Rural Life

Weird weather and a garden update

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Flaming June!

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

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

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

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

Mum is being quite protective.

 

And then there is badger action too.

 

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

 

Heatwave and drought

It's broadly official now, with 40 days at over the seasonal average temperature, and pretty well no rainfall since early April - it's a heatwave and it's a drought.  There are water restrictions and even the farmers are mostly complying with them.  Lawns look parched unless overhung by willow trees, in which case they are lush and green and long.  Anywhere else and they are turning yellow or brown, apart from the weed flowers which happily rise above it all.  I think the drought conditions have really done for the bee orchids this year - there were so many rosettes in the winter and early spring, but not enough moisture to let them push up flower spikes.  Those that there are, seem a bit stunted to me too.

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Temperatures have gone over 30ºC a fair number of times in the last two weeks, and while we can strip down to shorts and skimpy t-shirts, the cats can't.  They are doing a good effort of shedding fur whenever we touch them, and actually as desert animals probably cope a bit better than us in the heat, but they are seeking comfy places to sleep this out.

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The plants are doing their best, with late evening watering for things in pots.  The butternut seedlings are ready to go out I think/hope.  They seem big enough to cope with being nibbled by any snails mad enough to break hibernation seals and come out and about.  The chilli seeds are coming up - given the weather, they might seem a bit late, but we are only 3 weeks into May and are actually on the early side.  The cheap rose I bought at Aldi shrugged off the greenfly, after judicious application of soapy water, and is now in flower, while the single red hot poker that I have nurtured in a pot, ready to plant elsewhere, is now out.  Another bit of colour, this time by the front door, comes from the pinks we got at Jacques Briant, and I finally potted on into something sensible a couple of weeks ago.

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The trail camera has moved - after getting 500 photos and 500 short videos of moving grass seed heads, it was clearly time for a change.  Currently I am trying it at a sort of crossroads between the Orchard and the Meadow, and as there are no handy trees or fencing poles there, I have it on a piece of willow log, rescued from a work site.  I only managed to check it once before today, and have evidence that it has been investigated by the badger family!

This week's blog is early.  The weather today is hot, so we aren't going to feed the cats and put water around until a bit later.  Tomorrow (Sunday) we are spending from midday or so, helping out on the beer and sandwich stand at the village trout fishing day.  Next week I hope there will be lots of jolly photos from the event, but I know I won't be in a fit condition to sit in front of a computer and write about it tomorrow evening.  I expect my ankles to be the size of footballs!

 

Blooming May

This week it's all about flowers - we've had no rain since the 24th April and while there is still a fair amount of moisture around, the forecast is for a hot 10 days, which will fry things out rather.  There are water restrictions here already, which should stop any watering between 10am and 8pm, but you still see the vast water jets on farms, which doesn't sit well when gardeners are being told that only vegetable plots can be watered and then only "reasonably".  I think if you have planted new trees during the winter, there is also generally a derogation for that, but no watering established shrubs or borders, no watering lawns, and no filling swimming pools (yeah, right, like people are going to obey that one!).

On the cultivated flower front, we are in my favourite season - irises!  The selection below are red from our garden, mauve from the Chinon garden, black and white (well, very dark purple and white) from the edge of the wildflower meadow, and Dutch irises from by The Shack.

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Then there are the things that are cultivated, or sort of cultivated, such as the campanula, the semper vivum baskets that are starting to overflow (although not strictly flowers, they are quite magnificent I think), the mix of self-seeded forget-me-knots and purple flowers which might be phacelia, and the deep red poppies that also spread themselves around from last year's display of bee-friendly flowers.

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The wildflower meadow is really getting into its stride and you can see the masses of white oxeye daisies, while around the area there are great fountains of false acacia flowers, humming with bees.  If you sit near a group of these, you can even smell the honey - acacia honey is very popular, very pale and not strongly flavoured, assuming you can find single variety honeys.  L'Or de la Ruche in St Martin d'Arcé makes a particular feature of the different types of honey based on what was flowering near the hives, be it colza, sunflowers, chestnut, acacia, meadow flowers or summer flowers.

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The first couple of bee orchids are out, and I am particularly pleased with this photo of one.

Sunny weather, flowering meadows, a feeling that summer is really on its way all add up to one thing - a need for ice cream.  This year one of the local farms has opened a creamery to sell milk, cream, cheeses, yoghurts as well as its headline product - ice cream.  It isn't cheap, but it is very good!  We are working our way through the flavours.  The vanilla is long gone, but we are currently on Rum Raisin, Pistachio, and eeking out the most amazing chocolate one.  What will I buy this week???

Have a good one!

