Rural Life

Starting the gardening season

I don't know why, but we haven't really been inspired to get this year's gardening underway so far.  We have planted shallots and onions, which are now sprouting, and of course in the last weeks of 2022 we sowed our broad beans, but other than that we've not done much.

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Over winter, we have been able to enjoy fresh parsley, parsnips, chard, leeks and the stored potatoes (now all gone), but yesterday we had a few spears of feral asparagus which acted as a reminder that if we want to feed ourselves, we need to get ourselves into gear!  After all, we do have 53 seed potatoes chitting away, which will need to be planted soon.

The chard will keep going for a while and there is a hint of cauliflower on the six plants that are still also providing ample food for caterpillars.  There is also corn salad hiding away among the weeds that have grown back, which I hope to rescue soon.

The state of the rhubarb reminds us that we need to care for the soil, adding organic matter back where we can, while at the same time continuing to fight the good fight against the rampant scrub that wants to reclaim the gardens.  These tulips were planted in a vegetable bed only 3 years ago, but are now fighting their way out of a bramble patch.

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Those plants that fight on through the weeds and scrub come out stronger - this calendular made it through the winter and is now developing many more flower buds for more blazing orange.

One reason for our lassitude to date is that for once things are a bit delayed in nature.  The daffodils would have been finished by now last year and the year before, while the cowslips are just going from strength to strength.  But blossom is late - the countryside is white with wild plum and blackthorn much later than normal, while the pear may not be in full bloom for Easter, as it usually would be (irrespective of date, as Easter is determined by moon phases).  There is a slow green veil taking over but that has been apparent in late March for the last few years, not early April.

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The birds are out in force, but there were few insects around, despite the blossom and the highly pungent laurel flowers.  The hornet trap is set at The Shack but not at home, but there is no sign of any interest in it so far.  There are a few heavy bumblebees around, but without insects, there will not be much fruit, so I hope they appear soon.

The extremely clear sign of a late spring was at the One Acre Wood however.  For the past few years, by the start of April, the lily of the valley would be perhaps an inch or two tall and showing whether there would be any flowers to come.  We walked through the spot today, and could see nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  They will sprout in due course, but they confirm we are right not to be plunging into too much gardening activity before Nature is ready to give us a helping hand.

Many the Easter Bunny bring you more chocolate than you can eat in one sitting!

 

Thinking about spring

Although it's March, it's not quite spring yet, but something is definitely stirring out there.  Of course some say that spring starts at the beginning of March and I can quite see that, but I'm going to wait for the equinox this year before I call it.  It's not that we have had snow this last week - far from it, in fact.  Today we had the hammock out for the first time this year, and pronounced it to be good.  I had a lovely quarter of an hour, relaxing, covered in large cats, and for part of the time at least, watching a magnificent woodpecker in one of the walnut trees.

I did do some spring-like work in the potager, in that I got around to planting the yellow onion sets I bought a few weeks ago.  Someone on one of the forums who is a bit further north than us talked about having their onion sets planted between the autumn sown broad beans, so that when the beans are done in June or so, the onions can let rip and use the nitrogen fixed by the bean roots.  Someone else poo-pooed that, but on the forums you can normally find someone who will swear blind that black is white.  Anyway, why not give it a whirl?  The onions can't really do any worse than they did last year!!

The plants are certainly starting to get into the swing of things.  The daffodils are coming out, although the more fancy narcissi are a long way behind, and the anemones I planted back at the end of 2021 are putting on another good display this year.

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No trail camera images this week I'm afraid, but a distant view of a small flock of cattle egrets along with next door farmer's cattle, doing whatever cattle egrets do.  I first became aware of them six years ago, when we went to Guadeloupe.  There, people park a cow anywhere where there is a bit of grass, and then each cow seems to have up to a dozen attendant egrets.  But now we have huge flocks of them in mainland France, some with more than a hundred birds, like a snow drift across a field.  I gather it is a sign of climate change as they have moved north from Africa.  They are lovely to look at but not right in the scheme of things.

