Rural Life

Heat and Fire

I've lost count of the number of official heatwaves we have had so far this year.  The current one - is it 5 or 6? - has been going on a long time and still has a day or two to go, although we are past the peak, thank goodness.  Everyone is getting bored and tetchy with it all - the continual heat, the challenges of keeping the house faintly cooler than outside, the restrictions, are all wearing people down. 

The latest heatwave has brought in local restrictions on access to woodland areas and what you can do in or near them.  This is a sensible precaution as there is a breeze, everything is tinder dry, there is little standing water outside of major lakes and water courses and we still see the ravages of the big forest fire from 3 years ago.  The Prefet has therefore banned all access to woodland areas between midday and midnight from Friday 15th August to Tuesday 19th August.  This has upset a lot of people.

This is because at Vernoil le Fourrier every 15th August there is the Festival of Hunting.  The grounds they use are, I gather, rather spectacular, on the edge of a major forest and partly wooded to ensure shade for horses and dogs (and humans).  It runs from 10am in the morning, with demonstrations, stalls, exhibitions, feasting and drinking, and is rounded off by fireworks before closing at midnight.  Despite arguments from the organisers that they had lots of tanks of water around the site, that all their visitors were responsible human beings, that it was all a bit unfair and "nanny state", the Prefet was unmoved, and they could only open for 4 hours, from 10am to 2pm.  The weeping and wailing and calling it all unfair has swept across social media and the press.

Not far from the land that we rent, there is a rather splendid chapel - Notre Dame de Montplacé.  The 15th August is a bank holiday in much of Europe for Assumption, celebrating Mary's ascent into Heaven, if you believe in such things.  There is therefore a pilgrimage to the chapel, and a well attended Mass is celebrated at 11am, drawing in the faithful from a fairly wide area.  It isn't too close to woodland, but it is surrounded by fields and copses. 

When we left that area on midday on Friday (tending our plants and cats, not attending Mass), there were lots of cars parked up at the chapel, and yesterday when we left that area, we found that there had been a scrub fire at the end of the track leading away from the parking area.  Today we stopped to look and photograph the damage. 

It would appear to have been a car fire, burning furiously hot (chunks of melted metal and evidence of totally destroyed tyres), which spread into the surrounding grassland, fortunately stopped by broadleaf scrub and presumably some form of fire extinguishing intervention.  Certainly the bulk of the car has been taken away.

I'm not at all sorry the Hunting Festival was brought to a halt at midday.  If a few pilgrims can lead to a small fire, what could a few thousand people on the edge of woodland do?

The heat is doing great things for the garden, however!

This is becoming a daily standard of what gets harvested.  OK we don't have aubergines every day, but the tomatoes are becoming a challenge commensurate with the courgette problem that has been going on for some 6 weeks now.  Then there are the Victoria plums - I've picked loads, and loads have fallen off, and still the tree is overloaded!

I've made jam, I've made crumbles for the freezer, I have a recipe to try for plum fool, and I have a burping barrel in the cellar that takes anything that isn't perfect or that falls on the floor.

And while it is still only mid-August, there are signs of autumn creeping up on us.  Trees that like nice moist soils (poplar, willow) are giving up and their leaves are turning colour and falling.  The swallows and house martens are starting to think about who they want to travel south with (the swifts are long gone).  The evenings are drawing in - while we aren't allowed to water vegetable gardens until 8pm at night (and only until 8am), the gap between 8pm and sunset not long after 9pm gets ever shorter.  The smoke from the wildfires in Portugal has also shortened the light at dusk, which doesn't help any either. 

However a happy harbinger of autumn is also appearing, as cyclamen flowers appear in the lawn, hedgerows, and woodland (when you are allowed in).  Such a pretty flower!

Next weekend is the Comice and Sunday is the parade of decorated floats, and I'll be on ours.  So the blog will not appear until Monday, because I will be way too busy to do anything else next Sunday!

Wish me luck, not least with the weather, and have a good week!

 

Full on harvesting

Down the road at Fontaine Guerin, they might be celebrating the ancient arts of harvesting, but here we are just trying to keep on top of things and failing to a greater extent.  Last weekend we did manage to gather about 4 pounds of blackberries, which were turned into the first Bramble Jelly I have made in years.  The temptation to eat it all very quickly must be constrained, not least as the less durable jams need to be made and used first.  It always looks lovely when it is doing its hard boil phase!

