From Here To Eternity

Is it Autumn Already?

2011-10-04T13:55:00.001+02:00

The weather this year has been odd, I think the most succinct description I’ve come across to describe it is; Summer during Spring, Autumn during Summer and Summer during Autumn. And while the calendar might say October, the thermometer has been in the 30’s.

I am loving the extra warmth this year but the lack of rain is more than worrying. Sometimes it’s the obvious things that remind you, the great cracks in the ground as in the pictures above and bellow or the depth to which the well has dropped, other times it’s the less obvious that suddenly hit you, in my case it’s the access to part of my septic tank. The lid used to be level with the ground, now it protrudes 5cm/2in due to the shrinkage of the soil around it – I suppose the good sign from this is that the tank isn’t leaking

Anyway, back to autumn, it’s migration time when I start scanning the skies for the cranes and storks migrating south for the winter. So far I’ve not spotted any but I have been lucky enough to see a large group of golden orioles flit through the trees in the garden last month and yesterday it was 6 red kites flying south and then circling on a thermal just to the south of me. They looked so majestic gliding effortlessly across a clear blue sky.

Moving the Alpacas

2011-09-20T22:43:00.001+02:00

I wasn’t planning on moving the alpacas until I’d built the new field shelters but they have totally run out of grass in the old fields and while we’ve have had some rain over the last couple of days it’s been nowhere near enough to get the grass growing.

The interim solution is to let the boys use the trailer as a shelter in their new field and to let the girls have access to the shelter in their old field from the new one. Al and I moved them in this afternoon and they have been beside themselves eating the new grass.

Moving them entailed a fight with one of the castrated males, Dartagnan. He can be a total pain and at one time thought he was in charge of me. He was put in his place by Colin the shearer and I’ve been doing my best not to let him gain the upper hand again.

Dartagnan decided that first he’d stop the others boys from moving down to their new field. Once we’d moved them round so the other 3 started on their way to the new field, Dartagnan decided he wasn’t going to follow and went to the far side of the old field and patrolled the fence where the girls were. He wasn’t going to move and there was no way I could shoo him to the gate’ so I got the leading rein.

He let me put it on him with only a little fuss but there was no way he was going to walk. He’s my biggest alpaca and to be truthful I’m a little scared of him. He’s also the most likely to spit, his nickname is ‘spitty boy’, well at least the only one I can write here is. We then performed something like a dance along the edge of the field, and by positioning myself in just the right place, when he moved it resulted in a step towards the gate. It was taking time but we were moving in the right direction and then… he let me lead him! He wasn’t particularly happy about it but he let me walk him round to where the other boys were at which point I took the rein off and all was fine. And even better I only was subjected to a tiny bit of spit – more a case of some he had in his mouth rather than aimed at me. A very definite success, well for today at least.

I’m still working on the field shelters; the uprights have all been cut to length – some the wrong length but that's life!

In this picture I’m in the process of planing the bottom of the uprights to fit the metaposts – one third of them are done and I’m hoping to finish the rest tomorrow and paint them with the wood treatment.

After that there’s just the matter of another couple of cross members and another 30 or so, 4 meter long, roofing planks to paint and we’ll be ready to start the construction.

It’s Quince Jelly Time Again

2011-09-20T22:09:00.001+02:00

While my quinces didn’t do well this year other people’s did so thank you's are due to Ann and Tricia for the above which have all been converted to that culinary delight that is quince jelly.

True Friends

2011-09-19T23:35:00.001+02:00

I am blessed with some really wonderful friends and words just seem so inadequate to express my gratitude to them last week.

In the background of the picture of the beautiful morning glories above you can just make out the two alpaca fields that are fenced. There were two more where the posts were in but were still waiting to be fenced. It’s been a while since the posts were put in and for various reasons the fields were never finished but I’d decided that they were going to be done this year.

However when I went round the field to clear the growth from the fence line it quickly became obvious that the 60+ post along the boundary with my neighbour were going to have to be redone as they were falling into the ditch between us. I think this is the result of clearing the ditch and the severe drought we had at the beginning of the year. There was a deep crack in the soil running along the line of the posts, a bit like join the dots; some of the post were already falling into the ditch and the bank was crumbling in other places.

All my enthusiasm crumbled too, the though of resetting them all 50cm further into the field, digging into a clay soil that had set like concrete, was truly daunting. I tried to buoy myself up by thinking how much harder it would be if the fencing had already been attached but even my positive attitude has a limit.

Then I was told of a petrol post hole digger for hire so decided to ask if anyone would be able to give me and my son Al a hand with the posts. Ann H, Alex B, Chris A, Chris O, Eric S, Graham D, Jos O, Sandra A, Terry D, and Tricia S all said they would come for the day.

An early start for me (I’m not a morning person at all) meant I picked up the post holer and the bread first thing and everyone turned up for 10 am. The post hole machine started without much of a problem but it couldn't dig more than a couple of inches into the ground. The clay was hard and the auger was almost compressing it and forming a polished surface. The digging team had a think and came up with a plan. Between us we had not only the powered digger but also 2 chisel type posthole diggers and a hand auger. Small holes were cut by Al using the hand auger, these were then filled with water and left to soak for a while after which the petrol auger could do its job.

While this was going on, other teams had been putting up the fencing on the posts that were OK on the other 2 sides of the field. By lunchtime nearly all of the posts had been re-set and we adjourned to the barn for lunch.

Suitably invigorated the teams set to and worked through to about 6pm putting up more fencing while I shuttled to and from the local farming supplies shop buying what ever we had run out of.

I was truly grateful for all the work they had put in and then they amazed me further. All those that were available volunteered to return the next day to finish the rest of the fencing.

It’s at times like these when I realise just how lucky I am to have so many special people in my life.

All that remains now is to fit the gates and one extra strand of wire and/or some tape to discourage the alpacas from thinking of jumping over and to make the fence line visible which is a really easy job and to construct the field shelters, which is a bit longer.

Al and I spent most of last week buying the wood for the shelters. Wood is heavy and even with my bigger trailer it’s taken a couple of trips to collect all that I need to make the two kits.

Collecting the bits is further complicated by trying to source everything which can be a bit of a nightmare. When getting the extra bits for the fencing I bought out the local farming supplies place of the items I wanted. They only held 2 rolls of sheep fencing, 2 rolls of the gauge of fencing wire I needed, 2 of the collars I use to secure the gates… A big project need planning and a sustained effort to get everything. Then add to that, finding it at a sensible price and your work is cut out.

I had been buying the metaposts over the year, -whenever I got a 10% reduction voucher, - and had 14. I need 18 so at the brico store where I was buying the first batch of wood I went to pick up 4 more posts. The shop assistant I had just been talking to basically told me to put them back and then pointed to the price. They were just under 25€ each. He told me to go to the garden department next door where I paid 3€50 each for them!

All the wood needs to be painted with wood preserver – the picture shows some of the cross beams and some of the roofing planks. I still need to cut the uprights to size and paint them and then we can head to the fields and attempt to get the metaposts in. As if to help it’s finally rained which has stopped the painting but will hopefully soften the ground a bit.

Did I Mention I Have Tomatoes?

2011-09-19T18:50:00.001+02:00

There are only so many fresh tomatoes you can eat in a day and I managed to pick my roma tomatoes before the chickens got to them – the chickens adore ripe tomatoes.

This lot made the first of my bottled plum tomatoes. The tomatoes are first skinned by plunging in boiling water and then moved to cold water after which the skins slip off easily.

I packed the skinned tomatoes in bottling jars and covered with brine solution and processed using the cold fill method.

It’s sad that there are so many horror stories put out about home preserving of food; while some may be legitimate, some I feel are to force us by fear to buy commercially prepared foods. After all they are supposedly regulated and therefore pose no threat to consumer health – BSE in beefburgers and e-coli in bean sprouts are probably just a figment of my imagination!!! Ok off soap box now.

In truth there are foods and ways that are perfectly safe and have been used for years and years, what’s missing today is the understanding of the process. In the past while the science wouldn't have been known, the safe way would have been passed down from generation to generation, today we can also look up the science. I chose tomatoes as my first things to bottle because they are slightly acidic and that inhibits a lot of the nasty's and I use the cold fill method, bringing the tomatoes up to temperature very slowly to ensure everything heats through completely. I check the water bath temperature and that the jars are fully sealed. I also seal check, visually check, smell check and taste check before I use anything and so far so good – the only problems I've had was listeria-like symptoms from a bought supermarket salami a couple of years ago. Of course I’m now going to worry about tempting fate .

And there is the other great ‘how to use up’ tomato standby, ratatouille which also helps out with the backlog of courgettes, squashes and aubergines.

And Yet More Food Preservation!

2011-09-17T17:06:00.001+02:00

Tomatoes and apples aplenty.

The dried tomatoes of previous years were very successful so the first batch for this year has been prepared. All the seeds and soft centres were saved and sieved leaving me with a lovely refreshing drink of tomato juice to enjoy as the tomatoes dried.

Then came the apples. This turned out to be a very long job but hopefully it will all feel worth it when the cider is brewed.

The apples have also struggled in the drought. They are much smaller this year and have ripened more sporadically than in previous years. An awful lot were brought down by the storm and suffered a lot of bruising but I still managed to pick around 10 UK gallons or so. I gave them a quick rinse and then cut them into small enough pieces to go through the shredder on my food processor. What you can’t see in the picture is the pebble-dashing of the kitchen with bits of grated apple flung out while putting yet more chunks of apple into the grater feed tube. Next year I will be doing this outside.

I then pressed the grated apple and finally transferred it to a large covered container to start a natural ferment. I will be tasting and sweetening if necessary this weekend when I’ll move it to demijohns to finish fermenting. The raw juice tasted good so fingers crossed for the cider.

The Storm

2011-09-17T16:44:00.001+02:00

01/09/2011

September started with a bang or to be more precise one of the violent thunderstorms that are frequent in the summer, but being very localised I rarely get. This one was however localised overhead!

It started with the sky turning yellow and then an ominous dark cloud rolling overhead. There were a few drops of light rain and then the wind began to pick up a bit. In less than a minute it as blowing a gale and the hail was flying through the air almost horizontally. Al was outside in this trying to find the cats that hadn’t made it back inside. Thankfully at the height of the storm, when I could barely see him through the hail even though he was only 25 feet away, he moved into the lee of the house – I was panicking that he had been blown over or hit by the items that were being swept across the front of the house in the wind.

A couple of minutes later and it was all over, Al was OK, all be it soaking wet but we were missing one cat, Hazel. Al eventually located her at the bottom of a deep ditch meowing pitifully, (something she is very good at). We attempted a rescue but the ditch was really overgrown and deep. Finally Al made it into the ditch and I tried to rake away some of the brambles and other weeds that were covering her, only to find that she had decided to make her way along the ditch, through the drainage pipe under the field access and up the easy way into the field, in fact the exact route we’d been trying to make her use but she had ignored while we were calling! She was extremely wet and covered in leaves but I think Al as even wetter.

I don’t know how people manage to photograph or film things like storms when they are happening, I was far to worried about all my animals and my son so the photos are of the aftermath taken about half an hour after the storm had passed and I was happy everyone was OK.

The first one is attempting to show the layer of hail lying on the ground, while the second shows the size of some of the hailstones. We were quite lucky, in the Bordeaux region the hailstones were the size of golf balls.

Looking down the drive all I could see were a few branches down and the remains of one of my patio chairs that had been thrown through the air.

At the back of the house I found this little heap that had been washed down the gutter,

It’s always difficult to photograph the sky and give a true representation of the amazing lighting you get with storms like that but here’s my attempt.

As both Al and I were soaked to the skin and it was getting dark we gave up on outside for the day and decided to leave any further damage inspection until the following day. That was a good choice as the power went out and stayed out until very late.

02/09/2011

A new day dawned, power was restored and we ventured out. The wind had blown over everything on the patio sending all the lighter items flying towards the pump house and the alpacas.

The plastic table and chairs on the lawn were as they say scattered to the wind. A couple of chairs had their legs broken off as they blew around and the side of the table was broken but it really did need replacing next year so all in all we got away really lightly.

Down by the pond another part of the large poplar was toppled, so having just got that area cleared of fallen wood I’m now back to square one. Work there though will have to wait until I get the big tractor back (it’s out on loan at the moment), as the branches are too heavy to safely use the small tractor.

During the previous evening’s power cut I had ventured out to check on a neighbour. I’d heard a lot of noise emanating from the farm above me and wondered if they had suffered any damage. Thankfully they hadn’t and it was just the people collecting the meat chickens, a job that’s always done at night when the chickens are roosting.

I had a bit of a shock as I drove down the drive though, the telephone line was down and an emergency stop was called for. As ever it didn’t come down in a place where it could be moved aside, it’s on a corner so it crosses the drive twice. On the plus side though, the ‘phone and Internet still work and there is just enough room to get past both points. The question now is just how long will it take to get fixed – I reported it straight away and I can’t claim to be a priority case but 2 weeks have passed and I think it’s time to complain.

So Much to Write About

2011-09-17T16:28:00.001+02:00

So much has happened already this month that I will probably forget most of it if I wait until the end of the month before posting so I think it’s time to start posting more than once a month again.

August 2011

2011-09-17T11:47:00.001+02:00

01/08/2011

Most of August was taken up by food processing although I did squeeze a trip to the prune museum at Grange sur Lot with my children. Those that were interested in the museum had already visited previously, (I’ve been round quite a few times as I find it charming), so this trip we limited ourselves to the gift shop. They do the most wonderful prune sweets although you do have to be careful as to just how many you eat!

The museum is situated on the river Lot and above is a view of the river from the landing stage along the river.

04/08/2011

My pear trees are not old enough to be producing much fruit yet, so it as nice to be given a box full of ripe pears which I decided to bottle in a wine syrup. I’m really looking forward to tasting these.

05/08/2011

While a lot of the vegetables plants grown this year either didn’t make it into the garden or shrivelled within an hour or so of being planted a few things did survive. The pepper plans were a gift from a friend and were planted in the polytunnel where once the watering system was up and running they did really well.

I learnt from last year and only planted a couple or courgette and patty pan plants and have also made an effort to pick every other day if not every day. Even so I’m getting at least one patty pan and one round courgette each day.

