Autumnal blues

The weather belies the melancholy of early November - it is very sunny and dry, although not totally warm.  The trees still have most of their leaves too, which considering many started to shed foliage during the summer, is a bit odd.  It's not been cold enough to get good autumn colours going and today I found ripe tomatoes and peppers in the kitchen garden.  It's all very odd!

As predicted, the potato crop is meagre at best - this is the result of 4 plants, where in previous years, it would be one or two.  The quality isn't the best either, although they are nice and tasty.

We've not done well for walnuts - the tree with the best flavour nuts died last year, many of the others had very limited numbers and black or empty nuts, and the one decent tree, we've had to battle to get our share.  One of the trusty trail cameras caught the culprit red-pawed!

If he had then eaten the nut, it wouldn't be so bad, but he planted it for later, which means there will be another walnut sapling to deal with in due course.  He's not worried - he's got a nice bushy tail!

Over the next few weeks, there should be a load of animal photos and videos going up as the two working trail cameras have both come in for downloads, battery recharging and cleaning up.  They will be put out again during the week but it takes ages to sort through the files.  The bird feeder camera will go out in mid-November - I'm still working through the thousands of photos that accumulated over three and a half months!

Among all the dying back for winter, there are signs of preparation for next spring - I found the first orchid rosettes in the Meadow this week!

The extraordinary weather has meant that occasionally there are times when you have to stop and admire, and indeed revel in, the beauty of the area.  Le Loir (the male tributary of the great Loire river) was looking particularly lovely in la Fleche on Wednesday, so I just had to take a photo!

But it's not been the happiest of weeks.  Poirot's drug regime is no longer totally effective and decisions need to be made.  Then on Tuesday, more bad news as a colleague on the Comité des Fetes lost his battle with liver disease, and left us with a big hole in our lives - Jean-Claude was a lovely man, and we'll miss him.

The shorter days bring challenges too - getting Rebus in before it gets too dark and exciting for a boy cat!  In fact he is a bit of a wuss, as he is terrified of things with engines (which I think is a good thing, but he does need silence to go near a road), is having disputes with a number of other cats in the zone, and doesn't like the sound of dogs barking.  During the week I spent a quarter of an hour waiting for him to work his way through a staring match with another cat, the horror of crossing a road and dogs barking in a nearby house, only to be met with Pepsi, another enemy sitting on his own doorstep!  Cat life is really hard sometimes!

Yes, I know, I've used this photo before!

Have a good week!

I may be getting superstitious

OK, so I knew last week was going to be a challenge as a client was going to be in town and had complex issues to sort out, but I hadn't expected quite the level of complication and uncertainty that ensued.  I was brought, as a gift, a bit of California bling - I didn't realise it was hexed.  I left it in a café by mistake, and it wasn't until I had recuperated it from the café owner that things sorted themselves out and life settled down again.  Some might say that it was just a coincidence, but I'm not so sure.  So for safety's sake, it is now hanging on a hook by my computer, and treated with great respect!

Autumn is really making itself felt at the moment - we have finally resorted to having a duvet on the bed, rather than just duvet covers, have used the fire a few times, have purchased a new mobile gas heater and I'm still making quince jelly to use up the last viable fruits that are knocking around the garden.  Yesterday I chopped up 3.8 kilos of fruit and today made 11 large jars of jelly.  The quantities were so great, I had two pots going as neither was large enough to get the whole lot boiling at once!

Storm Austen passed through on Friday and Saturday - around here we "only" had gusts of up to 87 kmph, which is quite enough, thank you.  Naturally a lot of plant pots got moved around, the chickens sulked but weren't blown away and all the cats went on strike due to lack of air pressure.  The greenhouse/polytunnel got blown over but to our relief, the impressive industrial quality cover survived in tact.  The only bit of damage that we really need to sort out quickly, and even then, relatively quickly, is that a chunk of one of the poplars in the Plantation dogleg of the Meadow came down in the farmer's field.  We need to get in there and see how much we can move off the field to avoid harming his much needed crop.

The other thing autumn does so well is sunsets - this one last Sunday (after I'd done the blog) was a particular humdinger.

