Up and at ‘em

Surprisingly, the only thing that seems like it’s growing at the moment is grass. My baby plants are doing well though, but I’ve not planted many out yet. I’m far too afraid of frost, since there was one only 8 days ago. I suspect this week will see a lot more going in, especially when it’s a bank holiday week as well. I’m pretty sure there will not be another frost, since we are only eleven days away from the last frosts recorded in France.

Yesterday, I put in another row of red onions and some Swiss chard.

The ‘brassica’ bed has now got cauliflower, kale, Swiss chard and onions in it. Today, I’m going to put another row of onions in and then the Savoy cabbage and red cabbage. There are two rows of kale down now – I figure if I have too much, I can always give it to my kale-mad friends. It’s like a kind of kale fetish round here. I guess it’s a superfood with lots of positive habits concerning your insides. It’s also great as part of a detox diet.

In the main root crop bed, the beetroot are beginning to show their first leaves and the Brussels sprouts that Marcus transplanted are doing fine. I pickled a lot of beetroot last year and the vinegar was sharp enough to set your teeth on edge. I need some more gentle vinegar this year. I think I used cider vinegar, but it is so harsh it makes me cry when I eat them.

The baby leeks still look like small blades of accidental grass. There’s kale in there too that was transplanted. The other seeds and onion sets haven’t put in an appearance yet, but I guess they will soon. It’s been damp and warm – the best combination.

The potatoes have now all but broken through the soil and I’m going to earth them up today. In the bean patch, I’ve been putting lettuce seedlings in but the beans are a little disappointing this year. Funny that last year was such a bumper crop. It was so cold so long that even the broad beans didn’t fancy it. The runner beans I started off in pots however… wow! They’ll be ready to go out in the next couple of days. I staked them already and they are HHHHYYYYYUUUUGGGGE. I’ve made hazel trellises for them to grow up, but I seriously forgot how massive they get. I’ve got some hazel and willow that I’ve coppiced and I’m planning on building a couple of raised beds with them. I stole had an idea that will mean I can use more portable beds to house all the big things that take up a lot of space. I’ve also got to get a handle on some weed suppressant – I spend far too long on everything besides the vegetable plots.

A lot of the raised beds on the internet are just not very big. They’re more like big planters. That seems like too small a space to me. I need B-I-G! Today I’m going to plan out a quick bed and have done. It’s getting a bit crowded around there, but I need somewhere near the water, because there’s nothing worse than trekking miles up the garden with a watering can, like Jean de Florette. In fact, I’ve had a good idea as I’m writing and I will see how I get on with it.

Today, I’ll also be putting down some more seed – parsnip this time – and planting up my geraniums. I had cuttings from last year and I’ve put them all in pink pots. Nothing says summer to me like geraniums. It’s a lot cooler today, so I should be able to get more done. I did a bit on the big patch that’s going to have all the summer crops – tomatoes, aubergines and peppers – but I need to crack on with it.

Hope your day is as productive as I need mine to be!

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!

Where it’s at

With massive thanks to my lovely helpers, the garden is finally coming under control. We’ve dug, we’ve weeded, we’ve hoed, we’ve raked, we’ve forked, we’ve mowed, we’ve pruned and we’ve strimmed. We’ve planted and seeded and re-potted. Virtually everything that needs to blossom has blossomed.

Not only that, it’s been a good year for blossom. Let’s hope it’s a good year for fruit. I didn’t get a single cherry last year, or even a plum.

The apple trees have now blossomed too – so that’s it for this year, blossom-wise.

The soil is now too dry to dig well – no rain predicted until the weekend.

So, what is up and what is in?

• Gardener’s Delight tomatoes
• Super Marmande tomatoes
• Alicante tomatoes
• Super Roma tomatoes
• cauliflower ‘merveille de quatre saisons’
• musselburgh leeks
• Autumn Giant leeks
• kale
• sweet banana pepper
• Rachel’s cauliflower seeds that I can’t remember the name of
• cheap aubergines
• expensive aubergines
• savoy cabbage
• oak-leaf lettuce
• red lettuce
• brussels sprouts
• basil
• red cabbage
• Webbs lettuce
• tabasco pepper
• poppies
• broccoli
• cucumber
• more lettuce
• pumpkins
• courgettes
• Reine Marguerite
• sunflowers
• soucis
• cornichons
• prairie fire pepper

We’ve also planted two rows of carrots, put the onions in, planted the leeks out, put in the organic beetroot. Today, we’ll be finishing off the big patch and planting in some more stuff. It’s a frenzy at the moment!

