Rural Life

Quiet days of August

Last week was the flurry of excitement that is the annual Comice here in Baugé en Anjou, and since then, things have generally been much quieter.  Local people are either on holiday or preparing for the Rentré next week - the start of September that brings a new school year, a new year for the sports and arts clubs, people going back to work and taking things a bit more seriously, being able to get an artisan to answer the phone, the tax assessment results, getting the chimney swept and starting to think about winter heating.  It's a big thing here, probably bigger than New Year, and taken most seriously.

For us, it should mean that the holiday makers disperse, making it easier to park at the local markets, less frantic calls from people who can see weeds in their lawn or furry pears on their trees (actually known as quince, but there we go), and a slightly less fraught diary.  In fact, in previous years, September has been a month where I have had something on every weekend, and sometimes more than one thing too.  This year seems more sane - only a pig roast in a couple of weeks' time and perhaps being able to visit things for European Heritage Weekend.

The gardens are relatively quiet - chillies are ripening, as are the meagre corn cobs, borlotti beans are flowering and setting and the potatoes need to be lifted.  With August, some of the loveliest flowers arrive - cyclamen.  They are mainly pink but some are white, and over the years, the clumps get larger.  The ones in our lawn started as the odd flower here and there and now have spread.  It's the same in the One Acre Wood.  These ones are at The Studio and seemed to come up overnight.

Although the weather remains frustratingly dry, there are more clouds in the evening now, which make for colourful sunsets.  I'm never great at taking photographs of these, but I am getting better, and this one was a pleasing one.

I've not taken many photographs this week, and the trail camera was pointing at an area that looked like it was a badger playground.  Well if it was, they weren't playing last week.  The camera has moved and there are no photos to share from it, so I will have to round off with a photo of young Monsieur Clause, who is looking very sleek and pleased with himself at the moment.  I think he is having a good mousing season.

I'll take more and better photos this week - I promise.

 

Piggie fun and other stuff

It's been a busy couple of weeks, with the report for the Marches Mosses BogLIFE last weekend and helping some people move out of their lovely maison secondaire this weekend, which included moving a lot of furniture, and not all of it ours.  We have had our much-loved DFS sofa and armchair for over 30 years, and while they started out stylish and comfortable, the sofa had become a lot less comfortable with time, while my beloved armchair was visually a thing of shame, if not horror when some of the innards splurged out.  The friends who are leaving had two smart small sofas and no desire to keep them and passed them to us.  My armchair went to the tip, but the sofa moved next door (!), and their sofa went to the tip as well.

We also have an embarrassment of storage units, shelving units, garden chairs and tables, extension cables and running blocks, chainsaws, rakes, spades, mowers, books, DVDs and bedding.  At least I know what I will do with the excess bedding...

Taking a breather from moving storage and shelving units around, we had a chat to the neighbour of the people moving out.  His garden is immaculate in general, although his front garden has too many gnomes and white stones for my taste.  There was a vine of some sort going along the fence and in passing I had tended to assume it was a form of bryony, but discussing it with him, it turns out I was completely wrong.  A tender but thug-like vine, the cristophine (or however it is spelt), is a semi-tropical or tropical savoury vegetable, which looks pear-shaped but knobbly, and tastes rather like salsify to my mind.   It makes a very nice gratin.  Here is a baby fruit, which was about 3 inches long.

We moved the trail camera to nearer where the boar were finding food, and frankly it was a bit of a disaster.  The camera was normally upright for at most 12 hours before they bashed it over, looking for food.  Instead, we strapped the camera to a suitable tree and a bit higher up than normal too and waited to see what we caught.  I had hoped that there might be some badger action, but I think they stay out of the way of the boar.  The following five videos were over the last week, with three during daylight hours and two at night.  It is a sizeable family group, with two parents, possibly a couple of young from the previous litter and smaller ones from this year's litter.  First the night time marauding, then the daytime playful ones - they seem to regard our orchard as a safe space - at least until the hunt come through the area (although they don't access "our" land).

The bright dots are eyes in the infrared light.

Daytime feeding is more amusing to watch.

