Rural Life

Lockdown III, Day 22 - I'm not planting any more potatoes!

It being Sunday and a day of "rest", we were back at The Shack carrying on the labour of love (or greed) that is getting the crops in for this year.  The final third of the potato bed was so much harder than the previous two - I'm not sure why!  There were more roots, more bits of branch, more stones, more cat poo, less wind, less cool air and therefore more breaks for rest and water, but it is done - 16 more spuds planted, and that's it.  I have 12 good quality, chitted, seed potatoes left if anyone in the area wants them - certified stock and purchased at Jaques Briant.  I'm not saying their stuff is any better than anywhere else, just that is where we got them.  Let me know.

In one of my many moments of resting before the next bout of root extraction, I took the time to look up and found (yet) another spectacular view across the fields of Anjou, but one that will soon be gone.  The walnuts are about the last of the trees to get their leaves (along with a number of one variety of oak, possibly sisal), but I reckon that this view will be blocked by leaves in a couple of weeks time.

While I was getting the potatoes in, John was tidying, mowing, rotavating and making a nice seed bed for sowing a few carrots and beetroot.  If you don't look too closely, it all looks rather ordered and like we know what we are doing.  I can guarantee that in another 4 weeks it will be knee high in weeds again, but for the moment, we are feeling a bit smug.

Once everything was put away in an orderly fashion, we popped into the orchard to try to enthuse ourselves about getting that tidied up (fail), and on the way back to the car I noticed this little fellow sunning him/herself.  It is really good to know that we have such creatures around the place, and who will help with the inevitable plague of critters that will try to eat our fruit and vegetables before we do!  It's a slow worm by the way, for those who've not seen one before - probably about 10 inches long in total.

We treated ourselves to a trip to the One Acre Wood on the way home, partly to retrieve the ropes for the hammocks which have been tied round a few oak trees for about 10 years.  We have identified a spot in The Garden by The Shack where a hammock will fit most nicely, sadly only the one hammock, so there will clearly be a few "discussions" about who gets to loll around in it, but that is something to look forward to for May.  Anyway, the lily of the valley are finally out, which is a joy - so I leave you with flowers for today.

 

Lockdown III, Day 17 - revisiting an old haunt

While rarely mentioned at the moment, Brexit has brought a number of changes to our lives, including the fact that friends and clients are selling up and moving back to the UK.  They give a variety of reasons - grandchildren, the garden has become too much, fear of being cut off from loved ones.  Covid has helped to hasten the flow, as properties are selling quickly and sometimes for reasonable amounts of money.  Properties that would normally take between 2 and 5 years to sell are now disappearing like hot cakes, while those that have been on the market for a while are also suddenly gone.

When that happens, in many cases we are asked to help with disposing of stuff (over the years, we have increased our collection of ride on lawnmowers in this way), get given things (towels are always appreciated) and try to have a final drink/meal with those heading back.  Those that are clients tend to leave John's card with the new owner - for which many thanks, and in this way we gauge the new owners.  Those that quibble at John's prices are those who really shouldn't be affording a second home, not least if there is also a pool at the site, as they clearly don't understand the level of work entailed in maintaining a country home.

This afternoon I was "helping" at one site where John has been working for years and where there has been a change of ownership.  Already the garden is taking on a new character, but then I've not spent much time there for a good 7 years, so it is interesting to see the changes.  The woodland paths that we created years ago are being taken over by nature, but when we first cleared them, they were surrounded by early purple orchids.  This year there are some - already almost over due to the dry conditions - but not as many as I remember.

This garden also has a pond that is spring fed (I think), and I remember watching newts doing what newts do in the spring when it was very clear and with no plants.  I'm pretty sure the newts are still there, but with a certain amount of planting, there is a greater diversity of wildlife, and I met two small and very beautiful frogs.  I also met a lot of mosquitoes - today was the first day it was propitious for them to emerge, so I demanded that the frogs do their job better and walked away.

 

Lockdown III, Day 15 - preparing for summer

Sunday morning means hard work at The Shack, but only for a limited time with powered tools, the rest of it is sweat of our brows.  Yesterday I made a start on planting the potatoes that should keep us fed next autumn and winter, and today I carried on.  I thought working in the morning might be a bit easier than in the afternoon, like I did yesterday, as it wouldn't be quite so warm.  How wrong can you be?  As that bit of the garden is relatively exposed to the east/south east, I was in full sun as I picked over the soil for wood, rocks and bundles of roots.  I then retrieved a piece of weed suppressant mat with ready cut potato holes from another part of the garden, laid and stapled it, and planted another 16 seed potatoes in the holes.  Now it is nature's turn to work her magic.  There is still another chunk of plot to pick over and cover, and another 28 seed potatoes to be planted, but not for a few days, as I have clients who need me and the Azay One to visit on Friday.

