Rural Life

It's that Christmas time of year

2024 is crawling towards its damp and muddy end - today adding strong winds to the mix.  Given the vile weather today, we took the advice of the television weather presenters and found fun indoors, going to the Baugé Christmas market.

For a small town, it packs above its weight in this regard.  Over three days, the cultural centre is taken over by craftspeople, food producers, wine makers, charities and Radio Parcay for a high quality event.  We spent a happy hour going round all the stalls.  We bought nougat from our favourite honey producer, an air plant for the bathroom, because it seemed a nice idea, and were tempted by a book by a local author.  He had a sculpture that visually described his profession in a bad French pun, which he happily explained to us as we were foreign, before telling us about his books. 

People were spending money which has to be good for the local economy, and we managed to miss any of the "special" events that were being put on by local music groups and musicians.  Indoors is too enclosed for a brass ensemble!

The village is nicely adorned with relatively low wattage Christmas lights, while town is festooned with them, as befits a Petit Cité de Charactere d'Anjou.  We can see a few from the house, but they are more in evidence when we walk to and from the pub on a Friday night.

This weekend, the hunters have been out, doing their best to bag a festive deer or boar for Christmas Day, although I'm not sure how lucky they have been.  There were a few fresh tracks in the Meadow and Orchard, as well as some festively coloured poo down by the ponds.  I'm not sure who the culprit is, possibly the pine martens.

A sure sign that winter is with us, is that the bird feeder is starting to get visited.  We put out fat balls from December to mid March for blue tits and great tits, and I think the long-tailed variety and tree creepers like them too.  We aim to attract tits as they will also attack the few nests of pine processionary caterpillars that we have in the pine trees.  Once they get into their stride, I will need to add four fat balls a week to the feeder, at the moment, it is just two every 10 days.

A gleam of brightness in the gardens is nice at this time of year, and some of the roses are putting out odd flowers.  The Silver Wedding rose we were given over 9 years ago has decided to bloom for Christmas, as it often does.  The white flowers are delicately scented and a joy when not much else natural is looking pretty.

So, not much more to be said today other than:

• Pay homage to your household gods
• Eat too much
• Drink too much (and DON'T drive)
• Count your blessings
• Spend time outdoors
• And have a lovely Christmas!

Until next week!

Cold, dull days

There is a German word, Dunkelflaute, which describes a gloomy, windless weather system, that is cold.  We have had that here for the past couple of months, interspersed with periods of just wet, windy and nasty.  Germany is currently suffering a major bout of Dunkelflaute, and that is placing a really heavy strain on the European electricity network.  Germany's electricity generation includes some 20GW wind capacity, and currently the turbines are not turning.  The knock on effect, combined with two country interconnectors being down, is that the power grids are doing all they can to reduce peak electricity use.  In the UK, you might spot a slight fluctuation down in power.  Here in France, if you are on the extremely interesting Tempo electricity contract, it translates into Red Days.  Days when daytime electricity is 3 times the unit price of the regulated tariff.  Tuesday to Friday was like that, and tomorrow will be too.  It is rather constraining!

The run into Christmas isn't totally fun when your feet and hands are always cold, and you are keeping the lights off as long as possible!  There are odd rays of joy - the very last cyclamen flowers are still going in the One Acre Wood for example.

There is little to photograph at the moment, as nothing much changes with the dull weather, and when you do take a photo, such as of a small amount of water in the lower pond in the Wood, it is singularly underwhelming.

I have had to resort to searching trail camera archives to find pretty photos.

The jay is handsome, although not as handsome as the male pheasant (who knows it too!).

However today, my spirit bird is this rather hacked off female pheasant.  I can feel my blood pressure boiling over the stupidity of HMRC and the unfairness of the amount of tax they suddenly feel I need to pay every month.  This is not good for me, so I need to go and find somewhere warm and cosy and try to forget about it all.  Being near computers only makes it worse!