And watching playtime, I am glad that this is as close as I ever get to a live one!

 

 

I'm hoping for a more tranquil week now, when I can concentrate on getting crops in and doing a lot of paperwork!

 

Autumn harvests and who gets what?

First off, an apology - I was unable to do this blog yesterday as the Typepad system was down for renovation (always worrying), but today it is back, so here goes!

We have had rain - not the torrential amounts seen down south, but enough to encourage some things to really put on a spurt - the red cabbages have huge leaves, the size of dinner plates, so I am hoping that we will soon see a heart developing.  Of course, I ask why I only bought 3 plants, but previous attempts have been disappointing at best.  The cauliflowers are also looking quite fine, so I hope for a few decent heads in the spring.  The agony of trying to grow a decent cauliflower is why they should be expensive in the shops!

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The chillies I set off from seed in the late spring are now covered in ripening fruits and I have already frozen 30 or so, which should deal with our need for spicy curry and chilli con carne for a year.  This time I grew two varieties, cayenne - the long thin ones, possibly from French Guyana, but a good solid favourite, and Jalopeno thanks to a free packet of seeds from Kitchen Garden magazine and probably about 5 years ago (they no longer provide seeds to European subscribers, so I no longer subscribe).  These have been a bit of a revelation, at least in the kitchen.  They take longer to ripen but the fruits are reliably hot and a bit juicier and plumper than the cayennes.  I may have to try to save seed for next year!

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The rain has also brought on the autumn flowers nicely and it was a real treat to see how the cyclamen in the One Acre Wood are starting to spread.  It seems to take four or five years for a cyclamen corm to go from a seed that produces a small leaf or two, to one that can support one or more flowers, and this patch have been tantalising in that I seem to have waited well over four years for these ones to flower, but now they have!  A real joy!

Autumn is also the time of nuts.  October 1st is generally the official start of the walnut harvest, as ancient wisdom says that those that fall before that aren't good.  This year that doesn't really work as the weather hasn't been "right", but the nuts are now coming off the good tree as well as all the others.  We really need to be on war footing with that tree as it is the one with the tastiest and plumpest nuts and other "people" also like nuts. 

When I went to check the trail camera yesterday, it was on its side - I thought perhaps a gust of wind had taken it, or a cat had been sitting on the log.  So, I righted it and then checked the photos and footage.  A first look at a daytime photo before the camera went over showed that there were visitors.

The five videos below show the marauding hoard and give an inkling as to what it is like to be investigated by a boar!

 

 

 

 

 

Something else has been getting the sweet chestnuts before me too, but that is a whole other story and not one I can comment on as the camera is too far away!

How long the boar will be in the zone, I don't know.  I suspect that will be determined by the hunt and when they decide to clear out all wildlife, but for the moment, we continue to enjoy the spectacle.

 

A question of who can harvest what!

It was an odd week, with The Funeral on Monday and falling temperatures and even, over the last couple of days, a weird phenomenon where water falls from the sky to make the ground moist rather than me lumping watering cans around!

Today I have lifted more of the potato crop and set it to try in a covered but open barn space.  We have also sown a bit of the grain we feed to the chickens as the price is going up and we need to scrimp and save a bit.  I picked a courgette today and there seem to be 5 more aubergines developing on the plants, but production is slowing down noticeably now.  With cooler weather and now we are past the vernal equinox, it is not entirely surprising that the summer crops are starting to flag.

So here are the potatoes in their drying rack - those on the left were dug up last week and have had the small and blemished ones removed for immediate consumption, while those on the right are what I dug up today without any triage.  Then there is the bed where the grain was sown.  The brassicas are looking a lot larger than when they went in - fortunately!!  The chard is doing well, and you can almost make out bean pods!

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We had to cover the seed bed with wire net to prevent it being used too much as a cat toilet, but it is bound to be used as a rolling around zone assuming the rain doesn't continue!