While I was cleaning and picking over the potato bed, John was out with the strimmer style brushcutter, trying to clear paths round the ponds at the bottom of the orchard and the wildflower meadow.  While deer, badgers, cats and pheasants can get round there, up until today, we couldn't.  It is still a work in progress, and we look forward to the day when we break through to have a circular walk around pond 2 and actually find pond 3, but it was rather wonderful to walk around the other side of pond 2, as if I too were a wild deer.

I got back to the garden to find the most awful violation of 'elf and safety violation going on, but in a good cause.  How many unsafe working practices can be seen here?

Having said that, it was totally worth it.  One day we will have one of those picnic benches here, so we can sit with sandwiches and cats and admire this wonderful view of rolling Anjou countryside.  Today we stood and admired and watched the tanker from the dairy drive through the view to pick up milk from the farm, and thought that life is good.

Finally, to note that we are getting into wild orchid season, with the first, an overblown early purple style, coming out in the middle of the wildflower meadow.  It will be two or three weeks before the bee orchids send up their flower spikes here I think and then another couple of weeks before the lizard orchids do the same.  Nice to see the first one though.

A demain!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 34 - OK, some things change

It's Wednesday so it is market day in la Flèche, and finally we see that some things have changed here and for the better.  It has been a source of huge frustration that while you can sell plants (deemed essential), you cannot sell flowers (deemed non-essential) unless done by order/click and collect or some such system.  So it was lovely to see my friend Brigitte out with her stand and the glorious colours of flowers and ornamental cabbages and bouquets and cyclamen.  Brigitte raises her own cut flowers about 1.5km from us, but buys in some potted plants.  It isn't worth her while coming to the market in the hope of selling a 2€ cactus sometime in the day, but people are always after a good bouquet, and hers are some of the best!

The fripperie stands were out as well - so much acrylic and lycra and faux leather in one place!  But people were  happier, even if they weren't buying much.  It was enough that the extra colours and activity were a treat for the eyes and you could dream of wearing that pretty draped blouse, "enjoy" the accordion music from the CD stand and wonder who on earth dreamt up the plastic stuff on the "anything for 2€" stall.  Life seemed a bit more normal.

While Radio 2 and Zoe Ball were going all mushy about the Pfizer vaccine being approved for deployment next week, the feelings about vaccines against Covid here are rather different, with nearly 60% of those questioned saying they wouldn't want it.  They want to ski, to cuddle their grandchildren/grandparents, eat in restaurants and drink in bars, but they don't want to have the vaccine that will make all that possible.  Weird.  Even more weird was a promotion of the Miss France competition that runs later this week with all the 28 contestants (Miss Tahiti can't make it) posing in pretty cocktail dresses, open coats and face masks outside Versailles.  We assume they get to remove the face masks at some point, but it will ruin their make up.  Below, we have not so much Frosty the Snowman, as firewood bundle the Snowman.

Finally, walking around the wildflower meadow, I found the first hints of next spring's bee orchids.  I see at least two on this photo!

I think the damage is badger looking for roots and stuff.

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 17 - details

I have a friend who helped to get herself through the first lockdown (in Denmark) by using her daily exercise period to find something and photograph it in enormous detail.  She looked at flowers, insects, leaves, buds - and each photo was a small miracle and was shared with her chums across the world.  Today I have taken a leaf out of her book and have details of two natural things that have brought me a certain joy.

People go on about lichen being rare, delicate and a sign of good, clean air.  As some of these are scientists, I guess I have to believe them.  Clearly the lichen in our garden is a mutant version, as a large quantity has chosen to colonise one of the plastic chairs in the garden, is growing away strongly and is pretty well impossible to remove, even with a pressure washer and a scouring pad.  Why would I want to remove it?  Well, I'm not so keen on sitting on lichen as it also marks your clothes quite badly (it is purely a nightmare that it would start to colonise my jeans as well, but someone might want to make a Dr Who script out of that).

That's the chair leg, and this is the chair back.

