Rural Life

Happy New Year - 2022, the Year of the Pheasant?

Happy New Year to chums near and far.  And a healthy one too, which is on my mind as others have been "pinged" in our close circle and it's a worry.

The period between Christmas and New Year is always an odd one, and this year is no exception.  The weather has been unseasonably mild, and the last couple of days have been gloriously sunny too.  Yesterday morning there was a hint of mist, which made going up the garden to feed the chickens a slightly spooky affair, as can be seen.

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The mist burnt off very quickly though, and both yesterday and today we have sat out with cats, watched birds, done some gardening and enjoyed nature.  It was lovely to get the hammocks out again today and sit in The Garden watching the tits and a robin working their way through a coconut filled with fat and seeds.  I was surprised to see the robin doing that in fact, as I thought it really was a trick of blue tits and great tits.  We do actively encourage great tits in The Garden as they are the only bird to have decided to eat pine processionary caterpillars, and with nests in a couple of the pine trees round the garden, encouraging them seems like a good idea.  A friend did happily point out that great tits also predate bats, but if my bats live where I think they do, no great tit could get into the space!

The weather is also conducive to good, dramatic sunsets - this was yesterday's.

The French make a big deal of the Reveillon as they tend to call it and New Year, although this year the festivities were more muted due to the charm free Omicron.  In previous years, we have gorged on foie gras, smoked salmon, steak, oysters (occasionally done as Angels on horseback with bacon and prunes), but this year we went for tartiflette, a delicious mix of potatoes (home grown of course), smoked bacon, onion, garlic and Reblouchon cheese.  We didn't eat all this pan, we did save some to go with sausages today!

Wandering around the grounds today, we spotted this rather dramatic and interesting fungus - I might work out what it is by next week!  So bright that I wondered if it was a piece of plastic brought in by one of the foxes in the Orchard, it stood out among the detritus under one of the walnut trees.

And so to the Year of the Pheasant.  The trail camera has been in a very tucked away part of the Orchard this week, and I managed to control myself and not visit it every day to see what it had caught.  We have dodgy photos of a fat pigeon, a rat, a hedgehog, and a possible ragondin, or coypu.  The fox was also nosing around and a blackbird did his thing in front of the camera too.  A duck walked past.  But the most prolific visitors to the area, and yet not the ones that make the paths, were the pheasants.  Here are three girls doing what they do.

The warm weather means that the male pheasants are getting frisky, so clearly my three girls are interesting prey.  There are sounds off too!

But I don't think male pheasants are that bright, and this one has also been tagged by someone, so is also at a bit of a disadvantage.  Doesn't stop him thinking he is pretty fab though!

The trail camera is on the move now, to keep an eye on what is causing damage elsewhere, and hopefully will have some good footage again for next week, when I will be back to Sunday updates.

 

 

Final post of 2021

Well, we are getting near the end of 2021 and quite frankly I shall be glad to see the back of it.  Covid and its constraints on life as we knew it have been a challenge, as they have made difficult things even more difficult than they needed to be.  Finding a quality nursing home and installing someone in it, trying to earn a living, helping people with the bureaucracy of Brexit (getting a residence permit, exchanging driver's licenses, reregistering cars) have all been that little bit harder than they needed to be.  As we get to the end of the year, we are back to the second guessing what the next restrictions are going to be.  Today we did forays into a number of stores for wild bird seed, chicken feed, and store cupboard basics in case, as there is a definite feeling from the media that the next few weeks aren't going to be easy.

But away from that, and looking at the natural world around us, there are still uplifting vistas, so once out of shops and built up areas, things seem more hopeful.  On Christmas Day we did a lovely walk from The Shack to the One Acre Wood and back, with hardly an engine or an unnatural sound to be heard.  Today at The Shack, we looked across the valley to the Chapel and the world didn't seem so bad (although the weather could have been better I guess).