The green beans took over 6 weeks to germinate but once they started they have provided a large handful of beans every day. These again are the purple variety but as I've blanched them ready for the freezer they’ve turned green.

And last but not least, in the basket is the first of the okra which this year I’ve decided to grow in the polytunnel. I grew it outside last year and the plants ended up about 30cm high. In the tunnel they are (at the beginning of September) nearly as tall as me, around 5ft or 155cm.

06/08/2011

A quick resume of some of the preserving, mainly using the nectarines. Starting from the right, is some nectarine jam. Then it’s some fruit chutney using up whatever fruit I had to hand, then it’s the pears in wine. The last row is a nectarine chutney, based on a mango chutney substituting nectarines for mangos and prunes for dates. It has a bit of a bite due to the chilli and is a nice change from the usual fruit chutney. The large jar on the left is some dried nectarines which I’ll hopefully remember to use in a fruit compote over winter.

This is one of my recycle/re-use projects. While I try to grow a lot of my own food, I still buy some and when it is in net bags I save the bags. The large ones I use to store my harvested onions or to store bulbs. The smaller ones I build up into a ball forming a scrubbing pad which I use outside to clean the alpaca and chicken water containers. They last about a year before they breakdown in the sunlight but it does give them a second use before hitting landfill.

20/08/2011

Once the nectarines finished the peaches kicked in. For some reason they started to fall off the tree before they fully ripened. At least it was before the hornets started eating them. They also suffered from the drought but I managed to get a tray full that ripened enough to be eaten fresh. The rest I peeled and poached with some vanilla sugar and I now have some lovely stewed peaches to brighten up the winter.

I used a couple of portions of the stewed peaches to make some peach ice-cream – very rich and very tasty. I going to try and remember, and those who know me know just how bad my memory is these days – I say it’s because of the amount I have to remember, my children say it’s just my age – to make peach sorbet.

As an aside, in the background is my vanilla sugar; a cheap and easy way to impart real vanilla into sweet dishes which my mother used. No infusing or chopping up and removing the seeds etc., I just pack an airtight jar with sugar and a vanilla pod in the centre. Shake it whenever you open the cupboard and when you make something that calls for both sugar and vanilla it’s there. The pods can be re-used many times until they no longer smell of vanilla. I keep 2 pots on the go so one is infusing while I’m using the other.

24/08/2011

And even more from the garden! Peaches, quince, ‘green’ beans, tomatoes, peppers, okra, cape gooseberries, hazelnuts, almonds, dried haricots, patty pan squash and courgette plus my feet on the chair taking the photo

July 2011

2011-08-06T22:47:00.001+02:00

July has been and gone in what feels like the blink of an eye; the most major thing to happen this month were the visits from my children culminating in me having a week with all 3 at the same time – the first time for around 6 years. As you can imagine I was a rather happy mother.

02/07/2011

I planted a grape vine by the patio a couple of years back in preparation of me installing a pergola. The pergola has yet to materialise but the vine has grown and begun its takeover of the surrounding fence. So time for a bit of pruning.

In keeping with the waste not want not philosophy, I decided to have a go at some vine leaves.

I trimmed and then blanched them and they are now in the freezer so I really need to get round to creating a meal with them.

11/07/2011

July also held some other excitement. Meet Cato. His entry to the world was a bit of a performance. I spotted the signs that Tabitha was about to give birth so thankfully was watching her while my friend Chris had come over to repair the outhouses. Alpaca births are usually really quick, (see later in the post), so after a couple of minutes it was obvious all was not as usual. I then saw that the head, and only the head was out which meant that the front legs that should be out first were jammed. This being my first non-standard birth I abandoned helping Chris and telephoned the vet who was here in a little over 5 minutes.

So Cato was pushed back, feet located and puled out first, swiftly followed by the rest of him – he was already breathing air so it had to be done fast to stop him suffocating. Tabitha was swiftly over the trauma too and quickly became a very proud mum. As Cato’s fleece dried in the sun it turned a beautiful fawn colour.

16/07/11

Every so often my chickens have free range of the garden. Sometimes this is because I’ve decided to let them out of their paddock for a change of scenery other times it’s because they’ve found their own way out. I usually keep them in the paddock partly to stop them destroying my garden and partly to keep them safe from buzzards and foxes. After one escape, I realised one of my hens was missing and thought she’d become a fox’s dinner – I’d seen 2 foxes on the edge of my property a day or so before.

Then after a few weeks I found her under the old rabbit hutches at the back of the house, along with the reason for her ‘disappearance’.

Ten beautiful chicks.

She’d obviously got fed up with me removing the eggs from under her in the hen house – I really don’t want any more cockerels and didn’t want to have to deal with disposing of the excess cockerel. So it looks like coq au vin is coming back onto the menu once I find someone to show me how to prepare them.

20/07/2011

I wasn’t sure if my second female Suri, Pandora, was pregnant as she was quite thin but I got my answer. I’d been out shopping and was driving down the hill on the approach to my property and saw the alpacas moving across the fields in a way that just screamed out ‘imminent birth’ to me.

200 meters later and I was most of the way up the drive and drew a quick breath of relief as I could see the feet as well as the head. 50 meters further and I was parked and getting out of the car and the baby was born. A quick yell to my children A and C who were in the house and I grabbed the camera and went over to the field.

Pandora had produce a beautiful female which we have named Cassandra – Cassie for short.

What I found fascinating and is visible in this picture is that alpacas are born with covers over their nails – really practical but I just hadn’t thought about it before.

21/07/11

Cassie the following day with her dry fleece.

24/07/11

It’s been a bumper year for sloes here. One bottle of sloe gin already in preparation, another batch of sloes in the freezer for when I remember to buy some more gin and 2 double batches in the freezer for sloe jelly.

25/07/11

Even though it was a tough start to the growing year with many crop failures, those that did germinate are beginning to produce.

In the colander is one of the batches of sloes topped by strawberries, blackberries, mange touts and purple ‘green’ beans. As you can see from the step it had rained and the shoes show the pick-up of mud I get due to the clay nature of my soil.

28/07/2011

Last year this tree was bare – it suffered badly, along with the other nectarine and peach from peach leaf curl. There was no fruit and just about all the leaves dropped off and I thought that the tree might die.

It didn’t and this year I treated against the peach leaf curl and was amazed by the bumper harvest I got. The other two trees have produced fruit this year too. This one is a white fleshed nectarine while the other nectarine is the yellow fleshed variety. One thing I noticed this year was that the ants and hornets attacked the yellow fleshed variety and I only got a couple of undamaged fruits off it. I don’t know why one was effected and not the other but I’m going to try and stop the ants next year as I’m wondering if it’s after they’ve eaten into the fruit that the hornets arrive.

Another day’s pickings from the garden – even more sloes and ‘green’ beans and the start of the nectarines. The large ones are the yellow fleshed ones.

30/07/2011

And yet more nectarines, these are being prepared for bottling, (canning). They’ve been skinned and are being halved and the stones removed before being put in the bottling jars, a light syrup added and then processed.

June 2011

2011-07-09T14:19:00.001+02:00

05/06/2011

And even more cherries. The blue bucket full of black cherries was destined to become the first batch of glacé cherries while the colander of the griottes made a second batch of cherry vodka. Patches decided to oversee the proceedings.

06/06/2011

I had so many cherries, the only way to deal with them was to make cherry juice – that used up around two 10l bucketful's to fill the press and resulted in this collection of bottles of juice to put in the freezer.

Hiding in the background are the cherries ready to be stoned for the glacé cherries and a bowl of large cherries with stalks that I had stoned and am marinating in brandy with the aim of turning them into a Christmas treat.

At the end of last month I took my lawnmower and my rotovator in for repair/service. as a result the new grass in the orchard took on a Monet-esque look.

And while wandering in amongst the poppies and the weeds I came across these. They are hare droppings and later that evening I spotted 4 hares running round my soya field.

11/06/2011

Not the best photograph in the world but I didn’t have time to change the camera default setting so it insisted on using the flash to light up the foreground. Thank goodness for photo manipulation programmes

12/06/2011

The blueberries have done really well this year although I do need to find out how to prune the bush as the weight of the berries bent the branches right down to the ground.

A tour round the garden brought these two lots of caterpillars to light. The first is a caterpillar of the Scarce Swallowtail which is on the bronze fennel, while the second is a group that I’ve yet to identify but I think might be saw fly caterpillars.

13/06/2011

Jewel is her usual mad self and decided to file herself beside me while I was working on the computer.

16/06/2011

The apricot tree outside the front door didn’t produce many fruits this year but made up for it in the size of the fruit it produced.

18/06/2011

The first batch of glace cherries being divided into 300g batches.

Having drained the glace cherries from their poaching syrup I was then left with a large pan of fruit juice and sugar. On the basis of ‘waste not, want not’ I decided to use this to make a jelly.

21/06/2011

The last of the cherries and the first of the greengages!

22/06/2011

And the last of the cherries processed. I made 2 batches of glace cherries starting with around 4 kg for each batch. This resulted in approximately 3.6 kg of glace cherries. The first lot of poaching juice I spiced and bottled as a sauce to pour over ice cream, while the second lot I spiced in the same way and added a couple of small bottles of homemade pectin in an attempt to set the jelly. The jelly on the spoon looked well set but that in the jars looks as fluid as the sauce batch!

25/06/2011

The extreme heat and drought left the gooseberries struggling this year but the blackberries seem to have not been too bothered. The coin is a 2€ piece

30/06/2011

And the final day of the month was spent on a 1200 km round trip to collect my son A from university in Aix-en-Provence. We stopped on the way back to take in the stunning view of Carcassonne in the evening sunshine.

May 2011

2011-06-14T23:13:00.002+02:00

06/05/2011

Cherry time! This year nearly everyone here had a bumper crop including myself.

10/05/2011

While wandering around near the pond I found another bee orchid with a slightly different pattern to the one in the garden.

It’s now marked and I hope it will flower again next year.

11/05/2011 & 12/05/2011

While clearing out the barn I decided to get rid of a bin of old wheat. When I opened the lid I found some very surprised mice.

They all buried their heads in the grain bar the look-out mouse.

I carefully emptied out the bin and there were 12 mice living in there. I think they were trapped in there a the lid was firmly on.

16/05/2011

Jewel brought in another friend, a western whip snake as before but a bit bigger this time.

17/05/2011

A walk round the pond revealed the headless corpse of one of the moor hens from the pond. I’m now wondering if I have a mink around or if something else killed it.

The hayfield was also ready for cutting over the weekend but I’d not had a chance to check out the baler but was able to get someone else to cut and bale for me this year.

18/05/2011

This year I scaled down the collection using the small tractor and the large trailer rather than the hay waggon. When I used the hay waggon a couple of years ago I ended up having to use the kitchen steps to get up onto the waggon and then had to leave a gap in the bales to enable me to stack the bales.

With the trailer I could get around 22 bales on at a time from ground level. So while it seemed like a longer process, it was actually much quicker.

The first load was used to build a set of steps to reach the hay loft. And before long the field was half done.

The field as cleared and stacked the next day with a little help from neighbours J & C and I helped them collect and stack their bales.

20/05/2011

Today was designated a cherry picking day

21/05/2011

And yet more cherries!

28/05/2011

Meet the new additions. This is Pandora with her cria Brandy.

While this is Tabitha with her cria Bethany. Missing from the photos is Mr Frizzle. They are the start of my Suri herd and I travelled up to Brittany to collect them and while they were there they ere entered into a show.

31/05/2011

And this is what I came away with. Brandy, Bethany and Mr Frizzle all won their classes and Brandy went on to be Reserve Champion Suri

April 2011

2011-06-14T11:12:00.001+02:00

01/04/2011

April started with Jewel bringing home a new playmate. It’s a juvenile western whip shake which played dead on the kitchen floor but once out in the sunshine moved so fast I could only just photograph it.

I started work on the new garden area – the weeds are yet to germinate though.

And May Day came a month early!

05/04/2011

Time to make a few more garden stakes.

06/04/2011

Wood preservative goes on and in the background a rose arch for the garden.

Cutting up a barrel to make a couple of small ponds.

And the pump house before it gained it’ living roof.

07/04/2011

Clear blue skies, a portent of the drought to follow and some newly spun yarn hung up to dry.

11/04/2011

Living roof in progress.

12/04/2011

And in place.

January to April 2011

2011-06-13T20:34:00.001+02:00

28/01/2011

During the dark evenings I’ve been getting on with carding and spinning and have nearly finished the 4 practice fleeces I have.

06/02/2011

The polutunnel produced lettuce and rocket in February.

16/02/2011

Sunny weather brought the cats out to play.

28/02/2011

The bay tree at the back of the house was getting far too high and blocking both the access to the chicken house and around the rear of the house. Height greatly reduced but I will wait until the end of the year to thin the many trunks there, some of which are 6 inches in diameter. It smelt wonderful while cutting it.

03/03/2011

Working through the nuts collected last autumn. I’ve found that using the hammer to crack the nuts rather than nutcrackers produces a much higher proportion of whole nuts.

08/03/2011

A bit more dry weather and the whole of the potager has had it’s first going over with the rotovator.

25/03/2011

The foul drain – not only was there the problems described earlier but it turned out that the pipe was compressed to about half diameter too! I think I’m becoming an expert on septic tanks but hopefully this will have finally cured the problems.

27/03/2011

I’ve always loved Fritillaries, these are fritillaria uva vulpis.

31/03/2011

The first asparagus and this year I can cut a few too.

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

2011-06-13T20:32:00.001+02:00

So the saying goes so the next few posts should save me a lot of writing. Much as I wanted to keep up with the blogging, life has just taken over.

I have toyed with closing the blog but it is useful as a diary with pictures,(as long as I post to it of course)! So current plan is to just post photographs with captions rather than full posts to try and keep up with what I’m doing here and if I have the time and inclination I can write more.

Signs of Spring

2011-03-04T19:08:00.001+01:00

I can’t believe it’s March already even though the winter days seem to drag. The first signs have been springing up all round and my early evenings in front of the fire or the TV are drawing to a close for another year.

First of all, the crocuses and snowdrops showed themselves and the crocuses have their own rhythm too. The white ones appear first, then the various shades of yellow and finally the royal purple ones.

