Rural Life

Starting the gardening season

I don't know why, but we haven't really been inspired to get this year's gardening underway so far.  We have planted shallots and onions, which are now sprouting, and of course in the last weeks of 2022 we sowed our broad beans, but other than that we've not done much.

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Over winter, we have been able to enjoy fresh parsley, parsnips, chard, leeks and the stored potatoes (now all gone), but yesterday we had a few spears of feral asparagus which acted as a reminder that if we want to feed ourselves, we need to get ourselves into gear!  After all, we do have 53 seed potatoes chitting away, which will need to be planted soon.

The chard will keep going for a while and there is a hint of cauliflower on the six plants that are still also providing ample food for caterpillars.  There is also corn salad hiding away among the weeds that have grown back, which I hope to rescue soon.

The state of the rhubarb reminds us that we need to care for the soil, adding organic matter back where we can, while at the same time continuing to fight the good fight against the rampant scrub that wants to reclaim the gardens.  These tulips were planted in a vegetable bed only 3 years ago, but are now fighting their way out of a bramble patch.

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Those plants that fight on through the weeds and scrub come out stronger - this calendular made it through the winter and is now developing many more flower buds for more blazing orange.

One reason for our lassitude to date is that for once things are a bit delayed in nature.  The daffodils would have been finished by now last year and the year before, while the cowslips are just going from strength to strength.  But blossom is late - the countryside is white with wild plum and blackthorn much later than normal, while the pear may not be in full bloom for Easter, as it usually would be (irrespective of date, as Easter is determined by moon phases).  There is a slow green veil taking over but that has been apparent in late March for the last few years, not early April.

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The birds are out in force, but there were few insects around, despite the blossom and the highly pungent laurel flowers.  The hornet trap is set at The Shack but not at home, but there is no sign of any interest in it so far.  There are a few heavy bumblebees around, but without insects, there will not be much fruit, so I hope they appear soon.

The extremely clear sign of a late spring was at the One Acre Wood however.  For the past few years, by the start of April, the lily of the valley would be perhaps an inch or two tall and showing whether there would be any flowers to come.  We walked through the spot today, and could see nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  They will sprout in due course, but they confirm we are right not to be plunging into too much gardening activity before Nature is ready to give us a helping hand.

Many the Easter Bunny bring you more chocolate than you can eat in one sitting!

 

It's springing!

This afternoon I heard a cuckoo.  As someone else in the area has also said they have heard a cuckoo too, I'm calling it, it's now officially spring.  With spring comes the first vide grenier (car boot but it lasts all day), which we went along to this morning, saw loads of chums and got a useful implement, commonly known as a "truc", which will make getting ivy off walls a lot easier.  A bargain at only one Euro too.

I moved the trail camera to see what is invading the Garden area before we block off the hole in the fence (sometimes it just isn't worth it after all).  So far I don't have any images of that, which is big enough to make a clear path, but I have been hugely entertained by Woody Woodpecker's Missus, who is enjoying the last traces of walnuts from under the least appetising tree.  Here is her best shot - I will load a video in due course.

Something is setting off the camera at night too, but there seems to have been a mist, so I've not been able to spot what it is.  I'm hoping for something more significant than this fellow, because he doesn't really merit a path!

Soon we need to start clearing beds for serious 2023 crops, so we are working our way through the leeks that I heeled in during the dry season last year, but which have enjoyed the heavy clay soil and a damp December and January.  They are really very good, and the best I have grown here in France, though not necessarily up to my Worcester leek standards.

With spring come flowers, and we have some lovely ones at the moment.  The anemones continue to do well, the plain daffodils are still being a host, while the cowslips and the mutant cowslips (being slutty with polyanthus I think) are pinging up everywhere.  Even the fancy daffs are coming out!

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And it wouldn't be spring in France without a demonstration or two, although this one at la Flèche on Wednesday wasn't making that much of an impression on the guy loading his market goodies into his car.  A long stretch of main road through the town had traffic stopped while the police escorted about 200 union members, their wives, mothers and children up the high street and then back down again, back to the Electricity Company offices they were picketing when not marching.  They were happily singing the French sport theme too - Ultranate's Free from Desire, but didn't know most of the words other than the nanananas.