Nature finds a way (listen to Jetho Tull's Jack in the Green), and indeed we are impressed, as well as slightly concerned, at the persistence of a mole that wants to set up home in the near derelict Studio!  There are mole hills by the steps and next to the terrace!

The trail camera also shows us that we are not alone - so here are a couple of videos from near the Studio.

And this one

Happy New Year - I'll be back on 1st January!

 

All quiet on the French front

It has been mostly grey all week, so a very quiet time really - not least as it always takes ages to process all the information I gather on one of my work visits to the UK.  We had an afternoon and a chunk of a day that were fine, so I did manage to get laundry dry on the line.  There was a dramatic moonrise the day of the fine afternoon, which I managed to capture, sort of, as I came in from putting the chickens to bed.

Last Thursday was the third Thursday in November so Beaujolais Nouveau day.  I bought us a bottle to share that night - as the critics have said, lots of cherry flavours this year, but as they haven't particularly said, it is fairly expensive and it is pretty silly.  Still that didn't stop us quaffing a couple of bottles when out with friends for dinner in Chinon on the Friday night.  The lady of the establishment was adamant that if we wanted to experience France, we really needed to try it (we did NOT go with her recommendation on eating tripe however), and bizarrely it was cheaper than the house red.  Finally I had a glass or two as we celebrated beer o'clock a day late at the local pub, but that is now it until Beaujolais Nouveau 2022!

Spooky, the Black Cat in the Country gave me a scare this week, with a gummy eye, so on Thursday it was a trip to the vet.  I have never had such an excellent feline car passenger!  No offensive smells with suitable sound effects before the smells, no "singing the song of his people", no chewing my fingers through the bars of the cat carrier - he thought it was alright.  OK so he tried to bite the vet once, but he does chew quite a lot, and he didn't appreciate having his temperature taken, but he was really very good.  He has reacted well to his antibiotic injection, so doesn't have a return visit tomorrow (phew).  It would be unfair to share his photo showing why he had to visit the vet, so here is a photo of Donald, who was clearly a pirate's parrot in a previous life!  He also drools a lot.

Today's visit in the wet to feed the Boys in the Country was very exciting.  Last week John had discussed with our neighbour about access to the communal well, and the guy offered to get a machine to help find it among all the vegetation.  We arrived to find him in full "Find and Rescue" mode.  He did take a bit of the hedges as well, and took the buddleia back to large size rather than the Godzilla monster size that it had become.  As we have rainwater recuperation tanks, we are unlikely to use the well, but as it is a shared resource, we are delighted that, with a bit more work, our little hamlet will be able to use it (assuming there is any water at the bottom of course).

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Apologies for a dull resumé of the week - I'll try to do better next Sunday!

 

November and it's dull, dull, so very dull

It's been a bit of a trial finding things to talk about this week and also to find any nice photos to share to illustrate that with.  The dullness is more as it is same old, same old, as actually the weather has been fairly kind, so I have done a couple of walks (brown leaves, brown fields, brown woods) and seen a couple of fungi that were faintly photogenic, but otherwise of little interest to me.  No cèpes at all this year, so I have to keep going with my stash of dried from last year.

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There was an amusing moment during the week when I was wandering around the Orchard, and Donald decided he didn't want to walk so spent his time circling my head by standing on my shoulders (I really am stretching the point here).  The shadow we made on the ground was amusing - I'm either wearing a Davey Crocket hat or a saucepan!

Other things are preparing/being prepared for winter.  After the first significant frost of the year, I thought it was time to bring the avocado tree into shelter - they aren't known for being frost hardy!!  This is its third year, and it was grown from an avocado stone we brought back from Guadeloupe - the fruit was huge (family sized really), as was the pit, so we thought it was worth a try.  The tree actually has branches, and has done better than any other avocado stone I've grown, so I want to keep it going, but it will have to stay small enough to bring indoors each winter!

