Rural Life

Looking for happy things

I find late October and November difficult - the change in the hour doesn't make the difference, it is the generally short length of day, the mess and the realisation that it will be at least 4 months before it warms up again.  Every 10 years, it gets worse, with the lurking of a "significant" birthday.  Twice we have managed to avoid that - but the holidays involved were expensive, and we didn't have as many cats!

Storms Ciaran and Domingos don't help either - I hate the way that strong winds bluster around the house and garden, howling and rattling and shaking.  The amount of rain also makes visits to the chickens and just generally around the garden fraught with dangers of slipping on mud, and of getting wet if I don't time it right.  So I look out for things to cheer me up.

This year, something that just keeps giving are the cyclamen, both the pink ones that have run away from gardens (or have been helped in their mission for world domination by mice and shrews) and the more delicate but wilder white ones.  We have white ones in the One Acre Wood and each year there are more leaves, and now, with maturity, there are ever more places where one, two or a whole clump of flowers poke up between the fallen leaves.  Later, I will drive myself mad counting all the sets of leaves that indicate where there are corms, but not just yet.

The garden escapees are bolder in colour, and stronger flowers.  Between the Garden and the Orchard, there is a disused green lane, which is a haunt of boar and deer, and is gradually being taken over by false acacia.  During the late spring, the hidden garden shrubs put on a fine display of flowers, but at this time of year, the lane is filled with pink cyclamen flowers, hiding among the ivy and detritus, and lifting my heart when I see them.

Today, the sky has been swept clean by Storm Domingo and underfoot is wet and squelchy, so gardening didn't appeal.  Instead, armed with my phone and escorted by Monsieur Clause, I took a long ramble around the Meadow and Orchard.  The phone has an app that is somewhat addictive, which identifies birdsong in real time.  Standing in the sunshine at one edge of the Meadow, I was told I was listening to robins, chaffinch, great and long-tailed tits, a common firecrest and a Cetti's warbler.  I also watched a small group of jackdaw mobbing a buzzard that had the temerity to be in the zone.  The rain has refilled the ponds a bit, or the three I could look into anyway, the access to the fourth was too overgrown.  I fear it is too late for my huge fish, but many other things enjoy the wetland.  Walking back up the Orchard, I found some weird fungi - not as dramatic as Devil's Fingers which are black or red, but still ghostly and strangely disturbing.

The trail camera isn't behaving at the moment, so my only photo of wildlife this week is this huge, orange, flesh-eating, jelly slug.  I had hoped to plant some tulip bulbs in that old WC cistern, but it might not be the best idea I have ever had, if that is what lives in it at the moment!  I'll have to find a plan B.

The big news in the village is that someone has bought the lease of the pub and plans to open soon.  No hint of when soon might be, and sadly they are changing the name of the pub too (I wonder if I could persuade them that is bad luck?), but it will be good to have something happening in the village during the next long, dark months of late autumn and winter.  I'll keep you posted!

 

Hints of Autumn - finally

Here in France, Autumn is late, very late.  I am happy to be indoors with my computer as the temperature in the garden is over 30ºC at the moment.  Earlier, I was digging up potatoes - hard work in temperatures nearing 25ºC in the shade and the soil is pretty solid clay.  I can't totally complain, as look what just one seed potato produced!  They are huge and unblemished, and will take some baking later in the year.

But other, more autumnal signs are there - including my first bright orange, evil, jelly slug of the season, spotted mooching around between the raspberries and the wood store.  They are deeply unpleasant to my eye, but also seem to be harbingers of mushrooms.

I saw this fellow yesterday, plus there was a giveaway headline in the local paper this morning that mushrooms were appearing, so we just had to go for a walk in the One Acre Wood before doing any work at the Garden.  For once they were not wrong - there were mushrooms a plenty, but many had gone over or had bad slug or fly damage.  We found three nice ones for lunch - a delicious cèpe and comté omelette, made with free range eggs from the garden.

It goes without saying that if you aren't confident about identifying mushrooms, don't pick and eat!  We only eat what we know.

