Reader…

My garden is full.

Seriously.

I have 200 metres squared of vegetable garden and there is no room left for anything else. Although it’s not full yet, it will be in a couple of weeks, and I need more space.

So…

I’m torn between adding another vegetable plot or adding raised beds.

I quite like the idea of raised beds. Less bending. Also, less digging, less turning, less weeding. I can put down a layer of weed suppressant, some newspaper and some soil, and it is done.

If I dig, I have to clear turf first, then improve the soil, then weed.

And weed.

And weed.

Of course, there are some disadvantages. Raised beds can dry out more in the summer. I’d need to mulch like crazy. It’s been nine whole days of dry weather and the soil is already too dry to dig.

Normally, too, I leave quite a bit of space between rows and crops – rather than cramming them in. I suspect a raised bed might make me put more in and be more intensive. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Plus, I won’t be able to easily fork it over in the same way. It will be harder to clear and to do with big tools. I’ll not be able to rotavate, for example.

Not that I do a lot but I like the option.

I won’t have the usual problem that some of my plants will need a deep bed, because they will always be able to go in a deep bed, but that means I’m still going to have three or four raised beds, just so that I can rotate my crops.

The logistics are a little frightening. I need more helpXrs with power tools.

I think the garden last year was further on. By the end of April, virtually all my root crops were not only in but shooting. Here it will take a little time. Luckily, rain is forecast for the weekend, and lots of it, with fairly warm temperatures. This means I don’t have to worry about watering, and everything will grow like mental.

Yesterday was a busy day. Marcus put in a row of red onions, a row of leeks, and a couple of rows of kale that have been sitting about for a while. Shannon and I planted in a load of lettuces and I got busy with the mower again. I think I need a little tractor. I’m coveting a little tractor. The things I could do with a little tractor.

I introduced them to the delights of Pan’s Labyrinth and whilst they were watching that last night, I tidied up the pots outside. I bought a couple of penstemons a couple of weeks ago and put those into my perennial bed, as well as the gladioli and a pink cactus dahlia. I noticed the monarda is going crazy and the Grande Marguerites are huge as well.

 

I think this year there will be fewer annuals in my flowerbed. I’ve planted up some of last year’s scabiosa heads which are now seeding, as well as a couple of packets of zinnia and annual poppies. Most of the flowers go as companion plants for the vegetables… marigolds, zinnia, cosmos, sunflowers. I’ve not been so successful with delphiniums and tomorrow, I am going to stop off at the nursery in Montbron and see if I can find any.

Anyway, Mme V’s daughter is taking my guests to Angoulême today to see if they can find somewhere without a goat. Having heard that there are not one but two people who walk goats through Angoulême I think their chances of leaving Charente with a vision of a rustic citidel filled with eccentric animal-walking residents imprinted on their memories is pretty high.

I’m off to check my seedlings and see that they survived their first night in the wild outdoors.

Enjoy your Wednesday!

Piégut

I took my guests to Piégut market on Wednesday. I was hoping to take them to Rouillac, but it’s on Saturday this month and that’s a long day of work for me. Plus, I’d never been to Piégut market before as I usually work on Wednesdays, so it’s not somewhere I normally get to go.

I wanted them to experience the full-on French market. I don’t know why. Bury market is pretty similar. It seems to me that markets all over the world are kind of the same. French markets, though, give you a real view of French life. None of this Amélie and Chocolat business. You can get seduced by all the Chanel adverts and classy people and think that that is what French life is like, when really, it’s about aprons and bleus de travail.

Anyway, I was hoping it would not disappoint. I do drop-offs for the magazines at the Intermarché and Sausageland and I have to say it’s not exactly the highlight of my route (well, Sausageland is great – an English butcher’s) and I get the impression it’s for people who want to say they live in the Dordogne but don’t have the money to.

But… it did me proud.

Indeed, it even showed itself in fabulous colours.

I could kind of see why people might want to live there.

Sometimes, it must be said that ‘market’ in France can comprise five wagons. One will sell meat. One will sell vegetables and fruit. One will sell fish. One will sell flowers. The other will probably sell cheese. Some ‘markets’ are smaller than that.

However, I knew the lady from Chat Noir aprons does this market, so I expected it would be bigger and brighter than I anticipated.

And it was. By a long shot.

The remnants of last year’s festival still hang over some of the square. They look less weird now that winter has gone.

Luckily, right underneath, there was a guy selling French-style tabard aprons. Just like Mrs Overall.

You can see them on the right.

There were also lots of very French-style stalls that I was glad not to have missed. There were the good things – the fruit stalls, the bakers’ stalls with their huge meringues, the butchers’ vans, the rotisserie, the plant stalls – the bad things – the huge knickers, the underpants stalls, the weird tartan slipper stalls, the old lady shoe stalls, the oilcloth stalls – and the ugly things.

I love French markets.