I’ve put in two different carrots so far, though I might plant another row as well because I have an abundance of carrot seed.

The first one to go in was a gift from my friend Rachel; She got me a packet of ‘atomic red’ carrots that look a little like this…

This is from a cute blog I just found and I’m now following… She says it was the largest carrot she got from her raised beds. It looks pretty damn fine to me. It does look like it’s been accidentally cross-processed in exposure, so I am looking forward to this one! They’ve gone in next to the onions, as the onions seem to keep carrot fly away. On the other side of it are my little baby leeks; they are tiny little strands of grass at the moment. The carrots should be ready by the end of July. I’d kind of liked to have planted them when it was cooler, but the weather put paid to that, with such a cold spring. Hard to believe that three weeks ago, it was 4°C all day.

That’s something I don’t know for sure, but it does seem that my carrots did remarkably well last year.

The other is just a straightforward row of carrots next to my beans. The seed is quite old though, so I don’t know if I’ll have any luck. In the past, the only carrots I’ve had that were viable were packets of seed that were less than a couple of years old. Nothing like this palm that sprouted from a 2,000 year old seed!

Today, I’m putting in my lettuces and putting sunflowers around the bean beds. I’m mostly impressed by my runner beans, as I repotted them on Sunday and they’ve already shot up even further. They are growing at least three or four inches a day. It’s overcast today, so it’s a good day for seedlings to go in and get bedded in.

Last week, I harvested 3kg of sprouting broccoli. I’m still laughing at those things that say it is a six-month crop, because it was a good 12-month crop.

That means, from my 250kg total target, I have only 247kg to go! Yay! You might laugh, but if I can’t get 10kg cherries, 10kg plums, 10kg apples, 10kg pears and 10kg quinces, I’ll be mad. I’ll shake my fist at that there garden and threaten to burn it. I should get a good 30kg of grapes as well.

Anyway, I better scoot. I’ve still got fifty million things to do out there, and school starts again next Monday…

Come on Spring, where are you?

First, I need to confirm that I did in fact see The Brotherhood of Man. I was three. It was my Auntie Pauline’s birthday. We were in Torquay and they were playing in a hotel, so we did have a meal. Not only did I see them, but they got me up on stage to sing to me. She did not confirm, however, that there was chicken-in-a-basket.

There you are.

My nana just phoned to confirm that it did really happen and it wasn’t some weird sequin-induced euro-dream.

Early claims to fame.

Despite the cold snap today, I realised that things have actually blossomed a little earlier than last year. The forsythia by my window is just bursting into flower and there are lots of daffodils already in the polytunnel. The plum has yet to blossom though and that is usually one of the first trees to burst into bud. I can tell that it is close. I am just desperately hoping that the cold snap doesn’t kill off my cherries. I love my cherry tree and cherry picking is the highlight of the season for me.

I confess, though, the rickety home-made ladders are not exactly my cup of tea.

Ambulance for one?

So what is up this week, and what is not?

So far I have…

• Gardener’s Delight tomatoes
• Super Marmande tomatoes
• Alicante tomatoes
• Super Roma tomatoes
• cauliflower ‘merveille de quatre saisons’
• musselburgh leeks
• Autumn Giant leeks
• kale
• sweet banana pepper
• Rachel’s cauliflower seeds that I can’t remember the name of
• cheap aubergines
• expensive aubergines

This week, I have added savoy cabbage and today I’m going hell for leather with some planting to get my garden into gear. They might all only be tiny seedlings on the windowsill in the lean-to as yet, but they’re just biding their time. Maybe I should do a time lapse video for the season? It seems to grow and be over so very, very quickly. Stuff that goes in in April is out by September at the latest. You realise how short the growing year actually is. Except my broccoli. That’s still out there. I’m still waiting. All leaves and no florets as far as I can see.

I even mowed part of the garden on Saturday – though my neighbour shook his finger at me. Obviously he didn’t think it was time. Bah. At least my courtyard looks a little more presentable than it did.

Today is my big gardening day and I’ve got a good few things to get in. The things that are in the propagator are ready to move out and new stuff to move in.

