Rural Life

Orchids, roses and vegetables

The first half of the week passed in a blur of reading reports, analysing numbers and trying to get it all down in a logical way and make some sense of it all.  By Wednesday evening, when the first draft of the report was sent, my mind was mush.  Thursday I must have done something useful - but it is hard to remember what.  Ah yes, new cylinder for the sodastream, visiting a couple of clients, feeding cats and sewing labels into summer shirts - clearly I did quite a bit that was useful!!

After the usual Friday visits, the new normal allowed us to go to the pub, sit out on the terrace and enjoy being around people, while taking on a glass or two of something cold.  It is so good to start the old normal experiences.  Tomorrow should have seen a bit of yoga too, but local elections mean the large village hall wasn't available, while the room offered as a substitute, as well as having a huge framed photo of the President, was not really conducive to socially distanced yoga for seniors.  So we are cancelled until September, which is a shame.

Today we were out and about before the temperatures got too hot to do anything other than wilt.  As well as productive things (more later), I spotted three different types of orchid out - two in the Orchard, and one in the One Acre Wood.  Here are a bee, a lizard and a birds nest!

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The roses are also coming on nicely at The Shack.  There is a splendid white climbing rose with a delicate scent by one of the outbuildings, which is putting on a great display - next week will be all about dead heading I guess.  The Fergus Memorial Rose, or Orange King as the label more officially calls it, has also put out its first flower.  I photographed it both yesterday and today, but today's photo was after there had been a lot of strimming, so there were bits of shredded weed in the flower.  I've not included that one!

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The vegetables are coming on.  Today I picked all remaining broad beans, and also lifted one of the main crop garlic to see what was going on, as the leaves and stems looked like they had been ravaged by rust, but there was a nice bulb and later on we will eat it to check on flavour!  The sweetcorn I sowed last Saturday ALL came up, so I had to spend time thinning out the excess plants, which really, really hurt.  I also planted out three more butternut squashes and four Bright Lights chard, the latter hidden among the shallots to get a bit of shelter while they establish themselves.  The shallots will be lifted in about a month at which point the chard can do what it likes.  Getting rid of the broad bean plants will give the peppers, aubergines and tomatoes more light, which will be good.

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There is also a lot of wildlife around.  Yesterday we visited a friend so John could do his Lawnmower Repair Man act (not totally successfully, but there is a deeper seated problem than he can get at).  She has swallows nesting in her stables and while the parents were out gathering beakfuls of insects for the offspring, I was able to look in and catch a photo.  Today, after I had toiled and done hammock time as a reward, I did my nature walk around the Orchard and the Wildlife Meadow.  The wild scabious is coming out which means an explosion of marbled white butterflies, which are just lovely to watch and occasionally take a photo of too!

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Next week's episode may be a bit late, but should have more exciting things to discuss, assuming the weather is a bit kind.

 

 

Spring proper, or even summer, has arrived!

It was pretty brutal and unsubtle, but at 5:45pm on Thursday afternoon, the fine weather arrived.  It had been announced for that morning, so I had planned to mow on Thursday afternoon, but as the rain didn't stop until perhaps 5am, and there was no wind, there was no way the grass would be dry enough.  Yesterday was therefore mowing day - and annoyingly, although promised that there would be light rain only on the western most tip of Finistere and the top of the Cotentin peninsular, I got remarkably soggy! 

Not much happened during the week - I worked, which is probably a good thing.  I had a tender rejected - not such a good thing, but kind of expected, as I am on an organisation's list for "good for a tender if you need to make up numbers".  I work on the basis that one day they will have to choose me out of sheer embarrassment at having put me through the process so many times!  Not this time it would appear. 

When I went to Aldi yesterday, enough people were generous to their mothers and well prepared (it is mother's day here), so that there were some of their annual batch of cheap small orchids left over.  So I got me one - a different colour to the other two.

As I said, I went mowing yesterday, and the wild irises are out at the lake.  One of ours that hasn't flowered before was out at The Shack, while some that I hadn't noticed before at Chinon were looking nice and blousy, so here are a selection of irises.

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This morning we were working at The Shack in the garden there.  John needed to rotavate a patch that had been covered since last summer before the underlying clay sets hard for the rest of the season, so lifted the weed suppressant mat.  In doing so, he met three of our assistants in keeping slugs and snails under control, although they had to be evicted or they would have become blood and bone fertiliser!!  Meet the slow worm, the adder and Timid Toad!

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It has warmed up enough, and the plants have got so tall, that we could remove the plastic cloches from the tomato plants and tuck them away somewhere away from the sun, so that they are ready to use in the autumn or next spring.  If the peppers and/or chillies are doing well enough, they may need a bit of cover in October to finish ripening fruits, but otherwise it will be next April or so when they come back out.  There is a bit of caterpillar damage on a couple of the cabbages, but they still look good and we are munching our way through the broad beans.  I'd better confess that the sweetcorn has once again been a disappointment with 51 seeds sown and only 7 coming up.  We did a bit of forensic seed seeking and found nothing, absolutely nothing.  Some something has had it away with my seeds, and I need to resow, assuming I can find any more seeds of course!