We also need to prepare to pay our rent for the Garden, Orchard and Meadow.  The payment is in a number of forms - obviously providing all the necessary luxuries for Donald, Spooky and Monsieur Clause the cats is part of it, keeping the Meadow under control with an annual mow as per legislation is another part of it, and then there is the tribute of a shoebox of walnuts too.  Knowing that the boar like the good nuts best, well they aren't totally stupid, we have to gather them as soon as they fall, before drying them so the inner skin isn't unpleasant and bitter.  We think we have the required tribute spread out in the sun!

The Meadow got mowed finally this weekend too.  Between Wildlife Trusts, the RSPB and the LPO, it is difficult to spot at time when you can do this without being berated for being a vandal and putting life at risk.  Seed heads, chrysalids, eggs, nesting time, flowering cycles, shelter etc. are all cited as reasons to not mow.  The reasons to mow include seed heads (some things aren't supposed to be allowed to spread, including ragwort and thistle), brambles, old man's beard, not required saplings, improving conditions for low growing wildflowers and those that need a short sward to flourish (including cyclamen and wild orchids), and a legal requirement not to cause a nuisance. 

I prefer to mow in September, but we didn't have a working mower available until now.  It should also be noted that some bits of the Meadow didn't get done last year for no good reason.  Anyway, it was jolly hard work in the hot sun, and at the end I was half human, half wild carrot seed, and it doesn't look good as the saplings didn't get properly trashed, so I will have to do some of it again during the week, but finally we can see across the Meadow again!  There are large banks of scrub for shelter for my friends the hares and for any pheasants that the fox  hasn't had too.

There are no new wildlife photos to share this week as last Sunday the hunt went through our land and the valley.  They don't come into the Garden, as it is well fenced off but do treat the Orchard and Meadow as their own.  While I recognise very clearly the need to control the number of boar, as there really are too many, what annoys me about the hunters is their sheer arrogance as they stalk through other people's property.  Plus I don't trust them not to fire towards us in the Garden if they spot something interesting.  We sang and whistled very loudly while they were close by.  Once they have done a sweep through, we see very little large wildlife for at least a couple of weeks, until they find their way back to us.

I leave you with the flowers of autumn, the cyclamen that pop up everywhere it seems and spread gloriously through our gardens and the Wood.  They always make me smile.

Have a good week!

 

Dangerous beasts

For a few days last week, we had a ferocious door keeper - actually it was quite tricky at times to close the door as we didn't want to squash him or her!  While last year we saw practically no mantis, this year there have been quite a lot and this one has decided our front door area is their stalking point.  If I am in the way, then I too am a stalking point.  Either mating or cold will eventually kill them off, but until then, I enjoy the company.

Rather less fun was the hornet sting last Sunday, which is still a bit painful and blew up overnight on Sunday to rather unpleasant proportions, and made yoga moves a bit challenging.  My experience, if it helps anyone else, is as follows: the pain of the sting is like a searing hot needle into the arm.  Get the hornet off you, as they can sting more than once - to be sure, have a large person jump up and down on the blasted creature as well in retribution.  If you know you have sting allergies, get yourself to a chemist or doctor asap or use the EpiPen you carry or take the antihistamines you have been given.  There is a rumour that a cider vinegar compress as soon as you can will also be helpful - I didn't spot that advice until a bit too late.  Hydrocortisone cream will sooth, but needs fairly frequent application, and an anti-inflammatory such as ibuprofen will help with the swelling, but count on pain for four to six days.  All in all I don't recommend the experience.

The trail camera has been in to have its batteries recharged - the new camera is heavier on batteries than the old one, and seems to use up the rechargeable batteries in three weeks.  It is back now keeping an eye out for boar, and indeed the boar are about a bit, keeping an eye out for walnuts.

More interestingly, when I was going through what was on the memory card, were a series of short videos of a fox with something - frequent reviews of the set of 6 videos tells me that it was probably a blackbird.  I've loaded up a few of the videos for those who don't mind watching nature red in tooth and claw.   For me the interesting aspect of this, other than that foxes don't like feathers in their teeth, is that foxes, like cats, play with their prey.  Now TypePad and YouTube don't seem to be playing ball anymore so I am hoping that if you follow this link, you can see video number 1 - but do press any back arrow to come back to this post, same for the other two links, if you can spot a back arrow or back function that is (I really hate technology at times).  Then if you follow this link, you can see video number 2.  And finally, if you follow this one, you can see video number 3.

