We survived!

That might sound a bit glib, but the recent prolonged and severe heatwave has proved to be fatal to some and it will be a while before the figures for premature, heat related deaths is known.  Already hospitals, morgues and funeral directors are overwhelmed, and the full impact is not yet felt.  But on Friday the heat was less - it is extraordinary that we felt such respite as the temperatures fell from about 43 degrees down to "just" 38 or so.  We even went out on a jaunt to Chinon!

All the cats got through this round of heat, although one is suspected of falling out of a window, as he was sprawled on the window ledge.  He might have jumped deliberately, but that would be even more silly.  The Boys in the Country conned us into grooming them extensively to remove the winter floof that remained, and they couldn't be bothered to rub off in long grass.  This is the aftermath of grooming two barn cats over three days - I could have needle felted a new cat from all of this!

Among the house cats, while Rebus managed to find cool places in the garden (and on window sills), Zola (the fluffiest) suffered, lying dramatically across door entrances to catch a hint of air movement.  Poirot, being old and wise, just spread herself along a cool, hard surface and exposed her belly to whatever fan happened to be nearest.

We let the chickens out each morning and they found deep cover under shrubs and trees and laid smaller eggs than normal, so seem to be OK.

In the kitchen garden, the "soft" herbs have suffered quite badly with the sorrel burnt back, the dill going to seed and the chives fading.

However the Mediterranean style vegetables have quite liked the conditions and are carrying fruit.  The pumpkins have grown hugely but it is too hot for female flowers, and the cucumbers are happy now they have support to climb up their tower, again it is too hot for female flowers at the moment.

The cristophine vine is less convinced, as it is a tropical plant rather than Mediterranean or desert, and growing tips have been fried off.

In the wildflower Meadow, the blue spectrum flowers (mainly marjoram and scabious at the moment) are coming into their own, to the joy of pollinators of all kinds, who happily scoff while I watch, but as soon as the phone camera is out, disappear in their droves!

So how about us?  Our daily rhythm was severely disrupted, getting up about 3 hours before normal, eating a larger meal in the middle of the day and then resting like sticky, beached whales as near to a fan as possible (on Monday we bought the entire remaining stock of fans at Mr Bricolage to replace our broken ones).  We dealt with the Boys in the Country very early, so they could slope off into the undergrowth and find cool patches.  

In search of something useful, but not mentally taxing to do, I did bring in a trail camera that had been in a new position.  i thought the batteries might be used up and I was right as after 4 months, there were some 1,570 files on the SD card, and an initial view says they weren't all us.  To be honest I wasn't sure what we would find, but all the usual suspects are there: boar, deer, foxes, pine martens, pheasants, hares, badgers, lots of badger activity, coypu, squirrels, pigeons, hunters.  What has been rather nice, among the bits that I have looked at, is evidence of successful breeding.  If you look at this reel for example, you will see a youngster getting to grips with the trapeze set up its parents seem to enjoy.

I shared a photo a while ago of the fox cub by the kitchen garden.  Here s/he is with Mum.

The cub is quite well hidden but clearly has found something to nibble on - perhaps a nice, tasty slug?  You can see them better in this one.

Finally, here it is on its own at night, although I'm sure Mum was quite close by as this one actually predates the two daytime videos.

I am only a third of the way through triaging the content of the trail camera and I'm really excited by what I've been seeing, so I hope to have some more snippets for you next week, unless the weather is nice for doing things outdoors and then I may get distracted!

Anyway, here's hoping for a more normal week for all!  Have a good one!

How to cope with hot weather

A week into the latest hot spell, and it is getting deadly serious - I use that word advisedly.  The last time there were temperatures like this for a similar duration in 2003, thousands died in Paris and elsewhere due to the heat.  There were 4 fatal drownings yesterday, and there will likely be more today, although I guess not all make it to the national news.  With 42 degrees in our garden in the shade, and forecasts of over 40 degrees for the next four days, we are on war footing.  We advise others to be equally vigilant.

To be fair, one of my ways of coping was to travel to England for a good part of last week, and while the journey each way was long, a bit tedious and rather sticky, I did find opportunities to cool down.  A visit to Greatstone beach on the Fifth Continent was curtailed by a thunderstorm, but the short plodge in the English Channel was welcome.

During a visit to Penshurst Place, I met the Drinking Bear automaton - an excellent advocate for keeping hydrated I think you will agree!