I also went on a bee orchid hunt, as usual, and while some had disappeared, I found a new patch and got a half way decent photo for once!

All that left me a bit tired, so I had to offer myself a chunk of hammock time to recover - well that's my excuse anyway!  And it is Sunday after all!  Until next week!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - the day after

Well, I am pretty sure the vaccination yesterday is doing something as when I woke up this morning, all my joints ached and were only soothed by a hot shower and an ibuprofen.  In addition I felt tired and woolly.  None of this was worrying or unexpected really, in fact, like I say, I am sure it is doing something, so actually a bit reassuring.  (And clearly I am still a bit woolly.)

Yesterday evening I spotted a few interesting things in the garden after I had locked the chickens away for the day.  In no particular order - chive flowers, poppies that could be a bit dodgy, set raspberries and strawberries and the display from the red hot pokers getting going.

Stuff at home

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Then after lunch today, I went to The Shack to feed the boys and see what was going on there.  The vegetables are coming on OK although a bit more heat might be good for them, not least for helping the sweetcorn to germinate (now there are 4).  I did meet some butterflies trying very hard to make new butterflies, which isn't easy when you are also flying (which they did, but had stopped that for the photo).

Walking round to the wildflower meadow, I noticed a lesser spotted woodpecker in the sycamore tree, so flushed with the success of the butterfly photo, I tried to capture that too.  It is honestly in there somewhere, but I need a posh camera with a telephoto lens for that sort of thing!

Anyway, the wild flower meadow was looking fabulous as the clover and the oxeye daisies and the linseed are all going great guns, plus I did spot and photograph badly the first of the bee orchids.  Soon there should be lots more with the sun and the rain that we have at the moment.

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My favourite irises are coming out even more, and looking rather fabulous.  The irises I covet are starting to come out too, in a neighbour's garden - jet black!  I might get a photo of those tomorrow, but for today I bask in my purple and white ones!

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - jaunting!

Because I can't work Fridays, as they are devoted to the needs of the Azay One, Saturdays are the new Sundays, and I toil in the vegetable patches on a Sunday morning and in front of a computer on a Sunday afternoon - it sort of makes sense.  Anyway, with the patchy weather we have at the moment, plus we used up the last bottle of tender winning celebration fizz, we decided it was time to go south of the river (la Loire) and stock up again.  We haven't been down there since before Christmas 2019!.  I put the laundry out, just to draw in clouds and rain (it worked - 2.5mm while we were out), and then we jaunted down to Ackermans at St Hilaire-St Florent, just by Saumur.  The buildings are rather magnificent and they are the front for miles of tunnels into the rock where millions of bottles of rather good fizz are stashed.

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We invested in 6 bottles each of Cuvée Privé Blanc and Rosé - hopefully they will last the year, but hopefully not all of them assuming we have things to celebrate!  We also got a worryingly cheap 10 litre wine box of red.  We may survive.

On the way home, we stopped in on the cats at The Shack and fed them and admired the growth on the potatoes above ground.

In the garden at home, we have the next colour irises coming out - a nice pale lilac colour.  We don't have many and they get frightfully abused, but they are pretty.

And a final note of "isn't nature wonderful?" if you like that sort of thing.  I was wandering back down the garden last night having locked up the chickens, and spotted the unmistakable yellow blob that is a spider nest erupting with lots of little spiders.  By this morning they were gone, dispersed naturally or eaten by the wildlife that lives in the garden.  For the squeamish, the photo is deliberately out of focus!! 

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - brief notes

Yesterday was a glorious day - sunny, hardly a cloud in the sky, and a nice temperature for doing things.  Occasionally there was a cool wind, but not too often.  The change came through overnight with wind, then cloud bringing finally some much needed rain.  Our lawn should not have yellow patches through dryness at this time of year - yellow patches where we left things on the lawn and didn't pick them up for sure, but not due to poor growth.

On Sunday evening, I stopped on the way back from closing up the chicken run to admire the song of this little fellow, serenading the beautiful sunset.  I think he was a nightingale, from the size of the bird, the volume and twiddles of the song and the time of the evening, but I could be wrong.  Whatever, it was very pleasant.

We have hardly left the house at all today, and when we did, it was the signal for rain to start - every time!!  Paranoid?  O yes!  The first time was this morning when I got the paper out of the post box, and stopped to admire the flowers on the red iris.  This year the flowers look more iris like as it has been so dry that the snails that usually munch them have been hiding - that'll stop this evening.  I can almost here them starting to eat their way through the flowers!