The cristophine vine goes from strength to strength as this unseasonably hot autumn continues.  We have harvested off 8 fruits now, and counting today, it looked to me like there were a further 23 that might do something if we don't get a frost, including 6 that actually need to be eaten in the next week as they are fully ripe.  One tendril has disappeared 15 foot up into a birch tree, and the canopy the leaves provide over the structure we made for it are fairly waterproof.  It is a thing of wonder - well, to us at least, as other British gardeners over here in France seem to be singularly uninterested.  French people with relatives in the overseas departments are fascinated.

I'm not sure whether the recent full moon was the Harvest Moon or the Hunter's Moon, but it has been spectacular.  Here it is rising between houses.

We are still working our way through the quince harvest.  I have poached more and of course we do have some eau de vie de quince from a successful year about 3 years ago, so I have come up with Cocktail Maison - two small measures (a 2cl shot glass) of eau de vie, three good small measures of quince and spice syrup, and full to the top with fizzy water.  It slips down very nicely!!

Cheers! Until next week.

 

 

 

 

Preserving the crops

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness?  We've had a couple of early morning mists, so far, but they burnt off very quickly once the sun came up.  Mellow fruitfulness?  More like aggressive ripening and rotting to be honest!  We are currently in the middle of a burst of preserving such as I don't remember having to cope with before.

The peaches have been ripening and plopping off the tree for a while now - anything that hits the ground is immediately pounced on by ants and wasps and bees and their friends and relations.  What is still on the tree has a slight miasma of dark mould from the aphids that lived on the leaves during the summer, so eating from the tree is not entirely pleasant and the fruit still on the tree is only partially ripe.  That didn't stop me yesterday and I picked and peeled some two kilos giving me enough for 4 and a half pots of white peach and rum jam - very tasty!

So that's the jar on the right.  On the left is a slightly more sinister jar of spiced fig sauce, which is good with meat dishes.  That was the result of a raiding party on the fig tree at the bottom of the garden that has declared war on me.  We had a first crop of figs in June - they were tasty, particularly baked with sweet mincemeat and a bit of honey.  The second crop has gone slightly mad, with exploding figs everywhere.  The blackbirds that normally get half the fruit can't keep up.  The chickens are eating what they can and feeling the effects too I think.  The fig sauce was an attempt to cope and also to deal with some of the many, many chillies we are also getting from the Cayenne chilli plants (the jalapeños aren't ripe yet).

While the peach jam was gently simmering away, I picked a further kilo and a half of figs, chopped them up and made another four jars of fig jam (no surprising additives in that).  They are a nice ruby colour.  The major jamming session will be during the week when I attack the quince problem.  Normally our tree has about a dozen fruit - enough for a liqueur and perhaps 10 jars of jelly.  This year we stopped counting at 50.  They are turning quickly now, so I need to get moving and preserving.  I am also trying new recipies for other things to do with quince - watch this space.

But it's not all jams and jellies, because everything else is going nuts too!  During the week i froze a dozen sweetcorn, and once this blog is done, I have this lot to work through.

To be clear, that is a dozen tomatoes, three courgettes, 2 cristophines and 31 cayenne chillies, from a half hour foray of picking.  There is going to be a very big pot of hot tomato and courgette gunge on the go shortly.  The rest of the chillies will be frozen for later.

One of the cristophines was eaten last night as an accompaniment to fish kebabs.  I split it into quarters, boiled it, then peeled it (the skin isn't edible and has an annoying latex when raw), chopped it up and sautéed it with a home grown red onion, before adding cream to be glutton-ish.  Delicious!  I will do a similar thing with two more tomorrow, but adding in lardons to make a main meal.

But now I can hear the rumbling of yet another thunderstorm, so I need to go and round up a couple of quince for tonight's pork and quince tagine - I'll let you know how that goes.

