Rural Life

Change and new beginings

I'm not sure how much I am in favour of change - but I am sure it will happen whether I like it or not.  This year is one of farewells - some French friends moving south, some moving village, and British friends, tired of the challenges of Brexit, selling their second homes and settling full time (or an approximation of full time) in the UK.  They all say they will come back and visit, how many do, and how often remains to be seen. 

While the removals take place, there is the frisson of having a trailer that can be used for trips to the dump.  We also pick over the spoils of what won't be taken away, what is no longer needed or is too expensive to take "home" (there really is no Brexit benefit).  A local cat charity now has more pillows, towels and duvets than they could dream of.  Someone else has a 'new to them' sofa.  We have a bunch of things to put on sales sites to share around, and the awful process of triaging much loved libraries of second hand books to see what can be slipped into book swap kiosks, what might sell for a few centimes, what could be given to hospital libraries, and what, with the best will in the world, is best sent for pulping (Thomas Mann in the original is high on that list!).  How many copies of the RHS Encyclopaedia of Gardening does one need - purely rhetorical!

But that excitement declines very rapidly, as we try to find a bit of cupboard space for 6 tins of chickpeas, and regret the company, the laughter, the trips and events that will no longer animate the summer months.  We would prefer to keep the people to all the books, sofas, DVDs and chickpeas.

The moving stuff around this week has meant that we have also been out and about a bit.  Did you know that as well as building a tower in Paris, Eiffel also built a railway bridge in Chinon (OK it is a long way in the distance)?  You can also see that the river is chronically low.

We also visited the village church at Gée, just 15 kilometres away - it has been very well restored, presumably a nice legacy from someone.  The village also has a very good restaurant that does a very fine 15€ lunch!

I don't know if I should blame the cats for this, but I had a chance to take a very close look at one of my favourite moths - the tiger moth.  With their wings at rest, they are handsome and sober, but when they are in flight or when you look at the underside, they are the most marvellous and vibrant orange.

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It is still stinking hot and dry as a bone here - water restrictions are incredibly tight.  You can only water food plants, anything else has to take its chance unless you use grey water from doing something else.  Even watering food plants is frowned on between 8am and 8pm, and should ideally only be done with grey water or rain water that you have stored.  We are down to our last 800 litres of stored water, and while there was a promise of rain and thunder for Thursday on the weather sites yesterday, it has now been downgraded to a 20% chance of mild drizzle.  The sweetcorn hasn't worked and has been sacrificed for aubergines, butternuts and borlotti beans, while the chillies are doing well on the water that the chickens don't drink in a day.

The fact that there are cool shady corners and a bit of water/bog at the bottom of the Wildflower Meadow means that the trail camera has been working hard.  I did accuse John of knocking it over with a mower when he cleared the paths, but looking at footage from the camera, I then had to apologise.  The camera is on the move to a distant site where someone wants to know what is causing trouble, so I will be spending a lot of time clearing the SD card, but these videos were downloaded by phone and show that new beginings are possible.  I am pretty sure the faun was born in the meadow, and I may even have footage of the labour/birth when I go through the hundreds of files.  Anyway, enjoy these and see who you think pushed over the camera on its log!

Looking at that more closely, I think the young buck has a problem with one foot/leg.

This is the only time I have seen one here, and it is also surprising to see it in daylight.

He didn't really go far for a couple of weeks, and stayed with Mum in the zone in that time.

He (or she) really is rather cute!

Well, I know who my money's on!

Have a good week!

 

Surviving the heat - just about

Well, I have to say that temperatures over 40ºC are just awful.  Monday was the killer day, although Tuesday was still jolly hot.  By just after breakfast, it was already over 30ºC and just kept climbing.  We had to go out to a meeting in the afternoon (fortunately somewhere that was air conditioned), and just the few kilometres in the car (with the air con on) were nearly unbearable and with the air con, extremely expensive in fuel too.  It didn't get down to 33ºC until well after 9pm, when we sat out for a bit but not for long.  In town, the two pharmacies agreed it was over 40, but couldn't decide if it was 42, 43 or 44.  Any were too hot!

The following morning I went to The Garden to check on the boy cats and see the damage to the potagers.  The cats were fine, but very pleased to have gravy.  As for the plants?  Well I was pretty convinced we had lost at least 2 of the butternut plants, half the chillies, half of the leeks, and some of the beans.  Some plants had just rejected the fruits they were carrying, so the five set butternuts were yellow and gone, the courgettes had no viable female flowers, and the aubergines had no flowers full stop.