Isn't she splendid?  Actually, just looking at her makes me feel better!

Anyway, I hope your week is not affected by Dunkelflaute, and now I had better get back to writing Christmas cards!

 

Nursing duties

It's been a strange week, with memories of this time last year when my Mum broke a bone in her neck with all the attending panic and worry, added to nursing a poorly pusscat with an abscess behind her eye, while trying to get rid of the last vestiges of a nasty cold that has been doing the rounds.  Nursing duties for the cat have become more and more onerous (we don't begrudge her that), but it has been amusing to see how many of the medicines she has that I have also used, or my Mum needed to use after a corneal transplant.  We are now on drops every hour and a half or so, day and night (assuming we can wake up), and tomorrow we find out whether we have been able to save the eye or not.  I am not optimistic.  

I brought in a trail camera during the week - I wasn't convinced about the batteries, and quite rightly - it had stopped doing night time photos and videos at the end of October!  The change in the activity by this trail camera (it is a favourite position to leave one as there is a lot of activity) between the summer and October was extensive.  The ducks that used to waddle past most days are not to be seen at all.  There are only one or two shots of coypu and none at all of boar (although if they were around after dark, the camera wouldn't have picked them up as it was out of juice).  The pine martens are still in the zone and bouncing around very happily, which pleases me hugely.  One is larger than the other, so I'm not sure if it is a couple or parent and offspring.

There has also been some bird activity, with a Great Tit visiting more than once to see what might be lurking on the tree trunk by the camera.  We encourage this species as they have adapted to become predators of pine processionary caterpillars, which are nasty, non-native invasive dangerous critters.  There are a few caterpillar nests in the pine trees, so we do what we can with bird nest boxes and limited winter feeding to attract the birds that will predate.

The foxes are also around and there are some nice still photos that I need to work on to show what they are up to, but the stars so far of this batch of files have been the deer.  Any fear they have had in the past of the camera has gone and they quite happily stand by it and in front of it and show off their best and not so best sides!

 

 

 

It seems to me that deer spend a lot of time itching and waggling their ears.

After a certain amount of nagging, I made the Christmas cakes on Wednesday, so still in November but a little on the late side in my view.  They have already been "fed" once, and I will do them again shortly.  There is a wonderful stall in the market at la Flèche that sells loose preserved fruits, including not one, but two varieties of glacé cherries, three varieties of sultanas and 5 varieties of candied citrus peel, and is the only place I know in France to supply dried currants.  As I have stocks of treacle and the chickens provide eggs, while we have a fine range of our own eau de vie, there is no excuse for the cakes not being luxurious and alcoholic!  Here is the mixing, and if you are good, there may be a picture of the decorated cakes in due course.

This autumn is one of the wettest on record, so it should have been no surprise to us that the two small ponds in the One Acre Wood now have water in them, a full two months before our earliest sighting up to now (so in the last 18 years).  They are not natural ponds, but rather pits that were dug to provide clay for making bricks and roof and floor tiles (the chestnut coppice provided the heat to fire the bricks and tiles, while the few pine trees provided a resin to seal the tiles before baking).  As such they are on clay, but with years of leaf litter build up on top, and when the clay contracts when it is dry, the water soaks away.  Currently the clay is swollen with water and so the ponds form.  Newts and salamanders like them for breeding purposes, so I am hoping they will last and we will have lots of babies in the spring.

So now it is time for the next batch of cat eye drops - this time it is serum made from horse bodily fluids (so not one my Mum used to have), then in another hour and a half, it will be antibiotic eye drops, and so on all through to tomorrow afternoon.  We are fortunate that Poirot is a very gentle and forgiving old lady, and that she is very food orientated, which is making this process manageable on most levels.  I'm not keen on getting up in the night however!

Have a good week!

 

Unwelcome Autumn visitors

Late autumn often brings nasty surprises - tax bills for example - and we have had a number this week.  The last, but most impactful for me is a virulent head cold, which is making every task seem much larger than it really is and more painful too.  It will go in time - taking seven days if I use treatments, and a week if I let it run its course - but I am on day 3, normally the worst, and feeling sorry for myself.

