July 2011

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

 

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

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