Rural Life

Chickens and sun worshipping

Apologies for the delay and also, in advance, for the somewhat light nature of this update.  They are related I guess, as yesterday there was a Birthday Event, which took some managing and also most of yesterday.  When you are 90/91, a year makes a huge difference, plus Covid makes everything so much more special.  In August 2020, you could have 10 round a dining table at a restaurant, while the Birthday Girl was also able to walk a bit.  Not a vast distance, so she was driven down to the restaurant 250m away from her front door, but she could make it the 30m to the dining table, and remembered to wear a mask on the way in (not so much on the way out).  Then it was warm and sunny enough to sit in the garden, partake of more fizz and cake and carry on having fun.

This year we have Pass Sanitaire, and I think restaurant tables are still limited to 6 places.  More importantly, home has changed and the rules around entering a nursing home are strict and include the Passe Sanitaire.  Mobility has decreased, while the capacity of my car has not increased, so a restaurant or a picnic was not possible (the latter also as it was rather cool and windy).  Instead there were four of us round a bed, slurping the finest fizzy rosé Saumur (Ackermann) can produce, while scoffing a range of patisseries and talking about old times. 

Anyway, what else has been going on?  Two different forms of sun worshipping were spotted during the week.  The pears at Chinon really are not nice, they don't cook well, they don't make good eau de vie (the distiller spotted their overtones one year and told us not to do that again), they really aren't nice raw either.  I'm guessing they might have made good pig food at one stage, as the tree is very old, and the house has outbuildings.  Their only fans this year seem to be bees - I think possibly ground dwelling solitary bees, but I may well be wrong - who love sucking out the sweet juices from where they split when they fall.

The other sun worshipper is my feral sunflower - we didn't sow it, it just started growing out of the bin of compost we had some strawberries in.  It has grown to nearly 6 foot tall, and because it is on a plinth, I can't look it in the face.  It is very well placed to worship the rising sun in the morning, while the less open faces, follow the sun during the day (tournesol or tourne au sol - clever, huh?).  I take a photo or two each day to keep a ray of sunshine for winter.

On the chicken front, Auntie Mo is settling in quite well, although we still get some aggression from Mac and Jak.  She went up in the pecking order a bit when Bridie the Freeloading Bantam started to moult.

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Sometimes I spot things out of the corner of my eye and they are interesting.  Two examples to end with.  I was at The Garden, watering some things and carrying on with the potato harvest.  As I went to get the fork from the store, I spotted some movement in the grass and closer inspection showed it to be a small frog or toad - not warty enough for a toad, but too far from water to be a frog.  Whatever, he/she is very useful and welcome.  Yesterday evening, sitting in the garden, recovering from an overdose of patisseries (helped with a gin and tonic) I spotted another crop in the overgrown border - hops!  And quite a lot of them too, some looking really beautiful at the moment.  I'm not sure there are enough for beer making, and we don't do that sort of home brew anyway, but good for hop pillows perhaps.  I'll think on it!

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I promise I will try for Sunday next week!

 

 

Comice 2021 Covid-style

What a pleasure to be back in a Comice field yesterday, and Echimiré really did do a fabulous job, with a really well laid out Comice venue and some truly excellent entertainments.  We were advised to wear face masks most of the time, apart from when in the special areas for eating and drinking, where you had to have a health pass, but rather than keep showing it, you registered it once, and were given a very hard to remove bracelet that let you into the food and drink areas.  It worked well.

You know you are at a Comice if there are decorated floats - there were only two this year and mostly static, although they were moved to the main arena at one point, but with no one on or accompanying them (didn't stop Cheviré le Rouge singing a lot).  Well done to the two teams that put them together - for many it was a step too far.

One of the highlights of the Sunday afternoon was a Regional Percheron contest - I think mainly mares, ideally with foals tagging along, but there were some without I think.  It was a painstaking process as the horses had to be shown static and moving, standing four square and ideally with ears pricked.  Well, telling one tonne of horse who wants to keep an eye on her foal and doesn't much like flies to do that isn't the easiest task, and the judging went on all afternoon.  The photos show some horses being prepared, and the entrance of a beautiful mare with two foals.

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Among the entertainments were an all girl cabaret band, a fun show and some great musicianship too.

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Animals are a key part of the Comice, as it reflects the local agricultural traditions.  There were a number of cows, donkeys and ponies in pens in the woodland surrounding the Comice site, allowing them to stay cool as the afternoon wore on.

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Continuing the animal theme, there was a local gentleman who herds geese, of course!