Yesterday (so day 2 of nasal misery) I came face to face with another nasty surprise, an over wintering House Slug.  Not a normal slug: in its resting mode it was a good four inches (9cm) long and half an inch (one and a bit cm) wide, so clearly a flesh eating House Slug.  It was resting on the side of the pot that holds my tiny mango seedling, grown from a pip of a fruit given to us by our new neighbour, and it is the first time I've managed to get one to germinate.  The seedling was living quite happily in the garden until it got attacked by a slug or snail, so I put it indoors to be guarded by the Country Cats.  We had a discussion about how they were slacking, but they paid no attention.  I evicted the slug and hope it was found by a questing fox or buzzard.

We have had two nights with a slight frost this week, enough to further chill down the house after an October that hit the record books for being one of the two dullest (i.e. lack of sun) on record.  It was a relief on Monday to see a strange yellow glow in the sky, but it didn't last long.  

But in amongst all this gloom, there are some truly French things that remind me why we live here. 

There was a note in our post box a couple of weeks ago - "come along to my garage on Sunday morning for a wine tasting (there will also be nibbles)".  A neighbour has a chum with a vinyard over the border near Chinon, and once a year, they lay on a tasting of bottled wines and wines "en vrac", i.e. buy a canister and bottle it yourself.  We weren't much taken with the bottled offerings, but the "en vrac" was rather splendid, so we put in an order.  The word on the street was that the wine would arrive on Saturday evening.  So yesterday evening, along with a bunch of others, we strolled down the road with our wheelbarrow and brought back our 20 litres of finest Chinon red.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I am going to take my festering head cold away from my freezing cold office and down to the warm, where I will help bottle 20 litres of red wine, which seems a very sensible way of spending a November evening!

Have a good week!

 

Autumn taking its time

It's been a relatively quiet week, as Autumn slowly does its thing.  In the garden, the cyclamen flowers are disappearing and great tufts of leaves are taking over, to feed the corms for next year - it has been a riot this year.  In the One Acre Wood, the white cyclamen are slower to come through, and the light is very different of course.  Still we have some 14 flowering zones (one of which isn't strictly in our bit of wood), and there will be a lot more clumps of leaves than that, when they really start to show.  It would appear that a cyclamen needs at least three years from germinating to getting to the flowering stage.  It is worth thinking about that, when you buy disposable pots of cyclamen as presents for people I think.  The most magnificent flowering has been quite hidden from us until a bit of judicious strimming cleared access to part of the orchard where they seem to have gone totally crazy!

The weather has wavered between nice sunny days, warm enough to lie out on the hammock (modelled here by Monsieur Clause), and dull, dreary, grey and wet days, when the only useful thing to do has been to sit in my office area, do filing and throw out 30 year old insurance documents.

Some of the filing has been positively pleasurable though - 2018 files from a trail camera need a lot of pruning down to the bits that are worth hanging on to.  There is no point in trying to make a paradise for wildlife if one also clogs up a datacentre with unnecessary and rather poor quality photos and videos!  There was a rather nice image of the hare making a very rare appearance this year.

But badgers do not make good photo subjects in general, as they are out and about at night and tend to move quite quickly - this is a better example than most, but it isn't really worth keeping!

The video shorts of badgers were much more amusing though, and I was able to take time to load quite a few onto YouTube to share here.

This is much more amusing!

This one has two badgers going about their legal and lawful.

As does this one.

The quality of this video is dire I admit, but it did prove that once again we had a faun in the Meadow this year.  The weather wasn't great over the summer, with cool mornings so the misted up camera was a fairly regular thing.

We had to wait another 12 days to get better visual confirmation that the pair were in the zone, and by that time the faun had grown a lot!  Also, they weren't that close to the camera.

