Rural Life

Lockdown III, Day 2 - not so nice as yesterday

No sun-drenched photos today as the weather has taken a colder and duller turn, and we wait agog for some rain!  We've not had rain, proper rain, since John seeded a new lawn about 3 weeks ago - blame him!!  We had to go back to The Shack today to feed the Boys in the Country, so took some time to check the Asian Hornet trap we have there (I did write about it last year, but can't immediately find the blog).  I'd been pretty chuffed to find one critter in there on Friday last week, but today there were 3!  Nasty brutes too.  It is important to trap and kill these over-wintered queens as they have small nests dotted about, in which they are raising their fertile brood of up to a dozen future queens.  Get them now and that is up to a dozen per queen big nests full of bee eating hornets that won't happen.

We also admired, or tried to, the shallots that are starting to come up.  We were so pleased with how they grew last year, that we bought rather more this year, and there is a larger bed with 33 sets trying to do what they do.  They are hampered in that by big fluffy cats who find nicely turned, dry earth a lovely way to remove excess fur, and roll around in an abandoned fashion.  This is Donald doing his thing.

We walked the boundaries to check that all was well, and met the neighbours at the bottom of the orchard where there are a couple of small ponds.  They thought we were very interesting.

And then we admired cherry blossom along the boundary of the wild flower meadow - you can see just how different it is to the pear blossom I showed yesterday, can't you?  Sadly as it was cold, there was no comforting buzz of busy bees and no cherry blossom perfume, but that will be back later in the week with the sun.

The sun should be back tomorrow, for rather prettier pictures!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 40 - intellectually that should be it

Quarante - Quarantine - 40 days of lockdown, and in theory that should be it, although the French government never said that it would be over today, but next Tuesday it should be, except...  Those pesky daily new cases figures are not getting down to the 5,000 a day that would mean they feel they have this under control.  I suspect a slight alleviation of restrictions on Tuesday next week, and then another lockdown about the 5th January.  I'm not putting money on it though.

Today has been a day of little jobs, but that make things progress.  This morning we cut more bits off the cherry tree.  The next thing will be to get the main trunk down and then we will have to decide what to do with that bit of the garden, which has always been very sheltered due to the size of the tree.

I also designed the Christmas card, ready to take to the printers tomorrow, and wrote the Christmas round robin - yes, I know everyone sneers at them, but actually I like to know what is going on in people's lives, beyond the fact that they ARE alive, and do as you would be done by and all that!  After lunch we visited the Boys in the Country for much needed cat cuddles and then to the One Acre Wood to secure some firewood.  One of the delights of the wood, is that it is on a ridge of hills overlooking the Loir valley, and we have a splendid view for miles.  It was looking particularly pleasing today.

It's about time to reassess how the orchid is coming on, and you can see that there are some interesting developments.  The first three buds on the new flower stem would appear to be branches that will have flowers on, while the next couple are starting to look a lot like flower buds and slowly swelling.  It is very odd, for days nothing seems to change, and then all of a sudden I notice something different.

If you want to compare, the first photo was on November 9th (Day 11) and the second on November 23rd (Day 25).

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 39 - a walk in the wood

Today has not been an exciting day to write about.  I've been doing a bit of work with one of my clients, and would heartily recommend the Water, Mills and Marshes LPS website as a place to linger to learn about the Norfolk Broads, the mills there and the work being done to restore land and buildings, and to educate people.  I was there in early March, just before the first lockdown hit, and it is a hauntingly beautiful area.

Less cheery was the news that the staff at the Francois Rabelais Hospital in Chinon have been affected by Covid quite badly.

Yesterday however, after a visit to the Boys in the Country, I took the long way home and visited the One Acre Wood for a walk and contemplation.  The previous Sunday we had both visited and had worked hard to fill the trailer with firewood.  The weather had been perfect - sunny and a hint of warmth.  Yesterday the conditions were less good, and I was on my own, but there were still interesting things to marvel at, including self-seeded cyclamen plants, and the ever changing light and views as more leaves fall. 

The service trees do not make good firewood (although we gather they aren't bad for charcoal), and often just collapse and fall for no obvious reason.  We tend to leave the trunks to rot down or provide food for whatever passes through the wood.  I found evidence of something having a good rummage in one of the logs.

Further round, I found a new mushroom had come up - it is a bit late, as many of the others that were around earlier in the year have rotted away or are looking like something from a horror movie.  I don't know why but pied de mouton (hedgehog mushrooms in English) seem to fruit very late in our woodland, and this is a rather nice example.  They are edible I gather, but I'm never entirely sure about them, and none of the hunters or scrumpers that come through the wood take them, so I leave them as an interesting curiosity and further evidence of the excellent biodiversity there.

