Rural Life

Day 23 of lockdown - bits and bobs to delight and fright

A couple of days ago I mentioned my orchid that was torturing me with how slowly the flower buds develop and when would the blasted thing open.  Still not open today of course, but getting jolly close - see!

So there I was this morning, standing at a safe distance from the person in front of me and the person behind me in the queue to get into the market at la Flèche.  As I looked around, I noticed a lovely display of flowers - most likely hyacinths that have been around for a few years - on the roof of an outbuilding.  It is probably an old outside loo - my Mum has one very similar in Chinon.  It was so pretty to look at this morning though.

The apply blossom is starting to come out - this spray of flowers is from the Granny Smith tree, which is ahead of the Reine de Reinette.  There are unlikely to be any flowers at all on the Belle de Boskoop.

And finally, I present to you a bowl of eggs.  The big white one is a goose egg - geese are big.  The other three are from our chickens.  That one top left is scary.  Just think about laying that one, boys and girls.

Day 21 of lockdown - waiting for an orchid to bloom

First off an update on yesterday's post - we have indeed captured our first Asian hornet "reine fondatrice" or mother of queens.  I got the confirmation this morning.  So that is 10 hornets' nests less this summer, which is something to feel good about.

Anyway, that is our third week of lockdown completed.  The weather has been overcast, cool and wet, so it has felt more constraining today.  Even the baker's was closed, so no trip up for the daily baguette.

Time drags on a day like this, and so little things become important, and you reflect on silly things.  Here is one - a watched pot never boils.  Well yesterday that was certainly true with the broccoli to go with our pot roast chicken - I set it off before preparing the cheese plate, resting the chicken and making the sauce, and when that was all done and the wine opened and tasted, the broccoli still wasn't boiling!  

But more irritating than the broccoli that doesn't boil, is the orchid bud that doesn't burst!  Our first mini-orchid did so well last summer, and I nurtured it and kept it alive (normally I kill them very quickly), but then the flowers faded and died (after 4 months, so not unsurprising), and I thought that was it.  I went away for a few days in January, and when I got back I found tiny new flower buds forming and got all excited.  Then as each got to half a pea size, they turned brown and dropped off.  A new way to break my heart.  So when this lot of buds started, I wasn't convinced, but it is bigger than half pea size, it isn't turning brown - can it please hurry up and open!!??

Day 20 of lockdown - the battle with the Asian hornet

Before we get onto that - just a reminder of how on edge people are.  A banal but heated discussion between someone with a right to park in the shared courtyard, and someone else whose right is pretty well non-existent escalated into a heated exchange between four neighbours yesterday evening.  One person with nothing to do with the conversation got right in there and started hurling accusations around in a very heated manner.  Now while I admit that the person in question would beat herself up if put in a paper bag on her own, it is evidence of the short fuse people are on, and when given the opportunity to get stuck into something that is non-Covid-19 related, will do just that.  Walk away people!  It ruined a lovely evening.

But on to more interesting things - the fight against the Asian hornet.  Before anyone says anything about "nature", these are an invasive non-native species that can eat their way through a hive of honey bees in about a week.  There is no up side to them.  We were recruited in February to be part of an "observatoire", made up of 56 sites across our district, to try to trap queens in the period up to mid-May when they are laying and nurturing the queens that will create the big nests of the summer.  Stopping one queen now prevents between 10 and 20 nests of hornets later in the summer, each of which can overwinter a further 5 queens.  Think of all those social distancing tree diagrams you've seen recently.

Anyway, we are hosts to 3 traps, one at home, one where the cats are and one with a client who has had trouble with hornets in the past.  The traps are designed to entice the queens in, but not let them out again (although their efficacy in that is also part of the test). 

In the trap you put a pot of bait with a lot of pebbles or similar, so that good insects don't drown in the bait which is made up of a third dark, sweet beer, a third fruit syrup ideally blackcurrant or grenadine (in our case out of date Ribena), and a third dry white wine, to keep bees away from it.

Today, John checked the one with the cats, as they needed feeding, and we think we have caught one!  The photo below has been sent to the main man running the observatoire for his views, so I will confirm if we have been successful properly when he gets back to me.  We are ever so excited though.

 

Day 19 of lockdown - good reasons to stay "in"

For anyone worried about the visit to the vet with a cat yesterday, she is OK, the wounds were self-inflicted and have been cleaned.  She has had cortisone and anti-biotic injections and gets soothing cream rubbed in the wounds twice a day.  She has been enjoying the sun today.