The clocks have now gone back - fallen for the Anglophones (Fall - fall back - go back).  The French mnemonic is that in Octobre the clocks reculent.  For a couple of weeks we will be getting up in daylight again, but not for long.  By December it will still be dark at 8:30am and the temptation to stay in bed on grey days will be almost too much!  

Have a good week!

 

Quiet (!) Autumn pursuits

Autumn should be the time of foraging and harvesting, plus spending lots of time in the kitchen doing stuff with the results of said harvesting and foraging.  This week I got into the swing of that a bit more, and we peeled loads of chestnuts so I could get creative with the results.  A savoury fish crumble with a chestnut and cheese crumble was very good indeed.  The sweeter apple and quince crumble was a bit too sweet and sat in the tummy and on the hips in a rather alarming manner - less sugar, and more flour could be the answer.  But that means peeling more chestnuts...

In addition I had another go at the fig tree, which seems aware that it is going to be massacred soon, so is putting out more figs than the local starlings (the top ones), the chickens (the bottom ones) and we (those in the sweet spot in the middle) can comfortably get through.  I am now up to a dozen pots of fig jam made, and as we  haven't finished last year's, I'm making no more!

I should also be digging up potatoes, but the ground is currently still sodden thanks to Kirk and then another few depressions that have been passing through during the week.  I'm waiting for the promised dry patch next week to do more of that.  There are no frosts predicted, so the cristophines continue to produce a huge crop - this lot are on a new plant John planted to protect the asparagus bed.  I like to think that the row of diminishing fruit are reminiscent of the pottery flying ducks so beloved of sitting room walls in the 1970s!

The foraging is going less well, and the view locally is that it is not a year for cèpes, as no one has seen one.  I did find what looked like one, but it was under a birch tree, which is wrong, so I discarded it.  There are strange bits of fungi around, like these yellow threads we found in the One Acre Wood - inedible and also not clear from our array of mushroom identification books what they actually are!  Quite attractive though.

Less peaceful autumn pursuits include trying to get the dense thickets of bramble and old man's beard under control.  While I don't mind odd pockets of it, when you get banks that are taller than me and cover a third of a field, it is not good and it doesn't create valuable habitat.  The density is so great that most plants can't grow, the cover defends some animals (hares and pheasants mostly) from hunters, but doesn't provide a dry or comfortable holt for winter, the plant quality is poor, as they all strive for sunlight, so there is little if any fruit, and not much by way of insects as there are no flowers.  And it grows and grows upwards and then outwards, taking over flower meadow and pond edges to the detriment of a wide range of flora and fauna. 

So we are punching paths through the big bank with strimmers and hedge trimmers and then using the big yellow Beast to mulch through the cut stems to create walkways that may be easier to maintain next year, while providing some shelter and routes for our non-human visitors to move around more easily.  It's all very much a work in progress, but I am pleased with how it is going.

With bad weather forecast for much of the week, I brought in Trail Camera 1 to see what had been going on in its line of vision.  It was as well I did, as it had over 2,000 files on it, and the batteries were pretty well dead.  It had been out since late July and the batteries, which weren't the best quality in the first place, had been used for a few months before then too, so weren't fresh.  It took a while to prune down the 2,018 files to just 252 that had some interest, and they will require further triage and editing and videos put onto YouTube, but as a taster of what there is, here is our fox in the open.

I did also load just one video onto YouTube today, as I wanted to show how robust the cameras need to be - turn the sound up for the full effect and yes, those are tusks!

 

I did also promise a bit of coypu action - I am ambivalent about them.  They are an invasive, non-native species with no natural predators and cause a lot of damage, and I don't like their tails, but their whiskers are magnificent!

 

 

 

 

That's enough coypu for the moment!  Have a good week!

 

Storm Kirk and other local events

OK, last weekend I promised more wildlife videos, and maybe I will include a couple at the end, but this week has been quite a busy one, and for a number of reasons.

