Rural Life

A day out and lots of garden work

We've had a busy and a social week, meeting up with people over to see their second homes, as well as getting a bunch of stuff done ourselves.  We declared Tuesday a Holiday, and once we had done the very important job of choosing a new mattress and ordering its delivery (we've had the current one for 25 years, a change is allowed!), we set out on a jaunt of frivolity.

Our first job was to find somewhere for lunch, and clearly in the tourist areas, Tuesday lunch is not a popular meal.  It took us a while to find the Quatre Saisons opposite Langlois Chateau in St Hilaire/St Florent on the south bank of la Loire.  It was worth the search.  While the menu on the board looked delicious and may have had too many choices to make life easy, the menu du jour was cheaper and excellent.  Pan fried sander fillet with salad, chicken supreme with rice and beans and a nice wine jus and the most amazing vanilla pudding that I still fantasise about.  All served in a nice room overlooking the Thouet and served by the chap doing the cooking.  We were very pleased.

After a brief retail therapy stop at Decathlon, we drove on to Turquant.  This really is a tourist village, but again the out of season Tuesday effect meant that people were few and far between, although I can imagine it is the seventh circle of hell on a sunny Sunday in July or August.  It is an arts and crafts centre, and while the gallery was nice enough, the shop set of caves were a better display of the talents around.  Even so, the delicacy and chichi-ness of it all were not really to our taste, so while we could appreciate the talent, we were not tempted to put paws in pockets.  Not least as there were no ants for sale - they are big on ants in Turquant!

From there, our final stop was with a friend and wine producer in Restigné to buy red and rosé wines and hear about the challenges of selling a nice little vineyard as a going concern.

Now we are trying to catch up on all the gardening work we need to do but the weather has not been helping us with.  On Friday I topped out the broad beans, as there were enough small beans set to make me feel the time was right.  I guess there are something over 100 plants and only one had blackfly on already, so I feel my timing was impeccable.  I had some assistance with this slightly back breaking task, as Monsieur Clause supervised while squashing a number of sprouting onion sets.

Getting the potatoes in is slow work.  Through all of March and the first week of April the ground was too wet to work.  Then John got the cultivator out and cleared some space, but also pulled muscles nearly everywhere, so had to rest up for a couple of weeks.  Yesterday he felt up to giving it another go and I was able to plant another 18 chitted potatoes.  We now have half the available spuds planted, although I think we might not get them all in this year.

After some 6 weeks in place looking along a much frequented path, I brought in one of the trail cameras to see who is around.  After some quick copying and editing of the SD card, it is now back out again, in a different location, with the aim of admiring boar having mud baths.  Anyway, a trundle through the files reveals that we have just as many boar and deer in the zone as ever.  That the badgers are still knocking around, as is the fox and a hare and a probably pine martin.  It also revealed that images and videos of us walking away from the camera are beyond unflattering, and that goes for the boar and the deer too!  I have deleted all evidence for us, but the animals don't have those editorial controls.  Here are some of our neighbours.

The new cameras are less intrusive but still need to be checked out closely!

Have a good week!

 

Nature presses on regardless

The headline floods of last weekend are subsiding slowly, despite the continued rain through the week, but it hasn't been as intense or as much - just 18.5mm through the week. The rivers and streams are getting back to normal while the ponds remain well charged.  One evening I went to look at the sunset view, and heard the water oozing and sinking in a field nearby, which was rather unpleasant, but notable.

Nature is doing her thing now, and with every day, the veil of green and white spreads through the hedgerows and woods as new leaves are unfurled and cherry, plum, crab apple and quince blossom all open.  Some orchards are also full of blossom, but most commercial apple varieties will be a bit later.  it is the quince blossom I love the most - it is simple, but the flowers are large and generally tinged with pink.

At a distance, the wild cherry blossom is magnificent, but close to, the flowers are small and meagre, nothing to compare with the cultivated varieties, which have more and bigger flowers.  But when you get a run of wild cherry down a hedge line, it is magnificent.

Irrespective of how we might feel about working in this weather, the kitchen garden plots need to be sorted out and planted up or any crops will be too small or too late to be of much use.  I pulled up the matting that has been suppressing weeds  on this year's potato bed, so that John could get the rotavator on to it, and met a small helper.  They are very good at keeping slugs under control among other pests, so I am always pleased to see slow worms, and particularly baby ones.  This one can't have been more than five inches long or so.

