!

The sweetcorn is not quite so triffid like but coming on nicely - there are 60 plants in this bed and if they all produce a couple of cobs each, we will be nice and regular through August and September, if you see what I mean!

We had a visitor - a rarity for us - during the last week for a couple of nights.  It was fascinating for us to see our life here and the local area through different eyes.  I handed him mirabelles and raspberries fresh from the tree/cane to try, to be met with a query of were they safe to eat, before tasting the freshest fruit he had had in his life I think.  They were approved!  Similarly our wells were a source of amazement.  We drove through Durtal, and the surprise on coming down the hill and seeing the Chateau for the first time - What is that!?  Just another normal facet of French life!

Last night as I took down the heat shutter from the bedroom window, I looked out to see a new moon on the horizon.  It doesn't look as though this moon will bring cooler temperatures, indeed the forecast, always a bit on the conservative side, for Tuesday is a suffocating 41ºC.  We will be up early in the mornings to water the triffids and feed cats, then snoozing through the heat of the day. 

I have a trail camera to check over and download and triage the photos and videos, so there may be wildlife in next week's blog.  Eating fruit, fresh vegetables, salads, and things that don't need much cooking is the order of the day - yesterday's queue for tomatoes, melons and apricots was just about bearable!

As I stood in that queue, I was able to admire another jewel of the Middle Ages, as our chateau at Baugé stands guard over the market square.  Sometimes I forget to marvel at the wonderful area we live in, but not this last week, my eyes have been reopened!

So, I am back in the world of the living, albeit dripping with sweat at the effort of moving my fingers in an office that is currently 29ºC, which isn't that comfortable.  So I am going to go and find a fan to sit in front of, and perhaps have a restorative snooze.  I think I am allowed!

Have a good week!

 

No post this week

Apologies!  It has been a dire week and there is nothing much I want to share about it, apart from the lovely flowers on my Curcuma plant in the garden (decorative turmeric).  Normal service should resume next week.

A plague on carriers of disease!

Either that cold was a real humdinger or we had Covid, either way, the extra symptoms and issues just keep on coming!  I have never before had to phone the doctor's surgery here for a medical appointment that wasn't routine, but yesterday I did manage to get an emergency appointment to look into symptoms.  Thanks to Google, I was convinced I had a failing gall bladder or pancreas - actually it turned out to be acute gastro, so unpleasant but solvable. 

Then last night I became convinced that someone was trying to kill me by forcing a knitting needle into my ear.  Despite serious pain killers, sleep was elusive at best and my ear is seeping gunk.  This time Google tells me it is an anodyne ear infection and to take painkillers until it sorts itself out.  Much of the earlier part of the week was spent trying to fool myself that the bugs had gone - all in all, I'm not impressed!

Still, we did get one thing sorted out, and that was very purposeful.  Twenty years ago, when we moved over to France, we realised we needed a decent outdoor table and chair set, so went to Casa and invested.  The chairs lasted perhaps 3 or 4 seasons, but the table has only just fallen apart.  Actually it is still doing service as a place to put plant pots, so not dead yet.  It took a while to find something we liked - most stores go for the metal and plasticised fabric things, but we wanted wood.  We also prefer to buy locally, but sometimes you can't, and the internet helped us out.  Of course it needed to be varnished before being put into use, which meant that Poirot took against it until I put a bit of hardboard on it, but we now have our new outdoor table.  Let's hope it also lasts 20 years!

The week has been very hot, which made the session on Thursday sticking paper flowers onto cardboard panels rather uncomfortable, to say the least.  Actually I blame that heat for the gastro, but I could be wrong!  Anyway, progress was made and that was the important thing, as while the Comice isn't until the 23rd August, the time will fly between now and then!

The hot weather is suiting the Mediterranean vegetables although they are now starting to ask for water as well, which is an issue as we haven't had much rain for 3 months now.  The progress the courgettes are making is really rather scary and this year I might have overdone the number of plants!

This weekend, the local business support group, Baugé Entreprendre, has its regular Fair or Exhibition.  I am always stounded at the range of artisans we have in the area, much smaller than a British district council.  There were a number of people who upcycle things - leather, furniture, tyre inner tubes as below ...

There is a guy who makes lovely shelves from offcuts of wood - I will invest in one shortly!

And of course there was a furniture restorer and a lady who does lovely upholstery, who will be getting our custom in due course.

Not only was it fascinating to see the inventiveness and skills of local people, we also met up with a load of chums as we wandered round, making it a very convivial occasion as well.  Hopefully this spotlight on local talents will ensure that they pick up more work and provide an excellent economic base for the area.

Well, I hope that next week's offering is more interesting and less full of complaints about health.  The weather forecast is set fair for a beautiful late spring/early summer, and over the last week, the douceur angevine once again spared us from devastating storms.  Long may that continue!

Have a good week!

Summer colds and cherries

When I was in the queue for the till at Aldi just over a week ago, there was a handsome man ahead of me, necking a litre bottle of orange juice while waiting his turn.  In between urgent gulps of juice, he spent a happy time coughing repeatedly.  I might have wondered if it was juice with bits and they were annoying: I might have idly wondered about whether the new strain of Covid was anything more than tabloid click bait.  I did not expect to spend most of the week trying to breathe without sounding like a pig with its snout in a trough of tasty sludge.  Silly me!  Half the week seems to have been blurry, seen through eyes partly obscured by mucus, interspersed with periods of great clarity and purpose.