In the garden area we mainly defend things against cat bottoms and let nature take its course with any other visitors.  We have a pear tree in the garden that has been loaded with fruit this year, and we know when it is ripe as it falls off.  We do a triage before the chickens are released and John has a couple of barrels of burping brown goo which will be distilled early next year.  We had hoped to add some of the pears from the trees by the Meadow, but there never seemed to be any on the ground, while the ones on the tree remain fairly hard.  Well, the trail camera gave up its secrets during the week as the batteries needed boosted, so I took the opportunity to clear the SD card.  The camera has been pointing at the pear tree to see what is going on.

Badgers like pears.

It's probably not entirely unsurprising that boar rather like pears too!

The pine martin is actually trying to pick the pears off the tree though.

There's lots of deer and badger action, a hare and more from the pine martin but you'll have to wait until next week for that!

 

Back to School time

Actually, it is called the Rentrée and is taken very seriously here in France, with lots of things changing as well as kiddies going (back) to school.  It happened in general on Thursday last week, the 1st September, although we went out for lunch and were surprised at the number of people under 16 eating out with parents, and noticed the slow service due to the lack of people aged 15 to 18 serving tables.  It's the Rentrée effect. 

Another phenomenon at this time of year are the local Forums d'Associations or open day for clubs and societies, normally organised around a large sports or cultural centre, where you go to sign up for all the arts and sports and worthy things you are going to do after the Rentrée.  I got my sign up form for yoga for old people and talked to the blood donor society as I heard a rumour that rules are being relaxed about the British being able to donate blood.  Time will tell, as they recommended I speak to the doctor on duty at the next donor session on the 20th October.  A date for my diary.

The trail camera has been moved back "home" and was placed near a pear tree to see who is enjoying the pears as they fall, as we aren't getting a look in.  Sadly I placed it a bit too far away, and as the culprits attack after dark, and the infrared light only captures images so far, while the camera is tripping, I'm not getting much by way of images, certainly not video.  However here are three who are partly in the frame, and today I moved the camera closer to the tree, in the hope of seeing more soon.

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The vegetable plots are still going strong, with courgettes finally attempting to produce a glut, aubergines still producing slowly, butternuts filling and ripening, and the winter brassicas starting to look a bit more serious than they did when I first planted them.  We have red cabbage, winter cauliflower and Brussels sprouts in this row, and three more cauliflowers in another row.  Whether they will work or not, I don't know.  The soil is heavy clay which seems to suit brassicas, but weather and water are also important factors and those are in the lap of the gods.

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The uncultivated crops are coming on too - the hops are wild, or at least unintentional, and I don't know if they would be any good for brewing.  As for the sweet chestnuts, well they have a good while to go as they generally start to be ripe around the end of October.  They are still small, and may need more water than the gods provide this year, but there are a lot on the tree, so fingers crossed. 

Apparently I'm not allowed to show the photos of these for some reason, so instead I share a picture of the slow worm that I found when digging up potatoes earlier today.

As it took ages to get that image in, I think it is fair to say that the Web is also suffering from the Rentrée today, so I will leave it there and next week I hope to bring you more exciting images and events from rural France.

In the meantime, have a good Rentrée yourself.

 

 

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!

 

Scorchio!

As of 30 minutes ago, it's official, here in Maine et Loire we are on red alert for high temperatures.  I won't disagree as in my office on the north side of the house, it is 29ºC and heading to 30ºC.  One thing that means is that I will not be doing battle with YouTube to load up more video, you will have to make do with stills.  If you don't believe me, see the outdoor thermometer, hanging in the shade in the garden at 2pm (so two and a half hours ago).

It has been hot, averaging 28ºC or higher for over a week now, although last weekend there was a bit of a breeze.  Even so, we have seen the ravages of relatively mild heat stroke and I can only exhort people to be careful. 

As an example of what the heat is doing, here are two photos of one of my butternut squashes - the first is in sunlight, the second this morning while still shaded.  The squash has a natural defence mechanism to allow the leaves to flop when really hot and then repump up when it cools down, however the yellow scorch marks are not part of the plan.  A couple of squash plants have set fruit, but they may well reject them if this continues.  The courgettes  have given up for the moment too - I had to buy a couple at the market yesterday!!!

