Dog days and memories

Late July and August used to be referred to as the dog days of summer, not least if there was day after day of hot, sunny weather.  It could well be related to the French word canicule, which describes a period of intense, hot weather (going back to the latin for dog, canis).  This year is proving to be exceptional in terms of sunshine and heat, and it is affecting all sorts of things.  Our eating grapes that grow on the side of the house are ripening, as are the Victoria plums.  Apple trees are shedding fruit, and not in a good way - some are burnt by the sun and then discarded by the tree to concentrate on undamaged fruit.  

This week I have been picking blackberries.

There are quite a lot (probably too many) brambles growing down the edge of the Meadow that gives on to the neighbouring farmer's field.  They shelter us from the wind to some extent, if it comes from the East, and give haven to birds and small animals, as well as a bit of food.  The ones that face west seem to provide the best fruit too, quite large and sweet.  Today I picked perhaps half a kilo - this is just one punnet.

As John was doing a bit of strimming (before midday and with a good dollop of water if he set off a spark, as is the only way to do these things at the moment), I was able to wander around picking and bury myself in my own thoughts.  

When I was back in England in June, I met up with an old school friend.  We found a secluded café in Hythe and talked solidly for two hours - the maximum time she could get away from caring duties.  One area we touched on was blackberrying.  She was out with a couple of nieces I think and had found a patch of blackberries and was feeding them to the small children, when she was accosted by someone.  How dare she feed unknown berries to children - did she want to poison them?  No, my friend said, I'm just letting them enjoy wild blackberries.  "But they might be poisonous, they aren't from a supermarket, how do you know they are blackberries?"  We both expressed suitable horror at people not being able to identify blackberries in the wild, but that bit of conversation stays with me - how do I know which are blackberries, and which are the right berries to pick?

Naturally, you don't pick any that are too low down - anything that a fox can pee on is left for wildlife!  I know there are quite a few foxes in the zone!

Some of my earliest memories are going out looking for blackberries with my Granny, my Dad and my aunt (my Dad's sister).  All were born before the First World War and while not necessarily country folk, could access open spaces where blackberries might be found.  We knew to take a walking stick - not to help with walking or fend off stray dogs, but to draw down the vines with the best berries.  We knew to pick only what was ripe, to leave the rest to ripen for others, and we knew not to pick after the end of September, at which point, any that were left were for the Devil (actually for overwintering wildlife, but also they have less pectin and are less tasty).  Whenever I am out picking blackberries, I have this Black Country voice in the back of my mind telling me to get the best, to not mind the scratches and not to get stains on my clothes - Granny!  But my age group are now the grannies - how many know how to identify blackberries, and importantly, which black berries not to pick?

Each session I'm not getting enough fruit to do much with, so the day's booty goes into the freezer, ready for me to make bramble jelly in about a month's time.  However, it feels too early in the year to be picking blackberries.

The kitchen garden is challenging this year - the searing heat and the drought does no favours.  Courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins are reluctant to produce female flowers, the sweetcorn is a disaster and the ground is too hard to work so that I can plant leeks and cauliflowers for the winter.  Still, this little haul, with a couple of added onions that had already been harvested, made a delicious lunch.

There was an event this week - rain - a whole 7 millimetres of it!  The cat bed Rebus sleeps in on the bedroom window sill got soaked, as did he, the road was running with water and dusty scum for a while, and by the afternoon, any sign of rain was gone, but the air was unpleasantly humid.  We need days of solid drizzle, but perhaps not while people are on holiday.

So there we have it - a week of mostly dog days, plus a morning of rain.  The forecast for the coming week is similar, so I shall keep picking the blackberries in the mornings and keeping cool in the afternoons.  Have a good week!

Well, this nearly didn't happen!

I swear my loathing of Google grows by the day!  Yesterday it took me an hour to get back into my YouTube channel so I could load up some videos for today's blog.  Today it has taken me half an hour to log into Blogger to be able to write this at all!  A pox on their so called security and ease of use policies!

But on a calmer note -

This whole blog was going to be a rant.  About Google, about local politicians saying one thing and doing another, about lassitude and inertia, and about the French national sport of moaning.  But when Spring is in full "bursting out all over" mode and you can hardly hear yourself think for the racket a local nightingale is making in the trees - who needs to rant?