I've shared a couple of photos trying to show the joy of spindle berries, but today I found some that I could get up close and personal to, and these do show the colours and the shapes.  My mother in law remembered seeing great banks of spindle berries on the shrubs by the side of the railway line over the Malverns, taking her and her sister to the school in Herefordshire they were evacuated to.  We tried to buy and plant spindles in her garden in London, but they were never as prolific as the wild ones here around us.

Finally I did promise another racoon photo on a Sunday.  Here is a photo of Rachel the Racoon, another of the critters fed by a friend of a friend in the States.  Isn't she gorgeous?

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 13 - Remembrance Day

The 11th November is a bank holiday here in France - the second of two holidays to remember those who gave their lives for France (the other being 8th May, or Victory in Europe Day).  They are not quite so fixated on a two minute silence at 11am, not least as in a normal year some dignitaries and local marching bands have to attend more than one ceremony, so they can be at any time from about 9:30am to midday.  Ceremonies are well attended by local elected officials, the uniformed public services, the junior council and the old combatants, who wear their campaign medals and their best clothes.  Once wreaths have been laid and a few words said, there is then a vin d'honneur for those not going on to another ceremony.

Each commune was required by law to set up a war memorial in the years following the Great War, and to simplify things, the Government made available a catalogue of different styles, so it is quite common for towns across the country to have the same soldier or group of soldiers on a plinth.  This was an interesting snippet from a recent lunchtime news programme.  This is Baugé's war memorial, photographed on Saturday, next to the Tribunal.

This year the ceremonial has had to be much reduced, no vin d'honneur, and I could not track down when the wreaths would be laid in the village - turns out sometime between 10am and 11:15am.  It is near the cemetery so I photographed it yesterday on my walk, before the wreaths had been laid, but the flags were out already.

People have taken advantage of the bank holiday though, and when I went out for my walk, I saw more than I normally see, taking advantage of a fine afternoon to stretch their legs and get a change of scene.  I didn't go as far today - just 2.5 kilometres - as I was mixing up the routes a bit.  I may well have a rant soon about the relative ease (or not) of getting a different walk and one's potential full allowed distance, but not today!  Instead I found some more spindle berries but closer to where I could photograph them, so here is a better view.  The pink is almost synthetic and you can just see on one, that the seed inside is a bright orange.  They are still poisonous mind you!

 

Autumn Lockdown - Day 6 - out and about

Thanks to advice from chums who read this via Facebook, I decided to brave the market at la Flèche, armed with my attestation and a shopping list.  I was glad I did - for a start it was a lovely drive up, with magnificent leaf colour most of they way.  Parking by the river was easy, and I could stand and watch this view for hours!

Pretty well all my regulars were there, except the bread, croissant and cake stand, which was a real shame as I had been looking forward to croissants later in the week (although the porridge is still magnificent).  I came home laden with local produce including a very fine cauliflower and a christophine - probably the only one this year, as the guys who manage to grow this tropical delicacy found that the polytunnels were too hot for it this year.

This afternoon I finally started on a rather nasty but essential task, and progressed it as far as I could, at which point I felt that I needed a treat and some exercise.  Armed with another attestation (fortunately the paper supplies 3 normal and one work related per day), I set out on a short but beautiful walk.  First I turned up the mediaeval Rue Basse to the Church.

I then walked down to the Pont de Godeau (once again, he didn't turn up).  Passing by the wall of the mini-chateau, I noticed they had a very fine crop of olives this year.  If they have a couple of kilos, I'm sure they could get them pressed for oil at the oil mill - we are thinking we might get some walnut oil made, if I spend a period of confinement cracking them.

I then went up to the Route de Beaufort, along a bit and back down the Rue de la Croix de la Mission.  I had to go over the old railway line, now a walking and cycling path.  I did pass a jogger at one stage, and spent a few minutes contemplating how far he was taking the Mick, as he had clearly come and intended to go further than 1 kilometre from his home base or his place of work.  But what the hell - people are working within the spirit of the regulations, and keeping their distance, and that is surely the point.  I was wearing a mask too, so should have been safe from any droplets he was shedding around him. 

Anyway, on the field side of the disused railway, I spotted this magnificent spindle bush covered in bright pink berries.  The higher up berries are hawthorn and can be cooked, but spindle is pretty poisonous so is best admired at a distance.

And then towards home and the road back to the village - a very nice walk, but not the longest I can do in my allotted hour and within the radius of one kilometre, but more about that another day.  Now I must join a Women in OR and Analytics virtual conference.