While after a good roam through the gardens at Penshurst, we had to take advantage of the tearooms to rehydrate ourselves - plus a bit of sugar to keep the system ticking over!  The hot herbaceous border was magnificent but thirst inducing.

At Eastbourne, we were able to stroll along the promenade, admiring the fog sitting on the cliffs above while enjoying a delicious sea breeze - as I said at the time, thousands of visiting pensioners cannot be wrong!

All that exercise did mean we felt justified in indulging in an ice-cream sundae, but that was also hydration and cooling down at the same time!  I have to say, these weren't cheap, but the most amazing quality and stuffed full of, in my case, chocolate chunks, in others' cases, cherries and chocolate liqueur.

All the products from this café that we tried were excellent, and some of the local residents agreed and were plotting how to get their share.  I was firm - I think there are fines for feeding this lot anyway.

The reason for Eastbourne and the whole visit really was the exhibition Comrades in Art at the Towner Gallery - I won't write about that here or today as I need to take my time and process what I saw and learned, and it deserves more than a passing comment.  I was immensely impressed to see that the AA had put out signs to direct people to it, even though access is currently difficult due to the Tennis tournament.

I was even lucky enough to watch a hot air balloon float along the valley below my host's house, as proof of rather lovely weather.

But all good things come to an end, and yesterday, after lunch with an old school chum, I got on a fog bound ferry and headed home.  Driving down from Dieppe (17 degrees and foggy at 10:30pm), things warmed up slowly, so that at Rouen it was 19 degrees at 11:15pm, at Alencon 20 degrees at 1:00am, le Mans 21 degrees at 2:00am, and as I turned into our road at 2:45 in the morning, it was 23 degrees.  I was greeted on the doorstep by the night slug warden, doing a good job as usual.

After all that, I had to be up very promptly this morning to be able to leave the house with any degree of comfort, and have the joy of the heatwave for the next four to five days at least.  Gym classes are cancelled, and I will need to cancel work parties for the village float too.  I also need to buy fans, as two of ours have died with the heat - b*****y typical!

Have a good week!

Heatwave Number 2

It seems like only 2 weeks ago that we were getting excited about the end of the unprecedented May heatwave, and wondering if it would go with a bang or a whimper.  On Friday the temperatures started ramping up again, and today the weather station in the garden says 34.5 degrees at 4:20pm, so not yet the hottest time of the day (around 5:30pm).  We are back to early starts, keeping the windows closed and shaded during the day, a constant hum of oscillating fans and an unsightly selection of shorts and t-shirts to keep things as cool as possible.

No chance of me getting product placement money, but there are other brands available!  Yesterday at 7pm it was only 31 degrees, as you can possibly make out!  This morning at The Shack, the local bird population was getting its trills out early and also trying to compete with the sound of what might have been a rave party, or just some chaps letting off steam.  It was annoying enough to send us on to The One Acre Wood, but not before I had noted a number of our avian friends.

This is a screenshot from the Merlin application - I'm not sure if other reputable bird song identification apps are available, but it works for me.  The Golden Orioles were in fine voice today - clearly they like techno music - making a noise in the wooded area at the bottom of  the Meadow.  In the Orchard I met a rather nice butterfly - not a variety I can identify easily, and it is too hot to dig out my Observer Book of Butterflies and Moths I'm afraid (other butterfly identification books are definitely available)!

The wood was wonderfully cool after the direct sunlight in the Meadow and Orchard, and also full of very loud birds, but not as great a variety as at The Shack - it is amazing how much noise a Song Thrush can produce!  It was the first time we had been for a few weeks and now all the leaves are out, it is a chance to take stock of what is dead/dying and needs to be felled on a cooler day.  The plot next door was clear felled in 2020 using heavy machinery, so the light is very different, but the drainage is also affected.  That plot hasn't recovered from the treatment, with none of the chestnut boles coming back to life, rather rank bog grass in places over winter, and only pioneer species taking over the area.  As it is registered woodland, it can't be ploughed for crops, but no one seems interested in replanting trees, even Mother Nature.  Some of our trees are suffering from the changed conditions, as well as from climate change, but you wouldn't know it from this photo.

While laziness is affecting some of my productive gardening, other aspects seem to be working of their own accord.  For two years, we have been recycling tea leaves onto the rhubarb bed at home.  Last year we did well, this year it has gone nuts, and shortly I must go and make a pile of crumble topping to freeze as a batch of rhubarb crumbles for the winter.  There is also a very large pot of rhubarb fool in the fridge for eating now.