Less welcome visitors are the Asian Hornets, and for a number of years, I have been part of a local observatory group, that catches and records the numbers of Asian hornet queens captured in Baugé en Anjou, with the aim of reducing the damage they do to local and native insect life.  It isn't only their predilection for eating the heads of honeybees like candy, they have also been found to reduce all insect life by 40% around their nests.  In addition, they have a really nasty sting.  Yesterday's warm weather had them out and looking for food, and my trap caught 3 of the brutes, and I am very happy about that.

Finally I managed to get the onion sets planted, while the shallots that went in a couple of weeks ago are now starting to show.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed with the wet weather though.  Back in Worcester, we couldn't really grow any alliums as onion white rot is endemic through the Vale of Evesham and into Worcester, and there is no real cure other than not growing any of the onion family for at least 5 years.  I get very twitchy and hope that we can stay free of it!

During the week I moved the trail camera that had been in the One Acre Wood back to the Orchard, and put it where I got film of the water rail.  The new and unsophisticated cameras don't use much battery power, so in theory I can now leave that one in place for the whole of the summer and will only run into problems if the memory card gets full.  During the time it was in the Wood, the camera got 54 files, and when I reviewed them, they were all of John and/or I moving about the wood, nothing else.  Given it was by a clearly used wildlife track, it was disappointing, as in 24 hours it captured 26 files of wildlife at the bottom of the Orchard. 

But that is the wonder of our land in the country - the mix of habitats means it provides a marvellous corridor for things to move along, as well as the food sources and shelter for a huge range of birds and animals.  My Merlin bird song app tells me that there is a skylark or two in the zone, and a nightingale has just arrived too.  Very few of the bird species convincingly identified are considered particularly endangered (mostly in the Least Concern category), but it is the wealth of species and the density of the birdsong that tells me it is a rich area in the best sense of that term.

So I finish with a photo of some tulips that I bought cheap at a discount supermarket, planted late as I had other concerns, and that have rewarded me with a magnificent show of flowers that I hope will be repeated in future years.

Have a good week!

 

Using the new trail cameras

Last week I brought home the trail camera that had been on the ridge separating two pond areas.  Lazily, I hadn't deleted the 600 odd files from the camera being placed in the cats' kitchen to see who might be stealing their food (a couple of visitors, but mainly they are greedy gut buckets), or the 300 or so files from 24 hours in the chicken run, checking for rodents (no rodents, but sparrows and a big, fat, cat that isn't one of ours).  But lucky me, there were a further 600 odd files showing who spent time on the narrow paths that crossed just by where I posed the camera.

There were a few visitors I had expected - the ducks.  They really are rather sweet!

I was a bit concerned to see that a boar had tried to go along the path, but it turned around and went back.  Still, the photo was pretty worrying!

It should be no surprise that there were rodents.  I got one short film of a rather cute mouse with huge ears, which is quite difficult to see.  I got a lot of footage of what rats do when there aren't sewers and garbage bins around to rummage in.  I actually find it rather good to see a wild rat a long way from human habitation, and I have no intention of doing anything to move them on.  This is their natural environment after all.  Here is a bit of rat activity for you.

The mouse was about a quarter of that size, so that is definitely rat.  While this is definitely coypu!  Fortunately it only passed the camera once during the two weeks the camera was in situ, so I'm hoping that means it doesn't live around there.  If I spot it on another camera and a lot, then I will have to intervene.  Coypu are an invasive, non-native species that cause habitat damage and have no natural predators.  They are also rather ugly to my eye.  You can see he is a lot bigger than the rat, but has a similar style tail, so cannot be confused with a beaver.

Deer passed through and a thrush looked for snails, but the real find at that location was a bird I had to get a chum to identify as my original thought was a partridge with a dodgy beak.  It doesn't make much noise, so my Merlin bird identification app hadn't picked it up either.  May I introduce my new best friend, the water rail?  Elusive and rather scarce but seemingly happy to pass through the plot from time to time.  It went backwards and forwards for three days, and was a privilege to see.  

 

Otherwise, we have been working hard on the gardening front - I've been planting shallots and eyeing up the flower buds on the broad beans, which should come out soon.  John has set up and planted the new asparagus bed, complete with commercial compost on the top to give it the best possible start.  A good asparagus bed will last at least 10 years, while the corms we planted just before we moved (so back in 2003 or so) are still productive, or at least those that still survive are anyway. 