Following on from last week's pride in a first new flower on the little orchid, I can now present flower number 2, and looking closely at the buds, next week there might even be a third flower.  This small and frankly rather abused orchid has been with us now for three years and I am amazed by it.  I would like it to be an example to the bigger orchids that have since seduced me, but I don't know that they talk that much!

One thing that has made the week dull from a blogging perspective is the fact that I am preparing for a voyage to Plague Island next week.  I have had to get to grips with expensive lateral flow tests, passenger locator forms and Engagement sur l'Honneur form letters, do laundry so I have enough clean underwear, find the small rucksack for carrying my camera around, charge up the battery for the big camera, and look into the exotic subject of public transport into and around Birmingham.  All this should mean that I have lots of exciting photos for next week's blog, but make today's effort a major snooze fest.  

As even the cat is a critic, I'll leave it at that for now!

 

Autumn changes

Last week I picked and stored the butternut squashes, this week I picked the best red pepper I have ever grown.  Plus I also pulled two more of the large white radishes - one of them was a bit damaged, but we had a good sized salad with the two (Donald the cat insisted on being part of the picture, posing as you can see).  Now our thoughts are more about next year's crops, and I should be sowing the first of those, broad beans, in the next couple of weeks.  My darling husband acquired a trailer-load of leaf mould for me - lovely stuff that is dark and full of organic matter and will help our clay soil a lot.  It is now stored under a tarpaulin in a number of giant cat food sacks until needed.

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During the week, the weather took a serious turn, with the arrival of Storm Aurore.  She was forecast to track further north than us, although the clouds were a clear sign that she meant trouble.  She brought an hour of truly nasty winds which brought down trees and powerlines.  In the centre of the village, we had a couple of power cuts, but otherwise no major issues.  Isolated properties to the east of us weren't so lucky with more major electric lines down and some houses without power for over 24 hours. 

So here is a tip if you are leaving your house for a few days, leaving the power on, and have food in the freezer, and there is a power outage.  Have a half eaten tub of ice cream in the freezer.  If when you get back, you find a slick of ice cream across the bottom of the tub, your freezer has defrosted, if there is still a clear half and a half with ice cream in it, enjoy the rest knowing it hasn't melted and refrozen!!

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So Aurore has now passed and the sun is back.  And we have a new toy to help with those annoying branches where it is difficult to get a bow saw in and a proper chainsaw is over the top.   This little gem came with two batteries, two bars and four chains (on the basis that you work 2 chains to a bar and should replace the bar more often that we do as the bar gets clogged and damaged and warped with use).  We spent a happy quarter of an hour raising the crown on an annoying cypress style tree, and half an hour tidying up afterwards (always the way).

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Last week I wrote about my embarrassing orchid habit - this is the final one I hadn't managed to get a good picture of, while it still has a flower.  I know it will fall off soon.  The small orchid that was covered in buds now has one flower, and I'm likely to show it off next week.

And yes, that is a cat eating in the background!

 

The Days are drawing in!

We are blessed with a late spurt of good weather and so far October has mostly been lovely - cool overnight, but no frosts just yet, and the days dry and sunny, and not too hot.  The sun is good as it bakes the stones of the house, which acts like a storage heater, and means that we aren't using the point heaters much and aren't too worried that we haven't seen the chimney sweep yet (he comes on Wednesday).  We daren't light the fire until he has done his thing in case.  We did have a small chimney fire many years ago and it scared us witless!!  The conditions mean that we do get some very good sunsets, like this one.

Fruitfulness continues, with some late figs, more walnuts and lots more chestnuts.  I also cut the 7 butternuts and put them on a chair to do their final ripening, before bringing them home on Tuesday, after which the weather is due to get wet.  I made up a nice chestnut crumble recipe during the week and will try it out again tonight to refine it a smidge before writing it into my big Black Book of My Recipes.  The base is red peppers and leek, to which I'm going to add a bit of garlic, and the crumble is chestnuts, butter and cheese.