So, what will I be putting in there next?

Tabasco peppers for a start. Then some flowers. I’m a little late with them. I got some packs of Busy Lizzies and some Mexican sunflowers that look a bit like asters if you ask me, but who am I to quibble?

Then it’s the herbs that need to get a move on. I can’t believe I haven’t got any basil in yet because mozzarella, basil and big beefsteak tomatoes are just about my favourite combos.

I think today will be a potting day rather than a digging day – the weather is supposed to be very cold. I believe there’s been all kinds of snow chaos further up north, but nothing here yet. Mostly, we shall be trying to keep fingers and paws warm. We went out for a long walk this morning, saw a few wild boar trotting through the forest, a couple of pheasant and the first wild primrose in bloom.

I am just considering the cold weather and thinking. Perhaps I should plant some extra peppers and then I could warm myself up with my own tabasco sauce. Considering you really only need cider vinegar and a whole heap of tabasco peppers, it sounds pretty straightforward to me.

By this time last year, I had got a few rows of beetroot and carrot out – not this year. I’m a little behind. Nevertheless, they should be in by the end of the month, I hope. I just can’t get enough homegrown beetroot. Brassicas and root vegetables – I’m hard pressed to find ones I don’t like.

So come on Spring. Get a move on. I’m tired of waiting for you.

Houston, we have evening 2013

I’m such a daylight-lover that not having an evening really depresses me. Going from light to dark with ne’er a goodbye is just something very sad. I love that time when everything slows down and the sun melts into the horizon. It’s the first sign to me that the Winter is dead. You can actually do productive stuff without feeling like you should be in bed. Having the shutters still open at 6pm – delicious.

Not only that, but there’s actually another joyous little ray of light (no, not Madonna) coming into my life every day. I usually wake up about 6.30ish. I don’t know whether it’s me waking Heston up or him waking me up, but as soon as I’m conscious, I’m conscious of a warm breath right near my face. The room is pitch black – the shutters see to that – so the only way I know it’s nearly morning is Heston’s dog breath. Tilly would sleep all day I think. She snores right through even when I’m properly awake. However, I think that there’s something nice creeping into the bedroom – a little ray of light under the door each morning. It is wonderful to open the bedroom and see that the sun is beginning to lighten the world a little. Some days I think I just fester in darkness. It’s too cold to open shutters and opening them from 9am – 3am is so pointless that most of my village don’t bother. I don’t really either. This year has been one of the darkest winters for ages, apparently. It certainly felt like it. There certainly didn’t seem to be as many of those bright and frosty days as there have been in the past here.

It was that grim, it was almost Mancunian.

Sorry Manchester.

It’s true though.

So, to have an evening, to have long sunsets, to have mornings where it seems to take a while for the sun to break through the haze, it’s all good. Yesterday, the sun was so bright that I could barely see when walking the dogs.

However, how quickly we forget the grievances of warm weather. A fly came in the house yesterday. It really pissed me off. Can’t I have one day where I open the windows and a beast comes in?! Plus, I can’t leave windows open as the chickens fly in. Maybe I need nets over the windows? The flies are quickly dealt with by the uber-efficient Catch strips which are deeply unpleasant but highly effective. The chickens, not so much. They come in for the dog biscuits, as far as I can see.

Cheeky chickens.

They’re back at full lay now, and how lovely it is to be able to give away eggs to friends. I have more friends than eggs, however, so I have to kind of portion them about wherever I’m going if I’ve got spares.

The chickens like the evenings as well; they sit on the windowsill sunbathing and cuddling. It’s kind of sweet. I like peaceful evenings like that.

It’s nice too, since most evenings I teach from 4pm-late, depending on what day it is. It’s nice to finish and have a little left over and still feel like I could do something if I wanted to. I don’t really, since I’m usually worn out, but it’s nice to be able to think I could if I wanted to.

And, just because I knew I’d had this reflection before, I went looking for it. Indeed, on March 9 2011, I realised I felt just as excited about the oncoming evening. I should bookmark the post for the middle of winter when it seems like the days will never brighten up. Still, the last time the sun got up so early was September, and the last time it went to bed so late was the end of October.

I’m obviously going to have to control myself or else I’ll be breaking out into song here and there.

