Rural Life

Keeping an eye out for old familiars as well as new experiences

Autumn is definitely prime mushroom time, and while there have been no more cèpes since a flush of them perhaps a month ago, there are loads of fungi popping up in the One Acre Wood, demonstrating the biodiversity and the health of the underground mycelia.  Today there were green ones, purple ones, different shades of brown and a couple that might be compared to field mushrooms except they weren't in a field!  The two types that I illustrate here should not be eaten.  The little brown ones pop up all over the place and can be difficult to spot, but I think they are quite pretty in their own way.  The other ones are deadly but are very beautiful.

If you keep your eyes open, there are still some stunning flowers around.  A neighbour has a passion vine growing on their house and there are still blooms which are so impressive.  The forecast frosts for next week will likely kill them off for this year.  The cyclamen have their last flowers glowing against a background of vibrant foliage which will last through until March or April next year and serve to build up stores in the corms.

Following on from last week - we had the parsnips and carrots in a slow cooked oxtail stew and they were great and made a lovely soup for the following day too, as I cooked way too many vegetables.  The kitten, Rebus, is a boy, and was about 13 weeks old when we got him, so 14 weeks for his vet visit.  He is now chipped and legal and partially vaccinated.  The "operation" will be in January.  

Friday was a day of new experiences.  One of the best trainers of race horses over hurdles in France is based near us, and so we wangled an invitation to visit the stables and exercise area with a couple of owners.  What a magnificent set up!  The stables were large and airy, and the exercise area was discrete and beautiful in a large clearing in pine forest.  We watched about 20 horses put through their paces on the flat - impressive to see 10 at a time charging past at a fast canter.  After a coffee and visit to the stables, we then walked back to the gallops to watch another 12 do work over hurdles and fences.  The enjoyment of the jockeys and the horses was evident, with the particular horse we were visiting very proud to show himself off, be patted, be told what a good and handsome boy he was, and to see his evident relish at stretching out at a comfortable canter.

So that made for a lovely morning.  Then in the evening we hit the town at Chinon, starting with a drink or two at the excellent establishment XV, followed by an extremely good dinner at the restaurant Un Air d'Antan.  This small restaurant does not have an extensive menu - the night we were there, there was a choice of three starters, three mains and three desserts plus a cheese plate.  The challenge with choosing what to have, was that everything sounded so good!  We didn't cover all options, but the two starters we did taste were a mushroom tarte with a small side salad and a pumpkin and chestnut velouté with crushed hazelnuts on top, and both were excellent.  The (probably) home made bread that was served with them was also delicious. 

The main courses were things that had been simmering during the day - while we could smell the Blanquette de veau (which we didn't have), the beef cheek had clearly being cooking gently for hours as it fell apart, while the fricassee of chicken was falling off the bone as it arrived!  The chocolate fondant for pudding was also magnificent.  In the winter there are not many tables, more in the summer when there is an outdoor terrace.  The atmosphere is convivial and it is a bit like eating in someone's front room.  We heartily recommend it.

This morning I finally made it into the poplar plantation at the bottom of the Meadow.  Hunters and boar had cleared a path that wasn't totally easy to follow, but was possible.  The resident woodpeckers weren't too pleased to see me.  Some of the trees are dead and creating interesting feeding stations for them.  I leave you with an image of that for this week.

Have a good week!

 

November musings

This isn't a classic autumn, with lovely colours, sharp, bright days, and cold nights with a log fire.  October was the warmest ever recorded in France, Europe and indeed the world, so the sudden shock of cold that is needed for the marvellous reds and yellows of autumn hasn't happened.  Instead we had a warm and relatively dry October, and since the start of November, we have had two named storms and at least 66 millimetres of rain.  Of course that is nothing compared to up in the Pas de Calais, where they have unprecedented floods, but it is quite enough here.  Our ponds (other than in the One Acre Wood) are filling with water finally and there are waterlogged fields, testimony to the areas of clay pan in the valleys around here.  There is some autumn colour, but really only offered by field maple.