The cats are all trying to grow fur, floof and fat for the winter.  This is particularly the case with our outdoor family: Randolph, Wimsey and Wally Hinterloper.  When not sitting and judging us from afar, they are seeking out any last crumb of food to help create a layer of blubber for the long winter nights in our cellars.  I have pointed out to them that there are plenty of nice fat field mice around, but that just gets me even more severely judged!  Randolph is the father, and the big fellow on the right; the mother, Sluttella, moved away, tempted by the charms of a black cat as far as we can tell.

We are very lucky in our village to still have a pub/café, which is open Thursday to Sunday in the evenings for drinks, food and occasional events.  The local musicians have checked out the latest owner (she's been there a year now) and have finally decided she is trustworthy, so we are starting to get some seriously good bands coming in.  Last night was Spy Shuffle Drivers - a blues trio from L.A. (Loire Authion), who were very good, if a bit loud.  The drummer had a neat trick of being able to play harmonica one handed while still keeping a beat going on bass drum and cymbals.  They played a continuous set from 9pm to 11pm, with all sorts of blues styles, finishing up with (and bringing this story round nicely in a circle) Superstition and Voodoo Chile.

Support your local small live music venues and musicians and have a great week!

Getting active

The long, hot summer period had an odd effect on us (and not just us either), in that it has been very hard to get the energy and inclination together to do anything.  It's not that there isn't tonnes to do - the garden, The Shack and its attendant land, the One Acre Wood, the chaos that is the rooms we don't use much, the mess that is the rooms we do use - each of these has a To Do list as long as the landing carpet (another to do list in its own right).  It was the oomph to do anything about any of them that we lacked.  The sapping, continuing heat and the chores that had to be done irrespective (watering, dealing with cat needs, plus eating and washing, and anything to do with the Comice) distracted us from things that could also have done with being looked at urgently.

It is true, we did get the wood burner insert changed, and completed a dossier to get a subsidy - now I just need to sort out the evidence that all is done correctly for the money to be paid to us.  Indeed we are now thinking that actually using the fire might be a good idea as temperatures finally drop!

We are now taking a bit more interest in the garden, not least as the seeds for winter greens I sowed back in early September are now getting to the stage where meals can be planned rather than robbing a few tender leaves while wandering around the plot.  Yesterday I thinned the Bright Lights chard and we had this lovely salad to go with our prawns and baguette for dinner.  They tasted as good as they look.

We have had bits knocking around the garden and the woodstore for a while to make a greenhouse or polytunnel, and last week we got the base sorted.  This weekend we have put up three walls and a roof, and put in the potting table that has been taking up centre stage in the woodstore.  Now we just need that last wall with the door and the pot of chillies will have a nice place to spend the winter to see if it is true you can keep them going.  The gap on the back wall has been fixed by the way.

Cooler weather and a bit of moisture has reinvigorated the cristophine vine.  We thought that the two or three fruits we spotted a couple of weeks ago would be the limit, but closer inspection reveals that the brute is making up for lost time and reviewing its plans for world domination!  I mean really, where did this lot come from all of a sudden?

The news is full of the riots across France, giving the impression that life is impossible and that civilised activity has stopped.  This is not the case.  Yes, there were riots yesterday: yes, a lot of damage was caused by mindless idiots who have completely stolen the news headlines from the legitimate and almost legitimate concerns of the demonstrators. BUT the damage was limited to specific areas, while life continues away from those areas and people shake their heads sadly and mull over who pays for the repairs (spoiler alert - everyone through their taxes and insurance premiums).  It was a beautiful and peaceful evening yesterday on the terrace of our village pub.

Some demonstrators were chuntering about the horrors of living in rural France, where you need your own transport, and where taxe foncière (the equivalent of council tax) goes up and up but you get nothing for it.  Well, leaving aside schools, roads, street lights, meals on wheels, subsidies for new wood burning fires, rubbish collections, sewage services and all that sort of invisible good, one thing that small towns get is a subsidy to support a local cinema, generally run as a not for profit club, and staffed by volunteers.  

Thus you don't have to trek for half an hour into a big town or city multiplex, as your local cinema club will ensure that many of the big releases come to you.  Okay, you don't get Pearl and Dean advertising and all the trailers, but our two local village cinemas each have a varied programme of about 20 or 25 films a month, at very affordable prices and sometimes in VO (version originale).  If the volunteers are a bit pretentious, that VO can be Turkish or Outer Mongolian, but on Friday night we treated ourselves to an evening out to watch Pressure, and it was great.  The seats were comfortable, the sound was excellent and it is a brilliant film.