Nature is amazing though - among the photos below taken today, there are aubergines ready to be picked, flourishing borlotti beans, a newly set butternut, some small chard seedlings that survived and are pulling away, the parsnips that survived (2 didn't make it), and a chilli set on a different but equally abused plant.  The leeks are flourishing too.  Sadly the sweetcorn has been provoked into flowering too soon and too short to produce much of interest, but hey!

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How did the wildlife survive the heat?  OK as far as we can tell - there is evidence that the resident doe and faun made it through and in fact the faun looks pretty healthy to my eye.  The local buzzards are making a lot of noise as are the wood peckers.  There are no obvious corpses - I think they just head for cover and wait until it's over.

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It's the opera season in Baugé, so I must cut this short and do a bit of ironing before making salads for the interval picnic (it's a Glyndebourne style opera festival), but this week has seen a notable anniversary.  It is five years since Zola's Gotcha Day - to celebrate she rolled around on hedgehog pee for a happy 5 minutes.

Until next week!

 

Mediaeval madness and new critters

I am now officially Covid free, so have been able to enjoy fun and games at the Fête Medievale in our village, celebrating the 600th (well actually 601st, but last year wasn't doable) anniversary of the battle of Vieil Baugé, turning point of the Hundred Years War, and the first major defeat of the English.  The French were helped by boggy ground and Scottish mercenaries.  There is a small military encampment, there is a jousting tournament, there are sword fights, there were demonstrations of horsemanship, fireworks, a 10 pig roast banquet, a fair, and trebuchets.  They were firing trebuchets and my word that is fun - a video next week perhaps!

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A friend of ours who makes clogs as a hobby (well, it is in his family history, and he enjoys it, and it is harmless enough) was demonstrating his craft and had a load of his wares for sale.

It is very hot and dry at the moment, so I was surprised to find Mr Tiggiewinkle wandering the garden after midnight last night, until I realised there was a bowl of water out for the cats, which could well have attracted him.  The cheese rinds we threw for the chickens may also have been appealing if the chickens didn't eat them all - some chance!

On the trail camera, there is a lot of deer action still, including this nice still of the doe and her fawn.  There was also a new face on the camera - I need to check if it is a pole cat or a pine martin.  Whichever it is, lovely to see, and I'm so glad we don't have chickens round there!

 

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That's all for today, but I may update during the week.

 

Variety is good

What a varied week!  Last Sunday was Trout Fishing Sunday in Vieil Baugé, organised by a fishing group and the Comité des Fêtes.  There were perhaps 80 rods, and most seemed to go away happy with a catch or three.  The fishing group also provided baguettes with pork belly or sausages or paté (strictly carnivore!), while the Comité des Fêtes, with whom we volunteer from time to time, ensured that no one got dehydrated through lack of access to beverages.  Some may have got dehydrated from the volume of red and rosé wine consumed, or beer, but that was their own look out!

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We have picked all, and eaten most, of the broad beans so today it was all change in the vegetable garden.  The Aldi aubergines are doing OK, so two had their plastic cloches removed as they had grown too big.  The Year 2 potato bed now has aubergines, butternut squash, cabbages, parsnips, sweetcorn, haricot beans and radishes sown or growing in it.  Elsewhere we have mangetout peas, more butternuts, courgettes, garlic, shallots, onions and parsley.  The last crop to go in will be next weekend, when we sow the borlotti beans, which need nice warm soil to germinate.  Our learning so far this year is that sunshine doesn't always mean warm soil, and gardening on a slope is "interesting".

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The trail camera is doing sterling work as a log camera, and things are taking less notice of it, and carrying on in their daily life.  There are videos this week, but one thing that was captured as a photo only was a passing hare.  This animal terrifies the largest of the garden cats, and a full grown hare is indeed a large animal.  This is the best the camera could do.

So, on to the videos.  There are four for you this week.  One is an atmospheric - well, let's face it, blurred - view of a deer passing through in the morning, when the dew settles nicely on the lens.  There is night time feeding by deer and by badgers, and the boar are back, this time with a darling little piglet, which moves very quickly.

 

 

 

 

My homage to the Cannes film festival!!  Have a good week!

 

Heatwave and drought

It's broadly official now, with 40 days at over the seasonal average temperature, and pretty well no rainfall since early April - it's a heatwave and it's a drought.  There are water restrictions and even the farmers are mostly complying with them.  Lawns look parched unless overhung by willow trees, in which case they are lush and green and long.  Anywhere else and they are turning yellow or brown, apart from the weed flowers which happily rise above it all.  I think the drought conditions have really done for the bee orchids this year - there were so many rosettes in the winter and early spring, but not enough moisture to let them push up flower spikes.  Those that there are, seem a bit stunted to me too.