I spotted something else that doesn't seem right yesterday too.  I was looking at the ponds at the bottom of The Orchard - I am now the proud owner of a pond dipping kit and was checking them out, to plan my first play.  I was hoping to spot a bit of spawn perhaps.  I didn't see any spawn, but was pleased that the level of the ponds has risen a bit with the recent rain, although we need so much more as they are a good 6 to 8 inches below where they should be at this time of year.  Then I heard a swish and a plop and looking across, saw the back and dorsal fin and tail of a rather large fish - when I say large, probably about 8 to 10 inches long.  Naturally it took a while for me to remember to get my phone out to take a picture and it was too far away, but I got something anyway, as you can see.  No, really!  My bumper book of Freshwater Fish says it could be Roach or Rudd, but to me the bigger questions are how did it get there, why haven't I seen it before, what does it live on and will it survive?

Today from The Shack we needed to visit another property, to check on something, and the easiest route, or at least the route we took, went through the area devastated by the forest fire last summer.  I got out of the car to take a couple of pictures and also a video.  It was most odd.  It was very quiet - no trees for the wind to rustle through, few birds, certainly many fewer than at The Shack, where they are raucous at the moment, and an overwhelming scent of pine, like someone had been spraying toilet duck around.  I hope that in a few weeks plants will start to reappear, as the black ground is chilling to look at.

So that's it for this week - I'm not sure what will be on the menu next week, but am sure that nature and life will surprise me!

 

 

 

Winter activity

January is doing what January does - mostly it is cold, sometimes it is wet too.  Anticyclones at this time of year tend to mean that any moist air is trapped at low levels giving annoying, thin cloud, mist and fog, and if the air is dry, you can see for miles but it is jolly cold.  We've been having a bit of both of those, and quite frankly I am fed up with having cold feet, even when wearing my fleecy socks.  But the views can be lovely!

There are of course the hints that spring will happen - birds have been incredibly noisy the last week, and today there were woodpeckers hammering morse code messages to each other, and a thrush dealing with the last of the walnuts and any snails it can find.  Looking down there are many orchid rosettes appearing - they won't all flower this year, but the corms will be building resources - as well as timid snowdrops and the early signs of the swathes of narcissus that will adorn the top of the Meadow in a few weeks' time.  At the other end of the scale, cyclamen corms are rebuilding their strength after a prolific flowering season in the autumn, but the leaves will start to fade as the spring bulbs take over.

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The trail camera has moved and last Sunday, after I had been and downloaded images, there was deer activity.

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This is a particularly cheeky shot!

The badger is also out and about, but only at night!

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Finally, there was also a boar and a fox doing the rounds.

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The past week has also been Truffle Week, but with a few more meals to go, I will save a recipe by recipe account of 100g of best black truffle for next week.

 

New year, new promise?

Last blog was all about looking back, today is more about looking forward as the days start to lengthen and we stop thinking about how to celebrate midwinter and concentrate more on what the new year has to offer.

On the last day of the old year, it was unseasonably warm.  Now it is always hard for a gardener to hold back on sowing things and planting things, because that is what it is all about, making things grow.  That challenge is even harder when it is mild and you see buds developing and catkins shedding pollen everywhere (and so the start of the new season allergies).  However I felt justified in doing a bit of sowing, as I hadn't got around to the second patch of broad beans, and I like to do autumn sowing to avoid the worst ravages of blackfly.  So I uncovered a nicely clean bed, raked it over to remove any foolhardy weeds and a bit more of the underlying builders' rubble, made about 88 dents and sowed broad bean Aquadulce Claudia.  I then raked soil back over and added a nice long piece of netting to avoid the worst ravages of cat bottom.  I guess it will be another 3 weeks or so before the shoots show.