Apart from a quick trip to the local market for fish (yes!), olives and tea, we have been very much in lockdown mode today, but in the garden in the main as it is warmer out than in!  John has been playing with his pressure washers to make sure they still work (they do), and then blasting the 20 year old garden bench and the garden chairs to get them ready for the new season.  Here's a thing.  Virginia creeper suckers do not come off plastic with a pressure washer or a scouring pad - you heard it here first, folks!

I've been happily sowing seeds in cheap and improvised propagators - sweet corn in the Blue Peter style propagator as I don't have root trainers.

While in the proper propagators (well Lidl, 4 for 4 euros anyway), I've got sunflowers, lettuce, coriander, chillies, cherry tomatoes and butternut squash - many butternut squash.

Finally, what do you do with goose eggs?  Well, I will probably make a quiche tomorrow with a couple, but I thought I would see if my ducks would like to try to hatch one.  They don't seem too convinced!

And on that slightly bizarre note, I'm off for drinkie-poos in the garden.  Know where you left your sanity for when this is all over!

 

Day 18 of lockdown - and all the reasons I've been out

Not every day in lockdown is extravagantly exciting, although I do try to spread out the fun through the week.  However I have four things to leave the house for today (which makes it sound not so much like lockdown actually).  In the morning, there is of course the stroll to the bakers for (today) croissants, baguette and a pizza for supper.  I was also able to properly admire the new door at the bakers!

After lunch I combined two of my trips out, in that I had to do a bit of work for John, and on the way back from that, I stopped at the local pig farm to pick up my order of pork products and an organic chicken (the lady who does those uses the pig farm as an outlet).  Jean-Yves had worked hard to get a safe and orderly process for paying for and picking up purchases in the farm yard.  There was a perspex screen to keep us separate, we all had to bring our chequebooks and own pens, only one person picking up their parcel at a time.  It worked well.  Strangely I spotted the bloke from the post office, who I had seen the morning before at the bakers, and in the afternoon at the supermarket.  We agreed we had to stop meeting like that!

My final trip out shortly is to take a cat to the vet - it looks like she has managed to slice her face and neck with her own claws, stupid creature.  I've warned her that she will probably have to wear a Cone of Shame overnight in future!

No pictures of the wounds (nasty), but instead a catch up on photos from earlier this week.  This is what was left of the banana bread yesterday.

This is a close up of the forsythia, which will probably be over by next week.

And here is a cat in a tree - not the one going to the vet I hasten to add.

Day 16 of lockdown - time for me

So, the report has gone and no reaction from the client - I took that as a sign that today was me time!  Actually that started yesterday with a profligate glass of sherry (it will be months until I can get my hands on another bottle) and trying out a new recipe - banana bread.  Excellent recipe and it turned out well - sorry, no photos, so you'll just have to imagine it!

This morning was market day at la Flèche, and as word had got out that it was going ahead, there were more stalls and more punters.  Don't believe the French don't know how to queue - if it is something they want (fresh vegetables, fish, cheese etc), they will queue and they will behave.  Well outside Paris anyway!  See!

This afternoon I was able to take time to look closely at cherry blossom and admire the bee going about her business.  It was wonderful to watch, but she didn't have many colleagues.  The tree should have been alive with bees, not like a social distancing market!

I'm not convinced how well the garlic is going to do this year - it keeps getting squished by a silly cat!

After that, I thought I would try the first of my yoga teacher's videos.  I do yoga for seniors, but after a gentle start, she moved on to stuff I'd not done before plus I had cat help.  As I now ache rather a lot, I'm calling it a day!

 

Day 14 of lockdown - an evil wind

Last week lockdown was not too bad in many ways, as being in the garden was nice, the sun was out, birds singing and the air was warm.  If you had the potential to be outdoors safely and legally, it really wasn't so bad.  Saturday was positively balmy and we knew summer was on its way.

All that changed on Sunday as the wind turned to its most cruel direction - north east.  Nothing good comes of that wind, particularly when it is strong and gusty.  The outdoor thermometer got bashed around and broke.  Being outdoors was painful and unpleasant, even if it looked beautifully sunny.  The wind dries out pots and planters, which then have to be watered, but you have to choose the right time or things freeze.

The medieval builders who put up our house knew all this, so we have few windows and thick walls to keep out the cold and the wind.  However the backdoor, which the cats use to move around their realm, faces that direction and when they are out, the wind comes in.  Soon the girls will be trapped inside and we can light the log fire and warm up a bit.