We are now up to 188 courgettes, not counting the ones that "got away" and turned into chicken food about a foot long.  I'm testing freezing courgette cake (savoury with cheese and chilli), and if that works, will be making more for the freezer.  You can't eat a loaf of that a week or you end up looking like a cake yourself!!  I must also give the courgette bhaji recipe another go now the onions have been lifted.

We are drowning under tomatoes, and that is before the main red ones get going, that is just drowning under small, sweet, pear shaped yellow tomatoes.  The Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes are huge and starting to turn colour, although that does take quite some time with them.  The Corne d'Andes are also starting to ripen, and I don't like to think what is happening in the triffid zone that is the companion planting paradise of tomatoes and cristophine vines!  The individual Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes can weigh as much as 1 pound (450g or so)!

I picked a mixed tray of produce today, and we counted it a victory to off load 2 courgettes, 2 chillies, and 5 tomatoes of various sorts on our unsuspecting next door neighbour.  He looks like he needs feeding up anyway!

In a few weeks more, it will be sweetcorn time.  Yesterday I counted 24 lots of corn silks, which is manageable, but we have 59 plants so I suspect there will be a few more than that, even if some are small and more suited to chicken treats.  For some reason, the computer and all the software don't think you should be allowed to see that. 

But its not all about fruit and vegetables (although it seems like that sometimes), there are flowers too.  Most of the flowering plants and shrubs are over, but the variegated Birthday Rose that climbs over the front of the house is still going strong, and the flowers are beautifully scented in the evening.  Don't bother asking what rose it is!  It is a climber we bought locally 15 years ago, and that is all I can remember!

The cats all deal with summer in their own ways.  Monsieur Clause over at The Garden has decided that the only way to get through this summer is by living on the ride on lawnmower, on the seat, protected by a tarpaulin.  He gets room service delivery of food and cuddles, so why should he change?  Rebus has discovered the Gutter.  It is a stage all our house cats go through it seems, but there is something comforting for them about the zinc gutter on our neighbour's house and makes it the best place to slump of an evening.

Next week promises heat, courgettes, tomatoes, plums, peaches and more courgettes - that's me sorted out, how about you?  Have a good week!

 

 

August festivities and harvests

Normally I find that things quieten down in the first couple of weeks of August, before exploding into action again after Assumption (15th August) as we go into Comice season and preparations for the Rentrée.  This hasn't been the case this year, with Convivial'été having its last hurrah of the season on the 1st August in Vieil Baugé.  The Comité des Fêtes was on war footing, despite a number of key players being away on holiday.  We were supported by the Baugé en Anjou technical services and tourism teams, but everything food and drink was down to us.  By 7pm we were girded and ready for the off.

And that was about the last moment of peace until 10pm!  I was taking dinner orders, not payments, just orders.  The first was at 7:30pm and the queue didn't stop until we had sold out of sausages and chips and andouillettes (rather unpleasant to my mind tripe sausages) and chips at about 10pm.  I stopped the queue at one stage for 30 seconds to put a sweatshirt on as the evening was cool, but that was it!  A chum took a picture of the clouds and caught the queue.

There were two bands.  I totally missed the exotic Bulgarian folk music, complete with strange machine - this is an official photo.

The second band, Pet't J Bus, were a lot of fun.  A punk ska combo who delighted in taking French classics and turning them into ska anthems, with the occasional own creation thrown in (although that might just have been the sound test), which seemed a bit more "basic", if you see what I mean, and less suitable for a family audience.  I did do a couple of videos but there is no chance of loading them on YouTube today, so here is a photo for ambiance.

We weren't the only ones having fun and frolics.  Chinon had its mediaeval market weekend, with lots of people dressed up in fun costumes, lashings of food and drink and music.  I imagine it was impossible to park too!  Anyway, another robbed photo, this time of our favourite brewer, Simon, without his glasses, but looking suitably of the period!

And if that wasn't enough fun, the Comice season kicked off early this year, with Beauvau (tiny village, but gave it's name to Place Beauvau in Paris, which is rather important) trying to rekindle the Comice spirit in its area.  We remember fondly an amazing Comice there perhaps 12 or 14 years ago with 4x4 demonstrations, a chainsaw wood carver, a competition for the biggest pumpkin among other delights, and close to the centre of the village.  This year was all about tractors and ploughing.  We had a lovely ice-cream each from a local farm and admired the range of tractors, but only stayed 20 minutes.