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Another major winter occupation is firewood - now is a good time to fell as the trees are quiet, not too much sap around or leaves to encumber the fall, we aren't worried about missing mushrooms and we aren't being attacked by mosquitos.  We've brought down two trees so far this winter and want to bring down another couple to ensure continuity.  We had clearly grown soft this summer as moving the dead/dry pieces up to the top of the One Acre Wood is proving harder work than in previous years and neither of us have really felt that our elbows are in a suitable condition for doing a lot of splitting with an axe, however satisfying it can be.  We borrowed a log splitter which made short work of the existing stash of big logs, which are now ready for use.

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We are still eating the fruits of last year's gardening, and the Brussel Sprouts seem to be nearly ready for John to crunch his way through.  I won't touch them.  Next weekend we will have our first red cabbage, but I fear that the cauliflower plants, that grew so large and lush, won't have the reserves to make good curds in February/March.  I mentioned that it was unseasonably warm?  Today I found them covered once again by caterpillars!

It is good at this time of year to look around and appreciate what we take for granted.  Two examples of this.  Firstly I was in a neighbouring village for a work appointment, and rather than park at the client's house, I parked by the church.  Once the work was done, as I put my stuff back in the car, and changed sweatshirt to one that the cats could and would dribble on, I took a moment to marvel at the magnificent St Médard church in Cheviré le Rouge.  It's not the largest village by any means, but perhaps 800 or 900 years ago it was way more important, and deserved this large and impressive church.

Looking down, once at the Orchard and having a bit of a walk, I marvelled at the intricate patterns of cyclamen leaves and was perhaps a bit concerned at the number and size of orchid rosettes under the big walnut tree.  The cyclamen flowers in the autumn were magnificent.  The orchids are most likely to be lizard orchids - impressive, particularly when there are a lot of them, but not pretty.

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I'm travelling next week, so there may be photos from other places next Sunday!

 

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!

 

Sunshine and badgers

Happy May Day - and apologies to those in the UK as I gather the weather isn't too great - here it is lovely and has been for a while.  Sunshine, gentle cooling breezes and blue skies, which of course also means hosepipe bans and water restrictions.  It is the earliest I remember there being a ban on watering non-essentials using well or tap water.  Fortunately we have stocks of rainwater, and vainly hope that it will rain sometime soon - the earliest forecast is for around the 13th May!!

The sunshine does mean that there are some lovely things to photograph at the moment - distant chateau before they disappear behind foliage, but are nicely framed by green, orchids (although the bee orchid season will start soon and I'm sure that will get boring), lizards, butterflies, tadpoles and a vide grenier (literally empty your attic - the French version of a car boot, and all day affairs).

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The wildflower meadow is really coming into its own, with oxeye daisies, linseed, and bright pink clover - the bee orchids will join in shortly as they seem to go well alongside the clovers.  We mowed a trail round, so that you can walk round without worrying about treading on something precious or getting too many ticks on your clothes, as the hares and deer also like the meadow.  You can't take a decent photo of a wildflower meadow really, as the camera can't work as well as the eye for taking it all in.  By contrast, I show an area by the fruit trees where we haven't mown, and nature is springing back with all the "best" things in life - nettles, mares tail and bramble.

We now have aubergines planted out under individual mini-cloches and some lettuce under protection from cat bums - I am hoping the resident thrushes will do the needful with slugs and snails as I found this year's well used anvil.

Anyway, I also said something about badgers.  We moved the trail camera to near the set in the hope of getting a sight of cubs at dawn or dusk.  For the first few days there was no action at all.  Then a couple of days ago I checked and there were lots of files, although on my phone they didn't look like much - but I downloaded a few photographs and a couple of videos anyway.  Away from sunlight and with a pair of glasses, I could see there was actually quite a bit of action, so today I downloaded a further random selection and there is quite a lot of activity.  The following five short films show the hunt for food as young cubs need sustenance, all done at night.

 

 

 

And finally...

Have a good week!