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Temperatures have gone over 30ºC a fair number of times in the last two weeks, and while we can strip down to shorts and skimpy t-shirts, the cats can't.  They are doing a good effort of shedding fur whenever we touch them, and actually as desert animals probably cope a bit better than us in the heat, but they are seeking comfy places to sleep this out.

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The plants are doing their best, with late evening watering for things in pots.  The butternut seedlings are ready to go out I think/hope.  They seem big enough to cope with being nibbled by any snails mad enough to break hibernation seals and come out and about.  The chilli seeds are coming up - given the weather, they might seem a bit late, but we are only 3 weeks into May and are actually on the early side.  The cheap rose I bought at Aldi shrugged off the greenfly, after judicious application of soapy water, and is now in flower, while the single red hot poker that I have nurtured in a pot, ready to plant elsewhere, is now out.  Another bit of colour, this time by the front door, comes from the pinks we got at Jacques Briant, and I finally potted on into something sensible a couple of weeks ago.

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The trail camera has moved - after getting 500 photos and 500 short videos of moving grass seed heads, it was clearly time for a change.  Currently I am trying it at a sort of crossroads between the Orchard and the Meadow, and as there are no handy trees or fencing poles there, I have it on a piece of willow log, rescued from a work site.  I only managed to check it once before today, and have evidence that it has been investigated by the badger family!

This week's blog is early.  The weather today is hot, so we aren't going to feed the cats and put water around until a bit later.  Tomorrow (Sunday) we are spending from midday or so, helping out on the beer and sandwich stand at the village trout fishing day.  Next week I hope there will be lots of jolly photos from the event, but I know I won't be in a fit condition to sit in front of a computer and write about it tomorrow evening.  I expect my ankles to be the size of footballs!

 

Sunshine and badgers

Happy May Day - and apologies to those in the UK as I gather the weather isn't too great - here it is lovely and has been for a while.  Sunshine, gentle cooling breezes and blue skies, which of course also means hosepipe bans and water restrictions.  It is the earliest I remember there being a ban on watering non-essentials using well or tap water.  Fortunately we have stocks of rainwater, and vainly hope that it will rain sometime soon - the earliest forecast is for around the 13th May!!

The sunshine does mean that there are some lovely things to photograph at the moment - distant chateau before they disappear behind foliage, but are nicely framed by green, orchids (although the bee orchid season will start soon and I'm sure that will get boring), lizards, butterflies, tadpoles and a vide grenier (literally empty your attic - the French version of a car boot, and all day affairs).

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The wildflower meadow is really coming into its own, with oxeye daisies, linseed, and bright pink clover - the bee orchids will join in shortly as they seem to go well alongside the clovers.  We mowed a trail round, so that you can walk round without worrying about treading on something precious or getting too many ticks on your clothes, as the hares and deer also like the meadow.  You can't take a decent photo of a wildflower meadow really, as the camera can't work as well as the eye for taking it all in.  By contrast, I show an area by the fruit trees where we haven't mown, and nature is springing back with all the "best" things in life - nettles, mares tail and bramble.

We now have aubergines planted out under individual mini-cloches and some lettuce under protection from cat bums - I am hoping the resident thrushes will do the needful with slugs and snails as I found this year's well used anvil.

Anyway, I also said something about badgers.  We moved the trail camera to near the set in the hope of getting a sight of cubs at dawn or dusk.  For the first few days there was no action at all.  Then a couple of days ago I checked and there were lots of files, although on my phone they didn't look like much - but I downloaded a few photographs and a couple of videos anyway.  Away from sunlight and with a pair of glasses, I could see there was actually quite a bit of action, so today I downloaded a further random selection and there is quite a lot of activity.  The following five short films show the hunt for food as young cubs need sustenance, all done at night.

 

 

 

And finally...

Have a good week!

 

 

Four seasons in a week!

Last week I complained of frost and we had more of it too.  Now people get very upset by sharp frosts and imagine the worst and want to remove anything that might have been affected as soon as possible.  I find it is worth waiting a bit.  While we know that there will be no early season figs - the hint is that the tiny fruits and the leaf buds are black, brittle and horrid - I'm not giving up yet on plums, peaches, pears or apples.  Some still have blossom and the flowers are more hardy than the tiny fruits, while until the tiny fruits fall off, well, you never know!  Apple and quince are just coming into their own - quince has to be the prettiest blossom!

Last week I was upset as the honesty seemed to have been affected by the frost and I expected it to collapse and go black.  Not a bit of it!  Today I was admiring it and I can not remember ever seeing better!