A friend of mine's family are all current or retired professional flower growers and sellers.  My friend's father has moved into sheltered housing (aged 91), so they are having to dispose of his kit and property in order to fund his new lifestyle.  I bought a couple of earthenware baskets as interesting planters for the front porch.  I bought some trailing lobelia for one and a couple of surfinia petunias for the other, bulked out with supermarket stumpy petunias.  The results are currently gorgeous.

This latest heatwave brings climate change to the fore in our minds.  I read two reports this week, one saying that the North Atlantic Drift of Warm Water, or whatever they call it now, is shutting down, bringing us a climate similar to Siberia and making northern Europe uninhabitable.  The other said that the latest El Nino event would mean we are heading for the hottest period in recorded history, with drought, fires and extreme weather phenomena.  Certainly something is happening and we will have to adapt or die.  Our own little experiment leans towards the drought and extreme phenomena - for the fourth year in a row the beast (the cristophine vine) is back and looking stronger than ever.  This is essentially a tropical plant, living its best life in rural North West France!

I've got a busy and exciting week ahead of me - I hope I will be feeling up to doing a blog next Sunday, otherwise you will have to wait for Monday!

Have a good week!

Apologies, but we had our reasons

Sorry not to have posted yesterday or have warned you that this would be a day late.  There are a number of reasons, the primary one being a day out in Chinon meeting up with someone I've not seen since I was at school.  She was staying with the Chinon One, and we went out for a lovely, leisurely Sunday lunch before wandering down to the avenue of trees by the river Vienne.

This wonderful line of trees never fails to delight, particularly when it is sunny, and even when there is bad jazz going down.  We love jazz of many sorts, smooth, nu (yes, it's a thing), trad, but not so much "experimental who needs a tune?" jazz.  Still they had a good audience.

We did distract ourselves for a while, admiring the river, looking for kingfishers and taking a photo of the Eiffel bridge (yes, that Eiffel), but in the end, we couldn't stand it, and went home.

During the week we spotted a new bee orchid, but no more since then.  I think the very dry April really didn't help them this year.

Another thing we were on the lookout for during the week was the latest stash of bantam eggs, as Bridie the Freeloading Bantam went broody again.  They were quite easy to spot in the end, so much so that she has got bored with sitting on them and they are now waiting for us to find a way of getting them out so they don't explode and stink out a few gardens.

The pumpkins we planted out a while back are now getting serious about life, and we finally put out the two cucumbers I managed to set off a couple of months ago.  The frame John has set up for them is a bit Heath Robinson, but using stuff that was lying around.

The overwhelming preoccupation of the week has been the health of our little black cat, Spooky, who lives at The Shack.  He really didn't enjoy the hot spell, and that seemed to exacerbate an issue with his throat, which became very inflamed.  He had injections, then he was taken into intensive care at the vet for IV medication, hydration and oxygen.

Unfortunately, even with all that support, he wasn't making any progress, so this morning we did the right thing, leaving a big panther-sized hole in our hearts.  Here is Spooky when he was on form and looking magnificent.

So that's my lot for today, let's see what else this week brings!

Have a good week!

Hottest May period on record

This week temperature records fell most days due to an unusual and stable heat dome that settled over western Europe and stayed.  Most days we were up to 30 degrees by midday, and after that things got seriously hot.  If you wanted to do anything, it really had to be done before noon, and as soon as the outdoor temperature fell below that indoors in the evening, we opened windows to get rid of the super heated air.  That time got later and later as the week went on.  This photo was taken at about 7pm in the evening.

Then yesterday afternoon at about 4pm, things started to change, and by 5:30pm this was rattling around making the windows shake.

Typically, we had been invited to our first BBQ of the year yesterday evening, but our host's garden pergola had a more waterproof cover than ours, so we were able to sit out and watch the rain and hail fall just a few feet away from us.  At home we had 1.5mm of rain, but the main body of the storm tracked over The Shack, and there 12mm fell, saving me from watering when we visited this morning.

It has been very unpleasant, not least as the heat came on very quickly and at a time when it wasn't expected to be that intense.  We've all survived, but for our small, black cat, it has been a bit touch and go.  