 

Comice Day 2 - the important stuff!

While Day 1 is seriously agricultural, Day 2 is more about community, or communities.  The morning is marked by the ploughing competition between the mayors of each of the villages in the commune, not made easier by the fact that they aren't all farmers, they have to use old tractors (I think there is an option to use a horse, but never taken up), and they have to wear period costume.  For some reason not totally clear to me, this year actually seemed to turn into the festival of the old tractor, and the parade, while led out by the mayor of Vieil Baugé, in a fetching land girl costume, numbered some 75 old tractors, which takes a long time to go past!  We got an early preview as most went past our house to get to the staging area.  The exhaust does stink rather.

Anyway, here are several old tractors, to give you an idea.

There were a few oddities - this one I found puzzling, including wondering what it was for and whether there was really enough demand to make a run of them!

While this one is not allowed on the road, so had to be brought in by trailer!  You can see why.  This one had a staring role as it had been restored specifically for this Comice by the mayor's husband, Yves.

So many old tractors, all wanting to take part in a ploughing match, meant that went on way longer than normal.  But some tractors had to hurry away as they had a second role - pulling the decorated float for their village. 

In the past I have been involved in floats, I've designed them, I've made flowers for them, I've made papier maché bits and bobs, I made a fake organ once, and I've been on them too.  They take an immense amount of team work and hours of volunteer labour to get ready for their moment of glory on the Comice Sunday afternoon parade.  Thankfully it was dry - wet weather and crèpe paper don't mix!

Anyway, to give them their due, here they all are - led out by Vieil Baugé as the hosts.

Vaulandry followed up - they will be the hosts next year.

Fougeré should be the year after - their idea of a stop me and buy one ice cream seller was interesting.  

Baugé will host after them - this is always a challenge as there is no farm land in Baugé any more and you need 27 hectares for a ploughing competition!

Next up le Guedenieu - the more mature ladies of my acquaintance say that there used to be good parties there in the sixites but they always ended up with a fight...

Cheviré le Rouge always manage to get a musical theme and a song going on their float - this year, that wasn't a challenge.

We had lots of fun at the Bocé Comice, I hope they had fun at ours.

Most tractors pull their floats - Cuon pushes theirs.  I have no idea why that is at all, apart from it must be to do with the design of the underlying trailer.

St Martin d'Arcé were accompanied by musicians.

Then came Echimiré, who bravely hosted the first post-Covid Comice.

Finally Pontigné brought up the rear - they hosted last year.

The afternoon and early evening entertainment was provided by Mademoiselle Orchestra - a six piece cabaret band, who are very good and very amusing.  Sadly the heat and the excitement took its toll on us and we went home for a nap, but did catch the end of their second set, before joining the queue for the pig roast dinner.  14 locally born and raised pigs had been turning on spits over fires since 9am, and by 8pm we needed our portions!  The guy on the next table (British) complained there wasn't any crackling, so his French chums went off to find some for him, and came back with a whole head.  Lucky so and so!  The small boy next to him was astounded.

The final band of the weekend was a boisterous group mixing rap, hip-hop, French pop and a sleazy horn section.  The energy was amazing.

All good French events end with a firework display.  By this time we had gone home, but popped out to the field opposite our house to enjoy the spectacle.  It was very loud!

Now all that was left to do, was to tidy up!

 

Day 1 - the serious stuff

I know you are never supposed to apologise over this sort of thing, but I had hoped to get the Comice story out there earlier than this.  I blame a combination of being VERY tired indeed, extreme heat, the challenges of getting a new van, and a sort of general maiaise (not Covid - but we did check yesterday, we were so off) for not getting down to it sooner.

Friday night wasn't the best night's sleep as we worried about the podium and the rain.  We were on the field promptly, but the forecast was still dodgy so we didn't unwrap things until about 10am when we could see no more clouds heading our way.  There were also magnificent arrangements of dried grasses and grains, some with a bit of red paint to them, to give a classier air to the stage, in time for the hour and a half of speeches to open the event.  I caught up with those on a live stream on Facebook - I really could not be bothered to wait around to see them in person!