But I don’t care. I’ve waited a long time to see the sun get so warm (it’s three whole months since it was so warm in the day! We had two days in mid-November that crossed the 15° mark).

So, today I am breaking out the big guns. It’s rotavator time! After that, all hell breaks loose in a frenzy of planting and crazy gardening chaos.

I’m going to enjoy the quiet before the vegetation storm while I can!

Finding your purpose

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget who you are in life, or what you want out of it. In amidst the wind and cold and rain, with a few seedlings here and there, it’s easy to long for central heating. Sometimes, when I’m dripping with sweat, wondering why the hell I wanted to plant 10kg of carrots, the first thought that comes to mind is “I could buy these in the supermarket for 10€.”

And then, something happens to remind you why you do what you do.

That thing for me was the horsemeat scandal. It’s not the horsemeat per se that is the problem. It could be human for all I care.

It’s the fact that we have no idea at all about what goes into most of our food and what processes are used to make it.

And that was one of the reasons I wanted to be much more self sufficient and have myself a hard-work acre of land in France.

For many years, I was a vegetarian. I am a child of the Eighties: a teenager who hung around in radical bookshops in Brixton, a girl who was brought up in the socialist heartlands of the North, a student of Marx and Engels, a member of Greenpeace and every other reactionary agency that I could find to join as a young radical. I am little other than the product of a Thatcherite Britain, a girl brought up with a ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ canvas bag that she used to cart books to and from the library. Call it middle-class white girl angst. Forget Catholicism. The Eighties did a good job of making me feel guilty about the state of the world.

In my little hometown, a couple of animal rights organisations used to leaflet outside a row of shops. I picked up a few from various agencies, opening my eyes to battery farms, intensive milk production, the fur trade. Don’t even get me started on all the hormones and chemicals pumped in to animals to keep them ‘healthy’ and fatten them up. It’s like BSE and CJD never happened – most of the food industry carry on, blithely feeding the public exactly what we ask for.

And that’s one of the reasons I’m here, trying to do just a little less damage and live a less greedy lifestyle. I was moaning about not having central heating yesterday, but today I’ve remembered one of the reasons I like wood is that it’s carbon neutral (though, okay, I burn through a few litres of petrol cutting it!) and I can be proud of my ridiculous electric bill. I was only just thinking of installing a small solar charger in the lean-to so that I can charge my laptop and camera free of charge.

And that’s why I moved here. I moved here because I want to eat better food. I want to eat crops that have been cared for and nurtured, and that care is the reason they taste good, not because I’ve pumped them full of water and fertilisers. I want to know my apples aren’t covered in pesticides, that my cucumber isn’t full of e-coli. I wanted to be able to add more of my own home-grown stuff to my diet.

If I had it all my way, and if I had the skill, I’d eat only stuff that came off my own land. Not like that family they found in Siberia who lived in a dark, smoky hut and nurtured their only blade of rye, living in isolation for 50 years. I don’t think self sufficiency should be that hard, or that total.

However, if we all ate a little less meat, if our fields weren’t needed to feed cattle, then there would be more to go around. It seems silly to me that we expect meat prices to be low when it’s really such an expensive commodity. It reminds me of the imported cherries I saw in Japan that worked out at £40 a kilo. Things should be expensive if they have a big carbon footprint or are expensive to produce.

But as the world’s population grows, it’s inevitable that there will be more famine, as land is misused for cattle fodder, and that prices should go up. It can’t go on forever, this have and have not mentality. The group of people who have access to meat and expensive foodstuffs is just going to get smaller and smaller as the group of people who are hungry grows.

That’s not how I want to be.

So, with that in mind, how does my garden grow?

My first cauliflowers have leaves, as do my first leeks. The chilis are beginning to put out leaves and my alicante tomatoes are out of the propagator, making way for more tomatoes. This week, I’ll be able to put in some more chili peppers and some more tomatoes. I’ll also put in some more brassicas to start off.

It’s going to be a long time til they’re ready to go in the garden, but I will be ready.

And this year, I want more than ever. The more I grow myself, the less I have to depend on the rest of the world to feed me.