I’d spend all day, every day marvelling at their treasures.

As you can see, it was quite quiet. I like this. It was busy, but not too much so. Plenty of people were buying, and plenty were waiting, but there wasn’t that feeling of being cramped and unable to enjoy what there is to see.

We sat at a café and had a coffee with the rest of the English and Dutch tourists and I tried to explain how to spot English people. It was quite easy. Mostly, we talk loud, wear bad shoes and have terrible haircuts and bad teeth. Dutch people are often the tallest in the crowd. I was surprised that two elegant ladies next to us asked me to take a picture and told me they were Dutch – they had the French look down well. The non-granny look.

The rotisserie man does well – he usually had a queue of at least six people. The man with the tools got to demonstrate his arsenal at one point, complete with an oh-so-French cigarette dangling from his lips.

If I could ask for anything for American tourists to understand, it would be the French market. The towns can seem so quiet and deserted until market day. I’m not sure it was the best example, because there must have been at least two dozen Dutch and English stalls and I’m pretty sure you could get away with zero French.

Still, if anything makes France all French, it’s the fresh vegetables – all in season of course. One lady had a huge display of mandarin oranges. It’s these kind of displays that make France so very French, especially with the uber-French attachée handwriting.

Pollarded trees are a source of intrigue to my guests. I confess, it was only in 2006 that I came across pollarded trees, in Japan. I thought they were suffering from some kind of disease. However, I did see, which I had never seen before, a pollarded magnolia.

A lovely friend of mine shares my love of magnolias. In fact, she loves them more than I do, maybe. She has one in her garden that has flowered for the first time. I need a magnolia. I covet them. Mostly, I covet the old ones, but you plant magnolia for other people to enjoy. It’s kind of an altruistic plant. By the time it is magnificent, you are long dead.

It’s funny, too, because the houses seem very different than the houses around me. They are much narrower and higher, and many have the brick and stone combination. It’s very reminiscent of the houses in Royan, so I guess it’s a fashion thing.

Anyway, we stopped for a baguette and frites at a roadside truck – I was sad the market didn’t have one, and someone is obviously missing a trick – and then continued to Oradour. Honestly, it was unexpectedly hot and we were a little unprepared. Still, we lived. Though I drank a litre and a half of water in the car.

Photos of Oradour tomorrow, then.

Walkies

Yesterday’s walk was an eventful one, that’s for sure. Mr Heston found not one, not two, but three deer to chase. And, though he did not spot it, I saw a rabbit. It’s the first rabbit I’ve ever seen in the forest, and it was just hopping along up the path when I got there. Lucky Mr Rabbit managed to hop off before Heston or Tilly caught sight of him. The deer – well, they were a bit less easy to slip by.

Once or twice, I’ve seen little roe deer here. The only place I’ve seen a full-on huge stag was between Chasseneuil and La Tache – it was so big I could barely believe it was real. It had antlers and everything. The deer around here are usually only about as big as Heston, which isn’t very big at all. Sometimes, you can be forgiven for thinking it’s just a really big hare.

Yesterday, they were a lot bigger. I guess they were profiting from the early morning break in the clouds, just as I was. We don’t usually see deer – much more likely to come across a trail of wild boar. I think they too have been profiting from the hiatus in the hunt season, because there are a lot of piggy-trashings along pathways, where they’ve rooted something up.

To be fair, I’m surprised I lifted my head up long enough to see the beasts. I am much too entranced with the wild flowers at the moment. The periwinkles are now out, as are the wild primroses, and it’s all just a carpet of colour in the woods at the moment. The wild primrose are a really soft lemon compared to the cowslips, which are a rampant burst of sunshine. In places, the periwinkles are so thick that the whole woodland is lilac-blue. It’s funny to think that this burst of colour has come out of the forest ground, which was so thick with leaf detritus until just recently.

I am planning on doing a little artistic painting in the next few days – schools are on holiday and I have more time to dedicate to such things. The lovely helpxrs painted the kitchen today – or one side of it. The other side… Well, I don’t know what to do with that. It needs completely stripping back to plaster I think, and then re-doing. It might be a sledgehammer job. It’s such a mess. It’s got about 40 years of engrained dirt on it and I am not looking forward to trying to sort it out. Believe it or not but the kitchen does not have a useable power socket anywhere. What the hell is that about? How can you have a kitchen without power? I don’t even know.

At least, I didn’t.

Not until I lived here.

There’s a neck-breaking cable running from a power socket in the side of a fireplace in the dining room. I’m always finding I need a power socket next to my wood burner, aren’t you?

Just another example of the crazy fun electrics here.

I need my brother to come over for about four weeks. He’d sort it.

Anyway, although it is a little like putting make-up on a pig, the kitchen is now (partially) a cleaner, brighter space. I even have curtain ideas. Not sure how yet, but I do. One day, it will look like a cottage kitchen, instead of looking like a gas explosion happened.