Much of that purpose has been driven by greed.  For the first time in over 5 years, we have access to a crop of cherries!  There are two trees with tasty red ones, and I found one today that has lovely ripe yellow cherries too - or what we used to call white cherries back in the orchards of Kent of my youth.  Shortly I must go and stuff a kilner jar with as many ripe red cherries as I can, then top it up with (home produced) kirsch to be useful in the autumn and winter.

As far as I remember, the cherry season is short and intense.  It is a battle with birds who feel the need to eat some and damage as many as they can before I can get to them, and with the weather, which even in a record dry spell, will produce a downpour of rain to split the best, biggest and ripest of fruit.  That is without the, for us, new threat of people just wandering into the field and helping themselves, and the more familiar threat of deer, boar, pine martins, and badgers scoffing what they can, depending on craftiness and height.  The branch of cherries below shows the range of challenges, including a bit of mildew also making its presence felt.  Commercial cherry farmers should be feted for getting any to your table at all!

Fruit gluttony aside, the vegetable plots are starting to provide the odd side dish, and indeed meal.  Yesterday we had a small portion each of the tiniest petit pois to encourage the plants to keep producing.  I actually grew the peas as something to graze on while at the plot, as I love fresh peas, raw, direct from the pod.  The summer cold from hell has made raw peas about as appealing as eating pebbles, but lightly cooked and served with a bit of farm butter, they were close to heaven last night.  Tonight we have new potatoes and broad beans to accompany our extra fatty and skin on pork chops (fat is most appealing at the moment), and while the product of one plant isn't vast, we didn't eat all the potatoes from the 56 we planted last year, so eating some early this year is not going to deprive us during the winter I reckon!

The pumpkins that we set off from seeds from one that we bought during the winter for soup have suddenly decided that they like being planted in soil that is 50% kiln ready clay and 50% top grade compost and are sending tendrils everywhere.  Encouragingly, they are also sending out lots of female flowers, although if I am right, these three have not been fertilised and will come to nothing.  The hint being that the stems are yellow rather than green.  But it is still early days, and I would hope to have some set and growing nicely by the end of June.

The courgette plants in the ratatouille bed look as though they are getting ready for world domination.  Given that they were tiny when planted out, and some with very poor root balls, they have taken to the bed really well.  Rather better indeed than the expensive and posh pepper plants, which have yet to put on a new leaf in four weeks, and are now being cossetted with a protective cover!  The aubergines are also looking sulky, but I find they do that until late June and then become ravenous triffids.

Talking of triffids, it put on 20 centimetres in a week...

Anyway, cherries don't put themselves in jars of alcohol, so I'd better go and help them out.  Have a good week!

 

As spring ends, the summer triffid appears

We thought it had died, it took so long to appear.  Mind you, my Facebook memories hadn't featured it, so I probably shouldn't have doubted it.  The cristophine vine has shown its first shoots during the last week.  It is quite dry here at the moment, so we aren't seeing the rapid and lush growth we associate with this thug ... yet.  All we need is a good rain shower and it will be off.  Fortunately we have never bothered to dismantle its frame, so it has space to grow.  We are trying the companion planting experiment again, and there are 5 tomato plants around it.  Here we go again!

There has been little to photograph and little energy for taking photos this week - we were tired after the vide grenier and then the weather got seriously hot very quickly, and of course we have been tending to the needs of the poorly cat.  Spooky is now back up to fighting weight and regularly downing a small tin of gourmet food as well as most of a cheaper brand of sachet cat food.  Goodness knows whether he is blagging food off the neighbours as well - I sort of doubt it. 

The best photo of the week otherwise, is of the bright orange memorial rose (Orange King, in case you were wondering) that we bought to mark the demise of the resident ginger cat some four years ago.

However earlier in the month, I brought in one of the trail cameras for a check over.  Probably a good thing, as the batteries had failed, and it was also clear that there is an issue with the on/off switch - it is annoying that it is this, the cheapest relay in the whole unit, that is most likely to fail!  I hope I have found a work around, but won't know until I bring the camera back in soon.

This camera had been in place for a few months, and initially had been beaten up a couple of times, until we tied it in to a post very securely.  It was positioned to catch goings on near the badger set, and the route the badgers take to do their marauding elsewhere.  There is a small breach in the wire fence nearby and a small path through the grass that can be seen on Google Earth!  For at least the first few weeks, the plan worked well, as they didn't venture far from the set to look for tasty morsels and do their business.  Later they are just glimpses of a shape dashing one way or another, heading off to or coming back from, much more promising areas.

First, there is one badger nosing around for something interesting.

Then there are two badgers pottering around together.

There is one with a badger spotting the camera and running away.

Then there is the up close and personal.

Then the closer still.

And then a real good investigation before knocking the camera over!

The two trail cameras I've had that have had broken switches are those that have been attacked by animals, a badger in this case, and a boar in the other.  They are supposed to be robust, so I'm hoping it is just a coincidence.

Finally, because no sequence of videos is complete without the wild pigs, here is a family using the badger gap in the fence.

There are some nice stills in that batch of files, which I will dig out another day, when I am at a loss as to what to write about.  I have had the second trail camera in this week for a similar check up - I have to say that the contents were rather disappointing, with rather too much rat and mouse action, pine martens moving too quickly to be anything other than fuzzy and no ducks.  I'll see what is worth sharing though.

Have a good week!

 

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!