 And finally, I was inspecting The Meadow today and listening to my favourite winter bird song (the wood lark - and today it was really giving it some), so I thought I would check how the badger set is getting on.  Earlier in the year I spotted that it was being used as a den by a bunch of fox cubs, so I was interested to see if the badgers had done their usual preparation for winter.  It was encouraging to see that the entrance is well used and expanded - it has moved a bit further up the field, by perhaps two foot in all, and there was a clear paw print in the damp soil at the entrance.

Next week there is more quince jelly to be made, and those long, long To Do lists to be attacked if I can continue to channel a bit of the enthusiasm I felt this last week.  Dealing with cristophines is on that list as well as waging war on spiders - I don't mind a few as they capture any last remaining mosquitoes, but it has got beyond a joke.  They can play outside, but not so much in the house I think.

Have a good week!

Seasonal activities

I'm slowly getting through the autumnal stuff that comes with October.  Now even in the One Acre Wood, we have cyclamen coming up, which says that things are becoming more normal, although our chestnut forage proved that the impact of the summer heat and drought will be felt for a while yet - the nuts are tiny.  Also there was no hint of mushrooms in the wood, so we have to content ourselves with enjoying the flowers.

I have had to get to grips with the quince issue this week and found time to make a massive batch of 9 hour poached spiced quince, which now need to be turned into crumbles for the freezer.  I have also made (finally) the first batch of quince jelly for this year - 10 and a bit pots are cooling downstairs as I type.

Last week I had to dash off to see the photo competition exhibition and watch the winners be announced.  The theme was spiders' webs and heritage, and hadn't inspired me to participate.  The winning photo was nice enough, but many of those that had been printed up were pretty samey and with only 91 entries, clearly I wasn't the only one to lack enthusiasm.  Next year's theme is Ruins, here and elsewhere - now that is something to get our teeth into!

This week was also the second week of the Challenge Communale in boule de forte.  The Comité des Fetes Girl Power team did fine the week before, but we were beaten 10 - 4 in the next round, so didn't make it to the finals this year.  Bizarrely, none of us were too upset!!

The week brought rain, and fairly decent quantities too, although it has now stopped again.  It does concentrate the mind rather on garden activities and also doing something with the quince that decorate part of the lawn and the outdoor dining table.

That nudge meant we did actually get round to making a weed proof base for the nascent polytunnel, and during the week, we may even get around to putting the plastic sheeting up too.  We need somewhere weather proof for the big pot of jalapeño chillies and a table someone gave us for potting things up on, which is currently blocking the wood store.

The autumn weather has brought on yucca flowers on our rather rampant plant - there are these spikes doing nicely and another 4 which will take over in a week or two assuming no frost.  I find these flowers wonderfully alien and opulent among the weeds and dying vegetation of the deciduous bushes.

Things are starting to quieten down now after a manic spurt of making up for not doing stuff as it was too hot.  The nights are drawing in, as are the mornings, so we have to make the best of less than 12 hours of daylight - dawn doesn't arrive here until after 8am which can make getting up challenging.  For the moment, it is warm enough to not require any heating but that will change as the days get ever shorter and the stones of the house don't have a chance to absorb as much heat from the sun.

All the more time really for making more quince jelly!!  Have a good week!

Phew - that was a week!

And yet but Friday, all seemed relatively calm!

Monday was the start of the work on removing the old wood burner and getting the new one in.  The taking out was a bit traumatic for us, not for the work that needed doing but from the ominous crashes and bangs that punctuated the morning.  By the time the guys left for their lunch, there was a pile of debris outside in the courtyard that stank of soot and old smoke.  We looked at the tubing aghast as it had cost us a few thousand to have it installed, admittedly about 15 years ago, but even so!

Monday night we could only see a few holes and some bits that were keeping the fire space clear of cats and their explorations - clearly we put the wind up the salesman when we said there were elements to prevent cat intrusion in the chimney area!  But by Tuesday lunchtime, there was a beautiful, new, shiny wood burning insert, with no chance of cats getting into the area above the insert.  On Thursday, the boss turned up to check his team's work, light a fire, and get us to sign lots of paperwork.  It is very effective and efficient, and when the temperature outside is about 25 degrees C, that is exactly when you want a nice hot fire going!!