A few days of nice weather meant time outside – really good as it combats SAD – but being outside means I saw the first of the cranes migrating north again after their winter vacation to the south. As ever I heard them long before they appear in view but this year I also saw silent cranes. I couldn’t get the binoculars quickly enough to try and identify them but they looked a bit smaller than the other cranes and flew in total silence so I only saw them by chance when I looked up. After that I made sure I scanned the skies without waiting for the cacophony that heralds the cranes and also spotted other migrating flocks trekking north.

The trees are now beginning to break into blossom as well, both the almond and the apricots are speckled with the first flowers. There was a slight frost last night but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it wasn’t deep enough to cause damage and that we won’t have any more bad frosts or spring hail to ruin the flowers.

Work over the last few months has been lots of bits and pieces and the now obligatory crisis – I do wonder when, if ever, life will run smoothly

In January the ground dried out enough and the day temperature warmed enough to carry on with the tree pruning. This is the basic kit; electric chainsaw, pole pruner, long handled loppers x 2, secateurs x 2 and pruning saw!

Despite the weather only holding for a day or so here and there I made a good start on the trees but there was nowhere near enough time to finish them before the buds started to break – next year maybe?

The persistent damp weather of the autumn meant I didn’t get the potager rotovated before winter, in fact the soil was so wet I couldn’t even get on it to weed until February. However a week or so of dry weather and the first half has been done as can bee seen in the first picture.

Since the beginning of the year, the toilet has blocked twice; I was half expecting it although hoping I was wrong, since it blocked last May. The guys who pumped the septic tank for me last year, (I thought that as the tank hadn’t been emptied for 3 years to my knowledge that build-up was the problem) said it wasn’t a problem with the tank but it might be that the toilet was old and the calcium in the water had scaled up the pipework around the U-bed.

So when it happened this time, I bought the ‘thing’ to unblock u-bends and you guessed it – not the problem. In the end I found a plumber and I replaced the toilet. It wasn’t the problem but the only way to rod the foul drain was to take the toilet out and I as I’m not really keen on the dusty rose colour and it is around 20 years old and the matching sink is cracked and will need to be replaced etc. etc. I though I would bite the bullet and buy a new toilet. Of course mine wasn’t one of the standard horizontal exit (and therefore cheap) ones, it was a vertical exit. Well that worked for about a month and then blocked again!!!

All the work so far has implied that it isn’t a problem at the loo end so I headed for the septic tank and dug back towards the house.

With a helper of course.

It’s now a bit more obvious what the problem is likely to be. The thing we had realised when rodding and looking at the layout the first time was that there was a 90 degree bend in the pipework just before the tank. But as I had to keep reminding myself, the system had worked fine for the first 3 years I had been here so while not engineeringly sound it had worked.

Digging back towards the house it became obvious that in the 30 cm from the tank to the 90 degree bend the pipe also went uphill for a height of 10-15 cm, oh and between the bend and the house the pipe has been slightly flattened too.

My first thoughts are not printable , my second was “why on earth did they put it in like that” and then I again reminded myself that it had worked fine for 3 years. So what I think has happened is that the unusually dry weather spell we had combined with the unusually wet one has caused the ground to move a bit and the ballast that should have been under the pipe had moved into the soil. I have soil with a high clay content and as I dug round the pipe there were voids underneath it.

So with that theory in mind my kind plumber is coming back soon to put a flexible coupling in the pipe so that we can re-align it and reduce if not totally remove the uphill section and we are also going to incorporate a rodding point as having to remove the toilet to rod is more than a bit inconvenient!

Pre-Christmas Catch-up 3

2011-01-16T14:21:00.001+01:00

On the night of the 23^rd December, while in the local restaurant celebrating my friend C’s birthday it started to snow. No-one took much notice, it never snows much. So imagine our surprise when we left the restaurant to find everything covered by 4 in (10 cm) of snow. The journey back to the house was a rather slow affair. I know I do have the benefit of 4WD on my car but I was far more worried about not being able to see the edges of the road in the blizzard that was almost reaching white out in places.

For those who don’t know French roads, they are usually edged by ditches. Sometimes these ditches are only a foot or so deep, sometimes 3 or 4 feet deep and sometimes there isn’t a ditch, just a cliff!

The cats were a bit shocked about the snow too.

The next morning the snow was still there, I looked over to the alpacas and their hay was buried as well as the ground being covered so I decided to take them over a bit more hay before I had breakfast. Once over with them they all got up and I immediately noticed that Bijou, the youngest and smallest of the cria, had the snow sticking to her fleece which was also looking a bit wet. In addition she seemed a bit stiff when she started off walking and she was shivering to boot. Alarm bells!

The morning was spent frantically turning out the barn – I had thankfully reduced the wood pile considerably from the pictures in the earlier post but there was still all the smaller branches that take longer to cut than to burn still there.

Next problem was to transport the alpacas over to the barn. Unfortunately there is not an easy access between the fields and the barn and I have to bring them over in the trailer. While the snow was still lying on the ground, the sun had started to melt it but the ground was still quite frozen resulting in the top inch or so of the soil becoming totally waterlogged, a total quagmire. The tractors both started first time and coped brilliantly but the poor trailer just skidded about on the packed snow, slush and liquid mud and once I’d finished with it I just had to abandon it rather than park it.

Bijou recovered within half an hour of being in the barn. A drink from mum, a munch of hay and being out of the wind and the sleet that started falling later on was all she needed. I finally had my breakfast at 3pm.

More about cats:

Barney, my barn cat, has learnt to use the cat flap and has been a regular visitor in the house to fill up. I‘m pretty sure Barney pre-dates me in the house but he used to be really shy and I only caught glimpses of him. In fact I didn’t see him for a year or so and I thought he’d either moved on or died. Since he wasn’t a kitten when I first saw him back in 2007 he has to be at least 5 years old and I guess that age and hunger is why he’s started to risk coming in. On the whole my cats either ignore him or give him a wide berth although Cid is very jealous of another male cat being around. Having said he’s coming in he’s not been around for a few days but then the weather’s been unseasonably warm.

Jewel has been making here presence felt too; here she is helping me to skirt fleece.

And here again helping Hazel have a quiet nap!

It Goes With the Territory

2011-01-16T13:31:00.001+01:00

I’m pretty wimpish about receiving injections and even more so about giving them but there comes a time when they have to be done. I give the alpacas, and myself a break and use oral drenches too but alpacas are quite adept at spitting back oral doses if they want – injections do enable a known dose to be delivered. Thankfully, most injections are given by the subcutaneous method which I find far easier to give than the intra-muscular route which I find really difficult on the alpacas.

This time it was anti-clostridium vaccinations which should give some protection against a variety of possible problems.

After their injections the alpacas were really pleased to be let back out into their field after nearly a month in the barn and I recovered with lunch and a cup of tea!

Pre-Christmas Catch-up 2

2011-01-12T19:26:00.001+01:00

We might have been heading into December but this rose decided to bloom; a lovely find to cheer the dank dark days waiting for shortest day.

Now stuff I couldn’t post at the time: In general I find I’m getting more and more disenchanted with the commercialisation of Christmas – I’m sure age is a factor and the fact that my children have all grown up. However it is a lovely time to thank those who have helped you over the year.

I stared off with straining the liqueurs I’ve been preparing over the year; sour cherry vodka, sloe gin, and walnut wine. The walnut wine definitely needs much longer to mature and the lack of sloes this year means the sloe gin is for me but this year’s cherry vodka is lovely.

I also had a go at some sweet treats, these are marrons glace and an attempt at candied satsumas inspired by all the fuss over the Heston Blumenthal Christmas pudding this year.

I say attempt, in fact they were delicious but even though the sugar solution was strong enough to form jelly, unfortunately the oranges went mouldy. Not sure why but I will be making them again next year, upping the sugar content and storing them in the fridge. I also made stuffed dates and vanilla fudge too.

It’s funny how often kitchen disasters can suddenly turn into something good. Somewhere a couple of years back I had a go at making some cider. At the time I thought I’d failed and in disgust put the containers to one side to “deal with later”. As you may have guessed, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind, I totally forgot about them, the airlocks dried out and they were left in the corner of the room. In a fit of tidying I decided to clean them out ready for another attempt this summer. As I poured the remaining liquid out, this came out.

A Mother of Vinegar!

I tried unsuccessfully to grow one of these a few years ago. Above is only part of the mother, I’ve used a portion to convert over to making red wine vinegar and another portion I’ve stored in the freezer until I make some more cider. But it shows that I was actually successful in my cider making since vinegar can only be made from alcohol. Cider making is back on the to-do list for this year.

This time of year I get through a lot of satsumas and therefore generate a lot of peel. I usually dry the peel on the back of the cooker, grind it and use it as an anti-ant powder but when I was candying the whole satsumas I added some of the peel too. The resulting candied peel is pretty good so I’m freeing all the peel at the moment and will make another batch of candied peel when I have enough peel. Waste not, want not as my mother would say.

Getting back to the thank you’s, the cider vinegar and the cherry vodka looked lovely in the small bottles and I also included for the ladies a lavender wand that I’d made at the end of summer. Along with the vodka cherries left over from making the cherry vodka and some of the preserves I’ve made over the year I was able to make up some nice thank-you baskets.

Pre-Christmas Catch-up 1

2011-01-12T18:19:00.001+01:00

As November progressed, the next 2 cu m of wood was bought and needed cutting and splitting. Since the weather here is generally OK until February I stacked the wood in the barn so I could cut in the dry – my assumption proved wrong as I’ll blog later.

Once cut to length, many of the pieces need splitting; I’ve tried axes and wedges and it takes me far longer than cutting and exhausts me before I’ve barely done enough wood to last a day. However this year I was lent this tool by G, a neighbour.

When he’d gone looking for a manual log splitter he’d been told this was ideal for ‘older people’! I have to say it’s really easy and effective to use and have now purchased my own. I’m also hoping it will trim my bingo wings too.

When in the dim and distant past I had the solar tubes installed I saved the polystyrene end pieces they were packed in. Trimmed of the excess at the bottom which also allowed a drainage hole to be created they are now in use in the pollytunnel as plant modules. Again, due to the unusually damp weather I couldn’t plant the garlic in the potager but it’s sprouting nicely in the modules in the pollytunnel and will now get planted out in March. I may have to consider planting the onion sets in modules too but they usually do OK if I get them into the ground in March/April.

January Already!

2011-01-12T11:33:00.001+01:00

Just opened up my blog writer and saw that I’d started a blog entry entitled Christmas Approaches; this is as far as I got!

December is here already and I’m wondering just where November went.

----------------

It’s now well into January and the feeling hasn’t changed, time is flying so a quick catch up is required.

November is when I scheduled the garden tidying. Usually the month is relatively dry and warm, but not this year. It rained; not disastrously as we’re seeing in Australia but always just enough to keep the ground waterlogged. The pottager has just been abandoned as the soil is far to claggy to walk on but one job I could get on with was the annual pruning of the mulberry trees, (ornamental variety not fruiting variety).

I try to get these done before leaf fall as it’s usually heavy rain or a frost that causes them to all fall at once and large wet soggy leaves are more difficult to move.

First up is the ‘before’ picture; all the current year’s growth has to be pruned back. This is because once the trees have been pollarded this way, the joints between the new growth and the original tree are weak and if allowed too grow further branches there is a danger of them breaking off. Since my car is quite often in the vicinity of these trees, a branch through the windscreen is not something I want.

Each trailer load of branches was then shredded and the shreddings used to make a pathway between two raised beds I’ve put in. I know it will rot down but as I still had one side of the bed to screw in place I needed to put something onto the soggy soil so I could put the rest of the bed in place.

As you can see it was a lovely day out there and the butterflies were taking advantage of the sunshine too.

Voila! The finished trees.

Spurred on by my success with the trees I set about collecting the other leaves falling over the front lawn. At this time the grass was still dry enough to go over it with the lawnmower and pick up the leaves that way.

The mini tractor and trailer came into their own again – I’d never of got everything done with the tree pruning and the leaf collecting without it, the traipsing back and forth with the wheelbarrow would have tired me out way before I’d finished. Before I started on the leaves I had to make a leaf cage and although I’d not thought about it before, I somehow managed to make it just wide enough to back the small trailer into, which made unloading so much easier.

This year’s leaf collection. I’m looking forward to lots of lovely leaf mould in a couple of years.

That brings me up to the 23rd of November but I think it’s long enough for one post so…To be continued…. (I hope )

In Praise of Worms

2010-11-09T19:02:00.001+01:00

Way back when I first moved into this farm, the sort of rain we had today would have led to an amazing amount of runoff from my cereal field that would flood the pump house area, which is what I was tying to photograph in the following out-of-focus shot.

I also noticed when I came to plough the cereal field that there were practically no worms present even though the soil was still moist and cool unlike the pump house area where the worms took on giant status.

The lack of worms was why I decided to continue using a mineral based organic fertiliser on the field even though I realised quite quickly that it wasn’t feasible for me to be fully organic on the farm. The difference it has made is now becoming apparent; when I walk across the field there are worm casts. Not lots, but at least one every step. The improvement to the soil structure is even more apparent in the following photograph.

This was taken today after heavy persistent rain. There is no runoff from the field; the rain is able to soak into the ground far more easily than before and I put that down to the humble earthworm encouraged back into the soil by the mineral based fertiliser.

As it has been raining heavily and the wind has been gusting strongly I finally got round to doing something about the ‘window’ in the back storeroom. Window is in quotes because it’s actually a hole in the wall covered by a shutter.

The shutter is old, the planks it is made from don’t butt up against each other and there is a gap all round between the wall and the shutter. Needless to say, it is on the windward side of the building and the wind howls through the storeroom. I am aiming eventually to put in a proper window but the current hole is a non-standard window size, (like most of the windows in this place) so until I’m ready to enlarge the hole, all it is going to get is a temporary measure.

I tried polythene over the shutter last year which survived until the first gust of wind so this year I’m going for something a bit more sophisticated! It may not be pretty but I’m hoping once I seal the outer frame to the wall, when it finally stops raining, that it will stay in place and cut the draught.

The acrylic is fixed to the front frame and if I want to bolt the shutter again I can unscrew the front frame without having to remove the outer frame.