A demain!

 

Autumn Lockdown - new beginings

I guess it was predictable, and following a day mostly spent in bed with a migraine, it was with enormous trepidation that we sat and watched the President's address last night.  As expected, he announced a four week national lockdown, but kicking in a day or two sooner than many had thought.  There was I think less warning this time, or rather, less official warning.  We are also on alert here for bird 'flu, so things are pretty special.  So here's a heads up - from tomorrow, the daily lockdown blog post starts again!

This one seems to me more daunting than the last one.  Already days here are short, with only 10 hours between sunrise and sunset, and that will only get less between now and late December.  The weather will get worse - despite a slight reprieve in temperatures over the next few days, we are heading for winter, and can spend less time outside and less comfortably.  There really is nothing to look forward to now in 2020 - all events are cancelled that we would usually go to - and the last of the "part timers" left today - we doubt we will see any others before the New Year now.

The glories of Autumn are nearing their end.  We found these cèpes in the One Acre Wood a couple of weeks ago, and there may be a couple more this weekend, but then days are too short and cold to get them going again until next year.  These were delicious by the way!

This year has been particularly good for cyclamen.  The ones in the lawn started in July, and are still going, with some very dense patches of pink flowers.  The ones in the One Acre Wood don't last as long but have been going for a couple of months now, including two new flowering corms which have clearly self-seeded.  These delicate white flowers are a real joy to me, whatever the weather.

Autumn also means we have an extra visitor downstairs - the log fire.  It is like another member of the family and a welcome sight and feeling on cold and wet nights.  Lockdown brings challenges with finding firewood - we might have to go out and about with our best Professional Forest Workers kit on, but that is something to worry about another day.

The same day as the new confinement was announced, I received my official number for my new way of earning money.  I am now officially registered as an autoentrepreneur that helps people out with translating and interpreting (NOT official translations having said that) to get through daily life over here in France.  So getting that business up and running when I can't go out and about very much is going to be really easy, isn't it?  2020 just keeps giving!

 

Day 29 of 30 Days Wild - it's damp in the One Acre Wood

Not today, as I have either been chained to my computer or out at yoga, getting within 4 inches of touching my feet with my forehead, but yesterday, we got to the One Acre Wood for a walk after working on the plot.

Often at this time of year, it is cool and dry in the wood, with the air full of insects.  Sadly, as everywhere else, there are fewer insects in the wood, which is a shame.  Because of the recent rain, it was very damp underfoot and quite humid.  There is a beautiful bit of moss on the rustic bench by the upper seasonal pool (currently empty).

Further down the way, and looking through the trees it felt a bit like a temperate rain forest, although it isn't.

And every good forest has to have its monsters, this is ours.  They really are so unpleasant to look at, these monster orange slugs, but I tolerate them, as if the giant orange slugs are out and about, there is a chance that we will get mushrooms later in the year.  No scientific basis, just observation over the 15 years we have had the wood.

Apologies for this being so late in the evening - I'll bet you have nightmares about our Orange chum!

 

Day 12 of 30 Days Wild - unexpected things

When I said yesterday that I had to go to the supermarket today and that might inspire today's blog, John laughed, and he was right to, as other things have come my way today.  But first I will have a short rant about the supermarket, which does not seem to have worked out yet that lockdown is essentially over and therefore there is really no excuse now for shortages.  Empty shelves where red wine, chocolate, loo rolls, pasta, tea, and cat food should be were kind of acceptable in April, but in June not so much!

First thing this morning I walked up to the boulangerie for our pain au chocolat and baguette (cliché or what?).  There is renovation work going on with a house opposite the boulangerie, and today I got the full effect of the vile concrete render being off.  You can see where windows have been filled in and relish the stonework.  Sadly I expect the stones will be recovered with render next week, but it would be lovely if in fact, it was just the joints that were more fully filled in so we could enjoy this on a daily basis!

Then when I started to work through my e-mails, I found one from a chum in the States, Texas in fact, who had been inspired by yesterday's photos to send me one of the white-wing dove that is sitting on her nest in his garden.  She looks similar to our collar doves but the neck ring is less pronounced.  Thank you!

And then on the wild front - I spotted this in the lawn, after hanging out the laundry.  It is way too early for the cyclamen to be flowering - we aren't past the longest day yet!  Normally they don't start until August.

I wonder what tomorrow will bring!