 

It looks a bit like a hospital at the moment, but it won’t eventually. I have plans for it. It doesn’t help that there are those cheap and nasty tiles on the wall. I need a crash-course in tiling.

I found these photos before of what it looked like when I first signed the papers…

 

It’s funny to think of how it was and I’m pretty sure that I must have had some sort of crazy vision when I moved here, since this is what my kitchen looked like in Bolton…

 

Ahhhh…. sometimes, I think I must have been crazy.

But then, I remember all the deer and the wild boar and the sunny days… It would be fair to say that I am in a completely different world now.

Once that potager is beaten into shape, I continue not to care less about the loss of one beautiful fitted kitchen and the gain of one powerless monstrosity of a kitchen.

I miss those beautiful surfaces though.

Aspirations

Those of you who read my blog regularly know that I’m a massive fan of Mavis at 100$ a Month. I love Mavis. I love her name. I love her onesies. I love her garden.

Mavis’s blog documents her life as she and her family live off 100$ a month. Not only that, but she grew over a metric tonne of her own produce in her own back garden in Seattle. That’s over 2,000 pounds of produce, or over 1,000 kilogrammes of stuff. This year, she wants to grow even more. Oh. My. Days.

As the growing season starts, I’m kind of in a period of anxiety. The garden is a mammoth task for me, especially when I work so much and when I spend already such a lot of time walking the doglets. Sometimes, I get the urge to concrete it all over and just buy a load of carrots and stuff.

But…

That defeats the purpose.

I moved here with the dream of being more self-sufficient. I love growing stuff. I love my garden. I love the whole plot-to-pot seed-to-stew thing. I wanted to live in the countryside so I could grow my own, not so I could sit in a darkened room that is either nice and warm when it’s cold outside, or nice and cool when it’s too hot outside. The aim was that if I could grow enough stuff, I wouldn’t need to work so hard.

That’s becoming even more important. The queues in the supermarket were EPIC this afternoon. The woman right in front of me had one trolley of normal stuff and it came in at just under 200€. I reckon that’s one week’s worth of shopping for a normal family in France these days. She didn’t have loads of expensive stuff, and she did have a lot of fresh produce, but even so… 800€ a month to feed a family. It’s a lot. I know it’s not just a France thing, either (though things are sometimes disproportionately expensive here) as The Telegraph had this headline today: Waitrose says food prices are going to rise sharply. Another article said: “Rising prices will take the annual food bill for the average family to over £4,000 within a decade, up from £2,766 last year, heaping further pressure on already-stretched households.”

It makes you wonder how one family can live on 1,200€ a year, that’s £738 or 910€. Of course, Mavis has it a little easier in some respects. Firstly she gets coupons, and she is mad for couponing. Second, she lives in the land of Costco. Third, she has a supermarket that will give her out of date veg that she then recuperates. Still, she is a hardcore couponer, bargainer, barterer and gardener. And she doesn’t have animals to feed as part of that, I’d guess, since my pets and chickens cost me a whopping 60€ a month.

Still, at the moment, I am living on soup from last year’s paltry crops and I guess it will see me through to the sandwich time, round about March. I have more than enough in the freezer to give me a soup a day for a good couple of months.

Anyway, recalling that I came here to garden organically, to grow enough to eat, to live more naturally and to spend less, I am fully geared up for the coming season. I’ve got my seeds sorted.

 

I’d like to better Mavis, but having a full-time job kind of precludes me from doing that. Instead, I would like to set a yearly target of a quarter of what she grew last year. 250kg of stuff might not sound like an accomplishment, but we will see. Food is just going to get more and more expensive, and become more and more of a commodity. It’s also going to get more and more intensively-farmed. That’s not good for anyone. I’d like to make sure that I commit to bucking the trend, even on a personal level.

A lot depends, of course, on the winter. I got no fruit last year. Nada. Zip. No apples. No plums. No nectarines. No walnuts. Oh, I lie. I got some quinces (more quince jelly, anyone?) and some pears, since the secret garden is more sheltered than the main garden. It was a bad year for ratatouille veg. The onions went to seed. The tomatoes just had enough. The courgettes died in a late frost (not falling into THAT trap again) The aubergines never got enough year.

So, what does the contrary LJ plan to have growing in her garden this year?