So we have had winter frosts, spring showers, summer sunshine and autumn gales this week.  Storm Diego rattled through on Friday, bringing heavy rain, strong winds even inland and bringing down power cables.  He blattered our broad beans which are looking a bit sorry for themselves, but I hope will pick up tomorrow in the sun.  This afternoon we had a picnic tea in the Garden in lovely sunshine.  In Canada, April is considered the cruellest month due to extremes of weather (and the Canadians really do extremes of weather), but that may become the new normal for us here in Western Europe too I guess.  Last night we had a dramatic sunset to add to the mix.

It's been a quiet week on the trail camera front - just one fuzzy bottom of what I think is a boar passing through.  I will move the camera somewhere more interesting soon.

The orchids in the Orchard and Meadow are starting to rev up to flowering, well one has a well developed flower head, while the lizard orchids are looking more and more like they are preparing for world domination.  It is actually the time when the bee orchids go discrete prior to putting on their delightful show in May.

However one of the domestic orchids is putting on a fine show of three flowers.  For some reason I find it very difficult to take a good photo of them all, but here is one bloom.

Today the French are voting in the first round of the presidential elections, and we can only watch in envy, not being citizens and not having a UK vote either.  The news services keep giving an update on the turnout so far - last time I looked it was close to 70%, some 4% down on the same time five years ago.  It is a worry as there are some real nutty candidates, some with truly offensive policies.  In many ways the real campaign will start tonight at about 10pm when they are 95% confident they know who the top two candidates will be, having seen off (possibly) the nutters.  Fingers crossed!

 

Dear deer!

I gather today is the start of spring and the weather is certainly making it feel that way, with a hint of sun and warmth but still a chilly wind.  It was the first of the vide greniers (empty attics - the equivalent of a car boot sale but it goes on all day) in one of the local villages, so after a spot of gardening, we thought it would be churlish not to go along.  We assumed that it would be quite small and not too many people, as it is very hard to get people out to do things or volunteer for stuff at the moment.  Wrong!  We trudged a good 3 kilometres looking at baby clothes, books, computer games, knicknacks and junk.  We did pick up a big bundle of ground staples and five big flower pots, as well as sore feet.  It was great to see a few friends in the crowd too.

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Plants are coming up which reminds us that the vegetable season gets going very soon now (yes, technically we already have garlic, shallots, broad beans, cabbages and radishes in, but this is the serious stuff).  John has been rotavating this year's potato plot.  This patch has been used before so is proving a bit easier than in previous years, and when it was last done 3 years ago, it was pretty solid clay, but it looks better this time around.  The half a tonne of horse poo we added last year should have helped.  Next week I will start putting in spuds.  The other images are of peonies that I planted a couple of months ago just starting to show and our Victoria Plum tree starting to bloom.

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It may be a coincidence with the end of the hunting season, but we are seeing (or the trail camera is seeing) more wildlife in the country estate.  The previous time I had the camera at this point, we saw NOTHING, not even a cat or a duck.  This time we had a passing boar and deer.  They went through at night and in the early morning.  This pretty doe didn't seem at all phased by the camera and stayed for a while, hence the photo and the nice video.

 

Before that, a whole bunch of them came through.  At least two bucks and probably at least one doe, but we can't tell really.

Then they stopped, not least so one of the bucks could do something about all that velvet on his antlers.  if you are looking at this on a big computer rather than a phone, it is worth getting this full screen to watch, as then you see all the action.

I have read up on how to get better footage on a trail, as in general where I put the camera is where I can see things are passing through.  I have changed the settings again and moved the camera, so let's see what the next week brings!  Although it could be nothing.

 

A week with workmen

For the past couple of months, we have been anxious as we watched a bulge develop high on the chimney wall, with cracks appearing too.  In early February, we contacted a large local building company, asking for a visit and quote, and to their credit, they were out very quickly to have a look, do the professional sharp intake of breathe and muttered "merde", and produce a quote in 24 hours.  Since then, there has been an even more anxious wait until they got any necessary permissions and the weather was suitable to do the work. 

At the beginning of last week I was told Wednesday - phew!  Except no one turned up on Wednesday.  Thursday morning, 8am, there was a knock on the door, and while scaffolding went up outside, a mason came and checked the attic for any sign of internal bulges.  He disappeared, and at 9:30am, when the scaffolding was up, so did the scaffolders!  It was very grand scaffolding we thought.