While in the UK not wearing a poppy is near criminal behaviour, here in France, you can choose to wear a cornflower, but have to look hard to buy one.  However, every village in our district has its own Remembrance Parade, before everyone converges at Baugé for the big one.  The local Cadets get to play a lot of jaunty marches and the fire brigade and police need to attend as many of the parades as they can get to, and pity the poor standard bearers for the Anciens Combattants, not in the first flush of youth in any case, and then needing to parade their standards at least twice!  However the stigmata of war are to be found everywhere if you know where to look - small shrines to fallen planes or murdered resistance fighters, bullets and marks in walls, hidden arms in roof voids or skeletons in cellars, and a repurposed Nazi bunkhouse doing time as a garage.  It is therefore more than just the uniformed groups that are out and about whenever the 11th November falls, not the nearest Sunday, but the real day, to remember, to demand the end of war, and to think of those that have fallen.

Despite the lack of frost so far, I couldn't wait any longer and dug up a couple of parsnips.  In my defence I found a lovely oxtail in the market, and you can't slow cook oxtail without a nice parsnip or two and carrots.  That's tomorrow's joy as we have the rest of the cristophine and cauliflower cheese tonight, plus I set the slow cooker off at about 10am for oxtail and at that time today, these beauties were still in the ground!

Although the leaves are still on the trees, particularly the oaks, we made a start on this year's firewood campaign.  In late summer I check round to see which trees are either dead or mostly dead, and mark them up for felling, and then through the winter, we will cut down perhaps five and process them, taking the long dead stuff away, and leaving the lengths of recently living wood stacked in the One Acre Wood to mature. 

Three years ago, the plot next to the One Acre Wood was clear felled and that has made a difference to the light and the wind patterns.  Added to that, the desperately dry and hot summers, and there are actually nearer 20 trees marked for felling.  Yesterday we took a huge one down that had a good position to fall nicely - an easy one - as it has been almost a year since the last felling.  It came down nicely, but with a huge bang - it had fallen directly onto an old stump!  Close inspection of the trunk showed evidence of a fence nail from some 18 years ago, before we bought the Wood.

Another bit of evidence of how mucked up this year is, is a late flush of kittens.  Normal kitten time is the summer, with them being discarded by the road or in woods between late June and mid-August as people go on holiday.  So to find a young kitten, perhaps 14 or 16 weeks old bouncing around the garden and the courtyard in November was a bit strange.  A plea on the local Facebook site did not bring forth a worried owner, rather someone else who had the same kitten bouncing around, two gardens over, and wasn't able to take it on.  Another neighbour had taken it to the vet to see if was identified (a legal requirement here in France), but no.  He also tried to take it to a shelter, but was told no.  The shelter I support I know has run out of space as well.  What to do? 

Well, as an xx year old Mad Cat Woman, what could I do?  Rebus - current gender unknown (but will be neuter as soon as possible) - has landed and made itself very comfortable.  Nibbles is unaware and so not fussed, but Poirot and Zola are unimpressed.  It's going to be a long winter!

Have a good week!

 

Hints of Autumn - finally

Here in France, Autumn is late, very late.  I am happy to be indoors with my computer as the temperature in the garden is over 30ºC at the moment.  Earlier, I was digging up potatoes - hard work in temperatures nearing 25ºC in the shade and the soil is pretty solid clay.  I can't totally complain, as look what just one seed potato produced!  They are huge and unblemished, and will take some baking later in the year.

But other, more autumnal signs are there - including my first bright orange, evil, jelly slug of the season, spotted mooching around between the raspberries and the wood store.  They are deeply unpleasant to my eye, but also seem to be harbingers of mushrooms.

I saw this fellow yesterday, plus there was a giveaway headline in the local paper this morning that mushrooms were appearing, so we just had to go for a walk in the One Acre Wood before doing any work at the Garden.  For once they were not wrong - there were mushrooms a plenty, but many had gone over or had bad slug or fly damage.  We found three nice ones for lunch - a delicious cèpe and comté omelette, made with free range eggs from the garden.

It goes without saying that if you aren't confident about identifying mushrooms, don't pick and eat!  We only eat what we know.