It will be interesting to see how well this does against the winter storms and also how much difference it makes to the temperature in the storerooms.

October is Over

2010-10-31T20:22:00.001+01:00

As I mentioned in the previous post it’s been a hectic month; there is always so much to try and get done before the weather turns. In fact there is far more than can be done but then that’s just how life is. So what else have I been up to this month?

The area under the fruit trees that I seeded earlier in the month is a nice shade of green. While a lot of the green is the weeds that sprouted almost immediately but there is also a good bit of grass too☺

As I was preparing the area, I realised that I had to pick the quinces before the grass seed went down and I ended up with 33lbs of them.

This year I decided to make quince jelly again; it took nearly a week, boiling the fruit in batches and then straining the puree through a jelly bag. In the end I had enough juice to make 2 large batches of jelly.

One of the really nice things about home-made things is that everyone is different – there is quite a colour difference between the two batches of jelly even though I mixed all the batches of juice together.

Both batches taste good but even so I think I have more than enough quince jelly to last me for the next couple of years, which left me thinking about what to do with next years crop. This year’s was exceptionally prolific which is why I’m more than happy to make extra this year in case there is an untimely frost next year. The tree is still growing and should the weather be kind I should have even more quinces so I will use them to make pectin.

I made a batch of apple pectin this year but I think my apples would be better for cider or juicing. The quince has a high level of pectin – you could use my quince jelly as safety matting! – and they would be ideal.

I also took a course in Shibori and Indigo dyeing techniques

The fabric on the right I produced using various resist objects: Chick peas, screws, coins, twisting and stitching. However the main reason I did the course was to have a go at Indigo dyeing, so I took along a hank of alpaca wool I’d spun, (although sadly not from my alpacas, this was from a practice fleece I’d been working on) and had a go at resist dyeing that. I’m really pleased with the results and will, sometime, over the winter knit a stole with it.

I harvested the sweet potatoes I planted earlier in the year.

I was going to blog about growing the slips back at the beginning of the year but never got round to it so that will be something for next year. The plants went in a bit to late but I did get a few decent sized tubers, definitely more than I used to get the plants. With luck I cracked the growing method this year and will start the plants earlier next year and they will have a longer growing season than they got this year. They taste good though!

Way back in the mists of time, about 2 years ago, I had 3 large poplar trees that were planted around the house felled. Any one of the 3 could have landed on the house if they were toppled in a storm and the closest one was rotten and leaning towards the house to boot. I have spent the last 2 years trying to burn the metre plus diameter trunks to very little avail. Well, Regis took pity on me and turned up with the pusher attachment on his tractor that he uses to clear the plum tree prunings.

He also scraped up all the old straw and hay that had been lying about too, in fact I almost had to lie down in front of the tractor to stop him removing things – like the heaps of compost. The result was 3 very large bonfires, two of which have been smouldering for a week now despite a day of rain and I am really pleased as I can now start to cut grass and tidy up around the farm.

My saffron crocuses have also started flowering so everyday I’m picking the flowers and removing the stigmas and drying them on top of the wood-burner. I have a lot more than previous years – probably enough for 2 or three meals this time! I have converted their growing area to a raised bed and I think this has been very beneficial. Next spring I will divide the clumps and see if that helps them further

And finally for this post, I’ve also been spinning in the evenings. I have a fleece I was given which I've been using s a practice piece as I said above. My spinning is getting more even and generally thinner. Still a long way to go and my skirting and carding of the fleece still needs honing but I can see the improvement. It’s also quite a therapeutic thing to do of an evening and with the long evenings that have just started, - sob, sob, why do they have to mess around with the clocks, - I’m hoping to get more fleeces spun.

These are the hanks washed and hung up to dry in the kitchen today.

Happy Samhain/Halloween

2010-10-31T18:54:00.001+01:00

Yet another month has flown by and my feet feel as if they have barely toughed the ground. Tonight though is Halloween and above is my very unsteady hand-held photograph of my pumpkin lantern in the garden.

It’s the first year I’ve managed to grow a pumpkin – previous attempts have usually succumbed to either the weather or slugs. While this one is nowhere near record standard I’m really chuffed. It came in at 42cm high and 115cm round. I’ve no idea what it weighed but I could only just carry it.

This is it sat on the kitchen table.

Large pumpkins also mean:-

toasted pumpkin seeds

and pumpkin soup, which I think I’ll be eating for the next month!

Once the above vat has cooled I’ll pass it through a mouli to make sure it’s smooth.

I was worried as to whether I would be able to carve and hollow out such a large pumpkin; my previous efforts had been on smaller supermarket bought pumpkins and I had found them very hard to carve safely. However even though I’d picked this one around three weeks ago when the weather people forecast a possible frost, it was remarkably easy and I was able to use a soup spoon to scrape out most of the flesh.

Happy Halloween everyone.

Rose Hip Syrup

2010-10-17T22:29:00.001+02:00

I first made this last year and thoroughly enjoyed it so braved the thorns again this year. The summer drought has meant that there are not many wild rose hips this year.

The recipe is simple, rose hips, water and sugar. My recipe is from “The Complete Book of Preserving” by Marye Cameron-Smith and dates from the late 70’s but is one of my favourite, and now rather battered and falling apart, cookbooks.

These are the quantities given, but I usually scale it down, (thank goodness for Excel), to whatever quantity I’ve picked – usually I manage between 500 – 750 gm before I either run out of hips or get fed up picking them:

Bring 3 litres of water to the boil in a large pan. Wash and mince the hips – for ‘mince’ I substituted process in a food processor or liquidiser. Add to the water and bring back to the boil. Remove from the heat and allow to cool for about 15 min then strain through a jelly bag into a bowl.

Once drained, return the pulp to the pan and add another 1.5 litres of water. Bring to the boil then strain again through a clean jelly bag into a bowl.

Combine both lots of strained juice into a clean pan, bring to the boil and continue boiling until the juice is reduced to 1.5 litres. Then reduce the heat to low and add 1 kg of sugar and stir until dissolved. Once dissolved bring back to the boil and boil for 5 mins.

Pour into clean, hot bottles and they should then be heat processed for 20 mins at 88°C. I haven’t done the latter as I didn’t make much and am keeping them in the fridge.

One cup of hot rose hip syrup – not quite a red as last years as I added extra water and didn’t reduce it enough but delicious all the same.

Counting Down to Winter – part 2

2010-10-05T22:02:00.001+02:00

The next major job to get done before winter is to seed the orchard area. This is about 1200 m2 and before seeding, it needed to be raked to remove the troughs caused by the cultivator digging in and by the tractor wheels. I was slightly hampered too…Jewel decided I wasn’t taking enough attention of her and when she realised that I was ignoring her climbing posts and chewing them she took a far more direct approach and attacked the rake.

The soil was in perfect condition for raking but it still took a whole day to rake the area. I was trying very hard to get it done before the rain we had been promised arrive. This was taken about half way through.

Although the day stayed dry the wind was far too strong to allow me to seed which was probably jut as well since the rain we got was rather hard and might have washed all the seed to the bottom of the slope. I now need to wait a couple more days until I can walk on the soil again and can then seed the area.

Since I couldn’t get on with the seeding that evening I took a stroll across my harvested field to pick a few more hazel nuts and rose hips. On walking back my eye was caught by something in the harvesting debris. My apologies for the lack of focus.

Another sign that winter is approaching, a roe deer antler. I think it is from a 3 year old, and it is 14 cm long. I’ve always wanted to find antlers and have over the years spent time looking in woods but never finding any and then I find one when not looking, but that’s life isn’t it!

And a final sign for this post:

Making use of a good drying day to wash the summer clothes before putting them away and bringing out the winter ones.

Counting Down to Winter – part 1

2010-10-03T22:35:00.001+02:00

It’s been nearly a week since my last summer visitor, my son ‘A’ left but is seems so much longer. ‘A’ had been here for nearly 7 weeks and between us we got a couple of the more difficult/time-consuming jobs done. The first one was the hay-loft floor. This is a long running saga and starts about 2 and a half years ago; that’s when my other son ‘G’ fell through the hayloft floor while helping me stack bales. We decided that on his return visit we would re-floor the loft.

He returned last summer for a long stay, by which time I had also had a go at falling through the floor but thankfully didn’t succeed anywhere near as well as ‘G’. After a few days of searching we found a reasonably local building suppliers and collected twelve 4m long flooring planks. They only had the 12 so the other 88 I needed had to be ordered. Not too much of a problem or so I thought; I’d glanced at the order and saw that the date was only a couple of weeks away. Silly me, I didn’t think to check the month as well, I just assumed that a national chain of building supplies wouldn’t need nearly 2 months to obtain 88 flooring planks! So ‘G’ and I put up the dozen planks we had obtained and the remaining planks arrived 2 weeks after he had left.

I put another dozen or so in on my own, a long task due to having to keep going up and down the ladder between measuring, cutting and fixing the planks and put in about the same again with the help of other friends over the course of late spring and early summer. With ‘A’s’ help we put in all the remaining boards that we could, (I still have 3 support beams to replace before I can re-floor), and also removed an old pigeon loft which was in the corner of the hay loft. We were then able to move all remaining planks onto the hayloft floor so they don’t have to spend another year outside.

As well as the hayloft, ‘A’ and I had another project, the polytunnel. The instructions said it was a 2 day job for 2 people……. I beg to differ.

It took us around 3 weeks – not every day and not all day but long enough each day. Making sense of the instructions was the first challenge. It wasn’t that the instructions were lacking it was just making sure we got them right. It would have been a lot faster if we’d put up a polytunnel before and knew what we were doing, so I was paranoid about making a mistake and ruining it. Added to that the days were very hot and it is difficult reading instructions with sweat running into your eyes. ‘A’ was very patient with me.

The site I chosen look relatively level and I’d rotavated the ground and raked it too, however once we’d put the support post in; a small matter of digging fourteen 30cm square and 50cm deep holes for the anchor plates, it became very obvious that the ground sloped quite steeply.

The picture above shows the basic frame and the top of the boarding to the right is on a level with ground level on the left. A lot of earth shifting was and still is required. Thankfully the rotavator did and excellent job of digging into the rock hard ground and generating earth to backfill but I think that I will still be shifting earth throughout this winter before it is fully levelled inside and out. However:-

The first planting is in :-)

Gathering and Gleaning

2010-09-29T21:25:00.001+02:00

It’s that time of year again, when everything seems to need to be done at once – oh wait, it always seems to be like that! But it is also a good time of year, seeing what there is to harvest.

Today had been booked to pick up some sheep for some friends of mine and entailed a trip to near Limoges, a trip of 2 and a half hours each way. And as often happens, at the last moment, (in my case 7pm the night before), something happened. I was just hitching up the trailer and readying it for an early start the next day when a car pulled up. The wife of the farmer who’s been helping me with my soya explained that her husband had just finished harvesting a field nearby and wanted to do mine.

So the said combine turned up a short time later and harvested until 10pm when the machine was full. I’d arranged with the farmer that he would finish in the morning while I was away, so tomorrow I need to track down where the soya went and how much was harvested.

Having got back from the sheep pick-up I took a wander out onto the field and took a look at the hedgerow at the far side and within a few minutes I collected the above.

To the left is a wild form of sorghum which the chickens like. At the top are few hazelnuts; this year the nut harvest is not one of the best due to the summer drought. In the middle are some of the soya beans that I gleaned. I’ll collect some more over the next few days but I’m also going to let the chickens out onto the field too so they can take advantage of what has been left. At the bottom are some rosehips to the right, and sloes to the left. Not many of either but by the time I’d got to them I’d filled the pot I had and couldn’t carry any more. But….

here are some I picked earlier.

The sloes are nearly over, and many of the sloes on the bushes are shrivelled, again due to the drought, but I do have enough for one bottle of sloe gin.

The rosehips are destined for rosehip syrup; I don’t have enough yet for the syrup so will spend the next week or so collecting the necessary amount.

It’s also harvest time in the garden.

As you can see the butternut squashes are tiny but I’m really pleased with the giant pumpkin I’ve grown for Halloween.

And finally for this post, my first almonds, all of them. At the back are some quinces I had to take off a branch as there were far to many and the branch was in danger of breaking. They are beginning to ripen and turn yellow, then it ill be quince jelly time, one of my favourites.

My First Grapes

2010-09-10T19:20:00.001+02:00

I know they are not much to look at but I’m really chuffed. I’d planted the vine a couple of year ago in anticipation of installing a pergola. The planting position is far from ideal for producing grapes as it’s in the shade of a tree.

The pergola is yet to go up but I’ve just let the vine do it’s own thing each year in order to produce a good root system and hopefully it will be quicker to cover the pergola once it is finally up.

The vine has climbed nearly 20 ft into the tree over the year and produced the two small bunches of grapes down near the root, where I’d cut back the side growth.

I’ve planted more vines out in the fruit garden and I’m hoping for further desert grapes next year once those plants are fully established. I’ll post a picture of those vines once I’ve got them all in and the support wires in place.

Rain, wonderful rain.

2010-09-08T11:35:00.001+02:00

The weather can be a difficult thing to live with, Over the last months there have been the harrowing accounts of the floods in Pakistan and other places, while here in my little corner of France I’ve been watching the skies searching for a rain cloud.

We’ve had around 3 months without rain; all the irrigation ponds have been drained to try and save the plum, maize and sunflower harvests. Farmers such as I who have no irrigation water have just been crossing fingers. My neighbour harvested his sunflowers 2 days ago. All of the flower heads were at least 50 percent smaller than I would have expected them to be. Watching the combine harvester going round the field I was taken by how few times it made the trip to the transporter to discharge its load, and it wasn’t a large combine with large holding tanks.

In my own case I’ve been looking at my soya crop; the field is quite yellow and the leaves are falling off the plants. The soya beans themselves are about the size of small petit pois so I think I’ll be lucky to break even on the crop. Such are the joys of small scale farming. Thankfully the weather has broken and the rain, about 30mm of it, has fallen steadily over the last 48 hours. The ditches are still empty and the rain is soaking into the soil and not just running off the surface.

