Work In Progress

 

It’s summer, it started today

On the left, the cherry vodka is starting to take on some colour. 

The blackcurrants are from friends in exchange for some cherries and are destined for blackcurrant jelly.

The little bottle has some vanilla pod in vodka.  I read a post on the Homesteading / Survivalism  Facebook page on making it and thought I’d give it a go.

And finally the bottle on the right is the start of walnut wine.  This is a wine, brandy and green walnut concoction which if left to mature turns out a bit like sweet sherry.

The Hay Harvest 2013

 

The hay has been done and is in the barn: Three days of shifting hay bales, not all mine I must add.  There are three groups of us who get our hay cut at the same time and we then help each other to bring it in and store it. 

This year I had nigh on 300 bales but not all are usable.  The weather has been strange as I’m sure I’ve previously said and for the first time since I’ve been here, there was standing water down the middle of most of my hayfield and that’s even with the hay being cut nearly a month later than usual.

But I have a hayloft full of hay, around 240 bales thanks to some wonderful friends.  All the doors are open beneath the hayloft to help make sure it stays cool and, should any of the bale be slightly damp help dry them.  The bales have been stacked no more than 4 high and only one bale wide, (across, two bales lengthwise), and a gap of 50cm between each of the stacks.  The batteries have been changed in the smoke alarms and I’m now just going to be a bit paranoid for the next month or so as the barn is part of my house and I sleep right next to the barn!

I’ve Bee-n Busy!

Sorry for the terrible pun but I just couldn’t resist it.

I’ve been taking bee-keeping lessons on and off for the last few years.  I’d finally got round to getting my hives but thought I’d missed the boat this year to go and collect a swarm.  However, I received an e-mail from a friend who said she knew of someone who had come down to a holiday home and discovered a bee’s nest between a window and its shutters and did I know of anyone who could remove it.

Well, I’d only held a frame of bees once but luckily one of the members of the local bee group I’m with, (Martyn), had been to assist in the removal of one of these nests and was eager to have a go himself.  I wanted bees so despite the distance away the bees were we decided we’d remove them.

The bees had built their combs over the handle of the shutters so we couldn’t get at the nest from the outside but the window was  really easy to get at from the inside.

We tentatively opened the window and applied some smoke.  Some of the flying bees came into the room but most of the bees remained on the comb and Martyn then cut the comb to size and detached it from the window.  We attached the comb to the frames with elastic bands and placed the combs and as many bees as we could collect into the Langstroth hive I’d brought along.  Considering we were in effect destroying their home, the bees were remarkably good tempered, something I’m really happy about.

We then had to do something we’d rather not have had to do.  We had to abandon and destroy the bees that hadn’t stayed with the comb.  Normally we would have left the hive for a day or two and collected it a following evening when hopefully most of the flying bees would have gone back onto the comb.  Unfortunately, one of the occupants of the house suffers from anaphylactic shock from bee stings and because of that we had to remove the bees as soon as possible.

But I am now a bee-keeper and there should be more bee posts to follow. 

The Living Roof

Back in 2011 I decided to put a small living roof on top of my pump-house (see here).  Since then it’s been through one ‘normal’ winter and one where the temperature dropped to –18C and two summers of drought.  This is it now:-

And best of all, it only needed a little bit of weeding during the first spring, apart from that I just leave it alone.

Mad Dogs and English Woman…

So from moaning about how cold it was to the jump from 15C to 25C, today at 18:00 the patio thermometer is registering 39C!!  To be fair the front of the house faces south and is a suntrap but…  It’s also where I’ve been working for most of the day   Lots of tea breaks required, very definitely my sort of day; and that really sums up the day too, a sort day walking things to their proper places now that the ground is dry.

Still no news on hay-making although if the weather forecast remains as given at lunchtime we could have a weather window of 4 days starting tomorrow.

Last night at the bee group I attend we had a talk on permaculture so part of this afternoon has been spent mulching the bare earth in the potager and flower beds with the excess of grass clippings I have.

An Internet search on the use of clippings seemed pretty evenly split between it being a good idea and it being a bad idea so consider it an experiment in progress.  Nature abhors a vacuum I was always taught and that’s why bare soil never stays bare for long.  The hope is that the layer of clippings will be thick enough to stop weed germination but not thick enough to turn into a slimy layer.  Hopefully too, they will also break down over the year and help improve my soil – it really needs something to improve it.

Along with the hay-making a lot of grass cutting and weeding round the house is required as you can probably tell from the picture above.  A month ago the flower bed shown was weed free and the area all round it neatly mown but with a bit of (weather) luck, by this time next week it will be again.

And The Bad News Is.

Well, we’re a week away from mid-summer and the hay is still not cut!  The weather is still weird, but I have decided to be brave and put away my winter clothes and bring out the summer ones.  The hardest thing at the moment is switching between 29C one day and 15C the next.  Goodness know what it is doing to plants; the harvest this year will really depend on the following 3 months weather.

This year the apricots have failed completely, of the 2 almonds I have, the earlier one has a little fruit while the later one has none.  The peach and the 2 nectarines have all developed leaf curl despite winter treatment but did set fruit although one of the nectarines has lost nearly all its fruit during a storm last week.

On a brighter note the quince tree looks like it has a good crop so quince jelly this year and both the wild cherries and my late cherries look to have a really good crop.

It’s the vagaries of the weather that persuaded me to try and preserve enough for 2 years when there is a glut so I still have bottled peaches and apricots in the store and some in the freezer.  If this weather weird-ing is to become the normal I think I’m going to have to think more about longer term preservation of a greater variety of fruit and veg to cope with the more erratic harvest that will occur. 

I’m also trying to move away from freezing everything but only if the alternative method tastes as good as the frozen so for instance I’ll bottle my plum tomatoes but unlike the French I won’t bottle my green beans.

So, Just How do you Make Hay when the Sun Doesn’t Shine?

 

Weather Weird-ing, I think that sums it up the best.  The Meteo service in France are telling us that the average temperature for May here is running at at least 10C down and we’ve also broken the record for rainfall too.  I can’t believe it’s almost June and I’m still filling the hot-water bottle.

Haymaking is also on hold; the grass has grown and was ready for cutting a week or so ago but the rain and the low temperature even when the sun does peek through means it’s impossible to make hay.

But the good news is that summer is supposed to start next week!