Rural Life

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!

 

Location, location, location

After three very good weeks with the trail camera, I sadly have to announce a complete failure this week.  We chose a location that was away from the road and surrounded by dense undergrowth, near a water source and with tracks in many directions, seemingly used by animals large and small.  When we collected the camera yesterday, there were 6 files on it, with the least awful photo below.  The others included mainly my bottom retreating from the camera or me getting up close to turn it off.  Clearly that area is not in use at the moment, possibly as the hunt were through last weekend, possibly as it isn't an interesting area at this time of year.  I'll try again there in the spring or summer, but for now the camera has moved on.

So what else has been going on this week?  The gastronomy fest continues, with more truffle influenced meals.  We are using up the last bit of the truffle tonight and that is it until early 2023.  We also had lunch out at our favourite restaurant, and honestly it was hard to move after our 12,55 Euros a head blow out.  I've not had that good a bavette steak for years, while the chocolate mousse was positively intoxicating in its chocolatiness.  

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In order to recover from all the rich food, and to keep warm, we have had to spend time in the One Acre Wood, taking down and chopping up a long dead chestnut tree.  Yesterday we did the felling and sectioning.  There was freezing fog and everywhere was covered in white tendrils as the fog froze onto spider web.  When all was still you could actually hear the ice crystals falling off.  Today we went back with the trailer and a splitting axe (or merlin) and tidied up the largesse, splitting much of it to make it usable.  Reading back over past memories, ten years ago I was able to split a stère of wood almost single handed, but this year I managed about 8 logs.  Mind you, that is an improvement on last year, when I could do almost nothing with a dodgy elbow.

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We support a cat charity locally called Cat's Garfield - they catch, sterilise and rehome, as far as possible, feral and stray cats in the area.  This weekend they were trying to educate people and raise a bit of cash through an exhibition of photos taken by one of their members, a half-English lady who has just started up as a photographer in the area.  The pictures were lovely and it is also nice to hear the good news stories of adoptions.  What impressed us most was the venue - a converted chapel.  The downstairs was pleasant with nice features, the upstairs was breath-taking.

To close, a final picture of the frost in the wild clematis Old Man's Beard, which surrounds the wildflower meadow and strangles all the fruit trees, and much else besides.  The birds don't seem to be interested in the seed heads, but when the freezing fog does its thing, they are rather pretty.  Fingers crossed for some interesting footage from the trail camera next week!

 

Happy New Year - 2022, the Year of the Pheasant?

Happy New Year to chums near and far.  And a healthy one too, which is on my mind as others have been "pinged" in our close circle and it's a worry.

The period between Christmas and New Year is always an odd one, and this year is no exception.  The weather has been unseasonably mild, and the last couple of days have been gloriously sunny too.  Yesterday morning there was a hint of mist, which made going up the garden to feed the chickens a slightly spooky affair, as can be seen.

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The mist burnt off very quickly though, and both yesterday and today we have sat out with cats, watched birds, done some gardening and enjoyed nature.  It was lovely to get the hammocks out again today and sit in The Garden watching the tits and a robin working their way through a coconut filled with fat and seeds.  I was surprised to see the robin doing that in fact, as I thought it really was a trick of blue tits and great tits.  We do actively encourage great tits in The Garden as they are the only bird to have decided to eat pine processionary caterpillars, and with nests in a couple of the pine trees round the garden, encouraging them seems like a good idea.  A friend did happily point out that great tits also predate bats, but if my bats live where I think they do, no great tit could get into the space!

The weather is also conducive to good, dramatic sunsets - this was yesterday's.

The French make a big deal of the Reveillon as they tend to call it and New Year, although this year the festivities were more muted due to the charm free Omicron.  In previous years, we have gorged on foie gras, smoked salmon, steak, oysters (occasionally done as Angels on horseback with bacon and prunes), but this year we went for tartiflette, a delicious mix of potatoes (home grown of course), smoked bacon, onion, garlic and Reblouchon cheese.  We didn't eat all this pan, we did save some to go with sausages today!

Wandering around the grounds today, we spotted this rather dramatic and interesting fungus - I might work out what it is by next week!  So bright that I wondered if it was a piece of plastic brought in by one of the foxes in the Orchard, it stood out among the detritus under one of the walnut trees.

And so to the Year of the Pheasant.  The trail camera has been in a very tucked away part of the Orchard this week, and I managed to control myself and not visit it every day to see what it had caught.  We have dodgy photos of a fat pigeon, a rat, a hedgehog, and a possible ragondin, or coypu.  The fox was also nosing around and a blackbird did his thing in front of the camera too.  A duck walked past.  But the most prolific visitors to the area, and yet not the ones that make the paths, were the pheasants.  Here are three girls doing what they do.