So what to do on a rainy day? Well life is never boring here, there is always a new skill to learn and for my son ‘A’ and I yesterday it was tarmac-ing. My friends ‘A’ and ‘R’ had been given a pile of tarmac in exchange for the department appropriating some of their land to store tarmac while they were patching the road, and a working party was arranged to get it laid before it went off.

While it may not have been a totally professional job, all 5 of us (we were joined by ‘B’ who is on holiday in the village at the moment), felt the drive looked pretty good afterwards and there was even some tarmac left over to make a start on another hard standing area. ‘A’ put on a wonderful lunch and despite getting totally wet through the job took much less time and effort than we though it would.

Annual Update!

2010-09-05T15:20:00.003+02:00

The New Year resolution to post more didn’t do too well, time to give up on cataloguing and just summarise the last year and start again I think; so what has been happening here over the last year.

Firstly the sad news; my beloved Snowy cat died last September. Thankfully though it was quite quick and I had my son G here too but I miss her. After her death I decided not to get any other cats as I would like to get down to just 2 cats at a time since vet fees and cat food are getting so expensive these days. I’d also decided that I wouldn’t get another white cat or long haired cat due to the amount and visibility of fur they leave. Enter Jewel.

She chose me; she was an abandoned kitten who was brought to a friend’s house. Looking at the abrasions they all had we’re pretty sure she and her 3 siblings were chucked out of a car in the village centre. One of the siblings was run over before anyone could catch them but the other 3 found sanctuary at Ann’s. I went round to visit and this under-sized ball of flea and worm infested fluff curled up beside me purring the whole time. I fell for her hook, line and sinker and the long-haired ball of white fur, who is as mad as they get, is now a fully fledged member of the ‘FHTE’ society. And yes, she does have one blue eye and one yellow eye.

The next major occurrence was having my car written off. I was around 150 mils from home and of course I’d managed to forget my mobile, (put it on to charge especially for the journey and walked out the door without picking it up!), and someone went straight across a junction in front of me. I T-boned into the side of them pushing them 10-12ft up the road while they spun me through 90 degrees. Thankfully though I was not going fast, 50 mph or so was well strapped in and the impact was head on for me. I had a slight graze under the chin from the airbag and couple of tender spots on my arm and leg where I assume I must have hit the padded door handle.

The other car was lucky too, the centre of my car hit their door pillar and that protected the person in the passenger seat. The police and first-response medical units were brilliant and what was nice too was the police officer who made a point of coming over to me before I left to tell me very strongly that it wasn't my fault.

There after ensued a couple of months of sorting out the paperwork for the old car and finding and buying a new one. Sounds so simple written like that but it would take more than one post to go through the paperwork involved, stress and cost, so I’ll sum it up in one word for all the areas – lots.

My computer also decided to try and die too! Luckily I had purchased a laptop as I’d realised my computer was getting old. I’d also backed up everything on the main drive, or so I thought. My second drive on the old computer finally failed. It as then I realised that when I’d migrated to the new C drive that I’d installed in the old comp many moons back, Outlook was on the new drive but the contacts file was on the D drive still. I’d not bothered taking a paper copy as I thought I’d backed up everything when I made the C drive copy…. ho hum!

While I’m on this trail of disasters, the hay harvest didn’t happen this year. Everything was going superbly, they grass was at peak condition, I’d got it all cut and dried, took the baler down and it just wouldn’t tie knots round the bales. The weather broke a couple of days later before anyone else could finish their fields and come and bale mine. It then rained for a couple of weeks. I do still have some of last year’s hay and have bought couple of small round bales that I hope will see me through to next spring.

Next up is the ongoing tale of trying to get health insurance.

My file on that is now nearly 3 inches thick. At the end of last year I gave up on trying to get into the French system and applied for private cover. After a month or so the firm got back to me and refused me as they said I was eligible for state cover and by law they couldn’t insure me. So I was back doing the rounds between MSA and CPAM. MSA still saying that although they were the department that insures registered farmers I didn’t have enough land to qualify and needed to go to CPAM. CPAM then sent me on a paper chase collecting 2 years of French tax returns, 3 years of proof of paying local taxes etc before finally saying, after I’d gone down to the head office because every visit to the local one came up with a different set of paperwork to collect, that as I was a registered farmer they couldn’t insure me. The then said that one of the pieces of paper I’d got from MSA saying that I didn’t qualify for cover would mean that the private insurer could cover me.

So, re-applied to the private insurer with the new letter – 2 months down the line they’ve just rejected me again saying ….. I’m employed and therefore………aaaarrrrrggggghhhhhh!

So I’ve given up on trying to support the system here and have applied for cover from a UK based company for people living abroad. All fingers and toes crossed that this goes through.

Apart from the above, life is good if rather busy and I do remind myself that actually I’ve been very lucky. My crash could have injured me, and with no health cover it really doesn’t bare thinking about.

Another Quarter Turn

2010-01-31T18:08:00.005+01:00

That wheel just keeps on turning. The sun shone today and to celebrate I thought I would make a Brigid’s Cross.

While collecting the twigs for the cross, I came across this in the flowerbed. I think it’s a young weasel so I guess the tail-less decapitate one I found back in June 2008 was a weasel too.

My apologies to everyone who’s commented on my previous posts for not responding, I will try and do better. I’ve now put in the e-mail filter/rule on Outlook to separate out all the blog comments so I can easily respond to them rather than the notifications getting buried in amongst all the e-mails I get (sadly usually junk).

Nothing really major to report over the last week apart from enough rain to keep the ground unworkable but at least the ponds and ground water should be replenished. I’ve been working on my planting list. This is a very simple Excel spreadsheet, based on one from the Tiny Farm Blog, where I list all the seeds I’m planting along with when to plant, planting distances, where in the rotation they are going etc so I have all the information in one place on a few of sheets of paper. One advantage of this is that I can automatically work out how many of each plant I need for each row I want to plant in my pottager. As part of this I've also been through all my seeds and sorted them alphabetically so I can find them when it comes to planting.

I’ve also started to knit a scarf with the wool I spun from Chestnut. I know I’m biased but alpaca wool is just so lovely and soft and warm, it’s a joy to work with it. I'll post a picture when I've finished it.

I’ve also just had another delivery of oak for the wood burner and that will keep me busy for the rest of the week cutting it to size. The logs are all in the barn at the moment to keep them dry but I need to cut them and move them out so that the barn is available for the alpacas should I need it.

Lighting is provided by the floodlight as even with the door fully open and the single light in this part of the barn there is not enough light to work safely. The saw horse is a real boon, I was using a couple of hay bales but this is a much better height plus it also has a ruler so I know that I’m not cutting the logs too big. The cooker takes up to a maximum of 45cm so the 1m long logs are cut at roughly 35, 35 and 30cm; the two longer ones going to the wood-store and the shorter ones into the pile for immediate use. Sounds a bit odd I know but it’s the only way I’ve found to get the wood-store pile to stack properly.

So as you can see, everything is set; 2 cubic meters of wood, an electric chainsaw (no fumes in the enclosed space), heavy duty wheelbarrow to transport logs to the wood-store, face-guard, ear-defenders and Kevlar gloves on the saw horse. What you can’t see is me hobbling around like a penguin in my Kevlar chaps – smallest size and still they are too long - and steelies. Hopefully I can get most of it cut before my midweek trip to the chiropractor as I’d like to give my back a chance to settle once it’s been straightened out again.

Spinning a Yarn

2010-01-24T18:09:00.002+01:00

I’m not doing too well on my posting am I. Time is just flying by and there just seems so much to do.

Over the Christmas period I took some time out to do a little knitting and taught myself to knit in the round on 4 needles (post on that to follow). I then thought it was time to get on with teaching myself how to spin since I have fleeces and more to come in a few months.

So this is the first bobbin courtesy of Chestnut.

A little uneven and bobbly in places but overall I am very pleased with it.

I then plyed it and washed it.

And now have two hanks ready to knit.

As I said, overall I’m pleased with the result for a first attempt; like most things in life it was a learning curve. The thing that I realise most now is the importance of proper ‘skirting’ of the fleece. I wasn’t rigorous enough in removing the guard hairs or the second cuts so it’s not as smooth as it could be, but there is always next time.

2010-01-12T10:08:00.012+01:00

Stardate 27th May – 1st June

The grass was green, the sun shining and dry weather promised for a week so it was time to make the hay.
I then found out what happens when long grass gets wrapped around the PTO

The cleaning kit

And an hour or so later with help from the chickens

Cutting continued followed by the tedding and ….

By the next day it was drying well and didn’t clog the tedder.

Another day of tedding and it was ready to bale.

The next day it was time to start bringing the bales in. I’d had lots of people who had said they would help with the haymaking but, the week of good weather, coincided with the week everyone was unavailable - sod’s law really. So off I set to the field.

The set of steps is essential as I’m too short to get onto the trailer without it. I could only lift the bales as high as the base level of the trailer, so I had to leave a gap at that level to place the bales onto the trailer and to get on and off the trailer. Added to that, the planks on the floor of the trailer are pretty rotten so I had to be really careful not to fall through. It took about 4 days but eventually I got all the bales, 250 or more (I lost count), into the hay loft – and only fell through that floor once.

It was hard work but I had a real sense of achievement at the end; the hay looked and smelt lovely and best of all, the alpacas loved it.

Elderflower Time Again

2010-01-12T09:56:00.004+01:00

Stardate 25th May 2009

It was that time of year again; I really like the syrup, it;s great as a cordial, wonderful over ice cream and other puddings, and makes a wonderful kir royal.

Instructions here on previous post.

Help In The Garden

2010-01-12T09:50:00.004+01:00

Stardate 18th and 23rd May 2009

It was time to plant the petit pois so I went out to the big veg patch and made the trough for the seeds; I was then joined by Cid and Snowy. As ever, they thought that the best place to lie was in the trough.

Patches on the other hand decided to chill.

Sunrise This Morning

2010-01-12T09:41:00.004+01:00

When I went out this morning to let out the chickens I was greeted by this wonderful sky.

The picture really doesn't do it justice, it was much more ethereal and vast; beauty glimpsed for a few seconds before it faded away.

2010-01-06T11:06:00.006+01:00

Stardate 8th - 17th May 2009

I’ve been trying to leave some areas around the farm to naturalise a bit and was pleased to find a trio of orchids flowering beside the pond.

I was then overjoyed to find this bee orchid that flowered under the cherry tree that had been blown over in the January 2009 storm.

I then went down to where I’ve been protecting some orchids that were growing in a ditch by the road and was really pleased that so many more had flowered this year. From 5 the first year, I counted 25 this year. I think I managed to get 6 in this shot:-

The commune cut the verges and went round most of the orchids but I did find the following that had been cut.

Shearing Time

2010-01-06T10:56:00.005+01:00

Stardate 30th April 2009

The end of April is when Colin the shearer visits France and undertakes a whirlwind tour of a large part of the country shearing herds of alpacas. I was down for the 30th of April. Colin would be brought to me by the people he’d sheared for in the day and after he’d done my 5 I was to take him to the next people on the list. It’s a bit like pass the parcel.

I’d remembered to get them into the barn the day before so that I was sure that their fleece would be dry as you can’t shear wet fleece. I’d put in a couple of rings so that Colin could stretch out the alpacas and shear then. I was also very grateful to Sandy who came over for the day to help out; a very needed and appreciated extra pair of hands.

After an hour or so the alpacas had their summer cut.

New Year – New Attempt at Blog

2010-01-06T10:53:00.001+01:00

A new year and a new attempt at my blog, last year just sped past and was over before I knew it. Summer passed so quickly with friends and family; then it was harvest time, followed by a car crash and a computer crash.

So New Year resolution is to use new computer and along with current posts try to catch up on those from last year.

Only in France!

2009-09-01T18:04:00.002+02:00

You just hae to love living here:-

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8232041.stm

Volunteer apricot

2009-07-19T13:43:00.003+02:00

Stardate 22nd April & 18th June

At the edge of my patio, right in front of my front door there is one of the concrete electricity posts, (although for how long I don’t know as EDF are removing it sometime), and between it and the concrete patio has grown a bush that I’ve tried unsuccessfully to remove over the last 2 years. It has only produced some rather boring leaves, no flowers, no autumn colour, totally boring. I can’t get at it to dig out and by the time it is in leaf, so is everything around it so spraying is out of the question.

I’d resolved this year to deal with it and it must have sensed its imminent demise because this spring it gave me some beautiful scented blossoms; which after a few weeks turned into these.

A couple of months later and I had:-

They tasted divine, I had most of them fresh but I also have a few in alcohol and a lovely large apricot flan in the freezer for when summer is only a past thought.
My next task will be to try and save it when they come to take away the concrete post!

Making Mayo

2009-06-03T18:46:00.002+02:00

Stardate 29th April

Having chickens means that come the spring I have eggs, more eggs than I can eat just as eggs so it was time to expand my culinary repertoire to mayonnaise.

I’d been put off making it before because it seem like a real faff and I would then have egg whites left over and I really didn’t have the time to mess about making meringues. Then I found a recipe for whole egg mayonnaise made in a blender and it’s so simple.

The basic recipe is:
· 2 egg
· 2 tablespoon vinegar
· 2 cup vegetable oil
· ½ teaspoon mustard
· ¼ teaspoon salt

In a food processor or a blender wiz the eggs, mustard (either dried or ready made) and vinegar. Then with the processor running gradually add the oil. Once the oil is added it should be thick so scoop out into a lidded container store in the refrigerator. It should keep for a week.

The taste can be varied by changing the type vinegar or using lemon juice instead along with the type of mustard and oil, so lots of experimenting to be done here. Most recipes I’ve read say olive oil on it’s own is too strong for the mayo but a mixture with peanut or sunflower oil works well. I’m into using white balsamic vinegar and Dijon mustard at the moment which I think gives a taste somewhere between commercial mayonnaise and salad cream.

It’s the 2-egg quantity that’s in the photograph that I made for a group meal but for myself the 2-egg quantity is rather too much for me to eat in a week so I made half quantity. This would have been fine apart from one little problem; it barely covers the rotor blades in the processor or the blender leading to me having a mayonnaise face pack while adding the oil. Good for the complexion but not so good for the kitchen walls etc.