Sure, I’m not right up there yet, Ms Holier-Than-Thou being carbon positive and completely self-sustaining. I’m lucky to be born in a place and time that affords me such ethics. An accident of birth means I can afford to be all guilty about meat and what I eat. But I won’t lie. It does feel good to eat my own stuff. I just had an omelette for tea, made with my own leeks and peas from last year. The eggs come right from my hens who are perfectly free to wander wherever they please and eat snails and worms and snakes if they like. For lunch, I had tomato soup, made with last year’s tomatoes and a handful of herbs I grew and dried. I like that about country living. You get to have days where you can live off the fatta’ the land.

Now, all I have to do is remember all of this when my arms ache from pulling weeds.

 

Perennial herbs

I’ve not been idle whilst it’s been raining. Oh no. Yesterday, I did a ton of marking and even found time to squash in a little planning.

I’ve been planning a perennial herb garden for somewhere or other. I was thinking of putting it here ↓

but seeing as it has been under water twice this year, I might look for a drier spot.

One place I’ve been thinking is along the edge of my vegetable garden. There’s plenty of space and it will also serve another purpose: keeping the dogs (and other things) out.

César, the resident castrato labrador of the village, likes to wander around willy-nilly. You can often hear his arrival by the barking he sets off at every other house along the road. I think, out of the 14 houses in my hamlet, at least half must have dogs. César is a very happy chappy. He stops to say hello at every house. And, at every house, he is met by barks.

He used to love to play with Molly, and he’s not sure about Heston yet, but he still comes to say hello with astounding regularity. He, however, is not always my best friend in the Littlest Hobo category on account of he once had a tug-of-war with Heston using Rita The Chicken as his rope. I blame Heston. César had done nothing but sniff up until that point, but he must have thought it was fair game.

Anyway, César has now found two other petits copains – a blond lab cross and another black dog. They sometimes make a little foursome with a chasse dog who lives at a house in Les Hautes Ecures, up the road. They do nothing but play, but they love to play.

And, recently, they’ve been getting a little closer. One day, César is going to show them how he gets in my garden (via a surprising number of entrances, I must say) and then I’ll be back to getting mad, dragging various dogs back to their various owners with a il est gentil, mais… and a fierce look.

Not that my neighbours care.

A stray pack of dogs seems to be par for the course round here.

Plus, if they get in and play tug-of-war with Rita again, I may not be responsible for my actions.

Not only that, if mighty César can get in, foxes, martens, badgers, wild boar and the likes can all get in. I even had a wild boar in my garden once. And yes, it was of the animal variety.

So… I need to replace the 100 metres of chicken wire along the edge of my property. Whilst I’m in there, I might as well put in a couple of raised beds and build myself a perennial herb garden, so I thought to myself.

This is kind of what it looks like right now. The red diagonal line is the fence line.

So, the first thing in will be some Angelica. Angelica, the medicinal herb that grows by the wayside here and has been used for everything from curing the plague to adding to Chartreuse, is a statuesque creature and will look really good at the back of a big border. It’s biennial sometimes, unless you chop its flowers off, but it seeds happily. Also known as wild celery, you’ll definitely know its candied form – the bright green candied peel you get.

Angelica can be anywhere between 1-3 metres. It can tolerate slightly shady sites, but as you can see, this is a South-East facing site and it has sun virtually all day. It likes a slightly acid soil, but I don’t think the soil round here can deter it since it grows very well along the side of the road.

I’m not sure about the seed yet – whether I’ll buy a small plant or some seed. Apparently the seed is not viable for a long time and so I’m wary of buying a packet of it.

Then, in front of the Angelica, I’m planning on rosemary, sage and oregano. I don’t have masses of luck with rosemary or sage – but oregano likes it here. The rosemary and sage are easy enough to buy as small plants here.

I love the smell of oregano. I have one plant in the polytunnel and it perfumes the whole place. It’s one of my favourite smells – maybe it reminds me of pizza. I think I could quite happily breathe in that warm smell all day. In the early spring, when it’s still cold, I go in the polytunnel – always five or six degrees warmer and sheltered from the wind – and crush a few leaves of it. It grows right next to a thyme plant and they are very happy indeed. I’m happy because they crowd out the dreaded convolvulus.

I thought, since I got a bit carried away with just how many plants I could cram into a three-metre-squared spot last summer with my perennial flower garden, I might even indulge in a little prairie-style planting. After all, that ground is doing nothing except growing weeds and grass.

Raised beds mean that I don’t have to work it too hard, either.

This was my first perennial flower bed last year. It got full and busy pretty quickly!