Some of my favourite spring flowers - flag irises - are starting to come out.  These purple ones are the earliest, but will be followed by the reddish ones and the deep purple and white as the weeks go by.  As there is left over compost, I must also plant up the bag of freesias I bought a couple of weeks ago and then think about getting the onions in.  For ages we were saying that spring was still a way off, but now it is here, and it is action stations!!

So I'd better stop writing about it all and get back to doing useful stuff!  Have a good week!

 

Spring flowers

With the move into March, meteorological spring has now started and we can talk about flowers and buds with joy.  One of the least showy, but most successful spring bulbs round our way are grape hyacinths - you can't stop them it seems and they spread.  These window boxes must have been planted up with bulbs at least 7 years ago, and not by us.  We do nothing to them, and we certainly don't water them through the summer, yet each spring they produce a magnificent display to cheer us up on even the wettest and coldest of March days.

Daffodils can be a bit tetchy, coming up blind if they aren't treated with a bit of respect or if they are too crowded or if the weather isn't to their liking.  This year they are looking rather splendid.

One flower we never seem to have problems with are cowslips, with rosettes turning up everywhere and spreading across any green area they come across.  Later in the season, the mutants will start to flower, with orange and red flowers.  I believe that there are specific names for those, although I do wonder if they are the result of cross-pollination with the polyanthus that are in every garden.  For the moment we are just seeing the early yellow flowers of cowslips however, which are very lovely and a welcome sight.

The hedgerows are white with blackthorn and wild plum blossom, which is gorgeous but makes me worry for the cultivated plum blossom that will arrive soon.  So far only the peach is starting to flower, but that is quite well protected and always early.  Fortunately the Victoria Plum is not showing any sign of thinking that blossom is imminent, but the mirabelle style plum in the Meadow is a bit more optimistic.

Periwinkle can be a real thug, particularly in the wrong place, but in the Orchard it has to fight for its place.  I do love the blue flowers, and prefer the green leaves to the variegated versions.

There is another type of flower that needs my attention at the moment - the sort that is used to decorate the village float for the Comice.  It has taken a while to get a Comité des Fêtes reinvigorated, and a theme agreed for the float, but now that is all sorted, it is all hands on deck to make flowers, ready to be stuck on during May and June.  With 14 willing participants, the first session on Thursday afternoon went really well and was a very convivial event.  We have a way to go though.

There are two trail cameras placed around the ponds to see what wildlife is passing through and next week I will bring one home to check through.  While I have been without a camera, I have used a different technology to see what is going on, this time focussing on bird song.  The Merlin App by Cornell Labs (others are available) sits on my phone and when there isn't too much wind or noise of motors, I can get a view of who is making a racket around me. 

You do have to be a bit circumspect as I am pretty sure the bittern it thought it detected was actually a motorbike misfiring across the valley, but with so many small birds being hard to spot with all the vegetation, it is an eye opener.  The list of 47 species below are all those that have been picked up at least once by the app since the 1st January this year.  I have doubts about just two on this list - the green winged Teal and the European Turtle-dove, but the rest have made enough appearances for me to be confident they are, or have been, in the zone.

Brambling

Carrion crow

Cetti's Warbler

Common buzzard

Common chaffinch

Common chiffchaff

Common firecrest

Common Wood Pigeon

Crested tit

Dunnock

Eurasian Blackbird

Eurasian Blackcap

Eurasian Bluetit

Eurasian Green Woodpecker

Eurasian Jackdaw

Eurasian Jay

Eurasian Linnet

Eurasian Magpie

Eurasian Nuthatch

Eurasian Siskin

Eurasian Skylark

Eurasian Wren

European Goldfinch

European Greenfinch

European Robin

European Serin

European Starling

European Turtle-dove

Gray Wagtail

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Great tit

Green Sandpiper

Green winged Teal

Hawfinch

House Sparrow

Long-tailed tit

Mallard

Marsh tit

Mistle Thrush

Redwing

Reed Bunting

Ring-necked pheasant

Rock Pigeon

Short toed Treecreeper

Song Thrush

White Wagtail

Wood Lark

Anyway, that is more than enough for you to think about for the moment, so I leave you with an image of a small mud slide on the road near the Orchard, because, yes, it has been raining this week!

 

And if you thought last week was wet....