Last week I wrote this blog early, before dashing off to the photo competition exhibition, hoping I had at least one of my photos printed and therefore in the top 30.  Well, my hopes were dashed, but to be fair to those that were printed, there were only 2 that I would have said weren't worth printing.  One was out of focus, and perhaps I am old fashioned, but I don't think that is good photography.  The other one looked to me more like an advert for Legal and General (other financial services companies are available but have different advertising and logos) than an entry in a provincial photography competition, and in my view would have been barred on that basis in a similar competition in the UK.  It won the adult section.

Of the two printed ones I liked the best, one got a prize for the popular vote done over the two days of the exhibition, and is shown here the furthest left, modelled by a member of the Society running the competition, the next one along won the popular vote, probably as it had a bird in it, the other two were the winners in the Junior section.  Well done all!

The next big excitement of the week was Storm Kirk.  He didn't bring much wind, but he brought a shed-load of rain with him.  It started raining before dawn on Wednesday and carried on with varying levels of intensity until just after 6pm.  Overall we had 59mm of rain or 2 3/8 inches - however you count it, it was a lot!  For the main rain gauge in our garden by the house, we had to empty it twice during the day, taking readings each time.  At 10am when I went to feed the chickens it was like this!

Fortunately around us there is enough of a gradient to ensure that house, garden and cellars don't flood, and that was the case for most around here, although some low roads became impassable as water came off the fields, and the Couasnon broke its banks.  But the main flooding was in low lying fields.  Others were not so lucky in other parts of France and I feel for them.  Occasionally however field banks were not up to the task and ceded with the weight of water, particularly if the field above had been harvested or ploughed recently so the soil was compacted.  This slip was near our country retreat.

The ponds are now nicely full and since Kirk did his worst, the weather has improved and blue sky has been seen!

The other excitement during the week was round two of the Challenge Communale in boule de forte.  My team had won our first round match, so on Thursday evening we were pitted against the team from one of the boule de forte clubs, the Esperance, and weren't totally hopeful.  I was instantly depressed when I revealed my antique boules, which were denounced as disgusting.  However it turned out that the Esperance team were unavailable to play the semi-final on Saturday, so forfeited the game when they were leading 8 - 2.  Once that was sorted, they told me the product I needed to get to make my boules beautiful and shiny once again, so I sort of forgave them.

Saturday morning, 10am, I was back at the boule de fort club with my "disgusting" boules for the semi-final against another boule de forte society, la Paix.  Despite hangovers and lack of sleep on both sides (not me, obviously), once we got going, the game was quickly lost by us 10 - 1, so I didn't have to worry about the final.  To be fair, we would have forfeited if we had won as one of our team couldn't be there for the final.  Anyway, by 11am, hair of the dog was being taken by those that needed it, and I was drinking a glass of chilled sauvignon blanc, knowing that I wouldn't have to play again for another year!

The only ones of these boules that are ours are the red ones!

As I mentioned, it rained all day on Wednesday, so one thing I could do to pass the time was to load up a few more wildlife videos on YouTube so I can share them here (you can also find my YouTube channel and subscribe or follow to see more of what is there).  I found another amusing woodpecker video - I am very fond of the Woodies!

There is a fair amount of mouse or rat activity down by the ponds - that's fair, as it's a wild place and they are wild animals.  I have no issues with them living as nature intended.

In the same way, I am fascinated to watch "our" fox as he goes about his business.  He is in the wild, away from domestic gardens and chicken runs, fending for himself, and not relying on dustbins either.  I've no idea what he is eating!

 

 

I have looked to see if there are nests or fungus or fruit around there, but I can't spot anything.  If he is eating slugs or snails, good luck to him, but I would be a bit less happy if it was frogs and toads.  Whatever, it is nature doing its thing.

Next week you can see coypu, plus I'm going to bring in another camera which has been at a point where I used to see hares and deer, so hope to have news of them.  I fear there will be a lot of John and I strimming however!