Hopefully, like the perennial bed here (well, I put some annuals in to fill the gaps!) it will be pretty easy maintenance.

Then I can put a bed closer to the house in the courtyard. That will be more sheltered and better for annual herbs.

I’ve got other perennial herbs that I want to plant prairie-style as well, but they can wait. It’d be nice to have lots of useful AND beautiful plants.

 

Winter’s long tail

Given that some French folk will plant nothing outside until the very last threat of frost is passed in the middle of May (the 11th, 12th and 13th if I’m not mistaken) which are called the Saints de glace - or the ice saints – you may think me a little odd to plant already. I’m a little precoce. 

Us growing peasants depend on the Saints de Glace being the last frost date and I’m way out of the starting-gate. However, since I’m in the balmy Poitou-Charentes, renowned as being the second sunniest and warmest region of France, I’ll go off the Charente Libre last frost dates. Last year, we had a frost on the 17th April which killed off some of my things, so I’m not making that mistake again. Still, that’s only 12 weeks away, and I want to get a bit of a head start.

The first things I’ve planted are things that don’t need heat, don’t mind a head start and don’t mind being replanted. Root crops, so I’ve found, don’t like being moved. No point doing anything that grows underground yet.

However, surface crops don’t mind being replanted as much. So, leeks, cauliflower, cabbage and the likes can all sit in a tray until the world gives them enough light and warmth. Other surface crops like a bit of warmth on their bones before they get going and these are the ones that get a bit of propagator help.

My running order is roughly this, for the propagator:

• tomatoes
• chili peppers
• peppers
• aubergines
• basil
• cucumbers
• tender flowers

Virtually everything else will grow in its own good time outside or just in normal unheated pots. I grow five different types of tomato (apart from last year, which was a wash-out) including beefsteak, cherry, salad, plum and an heirloom or special variety of something or other. Therefore, from now until March, there’s bound to be fifteen or sixteen little tomato plugs in the balmy warmth of the propagator.

I’ve been amusing myself lately over amateur gardening advice. There are a string of threads on various French forums I follow about planting out. I smile at the people who say they are planting out in February, regardless. Notably regardless of everyone else’s advice. Last February, from 1st February to 17th February, my garden was under six inches of snow.

That’s the great thing about the internet. You can be faced with a wealth of knowledge that says one thing, and you can completely ignore it and tell everyone else they’re wrong. I love it when people who have no idea what they’re talking about try and give advice to others. I guess there’s a lot of that here in France, where people who have never had a garden are then faced with a potager. Even though I never had the chance to grow vegetables much, I did take good care of my UK garden. And… I read book after book after book on the topic. Blogs, websites, videos, Gardener’s World magazines, free ebooks, Reader’s Digest books… you name it, I’ll apprise it. Luckily, I must have soil in my blood, since my mum’s family had a smallholding in Gloucestershire, and gardening came to me as easily as the memories of feeding the goats and the smell of over-ripe plums.

It does seem a shame though that so many people just randomly ignore good internet wisdom. Life must be very frustrating for people who don’t like to research and learn, ever convinced they know what they are doing. Plus, let’s face it, seeds come with instructions. Plant now. Harvest now. How can you be happy to blithely do your own thing when it fails so very frequently?

I confess to being a bit of a devil with one woman bragging about what she was planting. I just kept saying ‘so you must have growlights or a propagator then if you’ve planted that now…’ – she didn’t reply. No point being ridiculously competitive over what you can get to grow at a certain time of year. Nature is nature. You can grow what she says you can grow, unless you’re a bit of a scientist.

I laugh, too, at the people gaily sprinkling their wood ashes on Charentais alkaline-neutral soil without any nitrogen-based fertiliser, and at the people with expensive soil-testing kits. Nature is very good at telling you what soil you have, if you have mop head hydrangeas for example. Acid soils make them blue. Alkaline soils make them pink. They’re like reverse litmus paper. Other things like acid soils, like rhodedendrons and heathers. If it’s Japanese or Chinese, it probably likes acid soil. Another way of telling is whether you are in a hard water area.