 

 

Getting serious about food production

I had intended a week of intense sowing and planting and weeding activity - well best laid plans and all that, something else came up, but having said that, we aren't doing too badly.  The first 27 potatoes I planted at the end of March are now all showing above the weed suppressant mat, while some of the second batch of 18 are also showing signs.  The final dollop planted last week won't show for a while yet - or so I assume.  The rows of garlic, shallots and onions are doing OK despite being rolled on from time to time by itchy cats - the shallots look very vigorous while the onions are slowly starting to show growing shoots.  They went in rather later than the shallots and have suffered more from cat attentions and being picked out by birds. 

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The broad beans all now have pods set, and as they have stopped flowering and are starting to show signs of blackfly, I have taken out the tops and they can concentrate on filling out those pods.  The speedy cabbages aren't really proving to be that speedy, despite a month with a cover on them, but are starting to look more convincing now, while the radishes sown among them will be ready this week, particularly if we have a bit more rain.

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Today was really devoted to sowing.  I carried on cleaning up the rotavated potato bed, although we aren't planting any more spuds.  Instead, while investigating my seed stash, I found an old packet of purple mangetout seeds, so I bashed in three poles, surrounded them with three former tree guards, and sowed a circle of peas around each.  I finished off that bit with a dense row of very cheap parsley seed - either they will grow, or they won't, we wait and see. 

John rotavated a bit of the potato bed from two years ago, cleaned it up a bit and spent a happy while sowing half of a cheap packet of dwarf french beans and half a packet of radish (18 jour variety) seeds.  If even half the seeds we sowed today come up, we will eat well in between 3 and 10 weeks time!

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The wildflower meadow is getting ready to burst into flower, so John took the opportunity to mow a path around the edge and along the line of fruit trees.  At the edge, under a cherry tree there are two early orchids flowering beautifully, but the main show of bee orchids won't start for two to three weeks yet.  The lizard orchids are starting to send up spikes, but they will be in full splendour in three to four weeks.  In the meantime, the ox eye daisies and clovers will put on a magnificent show, while the field scabious prepares to take over from them.  The better soil of the garden has a wonderful undercurrent of deep blue speedwell in it, while the bathroom orchid has finally bloomed again.

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Not much activity on the trail camera front this week - well lots of activity but too speedy for anything interesting.  The badger passing through was the best shot.  The camera has moved on - we are hoping for film of young badgers putting their noses out of the set, but realise it is a long shot (in every sense).  There was an Easter Sunday Excalirock festival at our local pub, so we went along - great to see people out and about again, and to enjoy the punkabilly of D-Track - a local group of people old enough to know better, but who are really energetic and fun.  My camera just about managed a photo of that, but wilted at trying to get a video!

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Have a good week!

 

Spuds we like!

Happy Spring!  And we have had a full week of sunny and warm weather which has brought out a lot of fruit blossom, pretty well done for the narcissi, and sent the cowslips into overdrive.  We'd thought it wasn't going to be a good year for them, but they have gone over the top.  There are more than ever of the red and orange ones and some odd variations which make us think that they may well hybridise with polyanthus.  This would explain the red and orange variants and also the rather odd one with primrose flowers on cowslip style stems!

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The honesty is also putting on a great display this year.  It is a biannual so these are the ones that germinated last year and it must have been a good year for that.  Wandering through the Orchard and Wildflower Meadow, I can seen hundreds, if not thousands, of orchid rosettes preparing for May.  They are spreading further and further as we get rid of the scrub, and the choking nettles and old man's beard, and will now curtail our ability to mow anything more than a path around the Meadow and Orchard for the next few months.  However I did spot one with a hairy caterpillar on it.  If there is a specific orchid butterfly or moth, then it has found the right place, if not, it will be bird food!!

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It was a major fail with the trail camera this week, which was a bit of a surprise after last week's excitement.  I only moved it about 20 feet, so should have seen the same level of action, but all I caught were two pigeons.  When I looked into the field behind where the camera was, I had an interesting, if one-sided, conversation with 5 young heifers, which might explain the lack of deer and boar.  The camera has moved on now.