• parsnips – because even the random French fella who came to Christmas lunch liked les panais. I have just realised I’ve got three different types of parsnip. Oh well. One of the packets is well past its sell-by date; 
• brussels sprouts – because the older I get, the more appealing these are, and I like them with butter and pine nuts;
• salsify – because I like to be contrary and grow unusual things – I have never tasted it, and it might be vile. I planted some a couple of years ago, but it didn’t grow. Rubbish.
• swede – because mashed swede is divine.
• lettuce – even though I don’t much care for it.
• kale – because I like soup. A lot.
• sweetcorn – because this is God’s gift to the vegetable garden and despite the fact I am surrounded by maize, not a stick of it is edible. It’s so rude. I never get the French. You can buy sweetcorn in cans, but not frozen, and you can’t buy it fresh, or at least I’ve never seen it.
• broccoli – for broccoli and St Agur soup. It’s not Stilton, but it will suffice. I’ve got purple and red and green.
• leeks – because homegrown leeks are the most amazing things ever. It makes shop-bought leek taste like watery, tasteless nonsense
• tomatoes. And more tomatoes. And more tomatoes.
• tabasco peppers
• cayenne peppers
• chili peppers
• pumpkins – if only because they look so damn cool in the vegetable patch!
• butternut squash – because it makes immense soup and is great roasted
• carrots – because last year’s carrots were great
• beetroot – because I can’t get enough of roasted beetroot
• aubergines – ratatouille. Just ratatouille.
• spring onions
• red cabbage – because there’s nothing nicer than pickled red cabbage with stew. There just isn’t.
• cornichons (gherkins)
• courgettes – even though I’ve still got freezer courgettes from 2 years ago
• onions – which hopefully will not go to seed this year
• garlic
• savoy cabbage – cabbage with butter. Yum.
• spring cabbage
• cherry tomatoes
• cauliflower – for the cauliflower cheese and for the cauliflower soup
• artichokes – for the blue air
• romanesco broccoli – for it is so very pretty
• peas – pea soup. Really. And pea risotto.
• broad beans – I’m currently working my way through last year’s frozen ones and they are soooooo good.
• haricot beans
• borlotti beans – for bean casseroles.

I’m sure I’ve missed some!

 

I do have a whopping great selection, but as with all seed, it’s a case of use it or lose it. I’m getting better at reclaiming seed from things, or letting a few things go to seed. Still, having spent £28 on all my vegetable seeds for this year, the cost of all these seeds is not such a big deal.

Now… to get the soil ready! You just know I’m being over-keen and there’ll be a terrible freeze like there was last year.

Harvest festival…

… was surely invented by someone who was bloody glad everything was in. I think it was just a good excuse to have a day off and a rest.

I’ve been picking all the crops from the back two patches, which looked like this first:

Just before it got really wet, it looked a bit like this:

 

I’m not going to embarrass myself by showing you what it ended up looking like, but I think there were more crops than weeds. Just. The weeds might have been higher, but I think there were fewer of them. Anyway, I’ve had about 6 kg of beetroot so far, and yesterday, I started on the carrots and onions.

Last year and the year before, carrots were a real no-go. They just wouldn’t grow. I don’t know why not. Maybe the seed was old, maybe the ground wasn’t just right, or the temperatures, or maybe a load of ants ran off with the seed. Anyhow, this was the first year of carrots.

I planted two rows of 5m. To be honest, I was a little gung-ho with the seed. I think I thought it’d just evaporate. And then I planted everything too close so I couldn’t go and thin it all out. And the carrots were plentiful but small. Lesson learned. I can grow carrots, but maybe fewer and further between!

And what started as this:

(weed included…)

ended as this:

That’s about 2/3 of one row. I got 2.5 kg of chopped, blanched carrots from them, which I’ve frozen.

I’ve also started to pull up the onions. To be honest, the onions have been temperamental. The white onions are tiny – more for pickling, I guess. The red onions went to seed. However, those that didn’t are pretty big. I’m going to make red onion marmalade today and get all of that clear before doing another run of pickled beetroot and beetroot chutney.

It’s worked well to plant the three together – they were very healthy crops and have really kept the insects away from each other. However, next year, they’ll be further apart and I’ll be able to thin out and weed between them!

I’d also planted some radish for Steve, but it never got eaten, so radish is off the list for next year, despite being so easy to grow. I don’t like it and I don’t eat it, so it’s not a hard choice. I’d planted some pak choi which got very confused about the weather, grew hardly at all, then bolted.

And despite all day of picking, digging up, washing, cooking, bottling, freezing, I needed to get the dogs out for a walk. I went a new route yesterday and it was a very good walk for blackberrying. Where I might not have plums or cherries, I have hedgerows full of blackberries. Swings and roundabouts.

I think you have to be philosophical about these things. It’s not been a brilliant year for some things, but then I’ve hardly had to water anything and I have a freezer full of broad beans, peas, borlotti beans, carrots and beetroot where last year I didn’t have much of any of these.

Today will be about clearing the decks before the pears get picked. Might leave the quince a little longer. They’re small this year, which is weird given how much rain we had. I thought rain would make them massive! Clearly not!

I’m hoping for 6 kg of carrots, another batch of beetroot chutney and pickled beetroot, a few jars of red onion marmalade, a couple of jars of pickled onions and a few borlotti beans today.