It rained last Sunday as I wrote last week's blog, it rained again on the Monday too.  On Tuesday, when I went over to Chinon for a visit, the fields by the autoroute were under water in many places, la Loire was full, but not dramatically so, but the Vienne was well over its banks and had closed quite a few roads.  When I was there, it was perhaps 4.3 metres over its usual level and hadn't reached its peak.  Fortunately for those in the area, it didn't reach the high end of the estimated flood levels and started to recede later on the Wednesday.

We were therefore interested to see what awaited us at la Flèche on Wednesday morning, when we were there for the market.  Parking was surprisingly easy, but I'm guessing that was an access issue.  Le Loir was seriously over its banks, with many riverside gardens flooded, the overspill carpark by the bus station underwater, and a number of roads flooded.  It was even more astounding that parking was easy, when one of the carparks right by the market was also underwater - I've never seen it that high there.  Perhaps half term made things easier.

With the rivers so high, it is only logical that our various ponds are also filling up.  The two main ponds at the bottom of The Orchard are doing wonderfully well - the level in the upper one is just at the limit of the overflow pipe (so it may well have been higher) while the lower one is at what I would call a sensible level.  With the winds on Thursday, we lost a chunk of one of the surrounding trees, which is now in the pond, and will need to be dealt with in due course.

Finally, yesterday we made it to the One Acre Wood and as expected, found the two small, ephemeral ponds there were full of water too.  They form in the pits dug to find clay for making tiles, and there are vague ditches that lead into them, but not the main ditches that mark the boundaries of our piece of land.  When these ponds form, they are a magnet for newts and salamanders.  Yesterday the upper pond was totally still, today both pond surfaces shivered with the antics of either marsh gas or hidden amphibians doing their thing.  You can also see a wild animal trail going to the right of the pond, and there is now a discrete trail camera keeping an eye to see who visits.  I'm not totally hopeful - the last time we had a trail camera there, it caught a chaffinch and that was it.

The pack of three new cameras has arrived, and one is now installed by the ponds at the bottom of The Orchard, a place that has always put on a good show.  Another is at the One Acre Wood, while the third did a sterling job showing us who was eating all the cat food we put out for the Barn Cats.  It was pleasing to see that in the main, it was the three boys eating it, but there are two others who are popping in of an evening for a good feed.  One we know as Minnie the Moocher, the other is a big fluffy thing we do not know.  Anyway, mystery solved and the spare camera is here, waiting for my next inspiration.

Today is sunny and not raining.  It is really too wet to do anything too useful in most places, although the portion of the wildflower Meadow that John has decided will be an asparagus bed was actually fine to rotavate today.  I'm not planting shallots or onions until we have had a couple of mainly dry weeks (which looks possible after Wednesday), but I could lift the last carrots and parsnips, along with a couple of leeks, so I can spend tomorrow making soup for the freezer.  There are also signs of rhubarb from one of the crowns we have, so that also inspires us.

Today we allowed Rebus the Psychokitten out into the garden for a bit of a run - he is so full of energy and just needs to run, perhaps he is in fact half whippet?  The chickens aren't totally happy with us, while Bridie the Freeloading Bantam has taken to a high perch in disgust.  Such is life!

 

Water, water everywhere!

It's been a wet week and tomorrow is due to be the same.  it has severely curtailed what I wanted to do outdoors - there are parsnips that need to be lifted and eaten, but frankly neither yesterday or today were conducive to anything other than a quick trot around to top up the bird feeder and check on the level of the ponds.  We've had a lot of rain.  The Couasnon - our local small river - is full and moving much more quickly than usual, while fields and ditches have sprung streams and ponds.  You can see sometimes where a helpful ditch has been ploughed over as it once again runs with water, heading for an ancestral pond.  

I'm not actually too upset about the rain on one level as the ponds are slowly refilling, particularly the upper one.  Today it was just an inch or so below the level of the overflow pipe, which is the best I've seen for a couple of years.  The lower pond is also refilling, and now we wait to see if the clay has expanded enough and there is enough debris to block where that one has been draining away.  Today for the first time in ages, it was at the level it was when we first found it three years ago.

Thursday and Friday we had Storm Louis, who came in with strong winds and left about 32mm of rain, and since then we have had unnamed depressions with abrupt sharp showers, or just interminable wet grey as per this morning.  Friday afternoon was occasionally dry, and when it was, the skies were dramatic.