So, if I want a Japanese garden, by and large, it will be in pots. Blueberries, bilberries and other native USA fruiting bushes like an acidic soil. Potatoes like an acid soil, as do sprouts and carrots. I put some ashes on my new brassica patch, because they like it alkali. I dig lots and lots of compost and chicken manure into the potato patches to be. I also have to pay attention to drainage, although my soil is not too bad. Chicken litter, mixed with sawdust and well-composted, is perfect for my soil. Things that have nitrogen in them are very good for slightly, temporarily, lowering the ph of my soil and making it drain more easily.

I’m at the lowest point in the village and the bottom of my garden gets waterlogged when the water table rises. My vines are right up to their feet in it. The water table is almost as high as it was last May right now, and my puits is full. A puits, by the way, is a hole. A kind of aquifer or well. And mine is full. It’s only the second time in three years that I’ve seen it with any water in. If it rains any more, the garden will flood very easily. I noticed this morning that the Tardoire had broken its banks in the fields opposite.

Do you think I’m doing a good job of being a garden geek? Honestly, I try hard, but I am so very behind in things. My mother is the real garden geek. I hope that I’ll be half as garden-wise as she is in another twenty years time.

So, what’s in so far?

• broad beans
• a row of peas
• cauliflower ‘merveille de toutes saisons’
• Pepper ‘Sweet Banana’
• Tomato ‘Alicante’
• Leek ‘Musselburgh’

I plan on adding a couple more things every week, then when April gets here, I’ll plant everything out in a great rush of planting joy. There is definitely much more light. It’s almost light now until 18:30 on a bright day. Roll on Spring!

 

 

Do you chit?

Giddy LJ has just scored herself some potatoes to chit from her local garden centre.

You just know how much I love this time of year, despite how cold it is and despite the fact that the weather looks like it will barely scrape its way over 2 degrees in the next week. It’s been so cold today that I thought the only warm place might actually be in the fire. Even being right up next to it, even though it was roaring, wasn’t warm enough.

Mind you, this was the weather on Wednesday morning at 8:30…

I’m also still unwell a bit. How has this happened? I got a bad cold on the 21st December, was just recovering by the 27th, got some gastric bug on the 28th December which tore the energy out of my very bones right through til just after new year, and then, joy of joys, just when I was recovering, I got another lovely cold in the first week of January. I’m still a little sickly, a little weak, a little tired. I go from being too hot to too cold. Je ne suis pas dans mon assiette, as the French say. I’m not in my plate. I’m out of sorts and a bit meh.

I’d gone to brico Leclerc to get a new collar for Heston. His old one is too small now and it is too tight, on its biggest setting. I also needed some cauliflower seeds and some soil. Then I saw the lady putting them out and I got all giddy. I bet I was the first person through with my spuds. I’m sure I could hear them laughing behind me.

I bought three packs of 1.5kgs. I might buy more, it depends. I bought a pack of Sirtema, good for chips apparently. I bought a pack of Cherie, because they sounded cute, and a pack of Charlottes. You might laugh at me for buying potatoes with a cool name, but one year I bought some called Samba, just because they sounded good. I had Sirtema last year I think, but for the life of me, I can’t find details of what they were. Oh well. As soon as Jardiland get theirs, I might go and have a root around there too. It feels like a potato kind of a year. When we first arrived here in April 2010, it was practically the first thing I did. We got this harvest that year – about 7kg.

I’m glad I got a bit of digging in before the ground hardened up. Paying it forward. You get a bit of time and it’s just right to get the jobs in.

It was 10° for the first time inside today. It’s not been that in the morning for ages. Usually, it’s 11 or 12° and when the fire has been on a couple of hours, it’s 18° or even 19°. So, I’m off to get a fire on, let the chickens out and try and not think about how warm my bed is. The bad thing about this new laptop is that I could quite easily take it back to bed and go and mark online in bed, sandwiched between two duvets and an electric blanket.

All I can think about is how glad I am that it is not (yet?) as cold as it was last year.

Preparing for summer

Most of the time I’ve spent in the garden has been in pruning the vines. I have to do it ‘Mother-Style’ (that’s not some weird Gangnam-Style thing) but the term I use for a really good hard prune. My mother prunes things brutally hard. I was always a bit of a namby-pamby pruner, but grapes always appreciate a real hard prune. Even last year when I had no fruit crops to speak of, I still had bounteous grapes. Even my neighbours were amazed. Their grape harvests were meagre.