We also need to prepare to pay our rent for the Garden, Orchard and Meadow.  The payment is in a number of forms - obviously providing all the necessary luxuries for Donald, Spooky and Monsieur Clause the cats is part of it, keeping the Meadow under control with an annual mow as per legislation is another part of it, and then there is the tribute of a shoebox of walnuts too.  Knowing that the boar like the good nuts best, well they aren't totally stupid, we have to gather them as soon as they fall, before drying them so the inner skin isn't unpleasant and bitter.  We think we have the required tribute spread out in the sun!

The Meadow got mowed finally this weekend too.  Between Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and the LPO, it is difficult to spot at time when you can do this without being berated for being a vandal and putting life at risk.  Seed heads, chrysalids, eggs, nesting time, flowering cycles, shelter etc. are all cited as reasons to not mow.  The reasons to mow include seed heads (some things aren't supposed to be allowed to spread, including ragwort and thistle), brambles, old man's beard, not required saplings, improving conditions for low growing wildflowers and those that need a short sward to flourish (including cyclamen and wild orchids), and a legal requirement not to cause a nuisance. 

I prefer to mow in September, but we didn't have a working mower available until now.  It should also be noted that some bits of the Meadow didn't get done last year for no good reason.  Anyway, it was jolly hard work in the hot sun, and at the end I was half human, half wild carrot seed, and it doesn't look good as the saplings didn't get properly trashed, so I will have to do some of it again during the week, but finally we can see across the Meadow again!  There are large banks of scrub for shelter for my friends the hares and for any pheasants that the fox  hasn't had too.

There are no new wildlife photos to share this week as last Sunday the hunt went through our land and the valley.  They don't come into the Garden, as it is well fenced off but do treat the Orchard and Meadow as their own.  While I recognise very clearly the need to control the number of boar, as there really are too many, what annoys me about the hunters is their sheer arrogance as they stalk through other people's property.  Plus I don't trust them not to fire towards us in the Garden if they spot something interesting.  We sang and whistled very loudly while they were close by.  Once they have done a sweep through, we see very little large wildlife for at least a couple of weeks, until they find their way back to us.

I leave you with the flowers of autumn, the cyclamen that pop up everywhere it seems and spread gloriously through our gardens and the Wood.  They always make me smile.

Have a good week!

 

Cooking and looking around

September continues it's mellow decent into Autumn and the vegetable plots keep giving, as do the fruit trees.  The quantity of fruit this year is truly breath taking and means a lot of sugar, a lot of peeling and a lot of finding new recipes.  One I was particularly pleased with was for slow poached quince, which could actually be done in the slow cooker, thus keeping surveillance to a minimum while it did its thing.  From solid and unpalatable to meltingly soft, spiced and delicious in 9 hours, while the house was filled with tantalising aromas.  There is a batch in the freezer, another third became the most luxurious crumble we have ever had, and a third we just scoffed as we could with ice cream.

Many more quince were chopped up into small pieces, boiled a long time and strained, to be made into 11 pots of ruby amber quince jelly - quite the prettiest of the jams and jellies I make!

Tomatoes are also having a good year, a very good year.  You can't really give them away at the moment, so have to do something with them.  I've made hot tomato gloop, I've made tomato sauce, now I am making tomato purée which takes up less space in the freezer.  I think there are about 2 kilos of chopped tomatoes of various varieties in this pot, being cooked down.

During the week I also cooked up a delicious cristophine gratin for supper - we have now had 5 individual fruits off the vine and there are another 10 that look like they will make it to edible size before the frosts, which is pretty amazing.

But it's not all cooking and preserving - every September there is a massive brocante or antiques fair at a local down called Durtal.  Obviously it stopped for Covid but before then it was the biggest such event of the year around us, and an absolute "must visit".  The roads and squares of the town would be stuffed with people and stalls with all sorts of tat; as well as the established restaurants and bars, there would be extra drinks and food stalls, including an oyster bar; and in my memory, every year it was hot and sunny.  

Covid has made a difference, as has Brexit.  For a couple of years there were camera crews from the BBC and Channel 4 doing shows, but no longer.  There were no British traders with stalls, and few British voices to be heard around the town.  There were fewer stalls and no oyster bar, and not all the restaurants were open.  The weather was good - sunny and not too hot, but on the other hand I got stung by a hornet, so wasn't too impressed.  There was still a fair amount of tat of course!