This wet weather left me with too much time on my hands.  After a long drawn out and heated discussion with the suppliers of my (non-functioning) trail camera over whether I understood how to use it properly and of course it was normal that it heated up to 55ºC and batteries only lasted 8 hours, I got frustrated.  So I spent time looking for another camera not supplied by that bunch, but that met at least 75% of my requirements (taking photos, taking videos, using rechargeable batteries, working, and WiFi or Bluetooth enabled), I settled on a pack of three cameras which are quite basic and don't do WiFi or Bluetooth but do take rechargeable batteries, and with three of them I can cover two places and have one in reserve to swap in and out.  I hope they will arrive during the week, and then I can get monitoring again - the hares, the deer, the boar, the pheasants, the badgers, the pine martens, I've missed them all these last 4 months, not forgetting Monsieur and Madame Woodpecker.

A pine marten from last year to illustrate the point!

In my post Changes for the New Year, I shared a photo of one of the chickens (Jaq) suffering a particularly drastic moult.  It has taken a while, but she is now back to full featherhood and looking much better I am pleased to say.  Perhaps she might even deign to lay an egg one of these days!

The other thing that took a lot of my time and attention last week was preparing for and then submitting to my five yearly colon examination.  It's a boring process, a bit icky if I'm honest, and I craved food with crunch or crumbs or crust, and I did pay for a private room.  It is important none the less to do those regular cancer checks, because caught early, many things are eminently treatable, and the tests are likely much less invasive than the treatment!  There we go - sermon over!

So I leave you with an image of a fairly full second pond, and hope that your feet stay dry and unwebbed!

 

Just an average February

February can be a rough month - if you are older than about 18, there is no real excitement, and certainly by my age, Valentine's Day holds no thrills any more.  The weather can be lovely, sometimes for longer than a couple of hours, and it can be vile.  We had some sunny intervals today, but it was blowing a hoollie and while it went some way to drying the laundry, things are now hanging all over the bathroom as there was a heavy shower.  We must have had an inch of rain in the week, and while that has done good things to the water levels in the ponds, we didn't actually need it.

During one of the nicer hours of weather, I managed to scramble round onto the deer path at the back of the second pond, to get a whole different view.  The pond is clearly leaking water somewhere, so while I had those lovely big fish in there last year, I can't see the pond ever being able to support 10 to 12 inch long fish again.  I'm not sure what has made the pond leak, but I'm sure the environmentalists will tell me when they visit in the spring.

With the longer days, the chickens have more time to consider their raison d'être, and one (I'm fairly sure it is Jacque the Ripper) has started to lay eggs again.  She is pushing out 6 per week, which is nice and enough for a meal and an addition to a pudding but I really need Mack (the Knife) to get back into the swing of things too before I can put away the egg box I take to the market on a Saturday.

I've decided we need to work our way through the leeks we have been growing, not least so the land can be prepared for other crops in the spring.  I lifted 4 rather nice ones and a runt - I could have done without the feline assistance, but Donald made it clear I had no choice.

I have a regular walk to check out all edges of the land and see what is going on.  There are little cul-de-sacs that I go down to check on the various ponds, that are like little spurs off the circuit.  One bit we always go past is a large walnut just uphill from the ponds that seemed to die last year.  It has a number of broken branches held up in the canopy - what the arborists tend to call widow-makers - one of which came down during the week.  While John tidied it up, I looked at another branch that appears to be long dead and needs to come off.  It was well festooned with rather unpleasant fungus.

Last night we pretty well finished this year's truffle fest - there is just the truffle infused camembert to eat up.  They were very aromatic, but the quality was a little patchy.  It was the first time storing them in rice and then using the rice in a risotto has really worked for me, so that was a real plus.  However the stuff going on in life in general has perhaps made me a little less inventive than normal.  It's been very enjoyable, but I hope to do much better next year.  Truffle and prawn risotto is always a winner though!

Anyway, that's all for this week - have a good one!

 

Truffle time again

January can be an OK month, with galette parties and AGMs for various societies and the hangover of Christmas bits to get through, but February, while shorter, seems to be more depressing.  Often overcast, often cold, often moist or even dank, there are a few signs of spring but most mean you end up worrying about frosts killing off blossom and new shoots. 

To lighten the mood, we tend to buy 100 grammes of black truffle and spend up to 10 days with a meal a day generously sprinkled with black gold.  The date varies - normally depending on the spot price and what John's suppliers are up to.  This year Truffle Arrival Day was the 1st February, and the 105g we received are very aromatic!