The serious stuff on the Saturday morning, other than the speeches, is the Young Farmers' Ploughing Competition - held on slightly adjacent fields, and with its own bar, so the ones on the field were quite quiet.  I don't know much about ploughing matches, so I didn't go and watch.

For those of us on decorations duty, the other thing to do was to ensure that the tables were decorated and ready to welcome diners - there were 580 metres of tables, each with benches on either side, giving a theoretical 1,400 covers.  We certainly needed them on the Sunday!

There was a certain nostalgic feel to the event - while guingettes are becoming popular again, they were more of a 20th century phenomenon.  It was therefore only right that there were a lot of old tractors knocking around and also a few other old implements - this is the chain oil application end of a two person chainsaw that was demonstrated a few times over the weekend.  It did the job, but it was loud, fixed and needed two people to make it work.

Day 1 is also about livestock, with a cow competition and a Percheron competition (a local breed of heavy horse).  The cows and goats were mostly only in for one day, although a few came back for the second day, just as an interesting feature.

While we weren't there too long on the Saturday afternoon, I did insist on going to see the Percherons.  The mares are so beautiful, and the foals often behave so badly!  A bit like a Lippizaner, Percherons are generally born dark and as they grow older, take on a grey white colour.  They are good work horses - sometimes they are used by loggers to move tree trunks around as they do less damage to the soil than machines - and also make reasonable saddle horses for the portly with long legs and supple hips!

After that, we went off to feed cats, water plants, eat food and rest up as Sunday would be a long day.

The Sunday story should be available during the week - keep an eye out for it!

 

Final push to get it all ready

My last post was brief and quite enigmatic as much of what we were working on was embargoed until the weekend of the Comice itself.

John and I were working on the big arches for the two entrances to the site - the big one was an issue just because of its size, as it was over 2 metres tall and very long.  To get sensible sized letters, we had to make a number of stencils for letters that would be nearly 60 centimetres tall.  The logo could be projected onto the panel and traced, but any other decoration had to be done by hand.  And for the reverse side - the "see you next year, elsewhere" - apart from the fact the letters also had to be pretty huge, there was no guidance, no colour scheme, no theme, so we made it up as we went along.

The smaller arch was more of a problem - no space for projections, too long in relation to its height, and more space to fill in.  Our preferred method of doing the letters with packing labels did not work as, and I'm not sure you will believe this, packing and shipping labels aren't brilliant at sticking in slight humidity.  The weekend before the Comice it was a real rush to get that one finished, so that I was free for the next set of tasks.

There was a nice video of John working on the arch, but Typepad won't let me upload it, and YouTube has done something silly with it, it seems to me!

Then on Monday and Wednesday (Tuesday was a bank holiday) we started to put up more decorations in the village - up to that point, it had just been bunting and the straw bales, now we had silhouettes of dancers popping up all over the place and a stream of jolly music along the wooden barriers by the village hall.

Then on Thursday and Friday we were on the Comice site, putting up even more bunting, dressing the podiums, decorating the vast numbers of marquees, adding fairy lights, signs and all sorts of other bits, so that the exhibitors had a clear run on the Friday afternoon to get installed.  Lunches were served at the village hall for the workers - cold beer has never tasted so good!  It was lovely being all together, working to a common goal and getting to know new people.

Then on Friday evening, we were all summoned to the site for the distribution of volunteer t-shirts for anyone working on site over the weekend, a few words of encouragement from our President, and the unveiling of the big arch.  There is a video stream of that, but California doesn't seem to want to play ball with technology at the moment - I guess they have other problems - so here is the great arch unveiled, and there was applause, which you will have to imagine.

So after a drink to seal team solidarity, it was home to a sensible meal and early to bed to be refreshed for the event - except that rain was forecast, so we spent the night worrying about how various aspects of decoration would stand up to moisture!

To find out how that panned out, look again in a couple of days' time as I'm not wrestling recalcitrant IT any more today!

 

So much to do, so little time!