Have a good week!

 

Drama! Games and ducks

We are past the vernal equinox: the gazebo roof is dry, down and packed away for next year, when I hope it will be out for longer than two months!  As ever it will need some running repairs to see it through the season but I think the Velcro has another year left in it, while the actual fabric is holding up nicely.  Ok the "outside" is faded, but we sit under it so still have the glory of its bright colours. 

With the cover down, the gazebo just has its strawberry hanging baskets, its weather station and its fairy lights, which I shall leave out a bit longer, as they bring delight when I put the chickens away at night.  Soon there won't be enough daylight to charge the battery and then they will come in.

 The arrival of autumn proper and the longer evenings means it is time for boules de fort - a traditional local game not played in more than a handful of departments, but Anjou is definitely a key place.  Le Vieil Baugé is blessed with four still operating boule pistes - there were 7, but the other three are no longer in use.  Every autumn there is the Communal Challenge, where all the clubs and societies, the village municipal workers, and any other identifiable group are invited to submit up to two teams to defend the honour of their group. 

The Comité des Fêtes has always tried to come up with two teams, as was the case this year.  Normally team membership is decided on having one good team and then a bunch of no-hopers.  This year membership was decided on who was available on which evening for the first round.  That got me into the "first" team with people who know how to play - a bit of a shock!

Even more of a shock for me was that we got points!

In fact, at the end of a three and a half hour game - I kid you not - we won 10 to 7 against the Society for the Preservation of Vieil Baugé Heritage!  That means I am playing again on Thursday this week, but against one of the boule de fort societies, so it is likely to be a pasting.

So back to the world of trail cameras.  Spoiler alert - it is a bitter sweet story.

There are a pair of mallards that live in the zone - he is a bit flighty, but she is a gentle soul.  Last year I actually saw her with a couple of ducklings in the fish pond, before the coypu had managed to make it a poorly drained swamp.  So it was rather nice to see her passing through with a little ball of fluff.

 

A couple of days later and she passed with two little fluff balls!

 

Then I saw her with five!  O what joy!

 

Except, two days later, there was just one duckling left.

 

But three weeks later, that ball of fluff had fledged quite nicely, and did stay with Mum until the end of July, when presumably she went off to find her own pond.

 

I don't know what happened to the other ducklings - there are many options and it is a hard world out there for small balls of fluff.  If they all survived, we would disappear under all the mallards however.  One of the culprits could be this chap - yes, pine marten can also be spotted in daylight!

 

Anyway, next week I turn my video attention to those relatively charmless creatures, coypu.  Something to look forward to?  

This afternoon is the exhibition of the annual photography competition run by the Society for the Preservation of the Heritage of Vieil Baugé (who got beaten by the Comité des Fêtes at boules de fort - ha!), with the prize giving at 5pm.  You submit your photos (maximum of 2) by email, the best 30 get printed and exhibited, and there are winners and prizes.  I hope one of my entries got printed, that for me would be the win.  You'll find out next week! 

Have a good one!

A week that ends in a feast!

Last Saturday's storm is being claimed as a natural catastrophe as numerous buildings were damaged, though fortunately not ours.  I was in a shop this morning that had been affected.  It is all very well having a foot of insulation in the roof, but when it gets wet, it becomes very heavy and brings down an awful lot of stuff with it!  Not pretty and not good for the shop keeper! 

If you track down WIRED you will find an article about the increasing cost of lightening to buildings and insurance across the world, using the marvellous example of Mutton's Mill in the Norfolk Broads, which has had lightening conductors fitted to all four sails to prevent significant damage in a storm (perhaps try googling Farrell of the Broads Authority to find the story).

[Mutton's Mill, photo credit, Andrew Farrell]

Since the storm, temperatures have got steadily colder, although there are nice sunny days.  Rebus has spotted that the best autumn billet is on top of the beer fridge, as there is no heating on anywhere else and his fur coat is quite thin!