Next week's edition might be a bit late for a number of possible reasons - apologies in advance.

 

Thinking about spring

Although it's March, it's not quite spring yet, but something is definitely stirring out there.  Of course some say that spring starts at the beginning of March and I can quite see that, but I'm going to wait for the equinox this year before I call it.  It's not that we have had snow this last week - far from it, in fact.  Today we had the hammock out for the first time this year, and pronounced it to be good.  I had a lovely quarter of an hour, relaxing, covered in large cats, and for part of the time at least, watching a magnificent woodpecker in one of the walnut trees.

I did do some spring-like work in the potager, in that I got around to planting the yellow onion sets I bought a few weeks ago.  Someone on one of the forums who is a bit further north than us talked about having their onion sets planted between the autumn sown broad beans, so that when the beans are done in June or so, the onions can let rip and use the nitrogen fixed by the bean roots.  Someone else poo-pooed that, but on the forums you can normally find someone who will swear blind that black is white.  Anyway, why not give it a whirl?  The onions can't really do any worse than they did last year!!

The plants are certainly starting to get into the swing of things.  The daffodils are coming out, although the more fancy narcissi are a long way behind, and the anemones I planted back at the end of 2021 are putting on another good display this year.

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No trail camera images this week I'm afraid, but a distant view of a small flock of cattle egrets along with next door farmer's cattle, doing whatever cattle egrets do.  I first became aware of them six years ago, when we went to Guadeloupe.  There, people park a cow anywhere where there is a bit of grass, and then each cow seems to have up to a dozen attendant egrets.  But now we have huge flocks of them in mainland France, some with more than a hundred birds, like a snow drift across a field.  I gather it is a sign of climate change as they have moved north from Africa.  They are lovely to look at but not right in the scheme of things.

I spotted something else that doesn't seem right yesterday too.  I was looking at the ponds at the bottom of The Orchard - I am now the proud owner of a pond dipping kit and was checking them out, to plan my first play.  I was hoping to spot a bit of spawn perhaps.  I didn't see any spawn, but was pleased that the level of the ponds has risen a bit with the recent rain, although we need so much more as they are a good 6 to 8 inches below where they should be at this time of year.  Then I heard a swish and a plop and looking across, saw the back and dorsal fin and tail of a rather large fish - when I say large, probably about 8 to 10 inches long.  Naturally it took a while for me to remember to get my phone out to take a picture and it was too far away, but I got something anyway, as you can see.  No, really!  My bumper book of Freshwater Fish says it could be Roach or Rudd, but to me the bigger questions are how did it get there, why haven't I seen it before, what does it live on and will it survive?

Today from The Shack we needed to visit another property, to check on something, and the easiest route, or at least the route we took, went through the area devastated by the forest fire last summer.  I got out of the car to take a couple of pictures and also a video.  It was most odd.  It was very quiet - no trees for the wind to rustle through, few birds, certainly many fewer than at The Shack, where they are raucous at the moment, and an overwhelming scent of pine, like someone had been spraying toilet duck around.  I hope that in a few weeks plants will start to reappear, as the black ground is chilling to look at.

So that's it for this week - I'm not sure what will be on the menu next week, but am sure that nature and life will surprise me!

 

 

 

And just about animals

So last week I featured the best photos of each of the bird species captured on the trial camera.  This week I will do the same with the animals - and the period coved is late November to late February, so everyone very much in winter mode.  Having said that, there was a good variety and it was difficult to pick the four best photos for some species, and a December video for most of them too, but I've done my best.  

The first photo is the only one I have of a mouse - otherwise they seem to keep away from the camera.  I know they are around as the cats catch some, but I assumed they were near the buildings.  This one is nearly as far away from a building on the land as you can get!

After that, let's stick to alphabetical order on what has been spotted (ignoring cat, dog, human and hunter).  The badgers are around and about.  I need to sort out more video of them as there is clear evidence of more than one individual, but for now, here are some photos and a video of a badger getting surprisingly up close and personal with the camera.

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Then there are the boar - less keen on the edge of the meadow, although they are making a mess of it, but quite keen on their trail around the ponds.  From the paper I gather that a sow can have two litters a year, of between 8 and 13 piglets - they are prolific and with no natural predators, so numerous but shy.