Durtal itself is a beautiful but forgotten little town on the River Loir (the small boy version, not la Loire), with a massive chateau in the centre of town, dominating the river crossing.  There are handsome old buildings wherever you look, and also the occasional heron...

Well I had better go and finish making that tomato purée now, but then I need to copy off all the photos from the trail camera, so next week there should be fox, deer, badger and perhaps boar action to entertain you.  Have a good week.

 

September is social

September is the Rentrée - the return to work, to school, to sports groups and to the serious job of earning enough money to pay for Christmas and two months off in July and August next year. 

People are more into good resolutions at this time of year, and it is no coincidence that it is the month when every area has its Forum des Associations or the period when they drum up membership for their club or group.  If you go to these sessions, it is a fairly testosterone fuelled and aggressive event. 

The Yummy Mummies need to get young Florence signed up for gymnastics, baton twirling, extra reading and creative arts, while the boy Paul needs to be kept occupied with football, judo, table tennis and perhaps a bit of music.  Then the clubs themselves want to sign up young Florence for football, basketball, judo and (if she looks lithe enough) baton twirling, and are eyeing up Paul in case he looks like trouble.  The four different yoga groups are vying for numbers, while the sewing group that supports the Chateau and the Opera need people with nimble fingers and an ability to make clothes with dodgy pieces of discarded bed linen and curtains.

It is also a time to reconnect with people after focussing on family and travel for two months.  A group I belong to holds a quiz and wine tasting each September so that people can restock their dwindling wine supplies while catching up, and trying to prove who has the best general knowledge.  This was our first time taking part, and we can confirm we have the best general knowledge, with only 7 wrong answers out of 60.  I was let down by an imperfect knowledge of the 10 Commandments and the jewels attached to specific wedding anniversaries.

Friday night was the dishing out of Comice tombola prizes and the donation of a large cheque to a breast cancer charity.  I was there to collect a prize on someone's behalf.

Saturday was our favourite event of the year - the Societé de la Paix's annual mechoui or pig roast.  About a hundred of us get together for a lot of sangria, a lot of food and wine, a lot of laughs and a fabulous atmosphere.  This year we were a little concerned as the forecast was 35ºC in the shade, and it certainly hit that, but interspersing the wine with a lot of cold water meant we were OK.

Then yesterday, friends were passing through the area on their way south, so we had to meet for lunch in Saumur and catch up after not seeing each other for years.  As well as being CEO of a large company, one of our friends is also a very accomplished potter, so we were delighted to receive a couple of his works.  They are both functional and beautiful.

The new trail camera is up and running.  I'm still getting used to it and the question of batteries is a big aspect of that.  Currently it is up in the orchard, waiting for the walnut and boar season, but is catching a few images of a fox that has appeared in the zone.  It also got attacked by a greattit - I know that word shouldn't run together but the profanity checkers on many systems are stupid and stupidly sensitive too.

Well that's it for today - I'm now going to recover from all that sociable activity and deal with the current glut of figs and quince.

 

Comice Day 2 - the important stuff!

While Day 1 is seriously agricultural, Day 2 is more about community, or communities.  The morning is marked by the ploughing competition between the mayors of each of the villages in the commune, not made easier by the fact that they aren't all farmers, they have to use old tractors (I think there is an option to use a horse, but never taken up), and they have to wear period costume.  For some reason not totally clear to me, this year actually seemed to turn into the festival of the old tractor, and the parade, while led out by the mayor of Vieil Baugé, in a fetching land girl costume, numbered some 75 old tractors, which takes a long time to go past!  We got an early preview as most went past our house to get to the staging area.  The exhaust does stink rather.

Anyway, here are several old tractors, to give you an idea.

There were a few oddities - this one I found puzzling, including wondering what it was for and whether there was really enough demand to make a run of them!

While this one is not allowed on the road, so had to be brought in by trailer!  You can see why.  This one had a staring role as it had been restored specifically for this Comice by the mayor's husband, Yves.

So many old tractors, all wanting to take part in a ploughing match, meant that went on way longer than normal.  But some tractors had to hurry away as they had a second role - pulling the decorated float for their village. 