In the words of the song, it beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as holly berries are everywhere and haven't been eaten yet by the birds.  In another week or so I might be inclined to cut a few sprigs and make a wreath, or I might just leave them to be enjoyed by nature.  I'll see how I feel.  I won't have them in the house, as the berries might be food for mice, and might be poisonous for cats.

With three cats living in the house, you would think I wouldn't be too worried about mice, but Zola brings them in and then forgets about them.  A couple have been living hidden in a crack between kitchen units and only coming out when we aren't moving, to eat their way through a packet of polenta.  Once we realised what was going on, we kept the packet in place, and caught one, and took it away outside.  Its chum finished the packet on Sunday morning.  On Sunday evening, it was looking for something else and making a noise, and for once Zola followed up, laid in wait for about 10 minutes and caught it.  And ate it - as the only evidence I found was a tail and a bit of "inner mouse".

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 38 - Sunday ramblings

Another cold, miserable, dank, late autumn/early winter day, and again so hard to get motivated to do anything!!  However after lunch, duty called.  John went off in one direction to see a client, but failed to extract money.  I went off in another to feed the Boys in the Country.  All four turned up quickly and the tin of beef and carrot chunks in gravy disappeared with a lot of slurping noises.  I've tried recording it, but it is the stuff of nightmares.  I'll spare you for the moment (or until I work out how to transfer the sound file in).  Once all the bowls were broadly clean, I put on my wellies and went out to beat the bounds - it was not a day to sit down for a love in.  I found a few raspberries clinging on and the couple I ate were very tasty!

Further down on my wandering, I found I had missed a last courgette.  The local slugs and snails hadn't, so I decided to leave it, as slugs and snails are food for my trusty toads that also live down that way.  Just one small one wouldn't make a meal for us anyway!

I then went round the other two plots, escorted as ever by at least one cat, to make sure all was safe and secure.  The badgers hadn't been out since the last rain (which would have been this morning), so there were no traces of them.

While we have perhaps between two thirds and three quarters of the wild flower meadow under control, there is still a chunk that needs to be got back from bad scrub.  If you leave rewilding to itself, essentially you end up with invasive scrub, which is great for brambles, mice, rats and other stuff, but doesn't favour wild orchids, the plants for butterflies and doesn't seem to be popular with the badgers either.  Next year we will try to claim back another 10 to 20 meter deep stretch of the meadow.

Finally, with a nod to the Festive Season, I share the progress on growing the brussels sprouts for John's Christmas dinner - they are small, but they are there!

Like that they even look faintly appealing to me!!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 32 - out and about

After yesterday's rant on the charms (or lack of) of ride on lawnmowers, today I will be much more measured and (I hope) interesting.  Yesterday was all about preparing firewood and recovering from the sheer bl00dy hard work that entails.  It was a magnificent, if cold, morning, so once I had set off an oxtail in the slow cooker, we went to the One Acre Wood to sort out our heating needs.  Our woodland is chestnut coppice with oak stands, as well as annoying amounts of service (or chequers), holly (lots of berries this year) and four pine trees.  The mix of oak, chestnut and pine is down to the requirement to grow oak for national needs (as set down by Napoleon), while the chestnut and pine are to service the needs of the local terracotta tile making industry - the coppiced chestnut provided the required heat for the kilns, while the pine sap provided the resin to glaze the tiles and make them waterproof.  Or some such story anyway.

The oaks are magnificent and we would not touch them for firewood, unless we are taking off unhelpful side branches.  This is the Queen of the Forest.

Chestnut is fair game though, and actually we have quite a bit of standing dead or nearly dead wood, which we are working our way through.  Yesterday John achieved a text book fell of a long dead tree, which I got to mark up into 50cm lengths for him to saw through.

The bigger or fatter bits get split and it all gets loaded into the trailer to take home where it is stored and dried in the more ventilated of our two cellars.  Each piece of firewood is estimated to be handled 9 times between being part of a tree and being on the fire, and that could be an underestimate.  Processed chestnut like this is sold at about 70 to 80 euros a stère (or cubic metre, 3 stères is a corde), which makes it in our view a very good value fuel if you have the right sort of wood burning stove (chestnut spits like crazy so has to be burned in an enclosed burner).  It's even better value if you own the wood in the first place!  This is our booty from yesterday - a stère of processed chestnut.

Today we were out dealing with a collapsed cherry branch - the morning was freezing and dull, this afternoon was brighter but very cold, so we had to keep active.  The better action shot would have been when we took the last chunk of the branch off, but I was holding a rope to swing the wood away from a pipe coming out of the shed, so had my hands full.  And then when it did come off, I ended up on my back in the ploughed field.  Someone thought that was funny.

There was some pretty autumn colour at this cottage - but a weirdly late flowering crocosmia!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 31 - the truth about ride on lawnmowers

Yesterday's activity and post got us chatting about ride on lawnmowers yesterday evening - yes, we have such fun!  For a start, how did we end up with 5?  So the next few paragraphs distil our experience and knowledge and may be of use to those that are thinking about them and those that want to replace them.