 Another excitement for the week was the start of the Challenge Communale in boule de forte.  Each club, plus the council is invited to put forward a couple of teams to play this uniquely Angevine sport.  The Comité des Fetes puts in two teams, this year again we came up with an all women team and an all men team.  I play on the women's team (Girl Power) and last year we got to the finals.  This year we were pitted against one of two teams from the Council (elected members, not staff), and won by an embarrassing margin (10 - 0).  I was busy, so no photos!  The men's team played the following night against one of two teams for Heritage Preservation, taking it all very seriously ... and lost.  If they had won, it would have been an all Comité des Fetes second round, so perhaps good?

Today I was able to harvest a few autumnal crops - a handful of potatoes and a small pumpkin.  The potatoes were rather small - this is due to the lack of rain during the summer and not being allowed to do much watering because of the drought.  Crisps and chips will be smaller this year and baking potatoes at a premium I think.  Still this collection will do us nicely for the week.  I am not sure if it is unusual to be harvesting cucumbers in October and it's the first year we have grown them.

The bed of autumn and winter greens is coming on very nicely.  The chard will need to be thinned soon, which will give us a nice salad to eat.  I've already been snacking on baby spinach leaves and they will also need thinning soon.  The lamb's lettuce, or mâche, will grow slowly and some may be ready for Christmas.

Something else that may be ready to eat during the week is our first cristophine!  Normally by this stage we would be fed up with them, having been picking them since mid-September.  This one snuck up on us rather, as we only spotted the first female flowers about a week ago, but then it is well hidden in the canopy.  It has been a bad year for this tropical perennial, as it has been far too dry and too hot as well - it likes temperatures between 20 and 33 degrees and either side of that, it is out of its comfort zone.

Another weird one are the jalapeño chillies, which would normally be searingly hot to eat.  This year they are full of flavour, but very tame.  We do still have some cayenne chillies in the freezer to add heat when required, but we had high hopes of these and are slightly disappointed.  I guess they would have preferred cooler temperatures too.

Anyway, the nights are drawing in, and we are told there will be a sharp drop in temperatures after Wednesday, so we take advantage of the light and outdoor events while we can.  Today there is the exhibition of the village Heritage Preservation Society's annual photo competition up at the church, with prize giving in about three quarters of an hour, so I had better round this off and put on some shoes and go and be seen to participate.

Have a good week!

A manic drift into Autumn

Apologies - I totally failed to post last Sunday and last Monday and today nearly didn't happen either.  After 4 months of either very wet weather (first half of May), or really hot weather (the rest of the time), people finally decided in September that things had to start to happen.  That's fair I guess, as climate change indicates that this last summer will soon become the norm rather than an exception and we will have to learn to live with it.

Mixed in with the fun of visitors, rock concerts and European Heritage Weekend have been preparing for having our fire insert changed, getting a house sale through for someone, helping someone to move into a residential home, helping someone else with various issues to do with life in general, failing to deal with the quince harvest, and finally getting some movement on our plan to buy (rather than rent/squat) the Meadow and Orchard.  It has been hard to find a moment to stand back and look at the bigger picture!

It was lovely to catch up with old friends, and fun that it coincided with a rather loud but jolly night of Rory Gallagher music, courtesy of Tribute Bourbon - a local rock combo, at the village pub.

As part of the visits with chums, we went over to Chinon for lunch, the antiques fair along the river bank and a look at the Collégiale Sainte Meme.  While I have been into the auditorium bit of this repurposed church, Heritage Open Days gave us a chance to go up the tower and look in painted rooms that are not normally open to the public - fascinating and very beautiful.

 The Romanesque ceiling with beams and spiders' webs was also very impressive.

The last time I wrote, I commented on my rather meagre and disappointing sweetcorn crop - at least those cobs were disease free.  When I went to get the last 8, two of them were infested with smuts.  While the Mexicans regard kernels like this as a real delicacy and strive to grow them, I find them disgusting to look at and touch, but the chickens are happy to sort them out for me!