In the past I have been involved in floats, I've designed them, I've made flowers for them, I've made papier maché bits and bobs, I made a fake organ once, and I've been on them too.  They take an immense amount of team work and hours of volunteer labour to get ready for their moment of glory on the Comice Sunday afternoon parade.  Thankfully it was dry - wet weather and crèpe paper don't mix!

Anyway, to give them their due, here they all are - led out by Vieil Baugé as the hosts.

Vaulandry followed up - they will be the hosts next year.

Fougeré should be the year after - their idea of a stop me and buy one ice cream seller was interesting.  

Baugé will host after them - this is always a challenge as there is no farm land in Baugé any more and you need 27 hectares for a ploughing competition!

Next up le Guedenieu - the more mature ladies of my acquaintance say that there used to be good parties there in the sixites but they always ended up with a fight...

Cheviré le Rouge always manage to get a musical theme and a song going on their float - this year, that wasn't a challenge.

We had lots of fun at the Bocé Comice, I hope they had fun at ours.

Most tractors pull their floats - Cuon pushes theirs.  I have no idea why that is at all, apart from it must be to do with the design of the underlying trailer.

St Martin d'Arcé were accompanied by musicians.

Then came Echimiré, who bravely hosted the first post-Covid Comice.

Finally Pontigné brought up the rear - they hosted last year.

The afternoon and early evening entertainment was provided by Mademoiselle Orchestra - a six piece cabaret band, who are very good and very amusing.  Sadly the heat and the excitement took its toll on us and we went home for a nap, but did catch the end of their second set, before joining the queue for the pig roast dinner.  14 locally born and raised pigs had been turning on spits over fires since 9am, and by 8pm we needed our portions!  The guy on the next table (British) complained there wasn't any crackling, so his French chums went off to find some for him, and came back with a whole head.  Lucky so and so!  The small boy next to him was astounded.

The final band of the weekend was a boisterous group mixing rap, hip-hop, French pop and a sleazy horn section.  The energy was amazing.

All good French events end with a firework display.  By this time we had gone home, but popped out to the field opposite our house to enjoy the spectacle.  It was very loud!

Now all that was left to do, was to tidy up!

 

Day 1 - the serious stuff

I know you are never supposed to apologise over this sort of thing, but I had hoped to get the Comice story out there earlier than this.  I blame a combination of being VERY tired indeed, extreme heat, the challenges of getting a new van, and a sort of general maiaise (not Covid - but we did check yesterday, we were so off) for not getting down to it sooner.

Friday night wasn't the best night's sleep as we worried about the podium and the rain.  We were on the field promptly, but the forecast was still dodgy so we didn't unwrap things until about 10am when we could see no more clouds heading our way.  There were also magnificent arrangements of dried grasses and grains, some with a bit of red paint to them, to give a classier air to the stage, in time for the hour and a half of speeches to open the event.  I caught up with those on a live stream on Facebook - I really could not be bothered to wait around to see them in person!

The serious stuff on the Saturday morning, other than the speeches, is the Young Farmers' Ploughing Competition - held on slightly adjacent fields, and with its own bar, so the ones on the field were quite quiet.  I don't know much about ploughing matches, so I didn't go and watch.

For those of us on decorations duty, the other thing to do was to ensure that the tables were decorated and ready to welcome diners - there were 580 metres of tables, each with benches on either side, giving a theoretical 1,400 covers.  We certainly needed them on the Sunday!

There was a certain nostalgic feel to the event - while guingettes are becoming popular again, they were more of a 20th century phenomenon.  It was therefore only right that there were a lot of old tractors knocking around and also a few other old implements - this is the chain oil application end of a two person chainsaw that was demonstrated a few times over the weekend.  It did the job, but it was loud, fixed and needed two people to make it work.

Day 1 is also about livestock, with a cow competition and a Percheron competition (a local breed of heavy horse).  The cows and goats were mostly only in for one day, although a few came back for the second day, just as an interesting feature.

While we weren't there too long on the Saturday afternoon, I did insist on going to see the Percherons.  The mares are so beautiful, and the foals often behave so badly!  A bit like a Lippizaner, Percherons are generally born dark and as they grow older, take on a grey white colour.  They are good work horses - sometimes they are used by loggers to move tree trunks around as they do less damage to the soil than machines - and also make reasonable saddle horses for the portly with long legs and supple hips!

