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!

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!

Two forms of culture this week

Indeed - culture of the artistic nature and culture as in planting things - it's been all go this last week!

On the artistic side of things, we decided to take a day out on Thursday and went into Angers.  Since the tramway has been developed, I don't like to drive into the centre of town any more, but a chum had told me about a very convenient park and ride point, so we thought we ought to try it.  

The entrance is still a bit dodgy and the signage isn't necessarily the best yet, but it worked terrifically well, and gave us time to work out where we wanted to go and what ticket would be best.  At 4.60Euros for a 24 hour pass, the system is actually very reasonable, and it meant that while in theory we only needed to go two stops, in fact we could jaunt all the way out to the other side of the city to see what the far end of the line was like, then hop across platforms and come back into the centre, even closer to where we wanted to go, and see even more suburbs, as well as a bit of heritage.

Parts of the route are actually very scenic and give you great views over the Maine to the Chateau and the Cathedral, so it is fun to do.  

Then in the centre of town we headed to the Collegiale Saint Martin - an adapted place of worship - for the Banksy exhibition.  It appears to be a touring exhibition of photos and a few installations, rather than bringing in large pieces of wall or concrete, so you don't necessarily get the authentic experience, and some of the French explanations of pieces were a bit worthy.  

For us, as British people with experience of British culture, well, we didn't need the explanations quite so much, and so many of the images are high impact anyway.  It was free, not much of a queue, you could take a free poster as you left, and there was an apple available for children too on leaving.  Thanks, Banksy!

Banksy wasn't the only controversial art in town either.  From the exhibition, we walked over to the Cathedral to look at the new portico that has been installed to protect the entry arch from weather and pigeons.  The old portico is rather magnificent and still has traces of the original paint work, so it is worth protecting.

There are two ways one can go with something like this - a pastiche of old architecture that purists such as my father would label bogus, but traditionalists might call respectful, or you can go modern.  Going modern naturally annoys people with not being quite the same, different materials, lacking respect and all that.  It also gets called brave and challenging.  I like what they have done.  It protects the original, it is plain and simple and bright, but suitably imposing, so I give it the thumbs up!

But it hasn't all been about arty stuff this week.  With a trailer of best compost, it was possible to get going on the raised beds at The Shack.  The two lower ones are in and planted up, at least in part.  One has two new rhubarb plants, as last year my niece gave me an amazing recipe for rhubarb fool and it is the food of the gods, but you still need the rhubarb.  In two year's time we should be doing really well!  

The other has "soft" herbs, so chives, sorrel, tarragon, and sowings of more chives, parsley and dill, with basil and coriander to follow.  I also did the first of the taller raised beds, which was rather harder work to fill, and that now has waif and stray strawberry plants that we have been accumulating for the past couple of years planted in it, well away from the chickens (like 5 miles)!

Just uphill from the raised beds are a couple of pea towers.

John has a client with a bamboo problem, and so we tend to have lots of very long and quite chunky pieces of bamboo knocking around.  He got bored one day and made a couple of tripods, each about 8 foot high, and they stand around looking slightly shifty.  He has now found a use for them.  The one in the garden (not shown) now has a triangular sun shade sail attached to it to create a sheltered corner at the top of the garden if one wants to hide and read a book.  The other has been planted up as a home for more cristophines - this is something he may regret.

The summer visitors are nearly all here now, nightingales, the cuckoo, swallows, and the swifts will arrive soon, along with the golden orioles and melodious warblers, the grass and weeds grow as you watch and very soon it will be orchid time.  For some aspects of gardening we are doing OK, but in other areas we are very delayed, and the potatoes are getting urgent.  But I do have to remind myself that we are still in mid-April.  

The other fun that arrives in mid-April are tax returns - aaargh!  While we only have to fill in about 10 numbers, those are spread across some 15 pages of internet forms, with explanations and instructions written in a language that is almost like French, but not quite.  Even for the French themselves, there is apparently an AI app which translates tax French into real French! 

Anyway, you have some idea of what will be occupying me - tax and gardening!  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!

Easter treats

The blossom this year is magnificent, if a little early.  The plum is long gone, as is the peach, but the pear is out, the cherry is still going strong, and some early apple blossom is starting to show. My favourite of all is quince blossom and this should be about the last to show, but this year it is in advance I think, although totally gorgeous.