Among the numerous stands, there was a demonstration of carving with a chainsaw, glass blowing and the "mobile" peanut roaster.  The largest crowd around the chainsaw sculptor was when it came to moving the massive crocodile, and everyone wanted to see whether the chaps with the big green lifter were up to the job!!

The Comice is all about the rural way of life and agriculture so the purveyors of nice, big, shiny machines are out in force with some mechanical porn.  How about one of these as the new ride on lawn mower?

Such a wonderful day out - there was so much more, but you needed to be there!  After the awfulness of the Covid months, it was great to enjoy such an event.  So well done, Echimiré and I'm already looking forward to Pontigné in 2022.

A beano and evidence of a visitor

Now I don't mean the comic, quality as that is, I use beano in the sense of a day's outing, such as used to be taken by workers from the East End of London, because I took a rare day off - needless to say the weather was not propitious but as a couple of things had been booked, Tuesday it was. 

I went with a chum, and first of all we stopped at the lac de Rillé, an artificial lake (supposedly the largest in Touraine) which is normally about two thirds empty at this time of year.  Not in 2021!  The trees around had been damaged by the storms with strong winds in June and July and there was still some tidying up going on.  It looks a lovely place for walks later in the year and over winter, with a bird hide.  We then went to Langais for lunch and a mooch around, admiring the outside of the Chateau, the inside of the Church and a very lovely bronze sculpture on the outside of the Church.  I couldn't photograph it, but the Church had the dodgiest ever crucifix above the altar, made by a local art group.  The pose on the Cross was actually more #paintmelikethosefrenchgirls, while the back was decorated with Nespresso capsules.

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Last week I was worrying about blight.  The potatoes escaped it seems as they were second earlies and therefore pretty well over before it hit.  I've resorted to the French trick of removing leaves, growing tips and anything that displeases me, and at the moment we are under control.  Evidence that the potatoes are looking good below, as well as a view of ripening tomatoes as proof!

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The Garden and the Meadow are good for wildlife and we find lots of evidence and see lots of things.  This week's interesting finds were a large and beautiful red admiral sunning himself on a log pile, a comma butterfly (I think) gorging itself on the buddleia, and the sloughed skin of a reasonably sized grass snake under the matting that we cover the potato plot with.

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Some know of my challenges with chilli plants - the fact that chickens eat them is a particular annoyance.  The fact that my brother has a couple in a pot on his terrace and despite being planted in the same soil at the same time as mine, his always do better, is even more irritating.  So it is with great pride that I announce the first flower bud on my chilli plants this year.  Of course they need sun and heat, which is lacking this year, but it is a start!

Incidentally, if you are reading this on a computer rather than a phone, if you click/double click on the photos you get a bigger, better view of them.

Until next week!

 

 

The camera isn't always there to hand

Well what's that about?  Only that the Patrouille de France - the French answer to the Red Arrows - have been based at our local airport for the past few days.  They arrive, they do a practice of their air show, they go off and do their air show at Saumur, they come back, they get a delivery of air force kerosene, they do another practice, then they go and buzz the Tour de France finish before heading home.  I've heard them three times and seen them twice - in formation - and not had a camera of any sort to hand to capture the moment.  Rather splendid though.  It was easier to capture us both relaxing in different forms of hammock at midday today, after working hard.

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We are getting different flowers out now.  My favourite cultivated flowers, agapanthus, are coming out by the front door.  The first cyclamen have started to show in the lawn, making mowing so much more challenging.  The gladioli are coming out but are a disappointing yellow - perhaps the red ones are the ones that got munched by snails.  Last year in the UK, when I could still get there and visit a Poundshop, and could bring back bulbs, I bought a couple of mystery lily bulbs.  They didn't do much last year but will be magnificent soon.

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I worry a bit about our older cats and that they can be a bit lazy, so last weekend, I invested in a couple of things to arouse their interest.  While Poirot has made it clear that all this is beneath her, Nibbles has taken a very keen interest in finding and catching the Red Spot, public enemy number one for all cats.  She has also taken to worshipping the planter that the giant catnip plant is wedged in at the moment - I don't think she can climb into the planter, or it could get very ugly.  She is not a pretty spaced out person.

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We lifted the shallot harvest on Wednesday - magnificent though I say so myself - and they are now drying on a nice bulb drying tray I got from a chum locally - thanks Brigitte!  I am concerned about the spuds.  They have flowered and there is a lot of die back.  I foolishly didn't read the packet properly and these are second earlies, so I am hoping they are doing what comes naturally, as the other explanation is Blight, which is Bad.