Still, despite the fact it’s been long days of preparation for the future, walking the dogs is always such a simple pleasure. Tilly is fab on walks, despite the barking. Heston is great too, though he gets nervous. He needs some walks without Tilly barking at every dog, or else he’s going to bark at every dog and be a pain.

The fields are mostly empty now, but for maize and sunflowers. Most of the sunflowers are past their prime, but I came across these few still holding their heads up for more sunshine

 

What’s not to love about sunflowers? They surely are the smiliest flowers of all.

And a shot of Tilly Wiggle’s bum heading off up the lane, and Heston. You can see how tall Heston is now. He’s going to be a big boy!

He’s all legs at the moment. At least now his tail isn’t longer than his legs and body! He was all tail a couple of weeks ago. He can now hop up onto the couch and the chair and sits there looking proud and naughty at the same time. I don’t know why he looks naughty. Tilly sits wherever she likes and often sits at the table outside with us as we eat lunch. I know it’s not a good habit to have, but she’s so goddamn cute. She’s snoring like mad today. She’s already had a good play with Heston, playing which is becoming more and more boisterous. I think a little boy dog somewhere in my house needs to learn some play restraint, otherwise there will be tears before bedtime.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Where the wild things are…

… is generally queuing up outside my kitchen window of an evening, treating us like some kind of beastie Truman Show or Big Brother. We’re quite the centre of attention around these parts.

Beastie number 1, identified by myself, is the Giant Peacock Moth.

This beast, with its huge wingspan (look at the 2€ coin for comparison!) was at least as big as my hand. Find out more about these beasties at the most excellent Days on the Claise blog.

Giant Peacock moth

Took me about 20 minutes of research to find it, and then I found it in the old posts of Days on the Claise, which I follow vociferously. I am a very amateur identifier of flora, fauna and insect life, but I’m keen to learn. I want to know what’s out there watching me.

The second beastie was much more difficult to identify. Steve said there was a beast at the window with huge eyelashes. I thought he was joking, like we say a spider is so big we can see its hairy legs.

No.

It really did look like it’d raided my make-up box and stolen my falsies.

What big eyelashes you have…

This strange looking beastie was identified by my lovely friend Liz, who should have been studying but released her amateur entomologist and found it on the Internet. I believe it’s a male May beetle  or cockchafer (I’ve just released my inner Finbarr Saunders) – known in France as le hanneton apparently – and with its love of big eyelashes, it kind of puts Eddie Izzard to shame. My funny tranny beetle.

At first, I thought it was a variegated June bug – but they’re a New World thing, so this little fella seems like my best guess, being found in France. I looked at a couple of other species, but they were either speckled and more black. It’s just a common cockchafer.

However, these beasts eat plant roots like nobody’s business and are considered a pest, which is a shame because it’s very, very beautiful. They live in cycles of three or four years, so you only see them every so often.

I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, and I’ll update accordingly!

To Butlins or not to Butlins?

I’m foregoing Top Ten Tuesday til later in the week because I’ve got more pressing things to show you.

A few weeks ago, on a cold, wet, miserable day, I started to imagine what I could do with a little bit of land I have in the courtyard.

It’s a bare bit of land with conifers on one side, the peach tree at the back and a lovely flowering currant Ribes King Edward VII and a viburnum ‘Snowball‘. There are sometimes some nettles and some hollyhocks and in the winter, there were quite a few mushrooms. The outpipe for the bath runs underneath this plot, and at some point there was a tree here too – now just a stump. I’ve said before that the garden is a very functional thing here – we have a few no-maintenance or low-maintenance shrubs left by Madame A, but essentially, if it doesn’t produce something or need very little maintenance, it’s not got a place in the garden.

The space looked like this when we moved in:

Two years ago!

What there was once…

And this is what it looked like a month ago – before Steve got giddy with the rotavator

I had a bit of a plan about what I wanted – a kind of spiral/keyhole shape that goes up higher in the middle.

A bit of a sketch

I’d started planting out what I wanted in the plot – a mixture of herbacious perennials and annuals – and I’d bought a couple that it was harder to find seeds for here in France, or that were part of our local pepinière’s 5 for 10€ deal. Not much has changed, except I’ve added a space for delphiniums and lupins.

So… what’s in it?

Pinterest board

• campanula
• calendula
• zinnia
• french marigolds
• limonium
• immortelles
• marguerites
• monarda
• rudbeckia
• coleopsis
• dicentra bleeding heart
• dahlia
• aquilegia

And this is what it looks like now… of course, there’s a lot of growing still to do!

What it looks like now…

Now, I had a great idea. I like plant markers very much, on account of I often forget where things are and what they are. I decided I was going to make little rustic bunting-style flags with the name of the plant on it in permanent marker, tied with gardening twine.

Flags…

However, this is the source of consternation. Steve liked the bed idea and followed my instructions to the letter as to how to make it. He shifted all the grass and put down the weed suppressing carpet of newspaper, then the top soil. He liked the plant arrangement.

