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.
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!
On the night of the 23rd 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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 