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Once the butternuts come home, there aren't many crops left at the Garden.  We do have a number of Mooli radishes, and tried one today.  One makes a nice side salad for two as part of a light lunch - it is very crunchy and has a little bit of a kick.  Still no major mushroom discoveries although there was a dodgy bolete in the Garden - a birch bolete probably as it was by the birch tree.  The cracks on the cap are testimony to the dry conditions.  Once the rain starts next week, they could be popping up all over the place!

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As the days get shorter, I return to my indoor orchid obsession.  But I have a problem.  One of the DIY stores in town buys large quantities of ornamental orchids and sells them for a certain price (a bit too elevated for me).  They probably over buy and they don't necessarily look after them too well, so after a while the orchids lose their flowers and look sad, at which point they get sold off half price and without their cachepot.  Then I go in looking for chicken feed, have to go past the orchid pen, and if I have an excess of cash, generally can't help myself as they are a bargain, aren't they?  So while last winter I mithered over my two tiny orchids, now I have three tiny orchids, and five strapping ones (one is a refugee from Chinon).  And I don't have that much space suitable for orchids.

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You've not had a cat photo for a while I'm thinking and actually what better picture for autumn than a totally relaxed cat?  Nibbles is pretty well stone deaf now, so I can get nice and close to take candid photos of her, like this!

Until next week!

 

Mellow fruitfulness, sort of

Last week I was in mid-pudding steaming when I wrote, so I won't leave you in suspense any longer - here are the puddings, cooled after 10 hours of steaming and ready to be wrapped up and left for 2/14 months depending which gets eaten first.  The smaller one is pretty good looking all round, the larger one I clearly didn't wodge down enough, so is a bit crumbly.

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There are still quite a lot of flowers around.  The rudbeckia on the flower border are still going, while the cosmos is just starting to flower - they are always so late for me, other people have dug theirs up already but mine is covered in buds!  In the One Acre Wood, there are small white cyclamen that we transplanted from another woodland about 10 years ago, and they are really coming into their own now.  The ones in the garden around the birch tree have been going since July and show no signs of stopping yet.  They always lift the spirits.

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In terms of fruitfulness, well we have a couple of walnut trees that have produced good looking nuts and we now have two big drying racks well stocked with drying nuts.  Sweet chestnuts are just starting to fall now - the ones that are worth eating, others have been dropping for a while - so we enjoy the guilty pleasure of roasted chestnuts with our aperos.  I also have some interesting savoury crumble ideas tucked away, including leek and red peppers with a savoury chestnut crumble topping... 

The last fruit of the year are always the medlars - still not ripe, but getting there.  They aren't edible raw unless they have been bletted, or left to rot for a bit, but in their unbletted state, I believe you can make a jelly from them.  There is a tree that we know that is coated in them.  Some people also have olive trees in their garden and they are also a very late fruit, and I gather making them edible is quite a process.  I regard them as a pretty curiosity this far north.

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Wildlife is getting more scarce and preparing for winter.  I met this young toad in the Garden, and encouraged it to steer clear of the cats, who miss all the mice in the now harvested and empty maize fields.  The badger preparations for winter continue and as the meadow has been mown now, ready for winter, the entrance to Badger Delvings is pretty obvious.

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It wouldn't be autumn without a few leaves turning colour - this is a Wild Service tree in the One Acre Wood, one of the earliest to turn there and also the species that is likely to produce the best colours for us.

Until next week!

 

Distinctly autumnal now

To finish the saga of the juicing apples, we went to the press on Monday lunchtime with our (to us) vast collection, and within half an hour were back on the road with 79 bottles of pasteurised apple juice in the boot.  As two kilos of apples is needed in general for a litre of juice, we therefore managed to pick 158 kilos of apples last weekend.  This is the bottling machine - not working, as when it is working we are the end of the production line taking off the bottles and packing them!