 

Time for a little sunshine

Storm Diego is now mostly a distant memory although he left odd pressies for us to find, like this willow that snapped off about 8 feet above ground.  What is on the ground has now been chopped into useful (40cm) lengths ready to move when a bit of sap has gone from the wood, while the top (not shown) is still in the lake, waiting for a more powerful tractor than my mower to pull it out.

The top bit also provides a bit of shelter and sustenance for the tadpoles, which are now around in profusion.  It may also stop them getting headaches from the sun, you never know!

There is a lot of colour at the moment, although the tulips are starting to go over.  The tree peony is out again - at this stage last year, it then got shredded by hail stones, so I hope to enjoy it a bit longer this year.  The cowslips are nearly over but the various orchids are starting to send up flower spikes, or in the case of the lady orchid, just flowering where it slumps - very lazy.

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Remember, you can get a better close up view of the photos if you click on them - assuming you want to, of course!

As well as riots of colour, there is also the small question of procreation.  Shrubs are full of rutting sparrows, while those who got it together rather earlier are building nests and collecting food.  The cuckoos are out and about - we hear them call but don't ever see them, and, whisper it softly, I've seen a swallow or two!  And it's not just birds, frogs and toads that are getting it on, the masonry bees are at it too.  These are large, dark electric blue, solitary bees; well apart from a short period when it takes two to tango.  And they can do it in flight or while sitting on pear blossom - that one can fly on its own is sort of against the laws of physics, but that two can fly together is pretty amazing!

Yup - the photo metadata is wrong.

So what has been happening with the trail camera this week?  Well, lots of short films of the same bit of scrub at night, sometimes with heavy mist, sometimes nicely crisp, and no real clue as to what set off the camera.  Perhaps there is a ghost that haunts the green lane nearby.  But today's video, because yes, there is a video link, is a rather lovely short bit of film of a passing deer.

I do think it should have eaten rather more bramble than it did, but there you go.

Happy Easter - shame the camera didn't spot the Easter Bunny!

 

Four seasons in a week!

Last week I complained of frost and we had more of it too.  Now people get very upset by sharp frosts and imagine the worst and want to remove anything that might have been affected as soon as possible.  I find it is worth waiting a bit.  While we know that there will be no early season figs - the hint is that the tiny fruits and the leaf buds are black, brittle and horrid - I'm not giving up yet on plums, peaches, pears or apples.  Some still have blossom and the flowers are more hardy than the tiny fruits, while until the tiny fruits fall off, well, you never know!  Apple and quince are just coming into their own - quince has to be the prettiest blossom!

Last week I was upset as the honesty seemed to have been affected by the frost and I expected it to collapse and go black.  Not a bit of it!  Today I was admiring it and I can not remember ever seeing better!

So we have had winter frosts, spring showers, summer sunshine and autumn gales this week.  Storm Diego rattled through on Friday, bringing heavy rain, strong winds even inland and bringing down power cables.  He blattered our broad beans which are looking a bit sorry for themselves, but I hope will pick up tomorrow in the sun.  This afternoon we had a picnic tea in the Garden in lovely sunshine.  In Canada, April is considered the cruellest month due to extremes of weather (and the Canadians really do extremes of weather), but that may become the new normal for us here in Western Europe too I guess.  Last night we had a dramatic sunset to add to the mix.

It's been a quiet week on the trail camera front - just one fuzzy bottom of what I think is a boar passing through.  I will move the camera somewhere more interesting soon.

The orchids in the Orchard and Meadow are starting to rev up to flowering, well one has a well developed flower head, while the lizard orchids are looking more and more like they are preparing for world domination.  It is actually the time when the bee orchids go discrete prior to putting on their delightful show in May.

However one of the domestic orchids is putting on a fine show of three flowers.  For some reason I find it very difficult to take a good photo of them all, but here is one bloom.

Today the French are voting in the first round of the presidential elections, and we can only watch in envy, not being citizens and not having a UK vote either.  The news services keep giving an update on the turnout so far - last time I looked it was close to 70%, some 4% down on the same time five years ago.  It is a worry as there are some real nutty candidates, some with truly offensive policies.  In many ways the real campaign will start tonight at about 10pm when they are 95% confident they know who the top two candidates will be, having seen off (possibly) the nutters.  Fingers crossed!

 

Frost!

Last weekend, the weather was amazing, and we knew it couldn't last, that it wasn't right for the time of year.  Although looking back through my diaries, it's not the first March that has been warm and sunny towards the end.  We were promised rain during the week and a cold snap, perhaps snow.  Well earlier in March they had been promising an end to relentless grey and sunshine, which didn't happen when promised, so you could forgive us for thinking the same about a cold snap and snow.  We did rather yearn for rain.