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We grow potatoes under weed suppressant mat.  It keeps the awful perennial weeds at bay, saves the need for earthing up and bizarrely provides habitat for a number of useful critters - slow worms, snakes, toads.  This year the potatoes are planted in soil that is as near to clay without being able to use it on a potter's wheel as you can get.  It's really heavy and horrible when wet.  Currently the top layer resembles pusilane - the pumice-like rocks you can get as decorative mulch or for use in a septic tank filter bed, but about 4cm below the surface, there is still a hint of moisture in there.  There are also potatoes - look what we got from just one plant, noting that it has hardly rained and I do not water the spuds!  Dinner in the making.

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I have rarely had a conversation with a farmer when they didn't complain about the weather in some way.  There is chuntering going on now about drought and poor yields.  They are working day and night to get the cereal crops in, collect in straw and hay, turn the stubble so it is less likely to catch fire (although that process can also start a fire if a plough hits a flint), and get water and feed to grazing cows and goats.  This year I can understand their angst, as I watch a crop of fodder maize near us develop - it is very early, but the cobs are meagre and the leaves are now curling with the heat and lack of water.  Maize is a very greedy crop.  Sunflowers, once they germinate, need less water.  Again they are a bit early this year, and fields have gaps where germination was poor, but there is still little better than a field of sunflowers against a blue sky, even when slightly past their best.

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The local wildlife has to cope with all this too.  The southern part of the Meadow includes a small bog and three small, spring-fed ponds which means that the deer, boar, badgers and others have somewhere to go and drink.  I strongly suspect that a family of boar are actually living in the bog at the moment - they would be foolish not to - but it is off limits to us at this time of year due to scrub overgrowth.  The doe and her faun are knocking around the area, while the faun develops - they seem to come past the trail camera every couple of days.  She enjoys eating the lower leaves off the good pear tree, but fortunately not the pears (we have other plans for them...).  The faun is getting braver and larger.

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And with that, it really is too hot to sit by a computer any longer!  I'm off to watch the end of the Tour stage at Carcassone.

 

Caught by the plague!

Last Sunday, when I was drafting my last blog, I thought I didn't feel quite right.  On Monday, I knew I didn't feel at all right, but a Covid test was negative, so I assumed a summer cold.  Tuesday morning I did another test, as I was supposed to be taking someone to an appointment - VERY positive!  Fortunately someone else could step into the gap, but I was not a happy bunny and didn't enjoy my brush with SARS-Covid-19 or whatever it is calling itself currently.

I thought I should perhaps share that positive test, but decided against it as too many of us have seen them now.

So the week was shaped by feeling a bit pants, wanting to sleep all the time, feeling cold (and actually the weather wasn't as warm as it might have been), and looking for elements of joy.  Well the garden is always good for that!  How about many shades of pink on one rose bush?  This shrub has been neglected and maltreated for over 22 years, but hardly ever stops flowering, it is a marvel.  And no, I don't know the variety.

Other handsome flowers out at the moment are this multicoloured daisy type thing, wild chicory flowers a deeper blue than I remember seeing before and each flower stuffed with a questing bee, and flowers on a cactus we bought years ago and abuse roundly.

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The vegetable plots are starting to feed us properly now.  On Saturday we enjoyed our first aubergine and more courgettes, while yesterday we had potatoes and more courgettes, flavoured with herbs from the garden.  The butternuts are starting run rampant which has to be a good sign, and I am hopeful that next weekend we will have haricot beans from the garden.  Planning for winter, we planted leeks where the potatoes were, and I have sown swiss chard (Bright Lights) seeds for next winter.  We have also spent time watering.

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Last weekend I moved the trail camera to the edge by a field of corn that I thought would be harvested soon (still there yesterday morning), as I wondered what would come off the field and into the meadow when it was done - perhaps hares?  The place I chose seems to be popular with wildlife and they appear to be used to the camera now, so there was a lot of deer action, a passing fox, a rather ugly young pheasant, and did I mention the deer?  Yesterday, when I was downloading video, a small faun was watching me from the shelter of the fruit trees.

Anyway, here are a selection of short reels for you to enjoy.