What are they good at?

Mowing large, flat areas of grass and light scrub with no trees or shrubs, no moles, easy access, no gravel, and no tricky bits.  If you have a suitable small trailer, towing things on the flat and strictly within your own boundaries.

What are they not so good at?

Mole hills, damp grass, fiddly bits, slopes, being moved from one site to another, gravel, narrow entrances.

What do you need to watch out for?

They are possibly the most dangerous piece of gardening equipment you can own, I say possibly because a chainsaw is clearly more dangerous, but people have a healthy respect for them.  My brother worked in insurance and read too many accident reports involving ride on mowers - when I started using them, he was really concerned and kept sending me nasty reports.  I have a healthy respect for them.

You do actually have to insure the things!  Not just against theft (although they do get pinched regularly), but against civil liability (think gravel, think injury to people or animals or fencing).  And that's not cheap.

They are tricky and expensive to maintain - wheels get punctures regularly, batteries generally only live about 4 years, and don't get me started on drive belts for the engine or the cutters!  The required lifts are expensive and irritatingly simple for the price, and the ramps for getting them on and off trailers are similarly expensive and annoying.  And yes, you will need a large, legal for your car, trailer to go with your ride on, because it will break down and need to visit a mechanic.

And on the subject of moving them around - they don't like it!  You see them being taken for drives on trailers around here, but our observation is that a ride on that moves around a lot for work lasts about 2 to 3 years, because they get bounced around so badly on the trailer, bits fall off.  They are not small tractors - build quality can be pretty shonky.  That's why we have so many - we don't move them between sites unless absolutely essential.

They don't actually replace having a conventional mower, as they don't do edges, tight spots, banks and ramps, around pools, and they don't give a particularly nice finish either.  Well some do - but those are the extremely posh, expensive ones that golf courses can afford.  If you have one that collects grass, you have to stop every 10 to 15 minutes to empty a very heavy collector, and also ungum the places where grass clippings fly.  If you have lateral ejection, you spread grass clippings everywhere, and if you have a mulching plate on your lateral ejection, you can only mow when it is very, very dry.

So as well as your ride on mower, you need a conventional mower and a strimmer, plus all trees and shrubs need to allow something 5 foot tall minimum underneath, plus all gates and entrances must be wider than about 4 foot to allow safe passage.  The storage area needs to have a post concreted in so you can padlock your dream machine to it, in the hope it doesn't get nicked while you aren't looking.

If you have 5,000 square meters or more of flat grassland, it can save time: anything less, or with lots of trees and slopes, buy the best conventional mower with traction and electric ignition you can afford - it will still be about half the price of the ride on you yearn for, will give you a much nicer lawn and garden, and you can still listen to your MP3 while mowing.  And that is the advice of people who use them regularly!!

To end this rather dull reflection on life, here is a photo of the limpid, clear and very cold waters of the village wash house, no longer used for beating one's whites in a communal gathering, but a very pretty place to visit.

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 28 - running late

The best laid plans and all that - I had planned on penning an exposé of the new stage 1 release from lockdown rules today, complete with how that would change my life.  I took some nice photos of cats and imagined a charming story to go with them.  I could have written about the wonders of keeping a fire banked in overnight - something we very rarely manage.  But it is time to talk to Chinon, then do dinner, so here is a photo of the fire this morning:

Here is a photo of a nice rural view:

And here is a photo of a cat in a walnut tree - honestly, there is a cat in the walnut tree!

I promise to be more entertaining tomorrow!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 6 - out and about

Thanks to advice from chums who read this via Facebook, I decided to brave the market at la Flèche, armed with my attestation and a shopping list.  I was glad I did - for a start it was a lovely drive up, with magnificent leaf colour most of they way.  Parking by the river was easy, and I could stand and watch this view for hours!

Pretty well all my regulars were there, except the bread, croissant and cake stand, which was a real shame as I had been looking forward to croissants later in the week (although the porridge is still magnificent).  I came home laden with local produce including a very fine cauliflower and a christophine - probably the only one this year, as the guys who manage to grow this tropical delicacy found that the polytunnels were too hot for it this year.

This afternoon I finally started on a rather nasty but essential task, and progressed it as far as I could, at which point I felt that I needed a treat and some exercise.  Armed with another attestation (fortunately the paper supplies 3 normal and one work related per day), I set out on a short but beautiful walk.  First I turned up the mediaeval Rue Basse to the Church.

I then walked down to the Pont de Godeau (once again, he didn't turn up).  Passing by the wall of the mini-chateau, I noticed they had a very fine crop of olives this year.  If they have a couple of kilos, I'm sure they could get them pressed for oil at the oil mill - we are thinking we might get some walnut oil made, if I spend a period of confinement cracking them.