At 10:30am, really serious noises started, and tucked away in my little office, I could hear drilling, banging, the odd crash and rumble.  We had all this (apart from the drilling) 16 years ago, when we had that facade repointed, an intervention where it took a whole day to get the scaffolding up.  What was missing this year was the odd cry of "merde" from the artisans.  Then at midday it all want quiet again, as they left for lunch.  So I ventured out to see what had happened, not expecting to see this!

They were back just before 2pm, so John had a word about what they could see in the hole in the wall, then the afternoon was taken up with the faint hum of a remarkably quiet mixer and odd sloshing sounds.  At 5pm they were gone, although the scaffolding was still there, but by 9:30am on Friday morning, that too had gone!  Now there is a very tidy patch on our chimney wall and one of these days we will feel brave enough to light the fire again (that wasn't a hint, John).  More importantly I don't dread seeing a pile of masonry in the road every time I turn into our road!

I left the trail camera where it was last week, in the hope of better badger footage, but it is clear they are settling into a routine of using the path to go somewhere important and not stopping on the way.  The only interesting video was a cat defecating on the badger path, the interesting bit being that we don't recognise the cat!  So the camera has moved, and there was just the one nice badger shot to show for the week.

Other wildlife of interest was spotting spawn (frog, toad or newt - impossible to tell) in one of the ponds, but clearly near to hatching, as two days later it was just empty casings left to provide food for whatever needed it.  The hares are also out and about.  The fuzzy shot was taken while a cat stood on my shoulders watching the hare, which was a good 30 meters away.  The hares come through the Meadow and Orchard too, but not where I had the trail camera set up - it's nice to see them around.  Clause, the biggest of the cats and bigger than many dogs of my acquaintance, is terrified of the hares!

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Those photos are out of order - first is the empty spawn, then the viable, then the hare - editing the image galleries is a perilous exercise on a Sunday!  But to make up for that, here is a happy picture of narcissi, which are particularly lovely this year it seems to me.

 

Don't get too excited!

While it was relatively sunny this week, enabling the mowing season to start and getting early crops planted, I'm sure winter hasn't had its final fling yet!

The broad beans we sowed in November last year are coming up quite well and look mostly healthy.  Inevitably with autumn sown seed there are some losses, but out of the 50, we have 42 up and about which is a bit better than last year, if memory serves.  The first year we had autumn sown broad beans there, I put out over a hundred seeds and 96 produced something.  More recently I have had trouble sourcing seed (which is nuts really).  I buy my planting garlic and shallot sets in the market at la Flèche - the garlic is local, so should be right for the climate, while the shallots come in from Brittany, but they know their onions over that way (hahaha!).  Most of the garlic and shallots are under minipolytunnel - not because they need protection from the elements but because they need protection from cat bottoms and whatever it is that is digging test holes around the Garden.  The trail camera may tell us more one day!

The Asian hornet trapping season starts next week - it may be a bit early, but getting the overwintered queens is important, or they will get the big nests going and kill more bees.  At this time of year it is possible to see the old nests in the trees - the secondary nests are generally high up, while primary nests can be in a hedge or a shed or lean-to.  We spotted one today and walked back to look at it - so high it is nearly impossible to get a photo that is meaningful, certainly with a phone camera.  It does explain where all the hornets came from that ate their way through a huge pile of windfall apples!  It also puts us on our guard for the emerging queens, so next weekend our two traps will be set, as the local observatory gets going for the 2022 campaign.

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However sunny it has been, the evenings and mornings are cold, so Poirot spends a lot of time fire worshipping in the evenings, and the snowdrops are quite happy and flowering away.  Spring is still a good month off!

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There is something about the sharp, crisp light of a sunny winter's day that makes it easier to see problems - like we finally spotted the hornets' nest today for example.  A couple of weeks ago, I looked up at the west facing facade of the house and decided I wasn't happy.  I shared my fears with John and I got the big local masonry firm out to have a look.  The big boss turned up and looked at the wrong chimney and said it was not problem to fix.  No, on our house - so he looked up and said yes, it needed a bit of pointing, no problem, they can do that.  No, no, not that side, look up from the road side - silence, sharp intake of breath, muttered "lalala" and "merde", then - yes, that needs doing, doing very soon, I'll get you an estimate next working day.  Which, to be fair, he did, and we got it back within 24 hours.  Now we wait for permissions to be granted and then we will be covered with scaffolding for a chimney rebuild.  Yoiks!

There has been so little activity on the trail camera, we have wondered if it was still working.  Last weekend, once it came back from a likely but unfruitful site, I put it up overnight in the chicken run, to make sure it was working.  So now you can enjoy the spectacle of chicken breakfast time, from a chicken's eye view!  So much technology for this -

Until next week!