I then recalled reading somewhere a long while back using a stick blender and its tall narrow cup to make it in. The technique here is to blend everything as per above and then blend in a little of the oil. As the mayonnaise starts to form the remaining oil can be added and will rest on top of the thicker emulsion. By slowly bringing the stick blender up you gradually incorporate all the oil. Difficult to explain but if you try it will probably become clear. It worked for me, a one-egg quantity of mayo without needing to wash the walls and a lot less to wash up afterwards too.

Mouse Damage

2009-06-03T18:43:00.002+02:00

Stardate 22nd April

I had my early courgettes and squashes germinating on the kitchen windowsill. Obviously someone thought it was a self-serve buffet. Mice in the kitchen are a no-no so it was time to get the trap out.

5 mice later and there is no further sign of any mice. It’s sad to have to use a killer trap but 4 cats and a humane trap weren’t catching any of the mice.

Lychees And Dates

2009-06-03T18:40:00.002+02:00

Stardate 22nd April

And what was I eating over Christmas?

It was lychees and dates.

Snowy And Cid

2009-06-02T22:49:00.003+02:00

Stardate 20th April

Snowy and Cid have come to an understanding. Snowy is still the top cat, the matriarch, despite being a much weaker cat these days; she’s coming up to 13 and is really showing her age since her ear operation, here and here.

Cid, even though he really wants to be the top cat, being the only male cat, knows his place. There have been the occasional spats but now most of the time they tolerate each other. So imagine my surprise when I spotted this:

I took the picture really quickly as I rightly thought that it wouldn’t last long. I think the togetherness was due less to friendship bit more because neither wanted to back down from having the seat. Still it was sweet while it lasted.

The Fallen Oak

2009-06-02T22:14:00.005+02:00

Stardate 6th April

Way back before Christmas I had an oak tree fall into my neighbour’s field. The field had already been sown with wheat and because the ground was wet it was impossible to remove the tree with out ruining the crop all round. The months passed and the wheat grew ever bigger and finally the ground began to dry out.

I’d spent ages inspecting the tree from my side of the ditch and couldn’t see where to begin on cutting up the tree. The problem was that the trunk wasn’t straight; it sort of zig-zaged and the branches were at odd angles and crossing each other. Not really the best thing to have as the first tree you ever deal with along with the first time using the petrol chainsaw.

I procrastinated for ages and then called on Regis for a second opinion. Even he refused to touch it but found a woodman who in exchange for the trunk and major branches would remove the tree. So the day after my quiche baking when I thought I would have very little to do I heard the sound of a chain saw outside and went down to help and to collect my share of the wood.

I was totally amazed at just how quickly he dealt with the tree. It did help that he after he’d cut off the side branches he took away the trunk in two pieces. Oh the joy of the correct tools for the job!

As the site was cleared I stacked my branches by the ditch and helped gather up and burn the brash that was left. I then helped the woodman load up his flatbed with his remaining wood (the pile to the right of the fire). It was then that I noticed that not only did he not have any safety gear – quite normal for rural France – he was also only wearing carpet slippers, making my steelies look a bit of overkill.

The next day was spent lobbing my branches across the ditch back onto my land and then transporting them to the back of the house. It doesn’t sound like a lot of work but oak is heavy, very heavy.

Tempus Fugit

2009-06-02T22:12:00.000+02:00

I can’t believe it’s nearly 2 months since I last posted on the blog. So what’s up? Well firstly it was just writers block stressing over lots of little things, compounded by lots to do. So in the land of metaphors, I couldn’t see wood for trees but now there is light at the end of the tunnel :-)

I will now attempt to catch-up with what has been going on here.

This Week I Have Been Mostly Weeding

2009-04-05T21:23:00.006+02:00

In the blink of an eye the vegetable garden by the house has become overrun with weeds. Well to be honest they’ve been there for ages but as they grew so early the ground was far to wet to hoe. Now the decent weather is here they have gone to seed. The two main weeds on this area are groundsel and bittercress, which fires its seed as soon as you touch the plant.

Because of the number of ripe and ripening seed heads, hoeing was out of the question along with rotorvating. Hand weeding I decided was the best option, to try and remove as many seed heads as possible. It is taking ages but hopefully it will be worth it by reducing the number of plants I will have to deal with for the rest of the year.

Each 30m row takes about 2 hours to do but having done each bit and seeing the clear row is very rewarding. I’m about halfway down or to put it in a more positive light I’m half finished.

Here’s a picture to show all’s well with the world today.

Snowy is also back to her supervisor self. She eventually decided that the comfort of her chair and umbrella (as shown here) would be better but it’s so nice to have her behaving ‘normally’ again.

This week I’ve also blown a few eggs.

They are either for Christmas decorations or next Easter, as I’ve no chance of doing anything with them before next weekend. Doing them now made sense, at least at the time. I had the eggs and I wanted to make a couple of quiches for summer picnics. One useful thing about having the alpacas is that I have various syringes and needles that proved very useful. Having blown the eggs, I gave them a wash in a dilute bleach solution and using the syringe I was able to inject the solution into the eggs and wash the insides too.

Kefir

2009-04-03T20:17:00.005+02:00

Way back last year during one of my Internet trawls I came across Kefir (information here) and was able to find someone who would send me some kefir grains. I had a go at producing some kefir but kept forgetting about it, eventually forgetting about the last batch I was making and it spent the winter in the back of my refrigerator.

I dug the mix out a month or so ago and to my surprise the kefir wasn’t rancid, just a bit over sour. Well I say a bit, that really should say a lot sour. I ditched the liquid and spent a couple of weeks refreshing the grains in water to try and clear the curdled smell. This was quite successful so I then started using the grains again with milk. It took about a week but the grains recovered and are now producing wonderful kefir again.

It really is so easy to produce; I strain the grains out of the kefir liquid each morning, rinse the jar, replace the grains in the jar and top up with milk again. All I have to do then is leave the jar on the work-surface and repeat the process the following day. I now have a very cheap supply of probiotic yoghurt.

Today’s treat was to have it on cereal instead of just drinking it. It has a slightly sharp taste but I find it a very pleasant one.

I got my grains via a kefir exchange site – I just did an Internet search – and also found this site, which has a wealth of information.

One of my friends here is very dairy intolerant and we are going to have a go at converting the grains to soya milk grains so she can have a soya probiotic.

Does anyone else use kefir grains?

Snowy Update

2009-04-03T19:51:00.004+02:00

Many thanks to everyone for their thoughts about Snowy. I'm really pleased to say that she's back to her meowy self and following me around and getting under my feet again.

She's still a bit frail but then she is coming up to 14 and the operation to remove the cancer from her ear did seem to age her quite a bit but she still defends her position as top cat so I think all is well.

Cat Worries

2009-03-26T21:30:00.002+01:00

Above is a picture of Snowy on her chair on Monday. She’s my oldest cat at 13.5 years and is beginning to show signs of her age. She’s still totally convinced I’m her human but she does spend a little more time these days sleeping. When she’s not sleeping, she is under my feet if I’m working outside, or sitting on the mouse or keyboard if I’m on the computer.

Tuesday though she decided to sleep for most of the day and when I got back from my French lesson she came to say hello and then went off again to sleep.

After my lesson on Wednesday I spent the afternoon keeping a close eye on her. She was only nibbling at food and when she didn’t come near the computer or sleep on the couch by me in front of the fire I knew something really wasn’t right.

So this morning it was off to the vets and the poor dear was running a temperature; it should have been between 38 and 39°C but she was at 40°C. She has a respiratory infection so along with the temperature she was finding breathing hard work.

One injection of antibiotics latter and we were on the way home; by the time we were back, after about 10 mins, she was meowing at me and as soon as we got in she demanded food.

I then went out to help Ann in the plum orchard, picking up the last of the firewood and by the time I came back she was a changed cat. She was sitting at the door waiting for me to come in and then demanded more food. She’s following me around, her fur feels smooth and silky again and she’s her chatty self and sitting on the keyboard again.

I can’t get over just how quickly she’s improved but I am just so happy that she has. I still have to try and get one and a half tablets down her throat each day for the next week to complete her antibiotics course but it will be worth it. Now where did I put all my plasters, I think I’m going to need them as Snowy hates taking tablets.

A Little Maintenance

2009-03-20T19:27:00.009+01:00

I’ve come to the conclusion that plans are never meant to run smoothly; take today for instance, it was marked as the day to break up the soil in the five-hectare field. To do this I have what I believe the French call a ‘herse a peigne de vibro’ – a vibrating comb harrow.

The problems started yesterday. I decided that as I was unlikely to use the plough for a while, I’d clean it and than put it back in the storage area and hitch up the harrow. Sounds pretty easy and usually it is; however this time I managed to put it somewhere uneven and it twisted as I tried to unhitch it. It twisted so much that I couldn’t re-hitch it; everything I tried just made matters worse.

Thankfully Regis was at his place and he agreed to come round after he’d finished work and help me sort it out. This he did; it’s amazing how more useful it is to be in two places at once. Between me moving the tractor and raising and lowering the linkage and Regis pushing and placing the props for the plough we got it straight and unhitched.

Regis then took the harrow out to check the ground was ready to work, which after the wonderful weather we’ve had for the last few weeks, it was. He then checked over the harrow and pointed out that a lot of the tines were worn and needed replacing. All my farming equipment is second (at least) hand.

I thought I would have to replace the whole of the spring tine totally forgetting that farming can be quite green in many ways. Replace, reuse, repair, they are the bye words in farming, at least with older equipment. Each of the tines is fitted with a shoe that can be replaced when worn and even better, these shoes are reversible.

So instead of being out on the field today I’m reversing or changing shoes. I thought that it wouldn’t take too long but…

I do think I was a bit naive setting about this with only a spanner. After an hour and quite a few bruises I gave up and set off for the local farm suppliers where I finally bought that decent socket set I’ve been promising myself and while I was there, a decent pipe wrench too. Oh what a difference, a little leverage goes a long way.

P.S. I’m covered in grease, I ache, I’m bruised and cut and over 100€ poorer after buying tools and parts, but all 30 shoes have either been reversed or replaced and I feel really chuffed with myself. Time for a sog in front of the TV :-)

Writers Block

2009-03-16T22:08:00.001+01:00

I’m really glad I don’t make my living from writing as it seems to be getting longer and longer between posts, so much so that C and S telephoned to check I was OK – many thanks for that you two :-) As ever, lots of reasons and the only one not true is that there is being nothing to do.

Losing the alpacas knocked my confidence rather hard, triggering a couple of panic attacks and a couple of other stress related things, one of the symptoms being finding it very difficult to concentrate and therefore work out what to write but that all seems under control now.

Other than that I’ve embarked on French lessons. I have two 3-hour lessons a week with half an hour travelling time each way so I effectively ‘lose’ a day from the week. These lessons are provided by the French government to help me integrate and set up my business. I’m only on the scheme very tentatively and expect to be asked to leave every week but until then I’m making the most of them. They are really good. One lesson covers French life, such as the intricacies of the French health system and which health department you register with depending on what type of work you are doing that month. The other lesson covers French language – this is the one I find really difficult as I moved schools frequently in my youth and was never taught English grammar so trying to get my head round French grammar is nigh on impossible.

I’ve also been working on the vegetable patch and been starting some seeds. The house looks more like a greenhouse at the moment so I hope the weather doesn’t take a turn for the worse, as I will need to get the seedlings outside soon, but I’m really hoping that I’ll be able to get the guy back to check out the vegetable plot and therefore be able to finally get my health insurance.

So that’s a quick update and I do hope to expand on some of the things I’ve been doing over the rest of the month.

A Bit More Ploughing

2009-03-02T20:57:00.005+01:00

Back before Christmas I ploughed most of the 5 hectare field but as it was my first attempt at ploughing I did have a bit of a problem in places. I just couldn't get the plough shears to dig into the ground, resulting in them just scraping the top of the soil. This occurred over quite a large area and then as quickly as it started, it stopped and the rest of the field ploughed correctly.

The result of this surface scraping is that the grass just grew back over winter. So I've been out re-ploughing the badly ploughed area which has been interesting. I've just about got the hang of starting on one side of the field and working across but I don't have the time to re-plough the whole field so I just ploughed the grassed areas.

This is the view of some of the grass. I'd ploughed the left-hand section first as it was the worst area and rain was forecast. As it was, the rain didn't happen and I have been able to go over the whole area.

All I have left to do now is finish the strip round the edge of the field and that's probably about another 4 trips round. I still haven't worked out how to do the corners properly yet but I think I've an idea from a bit of trial and error. I think it involves ploughing the outer line in one direction and the inner rows in the opposite direction.

There is a very great difference between ploughing here and the UK. Whenever I watched people ploughing in the UK there was always a large flock of seagulls following the plough. Here I don't get seagulls but I usually have half a dozen or so wagtails darting about. They're black and white but not the same as the pied wagtails in the UK. Apologies for the not very good photograph but they are rather small and flew away whenever the tractor approached.

An Eggcellent Day

2009-02-23T20:56:00.005+01:00

For the first time since I've been in France, all the chicken have laid an egg on the same day! The three original Lacey Ladies used the nest in the hay bale while the other 3 hens each used different places so I was also able to identify each egg.

From left to right, the first three are the original Lacey Ladies, next is the white Sussex, the penultimate one is from the pullet from last years hatching and finally it's the Phoenix bantam.

Hatching Potatoes

2009-02-23T20:54:00.003+01:00

Hazel will sleep just about anywhere. She sat up when she heard me switch on the camera

Anniversaries

2009-02-21T19:47:00.001+01:00

Not only was yesterday my daughter’s birthday but it also marked the start of my third year here. I can’t believe how fast time can pass, two years working on the farm I can cope with but my little girl now able to apply for a driving licence; that’s just unbelievable.

Another notable event of yesterday was that I now have for the first time since I moved in reasonable telephone and Internet connection. I’ve been more or less unable to keep an Internet connection for more than 10 minutes lately and once lost it often wouldn’t let me connect again for a few hours. I was beginning to think it was the modem playing up but telephoned France telecom anyway to report that I could barely hear people on the ‘phone line due to the crackling.

Yet again they said there was a fault and that they would have an engineer out to look at the line in the next 48 hours. The deadline passed and there was no change in the line – I didn’t really expect there to be, anyone living in France will tell you the same. But then, yesterday while I was working outside I spotted a telecom van moving post, to post towards the house. As they approached I could see they were replacing the line up to my house.