Obviously the first day we have the classic scrambled eggs with truffle, this year supported by local whole grain multi-seed bread that is delivered to our door every Wednesday.  Other meals have included poached salmon on linguini with truffle, emmental omelette with truffle and truffled mash.  Photographing food is challenging, not least when steaming slightly, so most of those meals don't have a good photo, but the scrambled eggs do and you will have to imagine the rest!

The signs of spring are there - we just hope there isn't a harsh and prolonged cold spell again.  The catkins are elongating on the hazel stands, puffing clouds of noxious yellow/green pollen if you brush against them - my sinuses are twitching already!  The less cultivated plum trees have very "pregnant" looking buds, so I fear that we might see blossom in the next couple of weeks - o so pretty, but o so vulnerable.

As well as being Truffle Day, the 1st February was also pompom removal day for our little kitten.  When I say little, he now weighs in at 4 kilos, while being whippet thin, so I think he is going to be a big boy in time.  As well as the main objective of the operation, the vets also sorted out an umbilical hernia he had.  It wasn't giving him any trouble and in relative terms was smaller than when we got him, but it seemed worth sorting now, rather than when it caused a problem down the line. So our little boy has been wearing the Cone of Shame - and perhaps because he is a boy, he has submitted to it, and lies around looking mournful, or bashes around looking like a grey Darth Vader and trying to cause the same amount of chaos.  Just another week of this to go!

I walked back from an appointment in town and took a footpath that leads past a garden I used to mow - the one with the lake.  I wanted to have a good look at what had been done before the screening trees and scrub get their summer coats.  It was sad to see that several trees had gone, and I would never have permitted the scale of mud on the grass walk around the lake, but it is their house now and nothing to do with me.  I also stopped at the stone bridge over the river and looked along to the village.  The river is quite full at the moment, and with the light in the right direction, I could see meanders and riffles in the current that should slow the flow and make the river more appealing to aquatic life.  I was delighted to see that.

We have a relatively quiet week ahead of us, apart from a post-Comice party, so hope to get more winter gardening done.  Today I planted the last of the garlic I overbought, and have also set to chit half of the monster packet of seed potatoes I bought in a fit of enthusiasm.  That means that we will need to prepare a bed for 54 seed potatoes, for planting on Good Friday or so - a task that should keep us off the streets a bit!

Have a good week!

 

Different kinds of cold

Cold shouldn't be surprise in winter - it is right and proper that it is cold.  Fruit trees benefit enormously from a good cold spell during the winter to rest and be inspired to bloom and then fruit in the warmer seasons.  A good cold snap will also kill off many undesirable residents of house and garden (as well as some desirable ones sadly).  In fact people often dream of those ideal winter days - sunny, frost glistening everywhere, puffed up birds tweeting in the hedgerows and around bird feeding stations, breathe freezing in the air, and then going back indoors to sit beside a roaring log fire, with a mug of something soothing, as your toes warm up again.  Something like we had on Thursday in fact.

It's been cold all week - but not that cold, as only once has the chicken water fountain frozen solid.  Instead, and apart from Thursday, we have had the less appealing cold winter weather - grey, slightly misty, never getting warmer than +1ºC or getting colder than -1ºC, unrelenting and dreary.  The stones of the house never benefit from a bit of sunshine, the house is mostly extremely cold as the electric heating only goes on between 10pm and 6am, there is no brightness to lighten the heart and spirits, just grey, drab, cold and depressing.

Yet amongst that frozen soil, there are the growing tips of broad beans starting to come through, and even with the cold, there are more every time I count them - today there were 27!  And hanging from that pine tree there is a bird feeder that is alive with great and bluetits, chirping and stuffing themselves with fat and seeds, and hopefully finishing off their meals with pine processionary caterpillars from the nests high in the tree.  My birdsong app on the phone tells me that Firecrests, song thrushes, dunnock, chaffinch and linnets are around in the hedges, while my ears are well enough trained to spot jays, green and greater spotted woodpeckers, blackbirds and magpies making their presence felt.  It's just me that is hating the dull days, so I flop on the sofa with cats.