We planted our quince tree in the garden not long after we bought the house and now it is a mature specimen.  It always produces large fruits - I'm not sure how, as we never water it.  This year we have had a bumper crop - earlier in the year I lost count at spotting about 60 on the tree, but I think there were many more than that.  One fruit seems to have damaged one of the chickens when it fell, and as the larger one in this photo weighs just under 3 pounds (well over a kilo), you can see how it might hurt if it falls on you.  Newton wouldn't have found gravity, he would have found a hospital if he had been sitting under our quince tree!  The smaller specimen is about the size of a large orange for scale.

While this autumn is extraordinary in its warmth and dryness, it is also living up to the usual promise of beautiful skies and sunsets.  We watch cloud formations come and go, but to date bringing no rain worth speaking of - perhaps this week, when we could do with dry weather, that will change.  Here is one good sunset, even if the photo doesn't quite match it in quality.

This week sees the new fire installed, my friend moves into her residential home, and I am back playing boule de fort for the honour of the ladies of the Comité des Fetes of Vieil Bauge.  I'm hoping that somewhere in the week I will also finally get a bit of time to start dealing with the quince mountain, assuming I can find enough jam jars!

Have a good week!

Getting back in the swing of things

September in France is all about new beginnings as well as profiting from the hard work of earlier in the year.  With a lull in the hot weather, we were able to turn the soil in the old broad bean bed and get in the first of the winter crops, so that there should be something available in February or March in the garden.  We have one bed where we can (normally) grow cauliflowers, so once the rotavator had done its job, we added a bag of well rotted horse manure and I planted 10 cauliflower plants.  They will now be in the ground and carefully nurtured for about 7 months, so if you complain about the price of caulis, remember how long they take to grow and how much space each plant takes, and only produces one head of curds!

As the medium term forecast for the autumn is quite benign, I have also planted a load of salad/leafy crops to make October and November a bit more interesting.  The seeds went in last Sunday, so it was encouraging to see that the Bright Lights chard and the spinach were well up and some signs of the mâche (lamb's lettuce) coming through as well.  If I am watchful and we are lucky, we should be eating baby leaves in October.

But what of the existing crops?  Well today I picked the best of our sweetcorn, as a snack to accompany lunch.  Disappointing puts it rather mildly - as these were very short cobs at about 3 to 4 inches long, sparsely populated too, but very sweet and tasty.  It just wasn't a good year for them, and I did sow about 2 weeks too late.

The cucumbers seem to remember now what their purpose in life is and have about 4 fruits set on them.  Reading the packet details, the variety is a slim version, and hails from Poland.  I have to hope that they do fatten up a little bit more than this, as it isn't totally appealing at the moment.

My fight against Asian hornets continues - this is the time of year when workers are on a feeding frenzy of finding sugar, while young queens need to really stock up on sugars to get themselves through the winter.  The exceptionally hot summer hasn't been good for them, as once the temperature inside the nests exceeds 40 degrees, they die off.  As we have had four periods when that has happened, we hope that they have taken a big hit.  The other noticeable thing is that as food has been more scarce and conditions not to their liking, any specimens that have been spotted are a bit smaller than usual.  On the one hand this is good, implying a weaker set of insects that may find it difficult to get through the winter.  On the other hand, there have been instances where they are able to escape from the selective traps that are set for them, as they can squeeze out of the holes designed to let bees and flies escape.  I have topped up the bait in my number 1 trap and have caught at least three of the beasties.

The star plant of September is the cyclamen and they are cropping up all over the place now, including random spots on the side of the road.  These clumps are at the entrance to the Orchard, and always cheer me up.

Yesterday was the annual Mechoui of our local boule de fort club - a lovely Saturday given over to gluttony and fellowship.  This year was a little subdued - the long, hot summer has taken its toll on people, and indeed the menu for the meal couldn't be finalised for a while until they got permission for the fire needed to spit roast the pig.  Our glorious Leader hasn't been in the best of health so he was less lively and couldn't make his usual general toast.  But having said that, the punch kicked above its weight, the wine was delicious, the starters were excellent, and the spit roast pig was all you could desire.  Once we got home at 6pm, we lolled, trying to digest and rehydrate after a decidedly warm afternoon among friends.

That is lunch and here are the happy punters.

Another feature of September is a rush of arrivals who didn't want to come over during school holidays.  The week ahead looks extremely busy with people, concerts, meals out, antiques fairs and the like and the blog will probably not be published until Monday.

Have a good week!