This Week I Have Been Mostly Weeding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.