The honesty is also going from strength to strength and is a lovely foil to white and pink blossom.

Even the plant with the nicotine problem is doing nicely and flowering - when I recuperated it from a pile of stuff waiting to be burnt, it was pot-bound, tucked in with four other things, and had been used as an ashtray for at least 2 years.  I cleaned off all the old soil, split it into four, potted each up and treated some as house plants and others as outdoor plants - round here they self-identify as preferring to be house plants.  Anyway two survived and the bigger one is flowering again.

To make life easier on the kitchen garden, I have decided to ditch one of the plots and use part of it for raised beds, some of which will contain more perennial planting.  So yesterday I spent time lifting the old weed suppressant matting and found a few baby slowworms.

Today I finally unpacked one of the raised bed packs and set it out to see how it worked, how tall it would be and how easily it fitted together.  I was impressed that the pack included a weed suppressant mat, and won't be using the things that divide the square into 9, because I may not want it divided into 9.  They will have the protection of my metal cages, which by some miracle seem to fit.

As we are now into April, I have taken down the bird feeder with camera included.  It will go back out again in late September.  Over the past two and a bit months, it has gathered in excess of 20,000 photo files (but only used a quarter of the SD card capacity), which I will spend the next while going through.  I fully expect to delete something like 19,500 of the files as rubbish - out of focus, misted up, partial bits of bird, nothing of interest etc.  A cursory glance at the contact sheet view of files hinted at something different to robins, great tits and blue tits, so I had a bit of a browse.

It's a bit in your face I know!  I wasn't at all sure what it was, but I think this photo gives a good hint although misses some of the drama of the first photo.

I'd be interested to hear thoughts!

Anyway, it's not been the most exciting week as I have spent a lot of time being sat on by a recovering cat.  At her first post-op appointment last week, the vet said she was doing very well, so clearly my role as cat mattress is working, and we all hope that she will soon be able to ditch the sunflower collar as the stitches dissolve.

Tonight there is reggae at the local pub, which continues the tradition of live music on Easter Sunday, so we shall need to be there, and not be square!

Have a good week and Happy Easter!

Travel and home

Last week's blog was very brief as i ran out of time to say anything interesting or find any nice photos and videos.  This time last week, I was on a ferry from Dieppe to Newhaven to visit pastures old and take some contributions for an upcoming exhibition.

The drive from here to Dieppe seems a long and boring slog - in reality it is probably only about three and three quarter hours, but it seems like more.  Then the ferry journey itself is four hours - not long enough for a cabin and sleep, but too long if you are on your own and the food is pretty boring and the weather is bouncy.  Now I like a rough crossing, but I get annoyed at having to hold onto a table to stay in my chair, and when they said they had to turn the stabilisers off to get into harbour, I was surprised they had stabilisers on in the first place!

Then there is driving in East Sussex.  I swear they are preparing for a Russian or Iranian invasion - most roads are being dug up and it is impossible to know what diversion signs relate to the route you want to travel.  Those that aren't being dug up, should be, given their condition.  In France a pothole is called a nid de poule - a chicken nest - but I'll swear that the East Sussex potholes would house not just a chicken, but several turkeys, an ostrich and probably a large flock of velociraptors!  But then if you go to the seaside, it is beautiful!

I'd not been to Seaford for over 45 years, so it was nice to spend time sitting on a bench, watching the sea and eating high quality ice cream.  There were some lovely benches - presumably a Heritage Lottery or Millennium project - really in keeping with the area.

And the artistic benches were in keeping with my main mission for the visit - handing over materials for a forthcoming exhibition at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne.  It is an impressive building and the standing exhibition is a homage to Eric Ravillious and his chums.  He was actually a contemporary of my father's, which was interesting if a bit tantalising at times.

The exhibition opens in May, and if you are interested, follow this link - Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism — Towner Eastbourne .  From my discussions with one of the curators, I think it is going to be a pretty special exhibition and I will brave the journey later in the year to go and see it.

I got home on Thursday and did not miss out on the fine weather here in France.  It is stunning and warm and bright, and the air is poor quality and full of pollen, so I am on antihistamines a whole month before I would expect.  Having said that - look at this cherry tree, seemingly in full blossom, and you can see why!