After that, we went off to feed cats, water plants, eat food and rest up as Sunday would be a long day.

The Sunday story should be available during the week - keep an eye out for it!

 

Final push to get it all ready

My last post was brief and quite enigmatic as much of what we were working on was embargoed until the weekend of the Comice itself.

John and I were working on the big arches for the two entrances to the site - the big one was an issue just because of its size, as it was over 2 metres tall and very long.  To get sensible sized letters, we had to make a number of stencils for letters that would be nearly 60 centimetres tall.  The logo could be projected onto the panel and traced, but any other decoration had to be done by hand.  And for the reverse side - the "see you next year, elsewhere" - apart from the fact the letters also had to be pretty huge, there was no guidance, no colour scheme, no theme, so we made it up as we went along.

The smaller arch was more of a problem - no space for projections, too long in relation to its height, and more space to fill in.  Our preferred method of doing the letters with packing labels did not work as, and I'm not sure you will believe this, packing and shipping labels aren't brilliant at sticking in slight humidity.  The weekend before the Comice it was a real rush to get that one finished, so that I was free for the next set of tasks.

There was a nice video of John working on the arch, but Typepad won't let me upload it, and YouTube has done something silly with it, it seems to me!

Then on Monday and Wednesday (Tuesday was a bank holiday) we started to put up more decorations in the village - up to that point, it had just been bunting and the straw bales, now we had silhouettes of dancers popping up all over the place and a stream of jolly music along the wooden barriers by the village hall.

Then on Thursday and Friday we were on the Comice site, putting up even more bunting, dressing the podiums, decorating the vast numbers of marquees, adding fairy lights, signs and all sorts of other bits, so that the exhibitors had a clear run on the Friday afternoon to get installed.  Lunches were served at the village hall for the workers - cold beer has never tasted so good!  It was lovely being all together, working to a common goal and getting to know new people.

Then on Friday evening, we were all summoned to the site for the distribution of volunteer t-shirts for anyone working on site over the weekend, a few words of encouragement from our President, and the unveiling of the big arch.  There is a video stream of that, but California doesn't seem to want to play ball with technology at the moment - I guess they have other problems - so here is the great arch unveiled, and there was applause, which you will have to imagine.

So after a drink to seal team solidarity, it was home to a sensible meal and early to bed to be refreshed for the event - except that rain was forecast, so we spent the night worrying about how various aspects of decoration would stand up to moisture!

To find out how that panned out, look again in a couple of days' time as I'm not wrestling recalcitrant IT any more today!

 

So much to do, so little time!

It's the final straight before the Comice.  Most days this week have been taken up doing "stuff", but unless that stuff is already out in the streets and fields, it is embargoed.  The weather has meant less progress has been made on some aspects than we would have liked - the wind and rain made working on straw bales nearly impossible.  It was possible to progress items that will be installed on the fields in due course, as we are working on them in a disused piggery, so we have shelter, power, space and quiet (unless we have a bluetooth speaker with us to blast out radio).  And when I say we, it isn't just John and I, it is all sorts of other people, including my next door neighbour's granddaughter, getting involved.

Next week I will find links to blogs I have written on previous Comices (Comici?) to show what the fuss is all about.

When not working on decorations, I have been keeping an eye on the new trail camera.  The boar are still around and a deer or two have passed by - they look rather odd from a higher angle!

On Thursday, I caught a different strange animal on the camera - one that I would not expect to see on our land before September.  I wasn't delighted, but I think I remember seeing a couple around this time last year too.

We think that the cristophine might be contemplating flowers - today there was a slightly different growth on a couple of the main stems.  It has grown another three feet or so in a number of directions so there is certainly enough oomph in it to think about flowering and fruiting I would suggest.

The sweetcorn got a real battering in the winds during the week - two named storms at this time of year and this side of the Atlantic is a bit odd.  While we were not near the strongest gusts, the gaps in hedges and trees funnel the wind in weird ways.  The big fields of maize are closely planted and dense, while our wee area of sweetcorn is only three rows deep, but it has all survived and the silks are out and starting to turn brown, which is good!