All the preparation work John did on the kitchen garden beds, with rotovating and adding loads of quality compost is paying off.  We are now up to about 150 courgettes harvested, and for the past couple of weeks have also been picking large quantities of small yellow pear-shaped tomatoes which are wonderfully sweet.  Today's haul also included two cayenne chilli peppers, and a green pepper, as well as some yellow carrots and an onion.  We will eat well and healthily tonight I think!

Earlier in the week I was able to pick the first Coeur de Boeuf tomatoes.  While not the largest on the plant, this one demonstrates the heart shaped form of the tomato and deep colour that gives it its name.  It was also delicious with a good dressing as an accompaniment to whatever we had for dinner that night.  There are many more of these to come, and they make a very good tomato sauce.

We've also been picking loads of blackberries - I will be making bramble jelly tomorrow for the first time in ages (I hope I can remember how!) as a real treat for the winter.  Today John was attacked by, or possibly flirted with, by a huge bumble bee.  Once removed from his shirt and placed on a plant, I was able to get a good look - what a marvellous specimen, and well over a centimetre long.

Next week the heatwave returns, but that might also ripen up more plums and tomatoes, so it could be a very red and purple post next week!  Have a good week!

 

So many changes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good week!

 

Standard July stuff - but still jolly good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a good week!

 

 

Summer colds and cherries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Full of the joys of Spring

Back in early March, I introduced my upcycled planters for tulips.  You could see early leaves poking out of the top and I was seriously excited to see how they worked.  They are now in bloom, and while I am a bit upset that the two types of tulip were out of synch for flowering, overall I think I am happy with the result.  Next time I do bulbs in them, I shall ensure that they have the same mix in each I think.  Still, a hit I think for the whimsical wellies!

Another sign that spring is here is that we have got the garden sculpture out again and he is on his plinth under the birch tree.  We bought this heron, created using a chainsaw, at a Comice (although they call it Ruralities) in the village of Beauvau some 10 years ago now at least.  It has had some surgery, as it got hit a couple of times by branches, and fell and broke its neck on each occasion, but the wonderful Olivier, a local craftsman in all things wood, has done a fix.

I have been getting a bit depressed about local markets recently.  The biggest and best near us is at la Flèche and was a lifeline during Covid lockdowns as you could go there and get real food, rather than what the supermarkets felt you should want to eat.  The town councillors seem to think that the market is a Bad Thing however, even though they make money out of it, but perhaps it is too much competition for their personal businesses?  Who knows!  Anyway, they have removed all the parking spaces within easy reach of the market, and have set up a shuttle bus, which few people take as it is never where you need it to be.  I caught it once, and found it too cramped for comfortable seating and was lucky I had no shopping with me, as there was no space for that either.  Last week my lovely fishmongers said farewell - I was in tears!

On a much happier note, Baugé market on a Saturday seems to be well supported by the local council and over the past month has acquired a fresh pasta stall, a stall selling food inspired by Guadeloupe, another selling Thai specialities, and my personal favourite, there is a new butcher too!  Long may that last!  The photo was taken by, and from, the Facebook group supporting the Saturday market.

The excellent weather over the past couple of weeks, albeit a bit unseasonable, has meant I have had absolutely no excuse not to get the potatoes all planted.  The final batch of 16 went in this morning and I can feel it in my haunches!  With the coverings (two of which are on their seventh season now), we don't need to draw up soil around the shoots as they come up, and it provides exciting habitat for toads and slow worms among other fauna, which keeps the slugs under control.  There is some protection too from cat bottoms, although not from cats rolling around in the sun and dust.

The onions are all in now, and I started peas off in old modules that we acquired with geraniums in them over the years.  I like to reuse these when I can and when they aren't too battered, and peas are vulnerable to mice and birds and mould when sown direct, so it seemed like a good idea.  Now they are nice looking seedlings, but need to go into the ground as the roots are starting to come out of the bottom of the modules, even though they are quite deep.  A job for tomorrow I think!

Next week there should be wildlife content, all things being equal, as I brought in one of the trail cameras today - it's been by the badger set for a couple of months, but the grass and weeds have grown up around it, so something needed to be done.

Have a good week and be nice to the Easter Bunny!