The weather for the past week has been too hot for spring, but probably just right for those on holiday and it was certainly good for getting the laundry dry.  Today I finally got the first of the new raised beds installed and with soil in it, now for the planting and sorting out the other three.  This one is going to be a herb bed, so I might actually use the spacing rods, although I'm not going to screw them in as that will make weeding more difficult when it becomes necessary, as it undoubtedly will.

It has been a pretty cultural week in many ways, with a reggae band at the pub on Easter Sunday, who were very good, but the singer was so laid back he was virtually horizontal!  Then on Friday there was jazz manouche at the pub, one of my favourite things.  As 90% of the audience were anglophone (shame on you French people), the harmonica player had a lot of fun trying to explain the songs in English, and the trio were outstanding.  Finally today we went to see the crafts on display in the newly refurbished Tribune building in Bauge - wood carving, furniture making, weaving, watercolours on plastic (fascinating and lovely), pottery, and calligraphy to name a few.  It is the European Weekend of artisan crafts, and if the local talents are a reflection of the rest of the country, what a talented bunch people are!

The highlight of the week was Poirot getting her stitches out and having her sunflower collar taken off, following the successful surgery to have her damaged eye removed.  She has taken to going out into the garden again to check on things and find the tasty water, and is a very happy girl once again.

I said I had wrestled on your behalf with YouTube - well let's see if it worked and was worth it.  I brought in Trail Camera 2 at the start of March.  This one lives on a ridge between two wetland areas, where two wildlife paths cross, but people not so much.  There were some 350 files on the camera after two months in situ, and quite a lot were of coypu and of mice, but I will show you the best video for each species of animal (not birds) that the camera captured during that time.

First off we have a rather handsome stag with furry antlers just mooching about.

Naturally the boar passed through, doing their thing.  They had a good try at digging up the path too, but not on video.

The badgers were around having a jolly good rummage, as they do.

The fox came through during daylight hours, later among the files I spotted a very pregnant vixen doing the rounds, but the video wasn't up to much other than showing just how near she was to producing.

As I said, there was a lot of coypu action, mostly running across the field of vision worryingly quickly, but this short of one having a bit of a clean up is as near cute as they get.

I mentioned mice and there are also rates.  This is natural land quite a distance from buildings of any kind, so this is a rat in the wild, doing what wild rats do, and therefore I have no issues with it.

There were lots of photos of pine martens, quite blurry, as they passed through at speed, but in one instance, one did stop for a moment to perform for the camera!

And finally, my favourite of all the animals we share the land with, the hare made an appearance.  It is not a usual area to find them, they tend to be more over in the Meadow, but clearly it was worth them checking out the area.

Well, hopefully that all works.

This week I'll be working on getting the raised beds set up, setting off seeds, and listening to the nightingale while he is in full song mode.  I heard my first Golden Oriole of the season during the week, but once they get going, things get really loud.  How lucky to share space with them!

Have a good week!

Sunshine and Success!

After a truly frustrating and damp period, things started to work and the sun came out.  I had scoffed about a wine order from down near Nimes arriving chez nous without any issues, but they said they would deliver on Monday in the morning, and at 10:30 while I read the local paper, the daylight was blotted out by a lorry parking up outside, with our (modest) wine order inside.  How could I doubt them?  Also on Monday, there was a flurry of messages from the passport office as my photo was accepted by the bots sometime on Sunday evening, and by Monday morning the document was printed, packed and on it's way to France.  Again, it arrived when expected on Thursday morning, after it had been on a trip to Germany on its way to France.  I can travel again!

I'm not sharing a photo of the passport, but I will share a photo of the daffodils that came out on Tuesday to celebrate sunshine and good will to all men.

The big news of the week locally is that with a scant 5mm of rain during the whole week, rivers have mostly returned to their beds, although still flowing full and fast, and people can get down to clearing up and waiting for things to dry out.  We dug up the remaining potatoes during the week - a heavy, depressing venture, as the fork became as one with the heavy clay soil, while the potatoes were generally rather small and nibbled by slugs.  The bottom allotment plot is really rather unpleasant, although good for brassicas.  Otherwise the ground is too wet to do anything yet, although I did resort to sowing some seeds in modules just to cheer myself up.