This week we have gone rapidly from summer to autumn.  Last weekend we got hot and sticky picking the apples, the sun was out and during the week, when mowing, I had a long discussion across a lake with a heron.  It was all glorious.  Friday I was taking a half day to meet friends, and take the scenic route to Azay with a picnic to do some birding at the lake at Rillé.  It started to rain as we got to the hide, and didn't stop until we got to Azay - that'll teach me to try to take time out!  We were lucky in that when we went for a walk around central Chinon, it stayed dry and fairly bright however, so there is a view of the mediaeval bit of the town from by the Chateau ramparts.

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The walnut harvest has now started.  We are actually rather lucky in that our trees have escaped whatever it is that is turning the nuts black before they fall, and therefore rendering them useless.  I show below a good nut still on the tree, and what bad nuts look like.  The third picture is me after gathering a couple of kilos, taking a rest and being jumped on by two cats.  Fortunately John was able to take over!

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It's Christmas pudding making time - actually it is a bit late, I should have done it a couple of weeks ago, but there we go.  There are some changes this year.  I thought I had packets and packets of almonds tucked away, but couldn't find any at all , and as the weather really was filthy yesterday, I wasn't going to dash out to buy any more, so they have been replaced with walnuts.  I couldn't find any currants in the French shops, they aren't so keen on Spotted Dick, Eccles cakes, squashed fly biscuits, and so forth, so don't see the need.  I had to replace them with more sultanas.  I had no fresh quince (instead of cooking apple) so had to substitute in shredded quince that had been sitting in quince eau de vie for a year making liqueur.  I used candied fruit rather than candied peel and lime instead of lemon.  Time will tell if all those substitutions were an error or not!  Raw puddings, the hallowed steamer and the cooking - which is still going on, so no pictures of the finished articles.

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Now to get back to watching the puddings cook.

 

 

Normal service is resumed

In fact, as I really need to cover two weeks of excitement and rural stuff, this could be a bit longer than normal!

The week Huguette died and the week after were mostly lovely autumn weather.  This meant I could do a few useful autumn things like make jam.  My Mum's tree was about the only peach tree with much fruit on it, and as they are very dark fruited peaches (almost black if you get a good one), the resulting jam was a rich, dark pink colour.  We got 12 and two half pots of jam, both half pots have already been eaten, plus five jars of quince jelly from the tree in the garden (no photos of the jelly though).

Today has been spent gathering in excess of 150 kilos of juicing apples for our appointment at the fruit press tomorrow.  We could have gathered more, but a couple of years ago we discovered the joys of single variety apple juice - pretentious, nous?  Anyway, we wanted to do that again, as the juice from these apples (probably Canada variety or similar) is not as sweet as a mixed variety juice can be.  You know what next week's blog is going to be about therefore, but here is a tree before it was picked, and here is our helper.

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Huguette wasn't the only one to leave us in September, with a close neighbour also bowing out.  His house is now shut up while the family wait for the French equivalent of probate to be sorted out, but the geraniums he tended outside his house are still going strong and a lovely memory of him.

September is a good month for views if the weather is suitable.  We had a run of magnificent sunsets, so after a bit of fiddling, I managed to get my camera phone to get this image, which is pretty dramatic I think.  Morning views of the church are much easier, although the angles are wrong to avoid the neighbour's laundry.  Why not wait for a day with no laundry?  They don't exist, even when it is raining.  I think they don't have wardrobes, so the clothes line is a place to store clothes they aren't wearing.

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The badgers at the Wildflower Meadow are getting prepared for winter.  They have cleaned out tunnels and done a bit more excavating - probably without planning permission.  As the ground where they live is pretty chalky, it isn't subtle when they decide that set maintenance is what needs to be done.  If you look closely at the second photo, you can see paw prints in the excavations too.  