Last week I said I couldn't find the first bee orchids to photographe - well, I spotted them again this week along with a couple of others that popped up yesterday.  I don't think it is going to be an amazing year for them, but four flower heads will do me fine.

The raised herb bed I set up in April is now starting to look quite the ticket.  The dill I sowed is coming up nicely and may provide a nice garnish for fish on Wednesday.  The parsley I sowed will keep going for a long time.  The planted sorrel, tarragon and chive plants are looking healthy and llush, and the new sown chives are coming up strongly too.  I sowed more sorrel but the seed was very old and doesn't seem to want to do anything, but that was always a gamble.

In my defence, it isn't easy to take photographs when carrying a frail and crochety black cat in your arms.

Apart from the orchids and herb bed, other flowers are coping better than us with the abnormal temperatures.  There is a patch of weedy opium poppies by the chicken run which are very pretty.

We have some fine banks of knapweed in the Meadow, which marbled white butterflies seem to find irresistible - I thought they were more into scabious, but that isn't out yet.

There are some fine, tall yellow flowers in the Orchard, where we pushed back one of the walnut trees.  I've seen the odd one before now, but this year there are quite a lot.

The early cherries are long gone, prey of starlings and wet weather, but one of the later trees is coming good.  I had thought that yesterday's storm would have damaged all the fruit beyond repair, but this morning we had a tasty and copious snack standing under the tree and I hope to do that again tomorrow.  There's not enough to make jam or do much with, other than enjoy them.

The only other activity of note was trying to make the sister blog to this look a bit more professional and searchable, without any luck.  It is on a different platform, rather more technical than Blogger, and I fear that if I want to improve it, I'm going to have to pay for something more than the free service!!  Foiled again!!  If you want to browse the other blog, you can find it here - James Holland, 20th Century Artist – The life and work of James Holland, 1905 – 1996 .  When it is looking better, I will write about it here.

Anyway, we are now looking forward to a cooler week so that we can get things done.  I have courgettes, aubergines, peppers, chillies, tomatoes and cucumbers to plant out and need to sow the sweetcorn too - things you can really do in temperatures over 30 degrees very happily.  I hope you have good things planned for the week too.

Have a good week!

All change!

Last Sunday, having spent a few very damp and rather cool hours manning a bar for the village trout fishing day, I complained about the wet.  Today, I am tucked away in my office area, wearing shorts, t-shirt and no socks, trying to keep cool as outside temperatures rise to something like 33 degrees.  It is sunny, hot and dry and worthy of a summer's day in July and yet it is only May.  Climate change is a thing, people!

This morning we were early at the Shack, so that I could do some strimming and John a bit of mowing - there are summer crops to get into the ground, but you've got to be able to get near the beds and ground, and the rampant weeds made that impossible.  John made a nice path around the Meadow so that we can walk around in shorts and not worry too much about ticks, although they will always be an issue thanks to the deer we share the area with.

The wildflower Meadow is looking magnificent at the moment, with pink clover, knapweed, ox eye daisies and other plants vying for the attention of pollinating insects.  The area hums with buzzing and crickets and grasshoppers and there are butterflies around too.  Today I saw meadow browns, a red admiral or two, a peacock and a swallowtail.  Along the side of the path I spotted my first bee orchid of the season, but couldn't find it again when I went to photograph it.  I did spot a very fine lizard orchid though.

It's only in the last couple of years that we have also had pyramid orchids in the Orchard, and once John had done a path through there I spotted these two beauties.

So I have confirmed sightings of three different species of wild orchid chez nous - good, but not as good as a garden we keep an eye on, where I found four species of orchid in bloom.  The same three as us (pyramid, lizard and bee) as well as the rather more rare fly orchid - or at least that is what we call it!

Very similar in concept to the bee orchid, the "body" of the flower resembles a fly rather than a bee, and so is rather less pretty.

My evening watering and walking activity is now blessed with strong perfumes from the honeysuckle hedge of a neighbour and another neighbour's magnificent fragrant mock orange bush, which is nearing its peak at the moment.  In addition the swallows, swifts and black redstarts make a racket as I go around the pots and planters.  It's a hard job, but someone has to do it!!

Well, with the computer producing heat, my office is becoming less appealing as a retreat from the blazing sun, so I will leave you with a photo of a small but very fragrant rose I bought from Aldi (other discount stores are available) a few years ago.  It only flowers once each year, so I have to ensure I enjoy it while in bloom.

Have a good week!