 

Spring-like activity

This last week, we have been blessed with spring weather in all its glory - sunshine and soft breezes have been the order of the day, although that is changing this weekend.  It has been a wonderful boost to the spirit and to the body to spend time outdoors, to feel the sun on our skin, to shed layers of sweatshirts, thick socks, rubber boots and to sit out and impersonate lizards.  Nature is playing along too, with spring bulbs sprouting and pulling away.  I am most proud of my improvised planters for a couple of packs of Aldi special tulips (other cheap supermarkets are available), and am looking forward to a couple of flowers each at least!

It's official, the last 12 months have been in deficit for sunshine and by quite a lot too - something like 20% less hours of sunshine than average.  While March has tried to make up for it, things are a bit behind.  The glories of Facebook tell me that my grape hyacinths are late, as are my blue anemones!

We decided to spend most of Tuesday working at the Garden in the Country, which meant we were able to do useful things like shift water between storage tanks, do a proper mow on the meadow before anything got too tall, start to rotavate the potato bed, and plant up summer bulbs.  We also sat out for a picnic lunch on the terrace overlooking the Orchard.  Good quality tinned sardines with artisan bread, "raw" butter, tea made with water boiled in the Kelly kettle, using twigs that were getting in our way as fuel - life doesn't really get much better than that!

Friday evening was not spent as it should be, at the pub putting the world to rights, but rather opening up a house for an estate agent to show it to potential purchasers.  They were late and annoying, but given the current weather, it wasn't so bad standing around in the garden, listening to the birds chatting their way to bed.  As the sun set rather dramatically through the trees in the distance, I saw my first bat of the season swooping around.  I hope it found lots of insects to make the evening's display worthwhile!

A couple of weeks ago (when I was feeling more positive about the world), I showed a photo of plum blossom forming.  It has taken its time to mature, and a very few blooms were out today, but most are still just thinking about it.  Very soon now there will be rich pickings for foraging insects as the plum trees start the procession of blossom.  Next it will be peaches, then cherry and pear, with apple and quince bringing up the rear - or that is the theory anyway.  The quince trees are showing very fecund buds, but the leaves come before the flowers so that is probably alright.  Of the various varieties of apple we have, the Granny Smith has the most obvious flower buds, while the Victoria plum is well behind the mirabelle style plums at the Meadow.

The forecast for next week is not so good, so there is a chance I will bring home a trail camera for servicing and clearing the memory card.  On the other hand, if the forecasters are being overly pessimistic, I could be planting onions and even a few spuds, so who knows?  The bloke at lunchtime wouldn't do a forecast further than Monday afternoon - isn't it wonderful how with all the satellites and computing power that goes into weather forecasting, they still can't see further ahead than 48 hours?

And on that note - have a good week!

 

2024 in review

As complaining about Dunkelflaute is probably getting rather boring, I thought I would take the opportunity, in this first blog of 2025, to look back at the year just ended to see if it really was that grey and sad.

It didn't start well in January, with my new found status of orphan, when the world stopped for a while and bureaucracy took over.  I would love to say that all is sorted but French Red Tape and notaires take forever to deal with very simple things and it will be another wee while before I can close the books.

But life does go on and with February, we had our annual truffle fest, a bit later than normal as it took a while for prices to stabilise and for me to be able to concentrate on all things culinary!  I now have some really good truffle staple recipes, so that the failures and the "why did I bother?" moments are reduced.

In March we were harvesting the last of the vegetables sown or planted in 2023, which really was a rather good year for gardening.  The multicoloured carrots were a revelation, although for some reason there were no black ones, even though the seed packet firmly showed that there should be a full spectrum of colours.  The leeks were excellent too, but perhaps a bit too prolific!

It was a spectacularly wet year, and at Easter, there was the added excitement of potentially excessive and damaging floods in Chinon.  The Vienne rose inexorably, and as la Loire was also in flood, there was nowhere for the water to go.  While there were calls for evacuations, the floods peaked perhaps 40 centimetres below the danger level, but were still very impressive.

May is the peak season for wild orchids and I go mad trying to spot and photograph each bee orchid that flowers on our land.  The challenge is to get the best photo, in focus, nicely framed, and ideally with a gleam of sunshine.  It was quite a long season for them this year and there were some very lovely examples.

The trail cameras were in permanent use during 2024 and there are a few very rich locations for them to capture the wildlife that share the space with us.  Summer months also bring babies, and this year the coypu (sadly) did very well, bringing up four cubs, or whatever you call a baby coypu.  Ugly, that's for sure, even if most baby animals are cute.