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Have a good week!

 

Still a chunk of weather out there!

I wouldn't want to be considered one who rubbernecks, but I did feel that if it was from a suitable distance, getting sight of what had happened at St Nicholas de Bourgeuil a couple of weeks ago would be interesting.  It didn't disappoint, and on Friday, as I took a different route to Chinon, I was able to stop just below the buildings of la Jarnoterie (many may know this grower) and look across the vineyards to something that might be compared to what Godzilla would do if she visited the area.  The village is still blocked off, and quite rightly.

The weather is really not right for this time of year, with sweatshirts not banished to the back of the cupboard, jeans de rigeur much of the time and mushrooms!  Further south, friends have found cèpes.  Yesterday we found three different varieties in the Garden - none of them convincing for eating purposes, but wrong at the beginning of July.

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There are also the things that you would expect from this time of year - lovely banks of lavender humming with bees and hawkmoths, peacock butterflies on the buddleia and marbled whites on the wild scabious.  Our nascent herbaceous border has lots of bee friendly flowers out now as well as hidden shrubs and rampant weeds - actually it is hard to distinguish it from the surrounding weeds as it has been too wet to get a mower in there to define the edges.

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Of course July in France is all about la grande boucle - the Tour de France - and today they are up in the mountains with an uphill finish at Tignes.  I downloaded the Tour de France app this lunchtime and am impressed by it.  But now I must go and watch the utter pain and ultimate glory of an uphill finish!

Until next week!

 

 

Let's talk weather, gardens and partying

The weather remains the number one topic in our household as British visitors start to drift over for the summer and expect their gardens to look lovely, while the incessant rain makes that pretty near impossible.  There was a brief window of dry weather on Thursday when we could get out to deal with the two most urgent cases, but even so the ground is now soggy, and in places it isn't nice to drive a ride on lawnmower.  To add insult to injury, in the short period where you can use motorised garden tools yesterday (Sunday) morning, it rained and then rained most of the afternoon too, so that we got soaked again doing a necessary harvest, plus some emergency weeding and sowing!

Weather

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The crop that had to be harvested yesterday, when I should have been writing this blog, was the garlic.  The stems were dying down and the wet soil would not help the ability to store the bulbs, so we got them in and put them to dry in the wood store.  In about a week I should be able to pick over them and pack them better for storage.  We also lifted another of the conical Hispi cabbages that we have been growing.  We picked the first one on Tuesday and had it steamed with butter - o my word how yummy was that!  There are also occasional surprising flowers, like this magnificent orange day lily.

Garden produce

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As more people get vaccinated (I had my second jab today), and we get used to seeing places open, life is getting a little more social.  Monday morning was nice (the afternoon was truly vile), and it was pleasant to sit out in the place near the Mairie in Chinon and watch café society.  Saturday was a day for partying, and so as well as going to a micro-brewery for an excellent beer tasting (as designated driver, I got a tiny sip of each), we actually went out for a meal for the first time in many, many months.  I don't think I've eaten out since October last year in fact, so it was lovely to sit under the plane trees in Chinon and have a meal cooked by a professional.  Finally, there is a significant birthday (well not in number terms, but in the person whose birthday it is) in the village this week, and the pub laid on a little do for her and her chums (including us) yesterday morning on their covered terrace.  A good thing the terrace is covered, as it p***d down with rain all through.  It was so nice to see people other than the family circle!

Getting social

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And then there are animals.  Don't ever think that chickens are cute and cuddly, they are closely related to dinosaurs (remember the velociraptors of Jurassic Park), omnivores who will eat anything.  Mac or Jak found a baby bird, and spent a happy hour running around trying to eat it and keep it all for herself too.  As hens don't have teeth, and don't know how to keep things quiet, this took a long time, and was disgusting. 

There is a small, spring-fed pool at one of the houses where we do lawns.  We have seen newts in it in the past, but this week it was all waterboatmen and frogs.  When the photo was taken, there were 8 sitting out on leaves and making a racket, and I suspect if I had stood still for a bit longer, there would have been more.  Either a frog orgy or a tenement!

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Apologies for being a day late - I'll try to do better next week.