It's the final straight before the Comice.  Most days this week have been taken up doing "stuff", but unless that stuff is already out in the streets and fields, it is embargoed.  The weather has meant less progress has been made on some aspects than we would have liked - the wind and rain made working on straw bales nearly impossible.  It was possible to progress items that will be installed on the fields in due course, as we are working on them in a disused piggery, so we have shelter, power, space and quiet (unless we have a bluetooth speaker with us to blast out radio).  And when I say we, it isn't just John and I, it is all sorts of other people, including my next door neighbour's granddaughter, getting involved.

Next week I will find links to blogs I have written on previous Comices (Comici?) to show what the fuss is all about.

When not working on decorations, I have been keeping an eye on the new trail camera.  The boar are still around and a deer or two have passed by - they look rather odd from a higher angle!

On Thursday, I caught a different strange animal on the camera - one that I would not expect to see on our land before September.  I wasn't delighted, but I think I remember seeing a couple around this time last year too.

We think that the cristophine might be contemplating flowers - today there was a slightly different growth on a couple of the main stems.  It has grown another three feet or so in a number of directions so there is certainly enough oomph in it to think about flowering and fruiting I would suggest.

The sweetcorn got a real battering in the winds during the week - two named storms at this time of year and this side of the Atlantic is a bit odd.  While we were not near the strongest gusts, the gaps in hedges and trees funnel the wind in weird ways.  The big fields of maize are closely planted and dense, while our wee area of sweetcorn is only three rows deep, but it has all survived and the silks are out and starting to turn brown, which is good!

Digging up the week's potatoes, I met one of my garden helpers.  From the size and shape of her, I think she has been doing very well on slugs, and certainly none of the potatoes have slug damage, so I think she is rather effective, if not the prettiest person on the plot.

Anyway, I must now go and deal with a rather pleasing problem.  Back in the days before Brexit was even considered, my mother in law bought us a Victoria Plum tree, to take the place of the medlar tree that didn't seem to like our garden (shame as the flowers were gorgeous).  It wasn't cheap and we had to source it in the UK, as they aren't a thing in France.  Since then we have nurtured it and protected it and been rewarded with at best a dozen fruit in a season, and only if we can get to them before the chickens.  This year is different.  This year it is loaded and we have supports under many branches to help it cope.  This afternoon I have promised myself I will make a batch of plum crumbles for the freezer, as well as one for tonight, so I'd better go and pick and stone some fruit and get baking.

Have a good week!

 

Harvests and cameras

After weeks of nurturing, watering, weeding and worrying, the first serious harvests are starting in the potager.  We've been digging up a couple of potatoes from the first block of 18, for a few weeks now - well this is the seventh weekend to be precise.  The potatoes are second earlies and were planted in three blocks over a period of about 4 weeks, and the first block are very ready to be harvested.  By taking just a couple of plants a week, we have enough and more for us to eat over the week and don't have to worry about storage and drying off.  The next two blocks will need that level of attention, but that is a way down the line, post-Comice.

Today's basket of goodies includes potatoes, carrots, a few onions that I missed yesterday when lifting the main block of red onions, a couple of courgettes that I didn't cut yesterday and a couple of little gem lettuce that looked like they were thinking about bolting.

We've also had aubergines - I think 5 so far, or it may be 7, and half a dozen courgettes already and of course there are the red onions to look forward to.

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This is only the start too - there are as many set borlotti beans as we had all season last year, and the bean vines are covered with more flowers.  The butternuts haven't yet got into their stride, but there are quite a few female flowers developing.  The tomatoes have some good looking trusses on them - fingers crossed that they ripen and don't get struck by blight.  And there is the cristophine vine, which gets bigger as you watch it and now has a vast structure set up for it to rampage over.  Perhaps one day there will be flowers and fruits too - in the meantime it provides shelter for a couple of tomatoes that I rejected for the main plot as they were runt plants, so have gone totally mad as companion plants for the cristophine.