The enduring damp, combined with nice weather, did mean that yesterday we finally had to make a start on making safe the dead walnut tree near the ponds, as we had no more excuses.  While good for insects and birds, the tree is highly dangerous, with "widow maker" branches all over the place and low branches that threaten to block access to the ponds.

Using a generator, an electric pole saw and a lot of elbow grease, we got down the most dangerous bits, and created access for getting at the bits that are blocking the hidden path between the Orchard and the Meadow.  The wood is quite light, but even so, there is a bit of firewood there for us in due course.  The area is now rather lighter which might encourage the brambles a bit too much, so as well as carrying on with the tree, we need to get in there with brush cutters of different sizes and power to push those back too.

Looking at one of the large, dead and partly broken branches, we did spot an amazing large fungus.  Not edible and not conducive to plant function or keeping qualities of wood, it is an impressive size.

Our fun was cut short yesterday by an unnecessary shower of rain, very localised but very wet.  It did create a rather nice rainbow though, which is just about visible on this photo.

As getting to the ponds is now rather easier and safer, with the walnut a bit curtailed, I was able to get to the ponds and decided to check on the trail camera based down there.  The camera is fine, although I think I need to bring it in soon, if only to watch the boar doing their best to dig a new channel between the second pond and the larger area of bog and pond to the east.  What a mess!

Spring is clearly on its' way now - if there were no other clues, the bird song has a distinctive character to it, and the mix of birds is slowly changing.  The Cetti's Warblers are strident, and the chiffchaffs are back.  I think there must be food sources appearing too, as the various tits are spending less time on the fat balls and bird feeder.  With grey skies and rain, I haven't paid attention to the wild plum growing by the chicken run, but this morning I could not miss the blossom!

The forecast is set fair for the week, and there is so much to do outside, I feel I must get going now and do something useful.  I hope the weather is kind to you too!  Have a good week!

Advent is here

I don't do anything about an advent calendar, but feel I can no longer yell "not yet" at Christmas preparations as today is officially the start of Advent, being the fourth Sunday before Christmas.  On the other hand, one can now say "five weeks and it will be over" with some sense of relief.  In between, there are presents to buy and wrap (allegedly), Christmas cards to design, get printed, write and post (new mortgage time), food to order and things to make.

The local council is very good at still doing Christmas decorations, and as most are LED, I don't think they break the bank to run.  Doing away with them would certainly be a bad message to send to local voters ahead of an election.  We have things on lamp posts, a banderol of lights across the main road between the mairie and the church, and a Christmas tree by the church.

 This time of year is really about greed I guess, or finding ways to get through the long, dark nights.  This week I made the Christmas cakes, packed full of sugars, dried fruit, fat, alcohol and eggs, and baked for two and a half hours.  They will be fed every few days until just before Christmas, when I put marzipan on the top and ensure that one makes its way over to Chinon.

Looking further forward than that, there is the new growing season to plan for and to work on.  Nature is already doing her thing, with the rosettes of lizard and bee orchids appearing in the Meadow, and cowslip leaves appearing literally everywhere around the vegetable beds, as well as in the Orchard.  I need to find and plant bulbs before it is too late, mainly in tubs as otherwise they get eaten by furry things or scratched up by chickens.  I have also managed to sow a full row of broad bean seeds before the end of November - always my objective.  I might do another row in December and they will catch the others up in the spring.

We have also moved away from the house and over to the vegetable garden the stock of giant bamboo John cut this year.  We don't use it as scaffolding, but it does make useful garden structures, such as the cristophine cage.  We now have two giant tripods, one guarding the water butts, and one in the garden by the house for no good reason other than they please us.  While Shirl in A Country Practice recommended sitting under a pyramid for mental relaxation (and how many remember that wonderful series?), I don't think it works with a giant tripod!

In theory, the coming week is calm and quiet, all the better to deal with the Christmas card issue, but I bet things arise to change all that!

Have a good week!

Time away from the routine

Much of the past week has been rather different.  Last Saturday I picked up the ferry at Caen and went to England for a few days to visit family in Essex.  It's been more than a year since I was last over there, and I found I hadn't really missed the country, just a few people.  