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As the fruit comes to an end, nuts start to catch our attention.  At the Garden, we have three big trees, then there are another four in the Orchard, and a couple more on the edge of the Wildflower Meadow.  We suspect that if we stopped doing any maintenance, the whole area would be taken over by elderberry, walnut, bramble and old man's beard.  Anyway, the area below the good two trees in the Garden has been close mown to make it easier to collect them, while it is possible to see them starting to emerge from their cases on the low branches.  I picked up 5 nice clean nuts this afternoon, but that is just the start!

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The weather has now turned, after the amazing sunshine and clear skies.  Soon I will be ripping up the sweetcorn and the faded tomato plants, trying to ripen off the small butternut squashes and thinking about sowing broad beans for next year.  It feels like we haven't really had a summer this year, and that autumn has been with us for a couple of months now, with cyclamen in the lawn, and falling leaves.  The rewards of autumn are of course sweet chestnuts, fresh walnuts, mushrooms and preparing for the year end festivities.  I expect to be making Christmas puddings next weekend - watch this space!

 

 

Chickens and sun worshipping

Apologies for the delay and also, in advance, for the somewhat light nature of this update.  They are related I guess, as yesterday there was a Birthday Event, which took some managing and also most of yesterday.  When you are 90/91, a year makes a huge difference, plus Covid makes everything so much more special.  In August 2020, you could have 10 round a dining table at a restaurant, while the Birthday Girl was also able to walk a bit.  Not a vast distance, so she was driven down to the restaurant 250m away from her front door, but she could make it the 30m to the dining table, and remembered to wear a mask on the way in (not so much on the way out).  Then it was warm and sunny enough to sit in the garden, partake of more fizz and cake and carry on having fun.

This year we have Pass Sanitaire, and I think restaurant tables are still limited to 6 places.  More importantly, home has changed and the rules around entering a nursing home are strict and include the Passe Sanitaire.  Mobility has decreased, while the capacity of my car has not increased, so a restaurant or a picnic was not possible (the latter also as it was rather cool and windy).  Instead there were four of us round a bed, slurping the finest fizzy rosé Saumur (Ackermann) can produce, while scoffing a range of patisseries and talking about old times. 

Anyway, what else has been going on?  Two different forms of sun worshipping were spotted during the week.  The pears at Chinon really are not nice, they don't cook well, they don't make good eau de vie (the distiller spotted their overtones one year and told us not to do that again), they really aren't nice raw either.  I'm guessing they might have made good pig food at one stage, as the tree is very old, and the house has outbuildings.  Their only fans this year seem to be bees - I think possibly ground dwelling solitary bees, but I may well be wrong - who love sucking out the sweet juices from where they split when they fall.

The other sun worshipper is my feral sunflower - we didn't sow it, it just started growing out of the bin of compost we had some strawberries in.  It has grown to nearly 6 foot tall, and because it is on a plinth, I can't look it in the face.  It is very well placed to worship the rising sun in the morning, while the less open faces, follow the sun during the day (tournesol or tourne au sol - clever, huh?).  I take a photo or two each day to keep a ray of sunshine for winter.

On the chicken front, Auntie Mo is settling in quite well, although we still get some aggression from Mac and Jak.  She went up in the pecking order a bit when Bridie the Freeloading Bantam started to moult.

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Sometimes I spot things out of the corner of my eye and they are interesting.  Two examples to end with.  I was at The Garden, watering some things and carrying on with the potato harvest.  As I went to get the fork from the store, I spotted some movement in the grass and closer inspection showed it to be a small frog or toad - not warty enough for a toad, but too far from water to be a frog.  Whatever, he/she is very useful and welcome.  Yesterday evening, sitting in the garden, recovering from an overdose of patisseries (helped with a gin and tonic) I spotted another crop in the overgrown border - hops!  And quite a lot of them too, some looking really beautiful at the moment.  I'm not sure there are enough for beer making, and we don't do that sort of home brew anyway, but good for hop pillows perhaps.  I'll think on it!

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I promise I will try for Sunday next week!