There is a fine tradition in France of leaders offering their best wishes to their populations of interest for the New Year.  In rural communities like ours, this includes a ceremony (this morning) where our village mayor and the mayor of the district, plus local councillors and a representative of the Youth Council stand up and say their piece.  They review the year that has gone and outline the plans and hopes for the coming year.  The big event for Baugé en Anjou will be the passage of the Olympic Flame through the area on the 28th of May, although at the moment it is hard to get too excited about standing around outside waiting to see a passing flame.  I'm sure by late May I will be more enthralled!  Anyway, if you make it through the one hour twenty minutes of speeches (that was this year's duration), you get a glass of fizz, a couple of sugar buns and a chance to catch up with people you haven't seen for a while.  The photos are the official ones taken by Maryline Margas - one from the perspective of the presenters, one from the perspective of the audience.

So now I've lost feeling in my toes, as after two days of heating, my computer room has only struggled up to 17ºC, which means that I'm going to proof read this, post it, and go and find a fire and a couple of warm cats to put on my feet.  Have a good week!

 

 

Changes for the New Year

Happy New Year!

Good health, a bit of joy in every day and may your feathers not all fall out at once!  We have four chickens and a bantam and we haven't seen an egg in weeks - I actually had to buy some yesterday, as we didn't have enough to make an emergency omelette if we needed to.  Bridie the Freeloading Bantam only lays when she thinks the weather is going to be right for some serious brooding, and winter is not that time.  Mo the Pensioner hasn't laid an egg since she came to stay until the day of her demise.  Well, she looks no different after nearly 2 years and hasn't fallen off her perch.  The economic migrant kept laying last winter, but gave up in March 2023 and hasn't produced an egg since - although she now looks rather splendid.  That means that all the laying work has been done by Mac and Jack, and they have decided to go on strike and to produce new feathers rather than eggs.  One is starting to look a bit more sensible, but I was faced with this horror this morning when feeding them.  It has to be cold round her bum!

Another change for the new year is that it has finally stopped raining!  We were down near Saumur during the week, stocking up on fizz, because a house round here without an emergency bottle of fizz is a very bad thing.  We parked by the Thouet, which joins la Loire just west of Saumur, coming up from Montreuil-Bellay and over the border with Nouvelle Aquitaine.  It had broken its banks in an impressive manner and was travelling at speed, feeding into an already swollen Loire, so respite from more rain is welcome.  However, be careful what you wish for, as it is turning colder, much colder.  Colder indeed than we have known for about 5 years apparently.

Cold weather anticyclones bring an interesting phenomenon, not totally pleasant, cold weather static cling.  It is annoying if one is human - it's what makes wearing a hat and taking it off and having your hair upright a thing in winter.  Yes it would happen anyway, but the cold static cling makes it worse, and crackly to deal with.  For cats, and particularly quite floofy cats, it is a sartorial nightmare and can be a bit uncomfortable too.  This morning, Spooky obliged me with a demonstration of how rather smart black fur can look horrific in these conditions.

My way of life is changing a bit too.  With no more work in the UK, I am now able to concentrate more on doing what I have been evaluating other people doing for nearly 10 years, and managing an area for wildlife.  I am hoping to get a visit from the naturalists that take an interest in the ENS (roughly translated as the area of natural interest) that just encroaches on the Meadow and the Orchard.  How to manage the pond/wetland area is one big question, not least as it is impenetrable due to bramble and dead man's beard, and I'm sure that allowing a greater diversity of vegetation would be better for wildlife.  What to do about the meadow, with the range of orchids that sometimes thrive there, the badgers and the sea of butterflies including one that I think is a species of conservation interest for the ENS?  Then getting a plan of action and seeing it through.  I fear my big fish are history, but you never know!

In the interim, I will enjoy the irises, that are just starting to show, and the narcissi, when they come through too.

On the growing front, there are the first signs of the broad beans coming up that I sowed in December.  Today I took advantage of a bit of sunshine to plant a first batch of garlic - as I'm a bit late with it, I had to buy a huge bag of planting garlic and have found space so far for about half.  They say you plant on the shortest day and lift on the longest day - well I missed the shortest day by about three weeks I guess, but it shouldn't make that much difference.  I'm prepared to wager 5 grown bulbs that I lift the crop before the end of June!

Our cheap electricity deal means that for the next week, we won't be able to afford heating in my office (when load demand is high, the unit price is three times normal, as a way of smoothing demand - when load demand is low we can light up the house like a prison yard).  Running the washing machine becomes a challenge and life is concentrated in the living room.  In preparation for the red day that is tomorrow, I must therefore close and go and use electricity in a wise manner.  Have a cosy week!