Arriving on a Sunday meant that while I was horrified at the number of people on the road at what I termed "stupid o'clock", there weren't any major hold ups.  The M25, if it hadn't been foggy would have been no problem, and I was at South Mimms about three quarters of an hour earlier than I had expected.  I was horrified at the state of the roads.  The M25 between junctions 10 and 11 was so badly surfaced I worried for the state of my tyres and shock absorbers, but that was nothing to the state of the roads in Essex, where axle breaking holes could be anywhere.  I made it without incident, but I'm sure it took a good couple of days for my blood pressure to go down.

The relative I was staying with has a large pond.  Until I entered the drive and saw diggers, I wasn't aware that the pond was being renovated.  This massive exploit was fascinating and dominated my attention much of the time.  It was particularly fascinating to watch where the underground spring that feeds the pond was rising, in the middle.

In order to accommodate the estimated 400 tonnes of sludge and leaf litter, a pit had to be dug, and the spoil from that created a couple of mountains of clay and subsoil, covered with top soil.  The pit will slowly allow water to drain out and can be capped in due course, but for now it is a shimmering zone that could eat people, animals or machinery without leaving a trace.

I am always fascinated by the plants my relative grows - the dahlias are large, blousy and colourful, the rhubarb a source of envy and there are always novelties.  This time round I was fascinated by a shrub with bright red leaves - a cotinus "grace", from the same family as the smoke bush.  Indeed, so much so that I will be finding one for our garden if I possibly can.  The leaves are this colour all the time they are the bush apparently.

To earn my keep during my visit, I replaced the cane seat in a chair that had been in the family for a while.  I had ordered new cane and a cane bodkin, so despite not having done a chair seat for some 20 years or more, and having sore hand joints, I was still about to complete the work in about 5 hours.  Getting the old seat out took a bit more time than I planned.  I was pleased with the result and the chair now functions as a chair.

Once home at the end of the week, French life took over again, including discussing a faulty telephone line for some elderly chums, checking the removal of a hornets' nest from another friend's house and preparing a rant for the people who inspect septic tanks.  A week's work was crammed into two days!

I also got round to the final fruit harvest of the year, and got to it at just the right time too!  Medlars are an ancient fruit, and going back many years, before more fancy things came along, were one of the staples of late autumn eating.  The fruits have to be bletted, or allowed to go ever so slightly rotten, at which point, if they do this naturally, they fall off the tree if you just look at them.  So harvesting is done when they are just about to turn, and the bletting was traditionally done in a crock of sawdust.  Mine will have to make do with a fruit crate in the garage, but I got perhaps a couple of kilos, and once they have turned, will be made into jelly.

You map spot that a couple of the lower ones are darker than the others, those ones were ripe.  One fell off the tree before I could pick it, but we had the other one and a few others that were ready with a piece of stilton yesterday for supper, and it was jolly good.

So that was my week, next week may be a bit more normal, then again, it may not.  We shall see!

Have a good one!

Random things

This is a hastily written entry as tonight I head for the Normandy coast and a ferry to the UK for a short visit.  As ever, packing and the like are last minute, I still have a pile of chores to do and have doubts about my tasks when I am in the UK.  Last year, when visiting family, I spotted a couple of caned chairs that were damaged.  One was totally broken, the other had a few strands snapped.  I promised I would go back this year and redo the small seat and patch the one less damaged.  As you will have spotted, the year is disappearing fast, so before my frequent traveller pass on Brittany Ferries expires, I need to go and make good that promise.  During the week I have been practicing my art, or trying to.  Time pressures and 24 year old cane have made it rather challenging!

Today's market was interesting.  As well as a range of events organised by a group of local artisans and vendors, there was a left-overs soup giveaway going down and the Cadets de Baugeois were celebrating their 60th anniversary by playing pop tunes between the vegetable stalls.

While the weather was typically overcast for the massive Beaver moon during the week, I was lucky enough to catch it just before it was full, for an arty shot on Tuesday evening.

The only produce still growing full on at the moment are the cristophines.  While earlier in the autumn there were fewer than previous years, they are still going and I think I spotted about 8 on the massive vine last time I searched.

The cabbages and cauliflowers I planted a few weeks ago for the spring are enjoying the warm and wet weather and are getting interesting, but it is a long way to go until they are ready in March or so next year.

And on that note, I had better close down the computer and get packing!  I am so out of practice, it will take longer than my record of 15 minutes to gather all my needs together!

Have a good week!