 

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The deer love the edge of the meadow and were also very apparent along the trail by the pond.  Apologies that some of the photos are just links - I think the internet is a bit overcrowded this evening.

 

And the deliberate errors there were that I didn't do a gallery of deer photos and the video name should be December 22 deer - you really can't get the staff!  Then there is the fox.  As we don't have chickens at that site, I'm pleased to see him or her.

My particular favourite by the meadow is the hare that has a hideyhole somewhere in the bank of brambles.  We know roughly where as there is a tunnel in and a tunnel out, and the camera was by one of the entrances.

And finally my much loved pine martin, although the video shows a rather worrying feature - no tail!  We fear that there is a snare or trap somewhere nearby and it got caught in that, although I guess there are other possibilities including a close encounter with an owl or a car.  Anyway, he looks distinctly odd without a tail.

 

Next week there may be more animal videos, but there will certainly be a review of the winter, as we are now into what can be classed as Spring (well March anyway).  Apologies for layout challenges - internet speed on a Sunday evening and perhaps the image files weren't as compressed as they should have been.

 

Just about birds

Last week, after the hunters had been through, we brought the trail camera home to recharge the batteries (rather good - in general they only need doing every couple of months or so), dry it out a bit, and download all the files of what it had recorded.  There were 714 photographs and 713 video streams - that is an awful lot to work through, triage, delete etc.  I download everything onto my desktop computer, clear the SD card (it's a big one, but even so there are limits!), so I can work through everything in slow time (should such a thing ever exist).

I've been through the first 460 photographs in detail, removing a lot that were either nodding bits of vegetation, things were going on beyond the reach of the infrared camera at night, or where the lens had fogged up or frosted up.  In addition, I removed a bunch of not very interesting images as well.  That has still left some 140 images to work with, and that is before I get onto the videos.

Today I have focussed on birds, as there was a lot of bird activity before New Year where the camera was placed.  Next week I will show the animal activity there.  Most varieties were captured more than once by the camera, but the Green Woodpecker only turned up once among the files.

The most persistent visitors were the blackbirds.  I assume it is a breeding pair, but it could have been a whole family - I'm afraid they all look the same to me.  They really do enjoy turning over leaves!

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Another frequent visitor was a thrush - I love them, but don't get to see them, I just hear them and find their anvils surrounded by snail shells, so it is lovely to see them in the feather, so to speak.  If you click on the link, the picture does show up, I've no idea why it doesn't show with the others.

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The male or cock pheasant is a more frequent visitor to the camera - I think he likes to show off - but a hen did come around too for contrast.

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Much more difficult to spot, but very seasonal for when these photos were taken, was a robin that had a good scrummage round the area for a week or two.  He is practically round as it was very cold at that stage.

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So that's your lot for this week, next week I will look at the animals that were operating in that area from mid-November to the 1st January when the camera moved on.  And I will include video too!  Probably

 

There's something in the air!

And it could very well be pollen!  Actually at the start of the week, when it was still cold and a bit frosty, there was also a certain amount of air pollution around too.  But the skies were bright, and while the air was cold, the blue skies and sunshine brought a certain lightness to the heart.  There was a robin singing his heart out in the top of the fig tree (really must bring that down a few meters before the end of March) and snowdrops glistened at the foot of the quince tree.

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Guess what this is?  No, not a dead hedgehog, nor a damp air filter from a lawnmower, nor an exotic mushroom!  It is the seed head from an artichoke that got frosted.  We've left them thus far as the wildlife people say they are interesting to garden birds.  I'm not convinced - the only garden bird that gets interested is Bridie the Freeloading Bantam, and each time she tries a nibble, she wanders off with a really disgusted look on her beak.

Now the weather has changed - we are still plagued by high pressure keeping any real attempt at rain at bay, but it is warmer and the air at altitude is more humid.  There are hints of interesting sunsets, and the warmth is bringing on the spring flowers, including increasing numbers of orchid rosettes.  Today we spotted our first cowslip flowers, while the row of daffodil style flowers are starting to show promising flower buds which are likely to be open by next weekend.