Actually, only half the tree is in blossom, the other half is burgeoning, getting ready to go.  The half that is in flower produces miserable little fruits, with a lot of colour but just a skin of red over the stone - it is a wild cherry, and looks to have come from below the graft point on the tree.  The other side, which isn't out yet, has lovely lush fruits that the birds get before we have a chance to try them.  Cultivated cherries are rather behind, as can be seen in this photo.

However in both cases, it is too early for this sort of thing, but that seems to be the way of it this year.

Other things are happening in the productive gardens - the first asparagus spears are starting to show!  Telling them apart from new shoots of mare's tail can be a bit challenging at a distance and without glasses, but all becomes clear close to.

And as we are getting to that time of year, I was able to harvest the first of our 6 cauliflowers - bijou and compact - for our dinner tonight.  This has been in the ground since August last year - if anyone chunters about the price of caulis, this is the reason, they take ages to develop!

So there we have it - an exciting week with lots going on at home and away.  Next week I will talk local elections perhaps, but can't this week as the polls are still open in some places.  

Have a good week!

Plants and bugs

It has been a mostly sunny and dry week so the floods have receded, the ground is slightly drying out (I found my first crack in the clay soil today, for goodness sake), and spring is definitely springing.  I have a couple of crocus planted out, I never remember where, but this year I did buy a cheap packet of bulbs and put them in a pot to be a pretty display.  That didn't work as they sulked, so after a couple of months, when I bought a sorrel plant, I put it in that pot, while I continue to decide where I will have a bed of sorrel that won't be a slug or chicken magnet.  Being crowded by a posh plant annoyed the sulking crocuses even more, so now they are coming up and flowering in a very small way, but rather pretty.

Other flowers and blossom are going great guns, which is sad, as it is too early!  Our froufrou narcissi are up and at their best about two weeks too soon.  The wild plums are nearly over and the mirabelles and small plums are coming out, the Victoria plum is rather later.  While the trees have quite a lot of bees buzzing around, they are mainly solitary bees and bumble bees, so the local honey bees are missing out.

We are waiting for the soil to dry out a bit and become faintly manageable, but there are still some overwintering crops in there, and yesterday I dug up a fine bunch of multicoloured carrots.  The packet always shows a lovely range of colours from white through to deep purple or black, but I always end up with cream, yellow and orange!

While there is still enough water in the ponds for me to be able to scoop some out without falling in or needing waders, I finally got round to doing a pond dip in the upper pond.  There are no fish that we are aware of, and I've (sadly) not spotted and spawn this year, be it frog, toad or newt, so I wasn't really sure what, if anything, would be living in it.  I managed to scoop out about a litre and a half of water at the edge of the pond and went for a walk while the debris and suspended mud particles settled.  When I got back and started to review my catch, I remembered why I needed to take a couple of chairs with me for this exercise - it is harsh on thighs, calves and bum!  I spotted 6 different species to my untrained eye, so there would likely have been more.  I managed to photograph a few adequately.  

There was this rather active water bug thing, which moved around a lot.

Then there was a water snail that moved around a bit too.

And there were lots of fine worms, that acted like snakes and travelled around the white tray a lot in the half hour they were in captivity.

There was also something that looked like a shrimp and very small oblong things that moved around pretty quickly too.  I might have another go in a couple of weeks, remember to take a couple of chairs with me and perhaps also my field guide to icky things in ponds.

We went for a walk around the One Acre Wood yesterday afternoon and met a very fine beetle - while we hear birds and occasionally see a hare, the Wood seems much more sparse in terms of wildlife that the Orchard and Meadow.  So meeting a beetle was something that was noteworthy, although I'm sure he had a lot of colleagues that we haven't met!

What the Wood lacks in visible wildlife, it makes up for in plant life.  A few years ago - well that's what it seems like to us, but actually it's more like 15 years ago - we transplanted some woodland cyclamen into the Wood from another wood we managed.  These lovely white, delicate flowers are slowly spreading along the paths we have made in the Wood, and every year there are more flowers.  Trying to spot where the next outcrop of flowers will appear should be easy, except that cyclamen leaves and ivy leaves get mixed together and aren't always easy to tell apart!

Anyway, that's it for today, as we have emergency apple and pear pruning to be done, but I hope that next week I will have some animal videos and photos to share with you, rather than bug pictures.

Have a good week!