A friend of mine, an Australian lady who has a vineyard close to me and uses both French and Australian viticulture traditions, reckons the ‘feet’ of my vines are a good 40 years old. I believe her. I have in my head the fact that the last lady moved in with her husband when her youngest daughter was married and lived here for 40 years without doing anything after the first year. All the decorations and furnishings seem to have come from that first period of their life in the house. My Australian friend would have torn all the pieds out and put in new ones. If I were to tear them out, I would maybe put three or four table grape vines in, but as I have really no use for an assortment of 150 random vines (I don’t drink wine much and I definitely am not a pineau drinker) there does not seem to be much point replanting them. As they are, I shall just keep growing them and looking after them. They are still very productive and although they’re a real assortment, I use the grape juice in lots of things, including jellies, sorbets and in with chutneys.

So far, I have pruned 42. They are already well established in a kind of T shape. I leave four shoots, two on each side. One is two buds long. The other is four buds long. French-style vines are about knee high. My Australian friend has hers at hip height. I’ve noticed some of the Pernod-Ricard vines are like this too.

Now I’ve picked out which ones will grow, I go back over them and prune the tiny bits back as hard as I can.

I’m planning on replacing the stakes and frames as well before spring. They’re very rotted. Then I’m going to put layers of newspaper down between the rows and put stones on them. The vines are impossible to weed around and mow around. More nutrients go to the weeds than go to the grapes, I reckon.

This is, as you can imagine, quite a lot of effort for a thing I don’t care much about.

I could rip them all out and put concrete down.

Of course, I will do no such thing. I like the fact that they are part of my garden eco-system. I still have plenty of space for all the other stuff I want to do. Space is one thing I’m not short of.

The vines did not have an easy year last year. First we had the hot and cold spring, then rain. Whilst it rained, I could not mow or keep the weeds back. The rain kept on falling; the weeds kept on growing. The vines ended up under water in May.

I’m not interested in becoming a viticulturalist or a wine geek, so they’re just a little hobby for me. I am not interested in all the load/yield/pruning science. It’s too technical and I’m just not that kind of a gardener.

I’ve got five things remaining in the vegetable plot: leeks, savoy cabbage, white cabbage, broccoli and cardoons.

Cardoons are these great, enormous dinosaur-thistle things:

You can eat the stems, once pared and boiled, like celery. They’re very popular in North African cooking. I plan on tasting some like that. As it stands, I have no idea what will happen to them. The seed catalogue I got them from shows a picture of them with the thistle-like globe artichoke-like head, but wikipedia says that the cynara cardunculus variety is used more for braising stems like celery. If they get heads on, all well and good. If they don’t, I shall pare and braise them. Not only that, they are quite beautiful and I am perfectly happy to have them as a simple architectural flower.

You can also see a few stalks of corn I left for the birds. I also left them some sunflowers and teasels.

Cardoons are also used in a popular Spanish dish, cocido madrileño. Most of the recipes I found for it usually say cabbage instead of cardoon. It just shows that these godzilla perennial vegetables aren’t so easy to get hold of, and that’s what I want for my garden. Rare things, unusual things, a little of lots of things. I also want to have a few more perennial vegetables, like artichokes and asparagus. I’m going to put in some rhubarb this year. I really miss a rhubarb crumble from time to time! Perennial = less faffing.

Not only that, but they have been ridiculously easy to grow. I planted them. They germinated. I put them in the garden. They grew. They’ve needed virtually no water (though that was true of most of my garden last year) and they’re growing super-healthy. They attract bees, apparently, too. Yay. There aren’t many cardoon recipes, but here are a couple. One is a Tunisian lamb casserole and this one for honeyed cardoons with pine nuts and thyme, which sounds rather Greek if you ask me.

I’m making the most of this ‘inter-cold’ weather, which is not particularly cold (vest, thin jumper and gardening ‘seed-attracter’ wool jumper, complete with seed pods… hat and scarf) to dig over the remaining plots. This one is being prepared for my peas and broad beans  The edges need some work yet to take it back to 2.5 x 5  metres.

The broad beans will go in next week unless there is a frost. I’m a little late this year, but I’m sure they won’t mind. There is a lot of speedwell in the ground, since this has only been cultivated for two years as a vegetable plot. Each year gets a little easier. This year, I think I’m going to put some logs around the patches because they are both moveable and easy to see where the edges should be!