We needed to stop off at the One Acre Wood to get a couple of logs from a stash we have there (we shouldn't still need log fires in May for goodness' sake!).  The rain got quite intense then, but as the trees are mostly leafed up now, we were fairly sheltered.  I took the opportunity to look up an oak tree we don't often talk to, but who is really rather magnificent!

And now I am going to find a glass of wine and put supper in the oven.

 

Lockdown III, marginal release - living life on the edge

The two selective hornet traps are still in place, and we have 5 and 10 corpses of Asian hornet queens in them.  This is good as they haven't started on the big nests that produce hundreds of bee chomping progeny, so we like to think we have done our bit for the honey bee. 

The selective traps are mostly doing what was intended and not getting much else trapped, well until last week that is.  Now each trap also has a European hornet queen in it, and if the Asian ones are nasty close up, the European one is really scary.  As we don't really want them around, eating us and what little fruit might grow this year, we are not too fussed about trying to release them either!

More scary than either type of hornet however, is an enraged Nibbles.  This morning I took her for her annual vaccinations and M.O.T. and happened to mention that she seemed to have trouble with her left ear.  That provoked one of those nice ear torches, then a brain scrape with a cotton bud - which produced a glob of the most disgusting black goo.  The vet seemed really pleased and went off to look at it under a microscope, during which time I worried and Nibbles tried to see what was going on in the laboratory next door.  Anyway, the vet came back to announce that it was just black yukky stuff, which needed to be rinsed out...  Twice a day... With a cleaning serum and then drops and then dry the ear out...  I tried to explain that Nibbles, who was looking cute and fluffy like this:

was in actual fact a Wild and Untamed Thing, who had taken 8 years to learn how to sit on a lap for longer than 20 seconds.  The vet relented and now we only have to wash out the ear, put in drops and dry it out once a day - for 10 days!  We may not survive!

 

Lockdown III, Day 27 - that rare thing, a Friday entry

Before anyone starts, yes, I have been to see the Azay One, and in order to fill in the accessing the building forms with an easy conscience, yesterday I invested in a packet of lateral flow auto-tests (they allege they are 97.5% accurate!).  Once it was nearly time to head off, I followed the instructions, remembering also the advice from the nice lady at the pharmacy, and after the appropriate waiting time, the result was....  Negative!  Yey!

First stop was Chinon to meet up with the Chinon One, put the world to rights, confirm my suspicion as to why there are mushrooms growing out of the top bathroom ceiling (hint, it is just under the hot water cylinder...), have a spot of lunch and see which of the Azay One's requirements we had, and what we had forgotten or failed to do.  There I was able to admire the fact that the freesia I planted last summer was having more flowers, and once we had been driven inside by persistent drizzle, admire the crow that the next door neighbour hand reared last year, who has come back after a winter away.

The visit itself was not the happiest - while last week everything was fine and she was putting on weight as she was eating so much, this week nothing was right, the food was inedible and she needed to find somewhere else.  Once that was off her chest, the staff are actually nice and she gets a good glass of wine with her meals, but the place is full of old people, some of whom are missing bits (from the person who lost half an ear last year).  After that there was a flight of fancy, but we did threaten her with a cribbage challenge next week, which might improve her mood.

When I got home, after a beautiful drive through the Anjou-Touraine National Park (woods, fields, lakes and pretty villages), and before entering the house to be shouted at by bored cats, I took a moment to enjoy the plant display by the door.  The Snow in Summer is starting to put out flowers, the tree peony is out (I really must repot that once the flowers are over, as it starting to suffer), the lemon thyme that had suffered from lack of water has sprung back and the cistus looks like it will flower shortly.  This pleasing display helps to shake off the feelings of guilt and self-loathing only a mother can inflict on her child!

 

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 10 - a trip to The Shack

We are having rather nice weather at the moment here - very cold overnight, which isn't so good, but lovely sunny days.  If you can find a place out of the wind to sit and contemplate, it is very nice indeed.  I sat under the birch tree at The Shack and while cuddling a cat, admired a humming bird moth sipping nectar and hopefully pollinating our broad beans.  As with humming birds themselves, it is very difficult to take a good photograph as they move so quickly, and certainly so with a phone!

This delightful reverie was broken when cat wars broke out on the shallot bed - thank goodness I planted so many, as four got well trashed with two large, fat cats rolling around on them!  Quite a good action shot though, if I say so myself!

Two of my favourite flowers are out at the moment.  Firstly we have a lovely big patch of honesty by The Shack, in the shade between another birch tree and the yukkas.  The purple flowers are a lovely colour and very simple, while the seed pods, later in the year, are pretty and dramatic oval disks.  You can peel them apart to make a nice dried flower/seed head display.

The other is periwinkle - a lovely deep blue flower.  In the garden at home we have a variegated version - the leaves are yellow and green - but I prefer the plain green version, which grows in profusion at the top of the orchard.