He doesn’t like the flags. Apparently, hate is too strong a word and he feels the same about these flags as he does about kidney beans. He laughed at the flags, though, and gave them a 2 out of 10. He said it made the garden look like Butlins.

I obviously DON’T think they make it look like Butlins. I think they are cool.

He also is taking far more of the credit than he should. He compared himself to Michelangelo and said that just because I came up with the idea doesn’t mean that I could execute it (I hasten to add, I did the actual picking, growing and planting and he moved some soil and put in the border) and he has laughed at my attempts.

This aside, I would like to thank him for his realisation of the foundation of my border.

Now all I have to do is get Noireau to realise it’s not a nice, plush outdoor toilet and convince a few people that the flags are a great, inspired idea!

A certain friend may find herself abandoned at the airport with her children when she turns up here for her summer trip unless she admits that they DON’T look like washing on a line and that people just don’t have knickers that look like this.

A tale of Jeremy Fisher and a swarm of honey bees

With the weather as it is, it’s a struggle to find stuff to do. It’s too wet to garden, too wet to plant things out. I mowed on Monday, but by Tuesday it was too wet again. About the only excitement around this end is the fact we had a bee swarm form.

It was really cool watching it – it kind of hung, suspended – and grew and grew. When it got very heavy, it dropped off the branch onto the branch below.

I was worried first that they were Asian hornets – they’re an invasive, murdering species of hornet that kill honey bees, adding to the honey bee plight. I don’t know much about insects at all, I confess, and it’s all a learning curve. It says, for instance, on loads of sites, that they are easily recognisable. Not so for me. I can tell the difference between a fat little bumble bee and a wasp, but that’s about it.

Anyway, I contacted Kathryn, my fabulous friend who knows just about everything there is to know about stuff. If something’s happening around here, Kathryn knows. Her husband, Jon, is a keen beekeeper and they have a bee blog too.

She knew immediately that they were bees, even from my rubbish description of their swarming. I don’t really care except to know that bees are all good and under threat and Asian hornets are like nasty little mass murderers and if they were Asian hornets, it would be a good idea to practise some extermination to get even. I’m not sure I like meddling with Mother Nature – but since they’re an introduced species, I feel a little compelled to save the native. Plus we all know bees are under threat.

Jon was worried that they might die, since it rained really heavily yesterday and they weren’t at all sheltered. The weather must be really throwing them. Between me telling Kathryn and me talking to Jon, there were only about a third left. By early evening, there was a very small cluster left.

The few remaining bees

Today, however, there has been a real surge in activity. I think they’ve taken up life in the old chicken house. This old gatepost is rotten and holey, so it’s a fine place for a few bees, but not so for a lot of them. The chicken house is bee-friendly and with all the wildlife in our garden, it’s not a bad place, though I can’t imagine there’s much to occupy them right here. All the more reason for more flowers. I know Madame A practised the ‘functional’ garden with only fruit trees and a vegetable garden, and grass (and dandelions) but this year is definitely ‘the year of the flower’ in my garden. And now I have a reason for it – being bee friendly.

I’ve got several bee-friendly plants to get going (though none have flowered yet) and perennials are my favourites anyway – annuals, though beautiful, are such hard work – and the only annuals I grow are as companion plants for the vegetables.

We don’t garden with chemicals here. Our nettle supplement is about as chemical as we get. Manure, nettle fertiliser – that’s it. I practise companion planting and crop rotation (who said I’d remember nothing from GCSE History?!) and I always plant extra stuff in case it goes the way of the slug or the ant. Mind you, this year, I am taking no prisoners concerning the sweetcorn. The birds got to it way before we did and this year, they’re having none of it.

Of course, though, we have a perennially-flowering garden from February to October. From cherries, plums and apples through to stinging nettles, clover, poppies and thyme, we have a lot to encourage wildlife. And more will follow.

I quite like the idea of being a little wildlife sanctuary! The reason for this is simple: Mother Nature is brilliant. Today, I was filling up the chickens’ water bowl, only to see a little froggie taking his place in the water. I suspected he was trapped because it’s not easy to get out of a slippery thing, so I tipped him out and he hopped off.

Jeremy Fisher

Anyway, from tomorrow, the weather is brightening up a little. Our puits are now about a metre below where they were – the water table is dropping quickly. I’ve still a gazillion things to get planted out – broccoli, leeks, cabbage, tomatoes, aubergines. I thought I’d planted some peppers – quite clearly not. Last year, the peppers were unproductive, and I wanted loads this year, but I fear I am too late. After the remaining vegetables, it’ll be the flowers – and hopefully, by summer, we’ll have had enough of this lovely water we’ve been having so much of recently, and a lot of sun too.