This cold autumnal weather means good sunsets in general, and also nice evenings to stand out and watch bats flitting around, hoovering up all the flies and other winged nasties that come out after dark.  We have at least two types that zoom around our house and garden, and actually the area is well known for its significant bat colonies, with protected caves where they overwinter.

Today (Saturday - I am writing this in advance - see below for why) was the annual Societé de la Paix Mechoui or animal roast, but in practice it is always a pig roast.  Festivities start from midday with people turning up for the aperitif and to admire lunch cooking.

Then everyone gets herded onto two long tables for more aperitifs, starters, the main event of spit roast pork with beans and ratatouille, rounding off the meal with cheese and apple tart.  We generally get home at about 6pm after coffee.  It is a wonderful way to meet people, to share village life and gossip and to feel part of something.  Every year is a bit different, even if the menu doesn't change, and we wouldn't miss it for the world.

Tomorrow I head for England, to see chums and family, and possibly even Mutton's Mill, so next week's story will be very different.  Have a good week!

 

Welcome to Autumn

Meteorological autumn started on the 1st September and autumness is being embraced by fauna, flora and weather with unseemly eagerness.  Temperatures are dropping, and the weather lurches from dismal to awful, with quick hints of sun in between.  Yesterday we were due storms in the afternoon, but needed to spend a few money off vouchers, so didn't get to the place in the country until the rain had started, while thunder rumbled around.  We were lucky, actually, to be there and not at home, where there were strong wind squalls, nearly three times the amount of rain, and hail.  While the barn cats munched their way through their feed, oblivious to the weather, I watched the rain and then checked the lightning strike web page.

There's not much by way of mellow fruitfulness about either.  The berries are rotting on the canes almost before they ripen and the pears are over - not enough for a burping barrel either!  There are apples - the Reine de Reinettes are falling and are quite tasty.  I need to burrow into the Bel de Boskoop to find any there, while the Granny Smiths will hold for ages.  The Canada juicing apples are rotting, then falling, so I fear for the trees if the marauding boar decide they like cider.  We had hoped for a single variety juice pressing this year, but if we do one at all, I think it will be mixed.  The quince are also a disappointment, as they have missed out on the heat and sunshine they need to develop to their full size and become fragrant.  They are falling!  I will have to try to make jelly, but I don't think they will be up to tagine or slow cooked quince standard sadly.  

Also in stark contrast to last year, we can only spot 5 fruits on the cristophine vine, despite it being even bigger than last year!  It also misses the heat and sunshine though it does enjoy a good deluge.

The cyclamen in the lawn have been later to flower than normal - about 3 weeks later if I recall correctly.  I had hoped that the delay might at least mean a full carpet of them around the birch tree.  I may be jaded and depressed with this year, but it seems to me that they too are less bountiful, although new corms have started to produce flowers in far flung areas of the garden.

We are hoping for a decent year for mushrooms, with all the water that there is around.  A walk around the One Acre Wood today showed that there are things popping up, but not interesting edible things so far.

We have found a first bolete, but not where it should be.  There was one growing in the lettuce bed, which I picked, but as there is no oak or chestnut in the Garden area, just a rather large birch tree, I did not risk cooking it.  It could well have been fine, but when picking wild mushrooms, any doubt at all and it goes on the compost heap.

The Marx Sisters have settled in well, and at least two of them have started to lay rather cute small eggs.  Groucho is a greedy so and so and likes to climb into trees and onto tables.  This can be disconcerting.  Harpo bumbles on in her own happy way, and seems to have been the one to come into lay first.  Chico is a bit more of a loner and likes to fly.  Specifically, she likes to fly at my back when I am walking away from her, which is a bit worrying.  Perhaps in a former life, she was an eagle.

I have had another major session with my new strimmer, using the brushcutter head this time, and have a number of projects with that.  More to follow in the coming weeks.  I also probably ought to shuffle the trail cameras around, so again something for another week.

Until next time!