 

Brutal weather and projects

I stupidly mentioned kindly weather last time round - well that will teach me!  Last Sunday was hot and the temperatures just kept rising on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.  I was on mowing duty on Monday and had to do that in the morning to keep it reasonable.  Tuesday evening aperos were in the garden and 31ºC at 7pm, so of course when it broke on Wednesday, it went with a bang!  There were reports of tornados, hours of sheet lightening and heavy rain Wednesday to Thursday, and I saw the damage as I drove the roads round Rillé on Friday.  It was still hot and sticky though, so more showers, more storms, more humidity.  Yesterday that culminated in a storm front that went across France causing havoc.  We were lucky, but St Nicholas de Bourgeuil lost its church spire to a tornado, while the floods in Saumur and towns near Paris and Reims were extraordinary.

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Yesterday was market day, and as I had company and the terraces are open, we took the opportunity to stop at one of the cafés around the market to have a drink and watch the world go by.  I am used to watching sparrows scavenge around under tables, but it was the first time I've seen a chaffinch do that.  If you are reading this on a computer or tablet, it is worth looking closely at the third photo - I'm rather proud of that one!

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This morning, after paying homage to the Cats in the Country, we went to the open day at l'Or de la Ruche - a professional bee keeper and purveyor of honey, where there was also an exhibition on Asian hornets and how to trap them, and a bit of a producers' market too.  It was a lovely little event, no face masks as there was plenty of space to spread out, and yet enough people to let you think life might return to normal one day.

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This afternoon we went out to a Brocante - O, how daring and how wonderful!  We were on a mission as the Chinon One would like a footstool for his birthday next week, and this seemed a likely place - a huge warehouse at Beaufort en Vallée.  Bizarrely, footstools were not plentiful.  There were bar stools, milking stools, coffee tables and a camel saddle, but just one footstool - rather modern and with a not very nice cover, but at 10€, something of a bargain, even if we are going to recover it.  It seems to do what was required anyway.  We did find another option as well - an old barley twist chair that has certainly seen better days, and the back struts are badly split.  But take off the back, cover the sawn off bits with a bit of foam and new fabric, add the missing stretcher, give it a good polish, and the chair will make a rather fine and unique foot stool as well.

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Until next week!

 

Orchids, roses and vegetables

The first half of the week passed in a blur of reading reports, analysing numbers and trying to get it all down in a logical way and make some sense of it all.  By Wednesday evening, when the first draft of the report was sent, my mind was mush.  Thursday I must have done something useful - but it is hard to remember what.  Ah yes, new cylinder for the sodastream, visiting a couple of clients, feeding cats and sewing labels into summer shirts - clearly I did quite a bit that was useful!!

After the usual Friday visits, the new normal allowed us to go to the pub, sit out on the terrace and enjoy being around people, while taking on a glass or two of something cold.  It is so good to start the old normal experiences.  Tomorrow should have seen a bit of yoga too, but local elections mean the large village hall wasn't available, while the room offered as a substitute, as well as having a huge framed photo of the President, was not really conducive to socially distanced yoga for seniors.  So we are cancelled until September, which is a shame.

Today we were out and about before the temperatures got too hot to do anything other than wilt.  As well as productive things (more later), I spotted three different types of orchid out - two in the Orchard, and one in the One Acre Wood.  Here are a bee, a lizard and a birds nest!

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The roses are also coming on nicely at The Shack.  There is a splendid white climbing rose with a delicate scent by one of the outbuildings, which is putting on a great display - next week will be all about dead heading I guess.  The Fergus Memorial Rose, or Orange King as the label more officially calls it, has also put out its first flower.  I photographed it both yesterday and today, but today's photo was after there had been a lot of strimming, so there were bits of shredded weed in the flower.  I've not included that one!

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The vegetables are coming on.  Today I picked all remaining broad beans, and also lifted one of the main crop garlic to see what was going on, as the leaves and stems looked like they had been ravaged by rust, but there was a nice bulb and later on we will eat it to check on flavour!  The sweetcorn I sowed last Saturday ALL came up, so I had to spend time thinning out the excess plants, which really, really hurt.  I also planted out three more butternut squashes and four Bright Lights chard, the latter hidden among the shallots to get a bit of shelter while they establish themselves.  The shallots will be lifted in about a month at which point the chard can do what it likes.  Getting rid of the broad bean plants will give the peppers, aubergines and tomatoes more light, which will be good.

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There is also a lot of wildlife around.  Yesterday we visited a friend so John could do his Lawnmower Repair Man act (not totally successfully, but there is a deeper seated problem than he can get at).  She has swallows nesting in her stables and while the parents were out gathering beakfuls of insects for the offspring, I was able to look in and catch a photo.  Today, after I had toiled and done hammock time as a reward, I did my nature walk around the Orchard and the Wildlife Meadow.  The wild scabious is coming out which means an explosion of marbled white butterflies, which are just lovely to watch and occasionally take a photo of too!