After the rain has gone…

There’s such a lot to catch up on since we’ve had such severe weather so far this year. The snow put everything in the garden on hold for three weeks and then this rain has kept us inside for another three. It seemed like March had woken up after the snows melted, but then there we were in temperatures colder than November and December with loads of rain – and not that it was unwelcome, but it was so cold, too. That means there’s six weeks of gardening to deal with – and admittedly not much grew in the snow, not the same in the rain and the cold, so I’m off out to try and get the lawnmower started. The little primer button has popped, and since it works on suction, it doesn’t work and therefore the mower is hard to start. Not only that, but the blade is knackered. It’ll do.

I sense a new mower is on the horizon – a bit of a pisser because we’ve only had it two years, and to have a blade that’s almost unrecognisable, as well as a burst primer – and it wasn’t cheap, as little in France is, unless it’s the world around you. I get the sense Sarkozy would tax you for that, if he could. I’m still reeling from my tax bill. Ironically, despite the fact that I earn so little, I still pay the same amount of income tax as someone earning a lot more.

And so the more you can enjoy in this place for free – the friendship, the sunshine (albeit a little later than expected), the vegetables, the hedgerow harvest – and the more you can make do and mend, the better.

The bottom of the garden is still under water – the stream that comes through is back – though it’s sitting water, not moving. It’s only run-off from the road, thankfully, and not from the Tardoire. Whilst I’m hoping all the rain has flushed the pollution away, I wouldn’t want any of the animals going in it. So although the field across from us is not flooded, the area under the troll bridge is a quagmire.

The water comes all the way up to the fourth vine row (I know… that’s a lot of vines) and beyond. I was mowing before and realised it actually goes all the way around the edge of the ‘lawn’. ‘Lawn’ is a loose way of referring to the very abundant dandelion bed. It’s no lawn as I know. Anyway… I’m wondering if our puits have filled up. I’m out to look after. These puits – for those of you who don’t know – is a hole. Well holes and the likes.

Now you have to declare your puits to your mairie – presumably so they can be taxed, I’d guess. Nobody wants you getting free water! They say it’s to do with water cleanliness, as I guess it is, but it’s a good way to ensure you have to buy all your water from the state.

I shall not be drinking this water, just so you know.

The dogs had a little paddle – Tilly loves getting her feet wet – but it wasn’t for Noireau. He still follows me around the garden like a little shadow.

For a rescue cat, he is very content. He will sit on my knee for hours upon end and wouldn’t move. He sleeps between me and Molly right now – sometimes on Molly, and sometimes on me. Tilly’s having issues. Bless her. She also found a bone that Molly had brought back from a walk ages ago. It looks like a cow bone – it’s huge. But she dragged it up to the house – it was seriously how I imagine dragging those stones in Stone Henge might have been – she’s a very tenacious little dog. And now the bone is in her bed and she is growling at anyone who comes near and might want to steal her dirty big dinosaur bone. Nobody does, but that doesn’t matter.

The next jobs on the agenda are to paint the toilet doors – they’re still brown, when the rest of the lean-to is now white and orange – and then to mow the area around the vegetable patch. I need to plant stuff out but I suspect the soil is still too damp. It looks like we’ve got a few colder days next week, and some rain, but nothing like we’ve had.

After that, the never-ending tasks of spring and summer can begin! I needed to cut my path through first, though, otherwise I’d have been wading through grass and heaven only knows what else.

Moll and Tilly enjoying the dandelions

And finally… a passage through the wilderness…

It's like parting the red sea, except harder

Hailstones and grey skies

This weather is hard work. I’ve got stuff queuing up to be planted out, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I was bored on Thursday – restless. I wanted to get outside. We don’t have television – only DVDs and downloads, and so there’s no opportunity to get lost in MTV when I feel a bit restless. I make no apologies for being hypnotised by MTV. It’s very soothing. It’s like sticking a baby in front of a washing machine. But No TV, no MTV.

But it was so very foul I didn’t want to go outside. I daren’t plant anything out. Most of the painting was outside and I was teaching in the evening, so I didn’t want to get messy and start painting the kitchen. Plus, I was just feeling plain irritable. I just want to get out of cardigans and jumpers – but it seems like this weather is lasting until at least the middle of next week. I even got my hot water bottle out again. It’s the middle of April!

Anyway, it was nice to have a break from the routine, the dirt, the seeds, the planting, and get a little glammed up. Well, a bit. I went out for lunch yesterday. I love going to lunch. It feels so much more interesting than going for tea. If you go for lunch, it’s like you can still go out for tea as well. In fact, I did. We went to a fabulous little restaurant on the bank of the Charente at Chateauneuf-sur-Charente. It was amazing. The food was wonderful – I judge everything by Le Cheval Blanc in Luxé which is superb – and whilst it wasn’t right up there, it was definitely on a par with a few others I’ve been to, like Le Vieux Moulin at Chabanais. And for 16.50€ for wine, apéros, coffee and a three-course meal, you can’t go wrong. The Cheval Blanc is 19€ for a five course lunch and if I could and I didn’t get massively fat, I’d eat lunch there every single day.