The warm weather means that the male pheasants are getting frisky, so clearly my three girls are interesting prey.  There are sounds off too!

But I don't think male pheasants are that bright, and this one has also been tagged by someone, so is also at a bit of a disadvantage.  Doesn't stop him thinking he is pretty fab though!

The trail camera is on the move now, to keep an eye on what is causing damage elsewhere, and hopefully will have some good footage again for next week, when I will be back to Sunday updates.

 

 

First image from the Trail Camera

Yes, finally, something other than a cat or a blackbird!  We took the camera down from its position yesterday afternoon and I watched through the videos and looked a the photos.  We now know what is making the tracks around the Garden bit of the estate (not by our house in the village), but it look a lot of zooming and searching and thinking.  This is the best image I could do (because all that image enhancement on CSI and NCIS is military boloney).

Anyway, the camera is now set up in a new position, and I will have to contain my excitement until Saturday next week to see what the new position gets (Big Hint, Santa, I want hares and badgers and deer and foxes and pheasants and partridges and hedgehogs!).

In the news today I see that Richard Rogers has fallen off his perch at the age of 88.  My Dad was very friendly with his first father in law, Marcus Brumwell, and used to stay at the house Rogers designed for him on the Fal Estuary.  I was therefore fascinated to see Creek Vean featured in the BBC obituary.  I remember visiting it once, when perhaps 13 years old.  Mum was having kittens while I was in the house due to the number of quality modern ceramics dotted around, while when I was in the garden I got annoyed with all the stones with holes dotted around - only Barbara Hepworth sculptures, but at 13 one tends to be a philistine!

The photo is from the BBC website, but is credited to English Heritage.

The days are nearing their shortest now, so it isn't surprising to see the moon rise as I go to lock up the chickens in the evening.  Or it shouldn't be, but the anticyclone is locking humidity at ground level so for much of the time we have been "enjoying" wall to wall low level murk.  Yesterday was different fortunately, so I was able to capture moon rise over the Church and next door's underwear (better photo editing required in future me thinks).  It is just past the full, but was exceedingly bright.

Although the bulk of winter is still ahead of us, there are ever more signs that plants are preparing for the spring.  There are seedlings appearing of annual flowers and weeds, and the tiny buttons of next year's sedums by the dead stalks from this year.  The polyanthus that John rescued from a bin are also starting to prepare flowers to brighten up January - and in a clever bit of planting, I got the purple ones in by the shrub with the spookily purple berries.

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Well, that's all for today - there really is very little new going on at the moment, other than laying bets as to when curfew will be reinstated and when travel within France will be limited (my personal bet is for the 29th December).  The next instalment is likely to be on the 27th and hopefully will include more wildlife photography from the trail camera.  In the meantime, Happy December 25th.

 

Short, wintery days

Still no images from the trail camera, after a week at what I thought would be an interesting spot.  What I actually captured was a still and a video of a cat following my trail around the meadow, a still of a blackbird, and numerous images of my legs as I went to check the camera.  Ho hum.  It has been moved and now to see what crops up at a different site - annoyingly, after I'd moved the camera, I found evidence of something having been in the area, which I think is jolly unfair.

So back to more classic ways of capturing images - and during the week we caught first sight of the new moon over the roof of the house.  It was a classic clear, cold evening and a tiny slip of moon like a toe nail clipping!

Of course if it is like that in the evening, you wake up to a winter wonderland of ice the following day, but frost crystals on leaves do make for interesting images.

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Cold mornings also mean that the small birds are keen on the fat balls I put out for them.  As well as remarkably critical tits of various sorts, there is a flock of sparrows that haunts the feeder.  At one stage I reckon there were a dozen on or by it, until Zola the cat trotted around the corner from annoying the chickens and they scattered.  That was also the time when I was trying to get a photo of them on and around the feeder, so typically I have a number of photos of nothing much.  But greed got the better of them and before I had put the phone away, a couple were back.  Not the best photo, but you get the idea.

We were in the One Acre Wood this morning, so I spent some time planning where the trail camera might go, looking at where the leaves have been disturbed or where there are clear trails that aren't us.  I have some ideas!  I was also able to spot the other beech trees in the parcels next to ours, as at the moment, their leaves are mightily conspicuous.

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Checking out the Meadow, after it has had its annual mow, and looking for evidence of wildlife as a target for the trail camera, I took some time to notice the new growth coming up.  It strikes me it would be interesting to do a quadrant test to see how many species there are in half a square meter, as looking at the photo below I can make out two types of orchid, clovers, plantains, moss, grass and others that I am not familiar with.  And therein lies the problem - I am not enough of a botanist to distinguish between clover types, or different trefoils, or different plantains.  Perhaps I need to buy a student for a week!  Anyway - here is a photo - how many can you spot?

I can see at least 9 different things in there.