 

 

 

I think you can see a doe feeding a faun in the background of this one.

 

Anyway, apologies for the delay in posting - blame the Covid, I do!

I hope normal service will be resumed next week.

Weird weather and a garden update

Last Saturday, the temperature in our garden in the shade reached 44ºC - unbearable was one way to describe it!  By 11:15am, when I would normally be turning up at the market in Baugé, people had mostly left and some stall holders were preparing to pack up and go home.  It was suffocatingly hot.  Overnight, it started to cool down, but (perhaps fortunately for us) we didn't get the big storms other areas suffered.  Stories of golf and tennis ball size hail stones are becoming ordinary, although the damage they inflict on crops, buildings and cars remain traumatic for those impacted.  We got our big(-ish) storm on Thursday evening.  Enough thunder to worry one of the cats (a scaredy cat), lots of lovely rain and a weird coloured sky and sunset.  You can see how much rain we got at home, but at The Shack, where we really needed water, just 5mm!

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To keep flowers out of the reach of the beaks of the Garden Vandals and away from kitty bottoms, we grow a lot of our ornamental flowers in pots.  For some things it works really well, other things suffer a bit.  The giant Poundshop lily I bought last year (before Brexit restrictions) is doing well again, with the first flower now out.  The agapanthus, probably my favourite flower of all, even more than orchids, have also been doing well, as they seem to love abuse!  We have three pots of agapanthus, this is the middle flowering one.

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The vegetable plots are starting to pull away now.  I've started to lift odd potatoes - here is the booty from one, but I didn't dig it up, just robbed what I could find easily.  The handful of mangetout pea seeds have produced several handfuls of mangetout pods already.  The first aubergine has set and should be edible in a week or two.  We have now had 5 courgettes, which is the same as we had all season last year, and the French beans will come on stream next week I think.  The borlotti beans I sowed three weeks ago are now about a foot high, and there are about a dozen parsnips coming up which I sowed as an experiment.  There are also plums and pears developing, as well as walnuts, so things are looking good, as long as we can avoid the killer hail.

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While we no longer have an apricot tree, it is apparently a good year for the fruit, so yesterday I bought a tray of 5 kilos and made 22 pots of jam, or sunshine in a jar as some refer to it!

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The trail camera was very quiet this week after all the visitors last week, with only one image captured and no video, so today I moved it on to a new position which may or may not be interesting.  After that, it is going visiting at a friend's house, but I'll give it a couple of weeks on the new site first.

Anyway, that's the lot for today, more in July!

 

Flaming June!

Yes, June is here along with meteorological summer - the one that starts on 21st June is yet to come.  Of course as soon as we get to June, the weather starts to go funny on us.  Actually we have escaped the worst of it - the major thunderstorms around the area have produced 3 and 4cm hailstones, antediluvian rain, and odd squalls of wind.  We have amassed about 15mm rain, which has dampened things down a bit, though not as much as we might like.  The rumbles have been quite dramatic, and we now know that we have one cat who is scared of thunder!

The heat brought on the courgettes nicely - only 5th June and I can see male and female flowers developing!  It has brought out a magnificent flower head on one of the yukkas.  It also made this morning's labour possible - we did a bit of turning then pushed in 20 wiggle stakes and threaded them around with green metal grills and finally I sowed a borlotti bean for every upright wire in the fencing grill.  It looks a bit odd now, but we hope that in 8 to 12 weeks it will be covered with bean stalks and lots of pods of delicious, stripy borlotti beans.

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The trail camera has had an exciting week.  I choose not to share images or video of John doing the rounds with the big yellow beastie, keeping the paths open, but from the gallery of photos below, you can see that it has been quite busy for other things!

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And there's more!  As you might expect, there are videos to go with some of those images - baby boar really are adorable!

Mum is being quite protective.

 

And then there is badger action too.

 

All that cuteness!  Enjoy!  There won't be a blog next weekend, as I attend the Broads Festival at Beccles Quay and also go visiting the Marches Mosses on the Shropshire/Wales border, but there should be some different and interesting things to tell you about from both of those when I do my next update on the 19th June.

 

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!