Digging up the week's potatoes, I met one of my garden helpers.  From the size and shape of her, I think she has been doing very well on slugs, and certainly none of the potatoes have slug damage, so I think she is rather effective, if not the prettiest person on the plot.

Anyway, I must now go and deal with a rather pleasing problem.  Back in the days before Brexit was even considered, my mother in law bought us a Victoria Plum tree, to take the place of the medlar tree that didn't seem to like our garden (shame as the flowers were gorgeous).  It wasn't cheap and we had to source it in the UK, as they aren't a thing in France.  Since then we have nurtured it and protected it and been rewarded with at best a dozen fruit in a season, and only if we can get to them before the chickens.  This year is different.  This year it is loaded and we have supports under many branches to help it cope.  This afternoon I have promised myself I will make a batch of plum crumbles for the freezer, as well as one for tonight, so I'd better go and pick and stone some fruit and get baking.

Have a good week!

 

Harvests and cameras

After weeks of nurturing, watering, weeding and worrying, the first serious harvests are starting in the potager.  We've been digging up a couple of potatoes from the first block of 18, for a few weeks now - well this is the seventh weekend to be precise.  The potatoes are second earlies and were planted in three blocks over a period of about 4 weeks, and the first block are very ready to be harvested.  By taking just a couple of plants a week, we have enough and more for us to eat over the week and don't have to worry about storage and drying off.  The next two blocks will need that level of attention, but that is a way down the line, post-Comice.

Today's basket of goodies includes potatoes, carrots, a few onions that I missed yesterday when lifting the main block of red onions, a couple of courgettes that I didn't cut yesterday and a couple of little gem lettuce that looked like they were thinking about bolting.

We've also had aubergines - I think 5 so far, or it may be 7, and half a dozen courgettes already and of course there are the red onions to look forward to.

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This is only the start too - there are as many set borlotti beans as we had all season last year, and the bean vines are covered with more flowers.  The butternuts haven't yet got into their stride, but there are quite a few female flowers developing.  The tomatoes have some good looking trusses on them - fingers crossed that they ripen and don't get struck by blight.  And there is the cristophine vine, which gets bigger as you watch it and now has a vast structure set up for it to rampage over.  Perhaps one day there will be flowers and fruits too - in the meantime it provides shelter for a couple of tomatoes that I rejected for the main plot as they were runt plants, so have gone totally mad as companion plants for the cristophine.

Another bit of companion planting that we did as an experiment also seems to be working.  Parsnips are very slow to get going, so "they" recommend inter-sowing with something that is quicker off the mark and doesn't stay in the ground as long.  I put the row of parsnips at the edge of the potato bed, so one bit of companion planting I guess.  I sowed parsnips every 4 to 6 inches and in between sowed carrots.  As you have seen, the carrots are doing fine.  Many of the parsnips are also doing very well too and their leaves can be seen over the potatoes and swamping the carrots in places!  They've got months more growing time to go too.

So to the saga of the trail camera.  It developed a fault.  Basically the switch inside the protective shell got disconnected, and despite having had it less than two years, it was out of warranty (I know EU warranties are 2 years - I did point that out to the supplier, but I know when I am on a hiding to nothing).  It had been attacked a few times by boar, a pine martin, a few garden birds and a few hornets, so it had a hard life!  Anyway, I couldn't cope without one, so blagged a discount code off the supplier, who were very good and allowed me to apply that discount to something that was already discounted, and also made sure it was sent through express, so the new one arrived on Wednesday and was installed on Thursday - once I had read the instructions with the help of a magnifying glass!!  We rigged it up in a tree close to where the last one died to see what was happening and test it out.  Boar are what is happening - they must be on their second litter of the year, and they do just love the shallow ponds for wallowing in.  The fish aren't so keen, but as there is little water, despite the rain, the fish are dying off, so I guess the boar can have their fun.

We'll see what more porcine fun appears over the next week.

In the meantime, the Comice approaches at a terrifying speed and I need to concentrate on painting dancers and doing lettering (some of it very big) so that people have an idea what is going on.  I've done the logos on the two arches (photo is of the smaller one), now for the lettering....

Have a good week!