Which brings us on to the potatoes.  We started to develop the allotment patches in the Garden in 2019, and now we are back to the first patch for potatoes, after growing them in two other plots in 2020 and 2021.  The soil was industrial clay with builder's rubble when we started (perhaps harsh, but that's what it felt like), but we have added a lot of organic material since.  I am told that rotavating was hard work, but not as bad as it has been, and certainly cleaning up what had been turned wasn't as bad as it has been.  I also added 5 sacks of real leaf mould before covering up the ground with weed suppressant matting and planting the seed potatoes through it.  We've gone with second earlies again this year - it worked in our favour last year, as the tops were dying off as blight started to hit, so we weren't affected.  The resulting tubers aren't as huge as main crop can be, but the variety we choose is versatile and also stores well.  We are still eating last year's crop!  So half done, the other half to do over the next couple of weeks, depending on the weather.

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Finally, in the saga of Bridie the Freeloading Bantam, she might perhaps be relenting a bit about sharing eggs with us.  She has found a way of getting into the chicken run (but can't get out again, which is weird), and laid an egg in the coop, which I scooped up with the eggs from the other chickens.  Then no more eggs, until I approached the chicken run from a different angle and found she had decided to lay in their "field shelter".  So we took those, and very tasty they were too.  Another egg appeared in the coop, which I left, and the following day, there was another one!  They are quite small but very white!

Have a good week!

 

 

 

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!

 

Hope springs eternal

First off, Happy Belated Burn's Night to my Scottish chums.  In your honour, we broached our second to last tin of haggis (it is now considered contraband to bring it in - one of those gifts of Brexit), and served it with roasted potatoes from our own production (tatties), creamed swede (neeps) and onion gravy (not a drop of whisky in the house - shock, horror).  It was delicious and there was enough left over for a nice snack lunch, hot on buttered toast.

This week's location for the trail camera was, if anything, even more frustrating than the last two.  There is evidence of activity in the zone and when I checked it on Tuesday, there were 92 files saved!  I left it in situ for the rest of the week and took it down yesterday, all eager to see what had been cavorting around for my entertainment.  There were the usual shots of me leaving and arriving, and 89 files showing the sun moving around, condensation drying off, the ambient temperature rising from -1ºC and frosty to 5ºC and sunny over the space of three quarters of an hour.  And in all that time, the only thing moving and setting off the camera?  A dead leaf on the Old Man's Beard!  It was also clearly the only time that there was any sort of breeze during the whole week, which apart from that one morning, was dull, foggy, dank, overcast and really rather cold.  Here is the offending leaf - the camera has moved to another spot, which I hope gets something!

This weekend is the RSPB's Garden Bird Watch weekend, which is also running with a French bird charity too.  The evidence from a week in a secluded orchard where no birds set off the camera is not entirely hopeful for wildlife.  In all seriousness, over the past fortnight, the hunters have "been through" twice round The Shack and seem to have frightened off pretty well everything other than a couple of very dedicated mallard and the small garden birds.  Today we did not manage to raise a pheasant, which we can normally do.  As they are only supposed to be hunting boar, any claims that the hunters are supporting local wildlife seem a bit spurious to me currently.

On a happier note, spring isn't here yet, but it is definitely on it's way.  There are bright yellow catkins around the edge of the One Acre Wood, snowdrops coming up under our quince tree and the daffodils and narcissus around the edge of the Wildflower Meadow are starting to show.

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Looking forward, I'm sure wildlife will be back - roaming around today, we found someone's stash of stolen maize husks and a hole in the fence to the farmer's field with well worn tracks all around.  They may be elsewhere currently, but I'm sure things will come back.  Looking even further forward, the cyclamen are spreading well where we have transplanted corms and the flowers have set seed.  Perhaps in 20 years or so the area will be a carpet of white flowers in the early autumn!

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One thing we have learned, badgers are not put off by coffee grounds.  Back to the drawing board on that one!