Of course the north east wind is not good for cats either.  For a good scientific reason (that I can never really get my head around) cold weather encourages static cling.  If you are a cat, covered in fur, this is annoying, not a good look and when you are being stroked by your servants, you are likely to emit sparks.  Fergus is modelling the pre and post- stroking look, and got rather worse after I was told to stop taking photos and pay attention by Spooky (the small black person with bad attitude).  One of the other cats, after producing two loud cracks of static, avoided me completely.

 

Day 13 of lockdown - clocks sprung forward, weather fallen back

For once the dreaded hour change and less sleep didn't actually make any difference.  We put the clocks forward but didn't set an alarm, and left it to the cats to tell us when they wanted breakfast.  Fortunately that was at about 9am, which convinces me they can't tell the time (we have wondered in the past), as normally they want breakfast at 8am.

Yesterday the weather was lovely - sunny, balmy, a very light breeze, but what a difference a day makes!  Today we still have sunny moments, but there is a cruel, cold wind from the North East, which makes shutters bang and rips the covers off tender plants.  While we went out for our permitted exercise this afternoon, it was too cold to stop and photograph anything.

Instead I will reflect on photos I took yesterday while sitting in the sun and enjoying the slow time.  Looking at cowslips for instance, where we have some mutants.  While most are yellow, we have a number of orange ones and one or two striking red ones.  I assume they have cross bred with the coloured primulas dotted around, but it is a very pretty effect.

Also from yesterday, I am always astounded and amused by the inability of cats to resist boxes.  Mr Clause is no exception to this rule and has taken over possession of this particular and rather large box.  I hope the wind hasn't taken the waterproof cover off and away into the surrounding fields!

Finally I sat and watched a blue tit attacking fat balls in the evening sun.  The photos are a bit grainy as I've had to tinker with them to remove all the extra sky and stuff, but it was lovely to have the time to sit and wait for him to get up the courage to stuff his beak while I sat and watched, with a cat at my side.

Day 11 of lockdown - nature notes

I am lucky in that occasionally I am allowed to go out to work for my husband, doing bits of gardening at people's maisons secondaires.  Now is the start of the rapid growing season for grass, and if we don't stay on top of it now, we will damage our mowers and kill ourselves dealing with 3 foot high hay when lockdown is over.  So we go out, armed with our attestations, including where possible attestations from the property owner as well, and work where people are not around.  Or if we were to be faced with someone on the property, we would be on the phone to the Boys in Blue asking for help with trespassers.

Yesterday I was at a site where there is a lovely wildflower meadow, and I was checking how it was doing, and if it had gone to far for its early season cut.  In about another 2 weeks, the orchid rosettes will be too advanced, but if we leave it too long, the brambles and other undesirable scrub will take over.  That meadow has a badger's set right in the middle.  You can see their footprints in the fresh soil (and evidence of the deer and birds that pass through too), as they clear out any rubbish and head off for their "bathroom" zone.

Today I was back mowing at the house with a lake.  I'd been keeping an eye out for frogspawn but hadn't spotted it this year so far, so I was astounded to notice lots of recently hatched tadpoles in the water - there is a great mass of them to the left of the submerged rock, a sort of dark mass, but you can see others too.  

The final nature note was that as I was mowing around a birch tree, I noticed a lot of wood chip.  The woodpeckers are back and making a mess again!

Day 7 of Lockdown - a bit tasteless?

And No!  That is not a reference to losing my sense of taste, which is thought to be a good symptom of going down with the dreaded lurgy!

After posting the Day 6 blog, we had a second go at doing FaceTime aperos with the Chinon Two, and it worked very well again.  This afternoon I had an inspiring virtual meeting by Skype with two work colleagues - there are some brilliant tools out there for connecting without endangering yourself or others.

There is however no good substitute really for going up to the village bakery in the morning for croissants and baguette, and it provides a bit of exercise as I have to go uphill.  Today the route was empty, although I met a couple of others up at the bakers, all keeping a good 2 metres apart.  What a difference a day makes, as this morning there was sunshine, so although eerily quiet, it was very beautiful.

While I slaved over a churning computer, John did sterling work in the garden, repotting things, finding new pots for things, sorting out sacks of compost and horse muck, enjoying the sunshine and tiring out the cats.  He found lots of lovely things for chickens - perhaps these will make the little blighters more inclined to lay eggs?  They are the stuff of nightmares of course, these giant grubs.  Who else remembers the classic Dr Who adventure The Green Death, which included a sickness (which turned you green) spread by 4 foot long giant maggots?

He also got round to potting up the strawberry plants we bought, when we were panic-buying cat food at Lidl 10 days ago.  We put them in hanging baskets to keep them away from slugs, snails, mice and chickens - in this way we might get a few during the season.  What variety are they I hear you ask?  No kidding - Korona!