Up until the end of Tuesday, it was very nice indeed.  Warm and sunny and humming with bird and insect activity.  I even had to water some bits of the vegetable patches.  It was supposed to rain on Wednesday - a couple of millimetres at most doesn't help.  But the cold and then the snow flurries did arrive, and really weren't nice, although nothing settled.  Last night there was a sharp frost, and there will be another tonight.  It has done bad things to flowers - the honesty, which I thought would be fine, is sagging as are the yellow tulips.  The feral potatoes also caught the frost but I'm not too worried about them!

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Not everything has been badly affected - yet.  The cherry blossom is still pretty, without brown frost burns, although that may still come, and whether there will be any fruit is also a moot point.  The Bright Lights Chard I sowed last year is also doing fine, although preparing to go to seed - there is enough for a good quiche later in the week and the chickens will enjoy it too.  The plants will need to be sacrificed as we don't want them setting seed and that part of the plot will need a go with the rotavator in order to prepare it for other planting in May.

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It was too cold and promised to be too cold again tonight to do much useful gardening today, so after a fairly short visit to supervise cats at The Shack, we went to the open weekend at l'Or de la Ruche nearby, a honey business.  They got subsidies to put up a larger building to house stocks, the equipment to maintain 300 hives and also the equipment to manage the harvest from 300 hives.  The roof is covered in solar panels which should produce 100kW of electricity - a good boost to local capacity.  They are also home to the local campaign against Asian hornets.

There may be Saharan sand around, or it could just have been the clouds, but the sky to the east turned pink yesterday evening at sunset.  It was most odd.  This photo has not been tinkered with other than cropping out things I don't want you to see!

Finally, trail camera news and was there anything last week?  Just one visitor this time - I think the cows in the back field and their electric fence have limited who is doing the rounds at the moment, so I have moved the camera again to see if I can track down the badger activity.  Anyway, this fine fellow came visiting.

So first we have some footage of him nibbling a branch and looking around.

Then he seemed to think that the camera was edible!

We'll see what next week brings.

 

Winter jobs and weather

While conservation organisations would like us to do nothing during the winter in the gardens and green areas we manage, that is a bit too utopian to be feasible.  Don't cut anything back until the spring they say, but then in the spring you mustn't cut stuff back because it is nesting season, you must wait until high summer.  Except you mustn't cut back things in the summer, when they are flowering and fruiting and providing nourishment for wildlife, but then in the autumn you mustn't cut things back either as things need seeds and protected areas to shelter and hibernate in.  If you follow that reasoning, of course, you never do anything and a wild area becomes a place of impenetrable scrub which nothing much likes.  The birds don't even eat the blackberries and they shrivel up on the briars and are very itchy if you get them on your skin or down your shirt.  This is not vibrant wild land!

So, John has been strimming it back, keeping an eye out for wildlife, but seeing none, not even a duck on the pond hidden in all that skank.  The toads will be abroad soon, and later in the summer, the dragonflies will be on patrol, but otherwise those are quite uninteresting ponds (or so I think, but I will do some dipping later in the year).

In addition, we have pruned one of the juicing apple trees - it was so overgrown with branches crossing, that it was impossible for the apples to fall off!  We removed the branch with the massive mistletoe - we have others, so don't need that one, and cut out a lot of wood, including dead branches.  Many were weighed down with moss and lichen, so that it was hard to tell the primary function of the tree!

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The signs of spring are ever more visible, although there is a lot of weather to go first I suspect.  In sheltered spots of the ground there are narcissi up and in some cases, flowering.  I had forgotten where I planted a load of anemone bulbs last autumn, but they are now showing, and I really didn't think I planted them through a poppy!  The late woodland snowdrops are coming up, with one flower bud to show for it, and the garlic I planted a few days ago in a low polytunnel are showing decent sized shoots.  But things are later than last year, as there are no cowslip flowers up yet. 

There are orchids everywhere!

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And then there have been storms.  Dudley was too far north to affect us.  Eunice meant we had some reasonable squalls of wind and rain on Friday, but fortunately nothing much over 75kmph or so - nasty if you were out in it.  Franklin or whatever he is called means we have annoying gusts that hit my office roof with an alarming sound, but again not too bad.  On Monday we had thunderstorms though, which are a bit rare at this time of year.  There were lightening strikes within a kilometre of the house and heavy rain - not much fun!

Bad weather means it isn't easy to get scaffolding up, so we would respectfully request some nice, dull weather so that the masons can get the frame up and do what needs to be done to the chimney!  Hopefully there will be news on that next week!

 

Hints of better days to come

So here's a thing - not one, but TWO sunny days during the week!  Friday might have been alright too, I can't remember, as Fridays are dominated by other things.  But TWO sunny days.  Well mostly sunny days, but two of them!

We took advantage of the first (Monday) to do a bit of work on a client's garden - it is quite exposed when the wind is in the West or Southwest, and many of the trees and shrubs have a jaunty angle, but where it is sheltered, it is a wonderful sun trap at this time of year.  Following animal tracks around, I found a glorious and secluded group of daffodils, with flower buds developing nicely.  They could be out in a couple of weeks!