Another bit of companion planting that we did as an experiment also seems to be working.  Parsnips are very slow to get going, so "they" recommend inter-sowing with something that is quicker off the mark and doesn't stay in the ground as long.  I put the row of parsnips at the edge of the potato bed, so one bit of companion planting I guess.  I sowed parsnips every 4 to 6 inches and in between sowed carrots.  As you have seen, the carrots are doing fine.  Many of the parsnips are also doing very well too and their leaves can be seen over the potatoes and swamping the carrots in places!  They've got months more growing time to go too.

So to the saga of the trail camera.  It developed a fault.  Basically the switch inside the protective shell got disconnected, and despite having had it less than two years, it was out of warranty (I know EU warranties are 2 years - I did point that out to the supplier, but I know when I am on a hiding to nothing).  It had been attacked a few times by boar, a pine martin, a few garden birds and a few hornets, so it had a hard life!  Anyway, I couldn't cope without one, so blagged a discount code off the supplier, who were very good and allowed me to apply that discount to something that was already discounted, and also made sure it was sent through express, so the new one arrived on Wednesday and was installed on Thursday - once I had read the instructions with the help of a magnifying glass!!  We rigged it up in a tree close to where the last one died to see what was happening and test it out.  Boar are what is happening - they must be on their second litter of the year, and they do just love the shallow ponds for wallowing in.  The fish aren't so keen, but as there is little water, despite the rain, the fish are dying off, so I guess the boar can have their fun.

We'll see what more porcine fun appears over the next week.

In the meantime, the Comice approaches at a terrifying speed and I need to concentrate on painting dancers and doing lettering (some of it very big) so that people have an idea what is going on.  I've done the logos on the two arches (photo is of the smaller one), now for the lettering....

Have a good week!

 

Being a good peasant

Apologies for not posting yesterday - I was indeed being a good peasant, and had just got my hands on 4 kilos of very ripe yellow plums - if I didn't jam them yesterday, they would have gone in the new burping barrel, and that would have been a waste.  I had also turned down a tray of apricots in favour of free plums for jam making, so had to get cracking.  But taking the stones out and chopping up 4 kilos of plums takes time, then you have to gently cook them, before adding the sugar and pushing to setting temperature.  Still, we started the half jar today at breakfast, and it was jolly yum, so definitely worth it and you will have to believe me!

And once that was done, I thought I was on a roll, so I spent an hour peeling the tiny shallots for pickling (no photo), at which point it was time to do all the bits for crab and comté soufflé for dinner.

At the start of the week, I was able to enjoy this wonderful vista over a vast field of sunflowers - in general they are nearly over but I was able to catch this field near its best.

Close to, some of the flower heads were huge, and while still flowering at the centre. birds had already started to peck away at the ripening seeds.  I picked out a few myself for sowing next year (just 8) and they were slightly sticky to the touch but fat and well filled.

Midweek I was able to spend a bit of time working in the potager and was able, after doing a bit of watering, to thin out the carrots a bit, particularly those that were quite close to the nicely developing parsnips.  I sowed a sort of heritage variety of multicoloured carrots - apparently all shades between white and black, via yellow, orange and red.  So far those I have thinned have been firmly in the white to orange spectrum, which is a shame as black carrots are so dramatic!

The woodstore by the potager is very useful for drying off crops once lifted, such as shallots, onions and potatoes, before they go to storage or are used.  It has the standard tin roof, ventilated wooden walls and a sandy floor.  This seems to be an ideal home for antlion larvae.  I've not dug down to see what they look like, but we have a lot of depressions which are very characteristic and very intriguing.  If I were 50 years younger, I would probably dig one up, now I am more live and let live.

The week has also been about Comice preparations.  I spent Thursday afternoon in a disused piggery with a laptop, projector and a load of paints, trying to trace the logo onto part of a giant panel.  It all went well until the scaffolding holding the projector shifted just a smidge!!

Saturday was Bunting Day - I helped on the morning shift, stringing up bunting down the main drag of the village to get people in the mood for fun.  It's amazing how lots of small triangles of fabric on a piece of bailing twine can make everything seem so much more festive!  In the afternoon our house got bunting on its façade too, which I can see a small bit of when in the back garden - it's the small things that can give so much pleasure!

Next week I'll try to be more timely, but there is a lot more Comice preparation to do!