Back in the mists of time during an earlier problem with the line an engineer had been sent out and he’d told me my line needed replacing but nothing was done and I let it drop as I did get a connection again. But this time they changed it – I was really surprised as there is over half a kilometre of line that is solely used for me.

All of a sudden I have a stable Internet connection and a telephone line with practically no background noise. I’m over the moon.

Confit of Duck

2009-02-21T19:40:00.004+01:00

While I’ve been unable to surf I decided it was time to have a go at making confit, after all I’ve been here two years so I really should have a go. I was also encouraged by there being a really good offer on duck at the supermarket.

I decided to buy the manchons (the upper bit of the wings) and the cuisse (the legs). The manchons were very cheap, 2€60 a kilogramme so I had a go with those first.

The idea is to partially preserve the duck by salting and then to poach the duck in duck fat until it is succulent.

So part one was to sprinkle them with sea salt and fresh bay leaves and ground pepper. They were then left in the refrigerator for 24 hours. They were then rinsed to remove the salt and dried. Being the lazy type, I didn’t fancy standing over the stove for a few hours so I placed them in the slow cooker.

I then covered them in melted duck fat and left them overnight on low to gently stew.

Once cooked to tender, or in my case, until falling off the bone, they were left to cool for an hour and then carefully packed into sterilised canning jars and covered with the cooking juice and fat. I then processed them for a while to ensure a vacuum seal.

There were of course a couple of bits left over and I know I’m a bit biased but they were delicious.

The Vegetable Field

2009-02-21T19:35:00.002+01:00

I’m another step closer to getting into the healthcare system. Over the last couple of days I’ve been able to work the area of land I’m going to use this year for the vegetables.

For those who don’t know about my healthcare problem, in order to pay into the system and therefore be covered, I need 11.5 hectares of land. I have 11.33 and there is no land available close by that I could afford to purchase. The French way round this is for me to cultivate an area of land for vegetables. This area of land has a weighting of 3; so if I for instance cultivate .33 hectare, I end up with a nominal land tally of 12 hectares – 11.33 – 0.33 = 11, the 0.33 becomes 0.33 x3 = .99 – call it 1 hectare, 11 + 1 = 12, over the magic number of 11.5 and I can get health care.

Last year I attempted to cultivate an area only to see it disappear under water and become unworkable until mid year, far to late to do anything. This year I’ve taken an area of my cereal field, (last year it was already planted with wheat but this year I’m sowing sunflower in a couple of months so it was still fallow).

So this is the lower half of the area; I’m using an 8-bed rotation, potatoes, squash, root, beans, tomatoes, cabbage, everything else, and the two yellow markers nearest mark the top of bed 4. In the distance is a single marker that marks the far corner of the area, which is 60 m by 30 m, which is only .18 of a hectare but it’s about all I think I can manage and it just takes me over the magic 11.5.

2009-02-16T20:09:00.001+01:00

I just had to post this picture of the sunset tonight, it was just so beautiful.

Dried Eggs

2009-02-15T20:01:00.005+01:00

While I’ve not been able to post for a bit due to my Internet connection giving up the ghost – I do wonder if France Telecom/Orange France will ever be able to provide anything like the service I had in the UK – I luckily had looked on the web earlier for information about drying eggs. So unable to waste time surfing I set about putting what I’d learnt into practice.

I decided to start with 5 eggs; the idea being to get a thin layer in the dehydrator otherwise it takes too long to dry the egg. As it is, the tiers in my dehydrator are slightly tilted so the egg at the outer edge was deeper than the inside edge.

The eggs were beaten well and then poured onto the lightly greased tray. They were then dried for a bit over 5 hours at the highest setting, around 60°C. One of the posts I read said that this heat and time were essential as this in effect pasteurised the egg as well as drying it.

Because of the difference in thickness across the tray I set the original time to 4 hours and then stirred the mix, then continued dehydrating until all the egg was dry.

Once all the egg had dried I then ground the egg to a powder in an electric grinder and transferred the resulting powder to an airtight jar for storage.

Other ways described to store the egg is in the freezer, vacuum-sealed or in zip lock bags. Once I’ve got my Internet connection back I’m going to do some more research into the storage but for the moment the jar is going to live in the fridge.

To reconstitute the egg, it’s one tablespoon of dried egg to one tablespoon of water and that’s equivalent to one egg that can be used for cakes, omelettes or scrambled eggs. The next job is to try it out.

The Woodland - Phase 2

2009-02-15T19:50:00.000+01:00

It was a lovely Sunday afternoon and having just signed up again for the chasse meal – gosh the year has passed fast – I thought I had better do some work. I know way back I decided to try and take time out on Sundays but at this time of the year there is just so much to do.

I’d already sorted out the trees required for the first two rows and combined with the ploughed ground it only took a couple of hours to plant the two rows. It was a very pleasant way to spend the afternoon out in the fresh air and sunshine.

While moving some of the hazel trees I noticed that along with the wonderful catkins there were also the female flowers; so tiny that you could easily miss them, it's the little red blob on the left of the stem.

Returning to the chasse dinner I've just read this version from Living the Dream, just to give another viewpoint - I love the bambi and babe idea.

A Red Letter Day

2009-02-11T18:04:00.005+01:00

Today was the day the alpacas moved into their new paddock. Ann came over to help and see them go in – she has been wonderful in helping me to finish all the fencing; I couldn’t have got all of it fixed as tightly or as quickly without her. And I’ve not forgotten all the help G, M & C gave with the posts last summer; thanks guys.

Dragging buckets of water over there is going to be a bit of a drain so that should spur me on to finish the roofing of the shelter and install a rainwater collection system there.

Moving the alpacas was nearly thwarted by the rain; yes folks yet more rain. Nothing torrential but just a few millimetres every day or so and seven millimetres last night just for good measure. Reversing the trailer became impossible, it just skated over the mud but by going round the block I eventually got into a position where we could load them up and take them over to the field. Once there they couldn’t believe their eyes, grass and space, it was then heads down and munch away.

Having got them into the field, Ann and I decided it was time for a celebratory tea. I mentioned that since finding the nests where the chickens had laid the last lot of eggs, they’d moved and I’d not had any eggs for 3 days. While I boiled the kettle Ann went for a hunt around and finally found the last few days haul. They were hidden away in the bottom of an old straw bale. Only one of the chicken is using the nest boxes I made. I don’t think my animals appreciate my carpentry skills; the alpacas never went into the previous shelter I built them.

I now have a mini glut of eggs so I’m thinking about trying to dry some as a method of preserving them for next winter.

Cats!

2009-02-11T18:02:00.001+01:00

The bucket contains rainwater just the same as their bowl, but this has added dirt.

Update For First Week in February

2009-02-08T17:22:00.002+01:00

This week has thankfully been a bit less traumatic, I’m still waiting for the results of the autopsy on Theo (autopsy is used for animals here in France) but Leah visited on Thursday and has given me some general pointers. So the alpacas will be out in their field as soon as possible and a couple of them need a tooth trim. The hay is not bad but not good either. I cut it a bit late because of the wet weather last year and that means it’s not as rich as early cut hay. No one round here got any early cut hay, but hopefully this year will be better and I’m aiming for a cut in May.

There have been chicken things too this week. Sadly sick-chick finally succumbed to whatever was here problem. She was the one who had the three maggot attacks last year. She seemed happy enough but never really recovered. Over the last few days of her life I noticed her tail was down quite a bit and an extra dose of wormer didn’t do the trick this time.

Egg-wise, I was really chuffed when the hens started laying after the shortest day but they stopped after the storm. I was a bit miffed at this as I was just getting back into the swing of having plenty of fresh eggs. Then on Thursday I noticed that the young hen was missing when I was feeding them and I wondered if a fox had been round. I carried on working round the house and then just in the time it took to turn round I noticed another of the hens had gone missing and not a fox in sight.

I then spotted her under a log stack that sent me looking for the other hen. I eventually spotted her under the branches of the felled tree round the back of the house. Once they were both out and about again I checked the two spots and was rewarded by 2 eggs under the logs and 13 under the branches. They’ve only been laying outside for a week so I quickly gathered the egg and took them inside to test them in a bowl of water. All of them sat at the bottom of the bowl, so eggs are back on the menu here.

On Wednesday I noticed a group of cranes flying over, four weeks earlier than last year. Well I think they are earlier, it might just be that I’m outside earlier than last year and so able to see them. Still it’s another harbinger of spring along with the first of my crocuses flowering. They are a little late but since I only put them in the ground Oct/Nov I think they’ve done really well. I’m now waiting for the snowdrops but they might take until next year to flower.

Bafta Night

2009-02-08T17:05:00.004+01:00

It's February again and that means it's Bafta time again, so it's a TV night for me tonight watching on the BBC and reminiscing. I was lucky enough to be 'live' at the Bafta's one year, all be it one of the lesser people with a press pass. Even so the buzz was tremendous and the free food wonderful! Funny how my memories of show business revolve around food, I was also an extra and again the food was great.

Show business, you just can't beat it.

Fire and Floods

2009-02-07T13:23:00.003+01:00

Thankfully not here but I wanted to send my love and prayers to my Australian readers. From floods in the north at the beginning of the year to the lethal fires that are now ravaging the south. I truly hope that the weather settles down and that you are all safe.

As a footnote, if Ann (Lisle-) Smith or anyone who knows her reads this could she please contact me via the blog as I no longer have your address.

Should say that the last address I have is Palymra but I think she was then near Sydney but moved from there a couple of years ago.

Oh What A Week

2009-01-31T20:31:00.008+01:00

Suffice to say this has been a tough week. I was very lucky in respect of the storm damage here but at the start of the week, I had another alpaca die. Totally different symptoms to the others but sadly the same outcome. I am now at my wits end trying to find out why this is happening and why my alpacas will not put on any weight.

I have been through many reasons and have been told many conflicting 'solutions'. Loosing my beautiful Theo so soon after Ashan has knocked my self confidence greatly.

Since the vets here have no idea as to what has killed them, I've arranged for an autopsy on Theo and am now awaiting the results of that. Robin at Utopian alpacas has been really helpful again; we've been through possible causes and our current thought is liver fluke, although why he should have got it when the others have been here for longer is something we haven't' a reason for. Until the results come back though it's all speculation.

Robin has also put me in touch with an alpaca breeder, Leah, who lives about an hour north of here. She has very kindly agreed to come down next week to go through things with me and see if there is something I am doing that is wrong, to look at the land and to look at the hay. Local farmers have said the hay is fine but their experience is with cattle so maybe...

Tonight though I'm suffering from backache; I've spent most of the day helping a neighbouring farmer in his orchards. He had around 900 trees blown over in the storm and the local farmers have been working on his property for the last couple of days.

Yesterday I made a couple of chewy chocolate cakes for the communal meal this lunchtime while this morning found me in the orchard with about 20 other farmers. Everything was in swing. There was a group collecting and distributing 6 ft log posts to each prostrate tree, then the next group of 3 or four would move down the rows with a bucket-less digger. The digger arm was used to press the post 3-3.5 ft into the ground and then they moved on. After them came another ground with a digger (because they are tracked they coped better on the land which is totally saturated), a strap was placed round the tree and it was hauled back to vertical and then strapped to the post.

After that the tree was heavily pruned and then came me, along with Ann and another friend, N, and our job was dragging all the branches to the middle of the track-ways so they could be bulldozed out of the way.

It was interesting again that none of the French wives worked in the orchard, their job was to prepare the mid-day lunch, it's still quite sexist here. Being single and a farmer I think I honorary male, especially after I did the tractor run to the plum drying cooperative back in the summer

Part way through the morning we had a visitation, the Conseil General - the department's general council - arrived along with their official photographer, the local mayor and photographers and reporters from 2 regional papers.

Lunch tile came and about 30 of us sat down for lunch at the village hall and in typical French fashion it was simple and yet a feast at the same time. A vegetable based soup that was delicious made by one of the men from the village as his contribution as he was unable to help in the orchard due to having his knee smashed by a kicking cow.

Then there was grated carrot and macadonie (mixed veg) served cols but mixed with vinaigrette, surrounded by quartered hard boiled eggs. It was a feast for the eyes as well as the body, oh and there was home-made mayonnaise too.

After that the main course was roast pork and creamed potatoes. I dread to think what the calorific value of the potatoes might have been, I know that they contained butter, milk and creme fraiche. Delicious.

Then came the lettuce with an enormous platter of cheeses and after that the dessert accompanied the coffee.

After that it was back to the orchard for another hour or so before I had to leave to do my chores here. I have to say there is something really heart-warming seeing how so many people here are turning out to help their neighbours. There is still community spirit, one of the reasons I wanted to move here.

Looking at the amount of work that is building up here, I think I'm only going to be blogging once a week, partly because a lot of the work is going to be very repetitive and partly because I think I'm going to be rather tired by the end of the day and I need to use what time I have for research.

As I'm probably not going to be blogging tomorrow, Happy Imbolic to those who celebrate it.

A Few More Pictures

2009-01-24T20:08:00.006+01:00

By 5:30 pm, the wind had dropped quite a bit so I ventured outside to have a look a little further away from the house and to round up the escaping plant pots etc.

Down by the pond a quick look at the tedder left me thankful that poplar isn't a particularly heavy wood or a tree that produces lots of heavy branches. I think once I remove the tree the tedder will be fine. The ground is very wet there and consequently soft so I'm hopeful that the damage to the tedder will be minimal.

Keeping well away from or at least up wind from any trees I wandered round the field above the pond. Three small trees/bushes have had largish branches snapped off so I'll need to clear them next week too if possible.

This picture shows the two poplars from above the pond and also gives a good view of the oak that came down before Christmas. I need to clear that sometime too but as it's on my neighbours land I have to be very careful to pick my time so as to not damage his wheat crop in the field.

Coming down the other side of the field from the pond this run off from the neighbour's field is heading for the pond but gives an idea of the amount of rain we've had over the last couple of days. There's more rain forecast over the next couple of days, some torrential so I don't know when the roof will be fixed but the winds which were the strongest recorded in this area, have gone.

Oh and all the chickens made it back safely too, and my red shoes are staying very firmly in the shoe rack.