I then went up to the Route de Beaufort, along a bit and back down the Rue de la Croix de la Mission.  I had to go over the old railway line, now a walking and cycling path.  I did pass a jogger at one stage, and spent a few minutes contemplating how far he was taking the Mick, as he had clearly come and intended to go further than 1 kilometre from his home base or his place of work.  But what the hell - people are working within the spirit of the regulations, and keeping their distance, and that is surely the point.  I was wearing a mask too, so should have been safe from any droplets he was shedding around him. 

Anyway, on the field side of the disused railway, I spotted this magnificent spindle bush covered in bright pink berries.  The higher up berries are hawthorn and can be cooked, but spindle is pretty poisonous so is best admired at a distance.

And then towards home and the road back to the village - a very nice walk, but not the longest I can do in my allotted hour and within the radius of one kilometre, but more about that another day.  Now I must join a Women in OR and Analytics virtual conference.

A demain!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 4 - a precious hour

I can't remember if sleep was hard to come by in the first confinement, but this time round it isn't easy, and there have been some deeply weird dreams.  Today I am trying a healthier day to see if that makes any difference.  First off, and force majeure as there is no bakery in the village any more, was breakfast, and a delicious bowl of porridge with quince jelly to get the day going.  Hopefully the oats will prove that they really are a super food - quince is also pretty special.  I should point out that I don't make the porridge, and it is also not my quince jelly - so a double treat, in that someone else made it all!

The weather was once again miserable, so for much of the day, I had to content myself with staring at the computer and dealing with trying issues that threaten to overwhelm me at the moment.  So it was a relief as it got round to four o'clock that the skies cleared a bit, and I could change my mindset and find a blank attestation, my map of allowed walks and a few bits to deliver.  Then I strode out armed with ID card, attestation, face mask and a desire for exercise and fresh air.

Once I had dropped off the things that needed to be dropped off, and had chatted with a friend who was walking her dog, I pursued the route I had mapped out in my head.  Once I got to the highest point, I could look out towards the main road and one of the chateaux in the area, but actually while I thought a view into the distance would help, it only showed how short a distance I could go towards the horizon.

Back into the village and I went down to the Pont de Godeau (you can wait there, but Godot doesn't turn up I find) to see how the local river is swollen with the recent rain.  That was a far more satisfying view.

This time, parks are not closed, so I could walk around the village lake and look back along the valley.  Here I could let my imagination run wild as I was close to the site of the Battle of Vieil Baugé, (in)famous for being the turning point of the Hundred Years War.  But sadly I stayed firmly grounded in the here and now - not least as next year is the 600th anniversary of the battle, but how many of the plans for celebrating that will actually happen?  I had hoped my Scottish friends would be able to join us, but that looks less likely (the invitation still stands, guys).

Clearly I need to prepare myself mentally before taking advantage of my precious hour out and about.  Something for tomorrow.

 

Autumn Lockdown - new beginings

I guess it was predictable, and following a day mostly spent in bed with a migraine, it was with enormous trepidation that we sat and watched the President's address last night.  As expected, he announced a four week national lockdown, but kicking in a day or two sooner than many had thought.  There was I think less warning this time, or rather, less official warning.  We are also on alert here for bird 'flu, so things are pretty special.  So here's a heads up - from tomorrow, the daily lockdown blog post starts again!

This one seems to me more daunting than the last one.  Already days here are short, with only 10 hours between sunrise and sunset, and that will only get less between now and late December.  The weather will get worse - despite a slight reprieve in temperatures over the next few days, we are heading for winter, and can spend less time outside and less comfortably.  There really is nothing to look forward to now in 2020 - all events are cancelled that we would usually go to - and the last of the "part timers" left today - we doubt we will see any others before the New Year now.

The glories of Autumn are nearing their end.  We found these cèpes in the One Acre Wood a couple of weeks ago, and there may be a couple more this weekend, but then days are too short and cold to get them going again until next year.  These were delicious by the way!

This year has been particularly good for cyclamen.  The ones in the lawn started in July, and are still going, with some very dense patches of pink flowers.  The ones in the One Acre Wood don't last as long but have been going for a couple of months now, including two new flowering corms which have clearly self-seeded.  These delicate white flowers are a real joy to me, whatever the weather.

Autumn also means we have an extra visitor downstairs - the log fire.  It is like another member of the family and a welcome sight and feeling on cold and wet nights.  Lockdown brings challenges with finding firewood - we might have to go out and about with our best Professional Forest Workers kit on, but that is something to worry about another day.

The same day as the new confinement was announced, I received my official number for my new way of earning money.  I am now officially registered as an autoentrepreneur that helps people out with translating and interpreting (NOT official translations having said that) to get through daily life over here in France.  So getting that business up and running when I can't go out and about very much is going to be really easy, isn't it?  2020 just keeps giving!