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Apart from broad beans, I know from bitter experience not to get the seed packets out yet awhile, but my mate Loïc at the market at la Flèche sells really good planting shallots, and I can never resist.  So today we pulled up the Brussel sprout plants - John will be munching his way through the few that we grew, while the chickens will get the rest - and I hoed and turned the soil lightly so that it was no longer solid clay.  I also picked out loads of bits of old masonry, which will do as crocks at the bottom of a toilet cistern I plan to sow carrots in next month.  I then carefully planted as many as I could in the space freed up - 14!  The other 10 will need to find a home elsewhere.  The trouble is I was greedy and picked out the biggest, fattest bulbs I could find, and when planting them, they told me they needed lots of space.  The rest of the bed will have red and yellow onions in, which take up less space, and won't be planted for a good month yet.

The broad beans are coming on nicely, while the cauliflowers are being munched by caterpillars.  The leeks will be eaten in the coming weeks and there is a bit of turning to do after which I may well replant the pea towers.

No images from the trail camera this week.  I will be moving it during the week, as today I got some fine footage of marauding hunters, so a lot of things will be hiding or will have moved on.  I am ambivalent about the hunters, as boar are far too numerous, but the way the hunters waltz through our land with dogs off the leash, when we have three resident cats, hacks me off too.  Next week, I hope to have as yet unseen photos and footage for you - but given there are 1,400 unreviewed files on the SD card, it could take a while and be a bit time consuming, and there are other priorities at the moment in our lives.

 

Animals, and the challenge of being a trail camera

After last week's unabashedly food oriented post, it's back to what people seem to be interested in - animals!

The trail camera was at the side of a patch of scrub during December, which brought a lot of "exciting" footage of blackbirds and thrushes turning over leaves, the odd sighting of the pine martin and badgers, but the main visitor was a hare who has a lair somewhere in the brambles and whose front path came out by the camera.  They are such beautiful creatures!

Anyway, fickle me got bored with blackbirds so I moved the trail camera to by a couple of ponds that are at the bottom of the Orchard, and for a couple of weeks got nothing more exciting than a hunter's bottom (fully clothed I hasten to add), so I moved the camera a short way along the path and waited.  Once again I got a fine shot and video of a passing hunter - I really do need to put a warning sign up that they are being filmed.  It won't stop them coming through but they can't sue me if I post the film; currently they could.

Anyway, despite the hunters passing through during daylight hours, the boar are knocking around at night time.

The deer are also around and pass through singly or in pairs.

 

The badgers trundle through - now picking off my phone the videos I want to download isn't easy, and while there is some nice footage, there is some of a limping badger that I wanted to share and this isn't it, but frankly sometimes life is too short on a Sunday!

I hinted that the life of a trail camera isn't totally easy.  Ours is currently a challenge to a Great Tit, and keeps getting investigated and attacked by that.  Have the sound up if you can too!

And given the fact that the camera is a good meter or more off the ground, if it had been a bit lower, it might not have survived this encounter either!

More excitement from the trail camera next week!

 

Winter activity

January is doing what January does - mostly it is cold, sometimes it is wet too.  Anticyclones at this time of year tend to mean that any moist air is trapped at low levels giving annoying, thin cloud, mist and fog, and if the air is dry, you can see for miles but it is jolly cold.  We've been having a bit of both of those, and quite frankly I am fed up with having cold feet, even when wearing my fleecy socks.  But the views can be lovely!

There are of course the hints that spring will happen - birds have been incredibly noisy the last week, and today there were woodpeckers hammering morse code messages to each other, and a thrush dealing with the last of the walnuts and any snails it can find.  Looking down there are many orchid rosettes appearing - they won't all flower this year, but the corms will be building resources - as well as timid snowdrops and the early signs of the swathes of narcissus that will adorn the top of the Meadow in a few weeks' time.  At the other end of the scale, cyclamen corms are rebuilding their strength after a prolific flowering season in the autumn, but the leaves will start to fade as the spring bulbs take over.

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The trail camera has moved and last Sunday, after I had been and downloaded images, there was deer activity.

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This is a particularly cheeky shot!

The badger is also out and about, but only at night!

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Finally, there was also a boar and a fox doing the rounds.