And The Wind Did Blow

2009-01-24T14:55:00.010+01:00

And blow, and blow, plus another 20.5 mm of rain to add to the 39 from yesterday. Added to which the power went out at around 8 am but was back on at 2 pm – I was battening down for the day without electricity as the winds haven’t let up so there must be some pretty tired people out there battling away to restore the power.

Link to BBC report here.

Last night we were just on orange alert but it’s been upgraded to red alert this morning – now I’ve got onto the computer. Apart from the wind coming in off a depression in the Atlantic, there is another depression coming down from the north and that is bringing much colder weather so possible snow flurries and ice.

The farm has taken some damage; on the windward side roof tiles have been lifted so rain is pouring into the rear storage area. I’m hoping that it won’t get much worse or it might start to affect the lived in part of the building. It’s far too windy to risk going up to try and fix the roof.

Down by the pond I have 3 young poplars that I thought would be fine. Wrong; when I looked out this morning, one of them had snapped and by lunchtime a second had also snapped and looks like it’s fallen onto my tedder, which is stored down there. I’m really glad I wasn’t tempted to go and look at the damage after the first tree came down and yet again I’m so glad that the 3 over large and rotten poplars round the house are down.

Elsewhere, the large plastic patio table has had the centre section broken – I tried removing the parasol but the base has swollen into the holder and everything was just too heavy for me to do anything about. I do now realise why wooden furniture is so popular here.

One of my wild cherry trees has also taken a battering; it’s not that tall so I was a bit surprised to see it leaning but the ground is so waterlogged, I guess it just couldn’t hold on well enough.

The chickens stayed in when I opened up this morning but when I went to give them their grain at lunchtime some of them decided to venture out – or rather ran past me. So I hope they are feeling strong or goodness knows where they will end up. The roof of their hut is also taking a battering and I’ve had to weight it down with more bricks. So still here at the moment and waiting to see what the rest of the day brings.

Picture Catch-Up

2009-01-23T19:40:00.006+01:00

First a couple more pictures of the flooding this morning – the little brook that runs along the bottom of the slight valley just couldn’t cope so water meadows were the order of the day.

There is a mega storm forecast for early tomorrow morning too so more rain plus 70 mph winds – oh joy, I think I’ll keep the shutters bolted, thankfully there are no longer any tall rotten trees to fall on the house. There are also warnings of power/telephone failures due to trees falling on lines.

So what have I been doing during this last week of blog silence? It’s been lots of little things and time-consuming things. I did some baking as I had lemons to use up and the bananas I’d just bought had been in far to cold a place and when I got them home and they warmed up they went soft. So I now have lemon cake and banana cake. If anyone is wondering, there is no added colouring in the lemon cake, just free-ranging chicken eggs.

Time has also been spent going to the tree nursery, ordering and then two trips collecting the next batch of saplings. There are only 166 this time and I’m really hoping that having ploughed the ground I should be able to plant much more quickly than last years.

A rainy day earlier on and I decided to fit the oak workbench. It didn’t need a lot of work, battens on the wall and the other workbench cut back to give it room. Once I got started I realised that I had to cut out a section for some pipes; that was tough going, while the workbench might be made out of bits of oak, they are solid bits of oak, really tough and the bench its self is really heavy. So here’s just a selection of the tools.

The circular saw is on the floor having already trimmed most of the workbench by the sink. It could only get to about 4” from the wall, and then it was the turn of the jigsaw. That got to about an inch from the wall and then it was the handsaw. Having got that done, I set about the small cut-out for the pipes. Thankfully I had a corded drill as my battery one would never have had enough power to drill the guide hole through the worktop. The jigsaw took out the bulk but it still needed rasping and that felt like it took forever especially as despite my very careful measuring I hadn’t realised that the two walls weren’t at right angles.

Why I thought this corner would be a right angle when the other corner that gave so much problems putting up the corner cupboards wasn’t I don’t know. So a little trimming and a little bodging and it finally fitted and had its first coat of oil, just don’t ask how long it took, I really don’t want to think about that.

I Thought I Heard Rain

2009-01-23T11:27:00.002+01:00

The view is of my neighbour's field at the end of my road; maybe I should start building a boat.

Monday’s Ploughing

2009-01-14T20:43:00.005+01:00

As promised a view of the ploughing I did on Monday. The area just over half way up on the left is the extension to the wood I’m planting. The ploughing started reasonably well even though the land is clayey and still waterlogged.

As I had a row of trees planted at the top I was only ploughing down the slope, (towards the front of the shot) which was fine until the left-right slope got a little bit steeper. Then, because you plough with one set of wheels in the grove cut during the previous pass, the tractor was gradually leaning over more and more. I finally chickened out, I’ve no idea how far the tractor can tip before it does fall over but it felt uncomfortable and I didn’t want to tip over either.

I then tried ploughing at right angles so I was going up the steeper slope but the wet ground meant that it wasn’t possible to get any grip. In the end I ploughed in the original direction but instead of running the tyres in the channel I moved onto the unploughed surface by a foot or so and ploughed strips that are roughly where the trees are meant to go. That’s why the rows to the right have the appearance of raised beds, as that’s effectively what they are.

I've also ploughed a small area further down the field, middle right in the photograph, and that's where I'm planning on growing a bit of maize this year. I've sown a few kernels in the house from the bought in maize I have and a few from the maize I gathered to see if either are viable otherwise I will have to look at getting a small quantity of seed maize.

Today was a relatively lazy day – I think I find it easier to work when the moon is waxing rather than waning as it is at the moment. Most of the day was spent getting rid of various pots and pans of grease. I try not to put grease into the septic tank system so I pour into containers. When they get full I then bin it. Not the best thing for landfill but at the present I don’t know what else to do with it – it’s usually past being useful for cooking.

Final picture for today shows what happens if you forget to close the gate to the patio. At least one of the chickens though there might be something tasty in the pots.

Morning Has Broken

2009-01-13T21:50:00.004+01:00

The sunrise this morning was truly wonderful and despite the rhyme there was no rain, although we might get some overnight.

Looking to the west where the moon was setting there was a lovely pink glow on the house on the hill. Unfortunately I only realise when I downloaded the photographs this evening that it’s not possible to make out in the photograph the work I did yesterday. It seemed light enough to the naked eye but the camera thought differently and if I try changing the lightness in the photograph, the colour balance goes so I’ll photograph it again tomorrow in daylight.

Today was taken up by bill paying, ordering the next 166 trees ready for planting and buying this.

I spoke to my neighbour last week who has a mini digger and once he’s finished pruning his plum trees he’s going to come over and dig a couple of drainage ditches for me that will hopefully protect the pump house from the run-off of any deluges. This pipe is to go in where the bridge into the alpaca fields is to go. Mind you I’m reeling a bit at the price, 147€ for 6m by 30 cm. Still it’s less than the vet’s bill I paid and a lot less than the cost of the trees. I keep telling myself that these one-off spends will diminish but I’m beginning to think I’m kidding myself. There will always be something else, that’s the nature of life, isn’t it.

Time Flies

2009-01-12T18:37:00.003+01:00

I'm finding it very hard to believe but it's only two years ago today that I was leaving the UK for France. Completion on my house happened at 12:30pm and I was on the 11pm ferry to a new life. Little did I know it would be 6 more weeks before I was allowed to buy my farm but the time has passed so fast.

I think the cats have forgiven me for their one and only stay in a cattery, they were there for 10 days, the time it was supposed to take for my house money to reach the notaire but that was without the bureaucracy taking over. I could have been on my way back but thankfully everything was finally resolved.

Here's to the next two years and the ones after that too.

In The Eye Of The Beholder

2009-01-11T17:46:00.005+01:00

Some might have looked at this piece of wood in the 1€ chuck-out bin at the local bricomarche and just seen something used as a shelf with boot-marks and spilt paint on it. Along with a few other bits that I’d bought earlier from the off-cuts bin and some bits I had lying around plus an old kitchen unit front courtesy of S & P, I looked at it and saw the back and base of this.

So tomorrow my chickens will have new nest boxes. At the moment they just nest on the floor. The nest boxes that are there are too high for most of the birds and have been taken over by those that can reach them as extra perches and as such they are fouled (no pun intended). My silver-laced Wyandottes are far too heavy to get up high so I’m hopeful they will take to the new boxes and I will have clean eggs.

With these two boxes being portable it should be easy to clean them and treat them against insects.

Today has been foggy all day and there was a little frost around this morning too. I love the way the frost brings things like spiders webs into view, they are just so pretty.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

2009-01-06T19:44:00.005+01:00

I thought it was rather quiet when I woke up this morning. This was the view that greeted me on opening the shutters.

The temperature hovered between 0 and +4 during the day so most of the snow has gone wherever the sun was able to get although I still have a bit around the back of the house which is in permanent shade during the winter.

What I love about a fresh covering of snow is it lets you ‘see’ things that have happened. For instance, during the night a rodent visited the area where I feed the chickens their grain, probably looking for anything the chickens missed. How do I know? I found this lovely trail; you can even see the line where the tail went.

I’m not sure what type of rodent but looking at the trail the prints are in pairs as though the movement is a series of jumps, each set being about 5cm (about 2”) apart.

The weather people have said tonight that we are unlikely to get more snow but the temperature is due to drop to between –7 or –10°C tonight and is unlikely to go above 0°C tomorrow, so depending on how the roads look tomorrow I may go in to town tomorrow and have a look at what’s in the sales which start tomorrow.

More of the Same Monday

2009-01-05T11:59:00.000+01:00

Somehow Monday came and went almost without me noticing. I spent a bit of time clearing some of the tree however I couldn’t keep the fire going and my back hadn’t recovered overnight so I didn’t accomplish as much as I hoped.

After the animal chores I delved into the back of the barn and found the thing to take the kernels of the maize cobs.

The kernels are still a bit moist but it was surprisingly easy and quick to use although I wouldn’t want to be doing 5 hectares worth of maize! What I hadn’t realised was that the machine passes the cobs all the way round so that if it doesn’t completely strip the cobs then you can do it again and you don’t have to retrieve the stripped cobs from the collecting bin below.

I’ve quite a bit of renovating work to do on the set-up. The seat is more than a little rickety, the unit is a bit wobbly and I’m not sure how long it will stay attached to the seat before the wood it’s mounted on breaks and the handle is lose and the wooden bit of the handle very split but it will last a bit longer and then I will have to add it to the repair list.

Gleaning

2009-01-04T17:47:00.004+01:00

What a difference a day makes. From yesterdays sun and warmth to today’s gloom and cold and the temperature hovering around 1 or 2 °C. The plan had been to continue with the trees but yesterday evening I got a telephone call from Regis saying that if I wanted to go and collect some maize (corn), then today was the day.

So 10 am saw me outside Regis’s along with harvest baskets and my trailer and Regis piloted me to his friend’s field. The combine had left a single row of plants standing along one edge of the field plus it quite often pushes the plant down rather than cutting it and harvesting the cob.

Two hours later, I’m cold but I’d got about halfway down the field and had a really good haul of cobs, the bag is about a metre square and the cobs are about 4 or 5 deep I think.

Had it not been so cold I think my back would have lasted longer and I might have picked a few more but I’m really happy with what I’ve got. Tomorrow (probably), I’ll extract the cob-stripping machine that’s at the back of the barn and see if it works. The mechanical parts probably will but the wooden seat has a high chance of being totally rotten.

The actual picking of the cobs was quite easy once I got into the swing of it but it was the half stoop that strained my back. It has made me realise though that I could grow a small area of maize and be able to harvest it by hand. I’m not going to grow maize commercially as it requires irrigation and I don’t have either the water supply or the irrigation equipment but a small area left to it’s own devices is I think practical especially if I plant it at the bottom of one of the slopes to where water drains.

Continuing in the gleaning vein, Regis also gave me some empty egg boxes as the chickens are beginning to lay again plus all the oyster shells from over the holiday period - oysters are a tradition dish for Christmas and New Year here. I'm going to soak the oyster shells in a few changes of water to leach out the salt and then I'll smash them up for the chickens too - I'm nearly out of the commercially prepared oyster grit I'd bought so this is rather good timing.

Saturday’s Work

2009-01-03T23:59:00.001+01:00

As ever there are at least 101 things to be done around here so I made a start on another one of them. I need to clear the two poplar trees that were felled across the area I’m turning into the veg plot.

I’m sorting through the branches and cleaning and putting aside any wood of a suitable size to burn – of which there is not a lot really, and burning the stuff that is too small – of which there is rather a lot. Poplar isn’t a good burning wood; I’ll have to season the logs for a couple of years I think, but it also means that the brash doesn’t burn that well either.

Luckily I’d removed some old hay from the barn that the alpacas didn’t want so I could use that as a starter; due to all the seeds in it I don’t put it on the compost heap. With the hay, an old cardboard box and later on some barbeque lighting fluid and I was to keep the burn going for 3 hours. I eventually cleared the area in the foreground of the above picture plus made a start on the area behind the tree trunk that’s hidden in this photo.

It doesn’t look very much in the photograph but the trunk is over a metre in diameter and the end of the tree, that just passes the first line of posts in the distance is around 40 metres away. A bit more work needed I think.

I had my supervisor of course, Snowy was really pleased when I peeled off my shirt, yes it really was t-shirt weather in the sun yesterday, and sat on it to make sure it didn’t go anywhere. The mist in the background of the picture is in fact smoke hanging round from my fire and the cooker, there wasn’t much breeze yesterday hence the t-shirt, albeit with a thermal vest underneath.

Is It Really Winter?

2009-01-02T16:57:00.003+01:00

While letting the chickens out this morning I glanced down the little valley below me and saw the magical misty view above. I’m having great difficulty with remembering it’s the beginning of January though. Today I was out clearing a bit more of the poplar trees and had to strip down to my t-shirt. When I came in at 4 the temperature was still 12 degrees. I hope to make the most of the good weather over the next couple of days as I believe we’ve snow forecast for a few days time.

Thinking about the temperature reminds me I have a weather station to install – yet another job to add to the list but it will make it much easier in the long run to keep track of the weather. It’s not that difficult to do it’s just deciding on the best site that is within the distance to send the data back to the base station, decisions, decisions, something I’m really not good at.