While much of the gardening in 2024 was disappointing at best, we did get a very good harvest of onions for the first time ever.  We are still eating them indeed, which is pretty impressive.  I don't know why they did so well - the shallots and the garlic were complete disasters, but that is how it turned out.

August is Comice time, and 2024 was Vaulandry's turn.  I ended up spending a lot of time on the village float.  As part of an overall theme of "the call of the forest", we went for the story of Hansel and Gretel and the gingerbread house in the forest, complete with witch.  The weather wasn't helpful, with rain on the Saturday and overcast conditions on the Sunday, but the final product was pleasing.

September is the annual pig roast for our boule de forte society, and is something we always look forward to.  Once again, we were lucky with the weather - I do remember one year when rain took over and made things a bit odd, but for once 2024 played ball and it was a lovely day.

The year has been wet and there have been quite a few named storms.  Kirk was a particularly unpleasant one, mainly for the volume of water it dumped on us.  In order to attempt to get a sensible reading of the amount of rain, one of us had to empty the rain gauge when it got to 35 millimetres as it clearly wasn't stopping anytime soon!  A field above the land we rent had been harvested but not resown, and there was nothing to hold back the rain water so it took the roadside down.

Gardening was difficult in 2024, with heavy and waterlogged soil, lack of sunshine, lack of decent summer temperatures apart from a week in July, and therefore all manner of challenges to deal with.  The number and size of slugs was incredible and they got everywhere!  This one was trying to get to the last remains of the mango seed I managed to germinate before I evicted it - roughly 4 inches or 10 centimetres long and too big to interest any bird, other than perhaps a buzzard.

The figures are in for sunshine in 2024, and the local press talk about a deficit of 400 hours of sunshine across the year.  I did count at one stage towards the end of the year and got to 17 days without a glimmer of sun.  It's not healthy and we keep checking ourselves for rickets!  December ended the year in murk, but we have seen the sun in January, so let's hope for a brighter 2025!

Happy New Year!

 

The final days of 2024

A few days before Christmas, our elderly neighbour tapped on the door to complain that our grey chicken was making a mess of her garden.  I immediately went to check the chicken run, and all 5 and a half feathery demons were safely impounded, but closer inspection of her garden did show something that looked like chicken damage.  In order to investigate this, I brought home one of the trail cameras, that had been placed where I wanted a particular shot - more of that a bit later.  I cleared off the files and reset the camera with a view of the foot of the washing line posts in next door's garden, so it wouldn't catch anyone human's face or even feet, and left it for a week.  I wondered if a dog was popping in or a cat was being unhelpful. 

I retrieved the camera yesterday and checked.  The first image was a cat, not one of ours, but on our side of the fence.  The second was one of our cats and on our side of the fence.  The third was the rogue grey chicken, and yes, it was one of ours - Groucho!  The fourth image was a wild bird and that was it.

The shame of it!!

The trail camera had been placed overlooking the pond that used to have large fish in it, until it silted up and sprung a leak.  I was convinced it was used by boar for having the odd mud bath, so set the camera to see if I was right.  Most of the images were of birds using the shallow areas for bathing and drinking and questing for worms, but the first two files confirmed that boar will go in there for a plodge when the mood takes them.

There is also a short video of what he was getting up to.

That trail camera has now been reset and positioned somewhere else, and in about 10 days I will get another in for a check over and to download anything good.

Christmas happened - very quietly!  We have tried to be restrained with food, but scallops are in season, and there are the small matters of Christmas cake and Christmas pudding.  I'm sure we will be good in 2025 - or that's what we are telling the GP!

While in general the weather hasn't been conducive to nice long walks in the country, we did get out on Monday to do firewood.  It was a better day than most that we chose for that, and looking up in the One Acre Wood, there was a hint of blue in the sky and the occasional glint of sunlight.  

However when we went back yesterday to carry on the good work, the air was thick and moist and you could barely see 200 metres down into the valley.  On a good day from this point, you can see for over 5 kilometres!

There are rumours that the Dunkelflaute (see the week before last's blog) will dissipate in the New Year - I'll believe it when I see it.  Tomorrow is another Red Day for electricity prices, so while I am sure someone is making a lot of money in electricity generation, we will be huddled around the log fire or doing active things outside to keep warm, assuming we can find a way to energize ourselves!

Have a good week and enjoy your New Year celebrations, however you choose to mark the day.