Yesterday (Saturday) was the other nice day - it made standing in queues at the market so much more enjoyable, and positively encouraged chatting with acquaintances.  Catching up with people and passing the time of day is one of those things that has been allowed to slide with Covid, sadly.  The sun also meant it was exceptionally pleasant to go to the One Acre Wood and sort out a problem on an oak tree that had been annoying us for a few years.  It is a magnificent specimen, about 70 to 80 years old we think, and the main trunk is straight and true, but there was a low side branch which affects the quality of the main stem, so we cut it off.  In three years, it will keep us warm.  It was lovely in the wood.

The days are getting longer and things are getting frisky.  If you are a semi-feral freeloading bantam, this means you are considered fair game by any young cat that is looking for a nice gift for the girl of his dreams.  I don't see the chasing, I just hear the objections, and if I go out to see what the problem is, I can bet I will be faced with a very cross bantam at head height.  I've tried telling Bridie that if she lived in the main run, she wouldn't have this problem, but she just won't believe me!

Something is thinking about setting up home in The Garden by The Shack - I'm not sure what it is, but it's a bit more than the test pits that the boar come up with in the wildflower meadow or the badger mess created elsewhere.  If it keeps looking purposeful, I might set up the trial camera nearby to see who it is.  This week there was more evidence that the hunters had scared everything off - the camera was set up by a trail and a pond that we know is used by ducks.  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing through the whole week other than me coming to take the camera down.  I even put it in the chicken run overnight to make sure it was still working (it is).  Ho hum.

(Apologies for the poor quality photo.)

During the autumn, my new found orchid obsession and half price plants at Mr Bricolage meant that the kitchen windowsill is now orchid central.  The largest, most expensive and definitely most worrying of the collection arrived with one large flower, which lasted a good three weeks before falling off.  But over the past two months, a bud has slowly developed and after an annoying 3 days, is now fully opened.  The flower isn't as big as the one that fell off, but to my mind, it is probably a bit prettier (well I would say that, wouldn't I?).

So that's it for this week - next week there will be exciting tales of garlic planting and the latest fail with the trail camera!

 

Not my video today!

Once again my trail camera placement failed!  Deep in the One Acre Wood, left alone without any checking for 6 days, and overlooking some clear trails, following all the advice, I spent the week imagining the videos of deer, foxes, badgers and boar, and dreading the images of poachers and hunters.  What did I get?  One very misty video, due to condensation we think as it was from a very foggy day, of a bird that could have been a jay or a chaffinch sitting on a branch and then flying off.  We couldn't tell which it was as it was so fuzzy we couldn't get a handle on the size or a clear view of colours.  So in answer to the question about if a tree/leaf/branch falls in the forest, does it make any sound, I couldn't tell you as nothing was there to see it and set off the camera!

The weather wasn't all dull and misty/foggy - despite being promised 4 nice days, we did manage 2 where we saw the sun at some stage, and I managed to get some laundry dry outside.  Seasonal affective disorder isn't being talked about much, as Covid is so much more important, but the high pressure gloom that has dominated the north west of France so far this year is enough to drive you to holiday porn of Caribbean beaches or Antipodean glamour.

Given that the trail camera provided no excitement, I have to point out that it hasn't been a totally dull week however.  When we brought our house the staircase had wooden panelling in places, and where someone had cut a hole for an electric socket (long gone), if you put your finger through the hole, you could feel carving.  When the whole two storey staircase had to be ripped out and replaced, we asked the artisans to keep the old panelling, and when we got our hands on it, the carving was as lovely as we had hoped.  I got a chum in the know to do an estimate of age for me, and he said that it wasn't really old linenfold, but it certainly wasn't modern either, and he put it at 17th century - think Jacobean. 

It has taken nearly four years to find another artisan to take the panels, clean them up and turn them into an internal door, but last week the moment arrived and the door was fitted.  It is still missing its transom window, and needs a little adjusting (should happen on Tuesday), but we are already besotted with it.  The guillotine door is to allow the cats to pass through easily, or not (when the door is closed).

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With January dashing by at a frightening speed, we have now invested in seed potatoes and can start chitting them soon, while John has started to build the small polytunnels that might win us a week or two on salads and radishes.  Next week he is muttering about firing up the rotavator and starting to turn the soil for the potato bed, so we can start planting in mid-March.

Finally, I get to work with some amazing environmental projects around England, one of which is Love Your River Cole in Solihull and Warwickshire.  They have just published their first VLog including work to improve the river at Meriden Park and also some nice footage of a heron and an egret.  So as my trail camera didn't provide a nice video, if you have 10 minutes to spare, enjoy this instead.

Until next week!