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Next week's episode may be a bit late, but should have more exciting things to discuss, assuming the weather is a bit kind.

 

 

Spring proper, or even summer, has arrived!

It was pretty brutal and unsubtle, but at 5:45pm on Thursday afternoon, the fine weather arrived.  It had been announced for that morning, so I had planned to mow on Thursday afternoon, but as the rain didn't stop until perhaps 5am, and there was no wind, there was no way the grass would be dry enough.  Yesterday was therefore mowing day - and annoyingly, although promised that there would be light rain only on the western most tip of Finistere and the top of the Cotentin peninsular, I got remarkably soggy! 

Not much happened during the week - I worked, which is probably a good thing.  I had a tender rejected - not such a good thing, but kind of expected, as I am on an organisation's list for "good for a tender if you need to make up numbers".  I work on the basis that one day they will have to choose me out of sheer embarrassment at having put me through the process so many times!  Not this time it would appear. 

When I went to Aldi yesterday, enough people were generous to their mothers and well prepared (it is mother's day here), so that there were some of their annual batch of cheap small orchids left over.  So I got me one - a different colour to the other two.

As I said, I went mowing yesterday, and the wild irises are out at the lake.  One of ours that hasn't flowered before was out at The Shack, while some that I hadn't noticed before at Chinon were looking nice and blousy, so here are a selection of irises.

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This morning we were working at The Shack in the garden there.  John needed to rotavate a patch that had been covered since last summer before the underlying clay sets hard for the rest of the season, so lifted the weed suppressant mat.  In doing so, he met three of our assistants in keeping slugs and snails under control, although they had to be evicted or they would have become blood and bone fertiliser!!  Meet the slow worm, the adder and Timid Toad!

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It has warmed up enough, and the plants have got so tall, that we could remove the plastic cloches from the tomato plants and tuck them away somewhere away from the sun, so that they are ready to use in the autumn or next spring.  If the peppers and/or chillies are doing well enough, they may need a bit of cover in October to finish ripening fruits, but otherwise it will be next April or so when they come back out.  There is a bit of caterpillar damage on a couple of the cabbages, but they still look good and we are munching our way through the broad beans.  I'd better confess that the sweetcorn has once again been a disappointment with 51 seeds sown and only 7 coming up.  We did a bit of forensic seed seeking and found nothing, absolutely nothing.  Some something has had it away with my seeds, and I need to resow, assuming I can find any more seeds of course!

I also went on a bee orchid hunt, as usual, and while some had disappeared, I found a new patch and got a half way decent photo for once!

All that left me a bit tired, so I had to offer myself a chunk of hammock time to recover - well that's my excuse anyway!  And it is Sunday after all!  Until next week!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - jaunting!

Because I can't work Fridays, as they are devoted to the needs of the Azay One, Saturdays are the new Sundays, and I toil in the vegetable patches on a Sunday morning and in front of a computer on a Sunday afternoon - it sort of makes sense.  Anyway, with the patchy weather we have at the moment, plus we used up the last bottle of tender winning celebration fizz, we decided it was time to go south of the river (la Loire) and stock up again.  We haven't been down there since before Christmas 2019!.  I put the laundry out, just to draw in clouds and rain (it worked - 2.5mm while we were out), and then we jaunted down to Ackermans at St Hilaire-St Florent, just by Saumur.  The buildings are rather magnificent and they are the front for miles of tunnels into the rock where millions of bottles of rather good fizz are stashed.

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We invested in 6 bottles each of Cuvée Privé Blanc and Rosé - hopefully they will last the year, but hopefully not all of them assuming we have things to celebrate!  We also got a worryingly cheap 10 litre wine box of red.  We may survive.

On the way home, we stopped in on the cats at The Shack and fed them and admired the growth on the potatoes above ground.

In the garden at home, we have the next colour irises coming out - a nice pale lilac colour.  We don't have many and they get frightfully abused, but they are pretty.

And a final note of "isn't nature wonderful?" if you like that sort of thing.  I was wandering back down the garden last night having locked up the chickens, and spotted the unmistakable yellow blob that is a spider nest erupting with lots of little spiders.  By this morning they were gone, dispersed naturally or eaten by the wildlife that lives in the garden.  For the squeamish, the photo is deliberately out of focus!!