I’m not sure where I stand on lunch. I don’t eat much in the morning and I only usually have a sandwich for lunch, so a proper lunch always puts me in a food coma. Luckily, that didn’t happen yesterday. I managed to keep up my end of the conversation.

What I mostly like about it (apart from sitting next to lovely ladies) is that it’s so anti Samantha Brick. If you recall, Sam Brick is the somewhat controversial lady who wrote a column about how she has no female friends because she’s beautiful and therefore everyone hates her. We must have been at the ugly table then, because all the women there were delightfully non-bitchy. Funny, since I’ve not seen so many glam women for a while – but then again, I’m not used to seeing made-up faces. The lunch party really was super-glamorous. I’d worn jeans and I felt a little under-glam, although I confess I’d put my make-up on. Like I said before, confidence and happiness are the two things that make a woman beautiful, and the company certainly was that.

I also would like to hold my hand up and say I put a bit of a foot in it – well, a toe, maybe – with a ‘friend’ of Mrs. Brick’s. I know. I thought she said all the women she knew hated her….

Anyway, this person had posted a link to a follow-up article of Mrs. Brick’s, in which she says out of the five English couples who arrived in her village at the same time as her, only her marriage is strong and all the rest have fallen apart. Mostly, she seems to blame this on their lack-of-preparedness for French (country) life. I thought she was very remiss in not shouldering some of the blame herself, since apparently, ALL men fancy her and therefore that must surely cause a lot of marital distress. I like how she left out the unnecessary explanation that no man in his right mind would leave her. To be fair, the article wasn’t that outrageous, even if one of her ‘sources’ was her husband. But I accidentally looked through her back issue articles, I realised she’s one of those ‘anti-women’ who hate women and blame them for everything wrong in their life.

Now, that, I can’t stand. As if I hadn’t got enough of this picture before, here she is in all her full-fledged mean-ness and misery. Women are the reason her business failed. Women hate her. She has no friends.

What I dislike is that I’m only one generation up from Women’s Lib. It’s not even 100 years ago that women in England got the vote (and the same for a lot of men, I know) and I am proud I went to a school where girls did physics and chemistry alongside biology (having worked with a science consultant, I know how few female physics teachers there are – so I feel a little privileged that my school had three…) and where no career option was out-of-bounds. I am proud that it made us all amazing, unconstrained women who never felt that they should do domestic science instead of electronics. We had this bus that came round  - the WISE bus – women in science and engineering – and it never even crossed our tiny minds that women wouldn’t have careers in science or engineering. I think it made us great women, not having boys in class. We lived in a world of women who were glamorous and educated and worldy-wise. And yes, we bitched. We bitched and we fell out. Girls do that. Boys do too. But I’m immensely proud of being a woman, and I’ve got a strong sense of sisterhood. My sisters, even those from another mother, are the biggest part of my life.

So I’m pretty glad I come here and I see amazing women doing amazing things – not least of which is bringing up a family – not unlike herding cats at some times, and not unlike soothing angry tigers at others – running businesses, doing everything with flair and a bit of wow! And I remember that I grew up in a time where most mums I knew stayed at home and didn’t have careers and only worked if they had to, or had ‘little’ jobs in shops or hair salons, in offices or as secretaries. I’m only one generation out of oppression – I’ve never known inequality because I’m a woman. Nobody ever paid me less, or asked me if I planned to get pregnant in a job interview (well, not getting pregnant IN the interview… some time afterwards) but I remember wondering if it would be appropriate to wear trousers to a job interview.

So I don’t really care if my mutual acquaintance tells Mrs. Brick I disagree with her, or if Mrs Brick sees my comments on her friend’s page (I was very diplomatic, too! I said I thought the article was quite sensible, despite my feelings about the author…) and if this mutual acquaintance can get past her jealousy of Samantha Brick’s beauty, then maybe there’s hope for us all. I don’t think I would like to be friends with a woman who admits her husband would divorce her if she got fat. I think I’d want to tell her to divorce the husband for being an idiot. He bought her an exercise bike and she took to it. I’d punch that husband and then run away. I hope all my friends would too.

Maybe I should have a little test to carry around with me, just so my new acquaintances can fill it in.

Would you be with a man who’d dump you if you got fat?

Y?

N?

Then I can decide whether they’re good people to be friends with. Anyway, none of the women I was with yesterday would have ticked the Y button, and that’s a good job because that food was delicious and I’d rather eat lovely lemon curd cheesecake than be a size 8, and I think the women with me would agree on the same thing – skinny as some of them are!

And that’s what I liked best about yesterday. The sisterhood. And we’re funny and wise and smart and cool and we make a lot of noise. But that’s the fun of it. I think I love France more and more, the more ladies I meet like these!