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The past week has also been Truffle Week, but with a few more meals to go, I will save a recipe by recipe account of 100g of best black truffle for next week.

 

Proper winter weather

It's January in the Northern Hemisphere, and despite 2022 being the warmest year on record, we are currently enjoying proper winter weather.  Okay so we don't have snow, but actually I don't mind missing out on the white stuff as I have twice weekly physiotherapy sessions at the moment and getting to those would be so much more complicated if there was white stuff on the ground.  But proper frosty weather and for quite a few days - it's good for the soil, the trees, makes parsnips sweeter and (I gather) Brussel sprouts more flavoursome - well, it has to be good.  The downside is that low winter sun on a frosty day makes for too much contrast on photos to be really good - for example:

On the other hand, honing in on fine detail can be a bit easier, with all that contrast:

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That is very nice carved detail over those windows!

The gardens can't really be worked at the moment, although when there is a bit of thaw, it's quite good for getting persistent weeds out.  It is traditional to slaver over seed catalogues at this time of year, but I have a big box with loads of free seed packets, so no need to buy new, just try to work out somewhere with enough warmth and light to get the seeds growing once March is here - anything sown direct is too vulnerable to chickens, cat bottoms, slugs, snails, being trodden on, being bullied by weeds, birds, drought, frost, flood, and heavy clay soil.  Weeds do remarkably well.  We had 5 seeds of giant parsnip we were given before Brexit made such things impossible.  We sowed them late (they don't like being stored) so were lucky two germinated and grew, and benefitted from the water the chickens didn't want in the drought conditions.  Finally this morning, John dug one up for our dinner - yummy!

The biggest we have grown in France (our biggest in the UK weighed over 2 pounds, and was 18 inches long of usable parsnip, but that really was a mutant!).

Last weekend I moved the trail camera as while all I had captured was a hunter's bottom, there was clear evidence that around the ponds, something was lurking!

In addition, the badger trail (which is visible on Google Earth surprisingly), is looking even more obvious than usual.

But at this time of year, the larger animals head for wooded areas, although the deer will likely be back in March or so I think.  While there is a lot of bird activity, unless we have the camera trained on a food station, it is very haphazard and difficult to catch, and frankly I have more than enough video footage of blackbirds and thrushes turning over leaves.  So it is the smaller, shyer, and less flashy animals I am looking for - foxes, badgers, ducks, the pine martin, mice, rats, perhaps even a coypu (although I really hope not).  Well, it paid off this week after the move - a badger bottom and a fox face!  Hopefully they will get a bit more used to the camera and I'll get more.

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I also need to get going on my campaign of attracting tits, particularly blue and great tits, as they are very good at eating pine processionary caterpillars and the pine trees have a few too many nests in for my liking.  The needles shed by the caterpillars are extremely irritating, and the rashes and swelling they cause last a good couple of weeks with no real remedy other than wrapping the affected part in wet towels so you can't scratch.  They can be deadly to animals, and have until recently no natural predators as they are a non-native invasive species.  But the birds are doing their thing, so feeders and nest boxes need to be set up in the next few weeks.  The feeders were very successful last year.

So, another frosty week in prospect for us, stay warm!

 

Review of 2022

It has been fun reviewing all the blogs of 2022 to see what were the highlights and what were the determining features of the year.  Weather, local events and wildlife were the standouts for me, as I will explain.

The weather had a major impact on the year, from a sharp late frost affecting certain crops, winds taking down trees, sand storms in the African desert affecting cloud colour to the searingly hot and dry summer, which facilitated the massive forest fire and reduced crop sizes for those things that survived the frost.  Once the rains did start finally, at least we had mushrooms for the end of the year - here are some photographic reminders of all that.

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After two years of Covid restrictions, 2022 had many of the usual events back, including the local trout fishing day, the delayed 600th anniversary of the Battle of Vieil Baugé, a full on Comice, car boot sales and my favourite, the Societé de la Paix Mechoui.

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But perhaps most excitingly, the trail camera lived up to its promise and showed us a wealth of wildlife, plus being more alert to that meant spotting others with a phone camera too, so the real stars of 2022 were the animals!

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Hopefully the animals will all put in appearances during 2023!

Happy New Year!