lettuces

I had planned that we would grow cos lettuce from seed, because they don’t sell cos in the markets here, but I didn’t get round to sowing the seeds in time. Instead I’ve been buying lettuce seedlings from the market, at €1,50 a dozen for oakleaf or batavia lettuces. When the big ones, fully grown, in season are €1 for 3, this hardly seems worth the effort.

But it is, it is.  Instead of getting a bit of lettuce from the bottom of the fridge and washing off the slimy rotten bits, we pick a fresh one from the garden and rinse the earth off the roots. I’m now beginning to wonder whether it would be worthwhile sowing seeds even if I did get round to it.

the lettuce bed- with red oakleaf, green batavia and the odd weed...

Nests a-plenty

an unidentified nest with a ball of unidentified chicks....

I have been trying to figure out how many birds’ nests there are… lying awake in the dawn this morning, listening to the cacophony.  I think there are at least two just outside our bedroom (that’s as well as the bats); and there’s two or three more in parts of the rest of the house. So, half a dozen in or on the fabric of the house itself. Then in the stables block (which contains the bar) I’ve come across at least two more, one of which is the swallows we watch swooping around and in and out of the bar. But that’s only the ones I’ve actually seen; I haven’t been actively searching for them.  And in the trees and bushes in the garden there must be dozens more. The birds live here; we are only interlopers.

Unfortunately, it is not just the birds who live here. We also have mice, moles and rats. The mice would be properly controlled by a good mousing housecat, who would also either eat or scare off most of the birds, so we put poison down a the end of the summer and tolerate, with annoyance, the mess they cause.  The moles are a real pain, mainly for the tunnels they make which, when they collapse, turn once-smooth ground into lumps and furrows. The rats don’t usually come into the house (although a couple of years ago we found a drowned one in a toilet cistern: horrible, but a satisfying explanation for a smell that had  had me very worried about the state of the plumbing), but are a consequence of keeping chickens. I haven’t actually seen them, but there are suspicious holes in the vegetable patch where the chicken run was first positioned.  I don’t know whether we should plan to eliminate them with traps and poison, or work out a peaceful co-existence. My inclination is the latter; but rats generate strong emotions….

Swallows hatched

Swallows' nest in the bar - with parents perched nearby

The swallows in the bar have hatched; the nest is now too crowded for the adults so they sleep perched
a few inches away on the electrical conduit that serves the light-fitting supporting the nest.  This is, for us, a less stressful time; although the birds do get alarmed when we go into the bar, they’re not going to abandon their chicks, and we can watch them feed. In a week or two they’ll have fledged; and then we’ll see the nest really crowded, four or five little black tails over the side (and a mound of swallow-poo on the floor below). Before we know it,  the family will be off for the winter….

a walk to lunch

Our current, temporary  household of twelve is now having a quiet night, some playing Monopoly, others an early night and I have just made some strawberry jam – not, alas, from our own strawberries – after a strenuous walk of four or so miles to Cheriennes, for a splendid lunch at the Auberge du Prieure – and back.

Lunch was superb. We started with an aperitif,  five small dishes accompanied by a selection of home-made drinks, including a delicious rose and rhubarb wine, a caramel wine, and a rum punch. “And”, not “Or”. Then a starter – the only course for which a choice was offered – followed by guinea-fowl, cheese and dessert. This does not do justice to the presentation or the quality of the cooking: predominantly traditional French, but with a creative and apt use of spcies. Cumin seeds in the glazed carrots, coriander in the buttery roast potatoes.

Wine, the aperitifs and coffee were all included in the fixed-price of €28. Even after a walk of the best part of eight miles, none of us much feels like eating supper.

It’s cold, sunny, and windy; ideal walking conditions. The harvest has just started, as barley fields were standing when we went out and rows of straw on our return.

potato disappointment

Cameron has just dug the second earlies – a variety called Bernadette. Not a great result, to be honest: a big bucket of spuds, but hardly the yield we were expecting. Quite a few of them had been eaten, but I don’t think that’s the main reason for the poor yield.   Close in the veg-beds, earthing up is tricky, and we simply didn’t get the numbers.  Next year I think we”ll grow them only in containers; if I do grow maincrops, it’ll be in a section of the field.

Fingers crossed, though, it looks as though we will get some tomatoes this year! We’ve already got a couple of them ripening. The weather has been great: hot, a lot of the time, but no really long dry spells since April. Yesterday was cold and wet; today it’s bright and breezy, and the dry wind will help keep the blight at bay. There are lots of green fruit, and if they all ripen  before the blight (some hope) it will be a bumper crop.

Broad Beans

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the first picking, podded...

We picked the broad beans yesterday. As there were twelve for lunch, I suggested picking all of them; and we got a big basket full. Disappointing that most of them had only two beans to a pod. I can’t remember what variety they were; I think a lot of the seeds were saved from last year.  But even so, when podded the picking weighed out at just over three pounds, so we froze half of them for later. Everyone, even the young guests and picky teens, enjoyed them. That’s the difference that plant to table in less than an hour makes..

Broody Again

The broody gaol....

Our Light Sussex pullet has gone broody for the second time this year, barely a week after coming fully back into lay the last time. It rather damages the relationship between us: we go off her because she’s not laying, and she goes off us because we keep turfing her out of the nest box and from the pot egg she is so valiantly trying to hatch.

I’ve heard a number of different tips for getting them to stop being broody. There’s the broody gaol, which is a draughty wire cage with just enough water and food but nowhere comfy. More drastic is the iced water treatment: you dunk her undercarriage into a bucket of iced water a couple of times a day. I can see her really loving that! Someone else suggests that you sit her on an icepack. The theory is to cool her down. Last time we just turfed her out of the nest box once the others had laid.

Anyway, it’s coop-cleaning day today so she’ll be turfed out anyway. I might try putting an icepack into the nest-box in the day-time; she won’t want to sit on that.

Bumble bees

Yesterday was much cooler – we had a great thunderstorm overnight – and I managed to finish the door on the west bedroom, my work only be interrupted several times to help big fat bumble bees out of the window.

A couple of days ago there were four or five fat, moribund bumble bees on the dining-room floor. With a cup and a piece of paper, I picked them up one by one and put them on the lavender  bushes.

It’s been hot, so we keep the windows open; and the bumble bees feeding on the Virginia creeper and the plants outside often find their way in through the open windows, sometimes blown in on the welcome breeze. But there are no flowers inside – only the odd stray bit of creeper that has found its way through the gaps in the gable-end – and they struggle to find their way out. If we don’t help them, eventually they die of starvation; I am afraid I have had to dispose of a couple of corpses already this week.

I think perhaps we should call the West bedroom the “bumble bee room”; and the East one, of course, is the “bat room”, which might make it appeal to fans of a comic franchise as well as to those who like bats for being such cool animals.

hot hot hot

I am supposed to be making, and putting up, a door – to the west bedroom, at the other end of the house to ours, but it is too hot – at six in the evening. It is in fact only four, as far as the sun is concerned; but the state in its wisdom decrees it to be two hours later than it actually is. So I am indoors, posting this, rather than outside cutting wood in the sun. And we have already had a siesta to pass away the hottest part of the day.

Not that – at about 30 – it is particularly hot, by most people’s standards. But we are pasty northerners, and we wilt in the heat. It is due to be cooler tomorrow, but then I am supposed to be scything back the overgrown grass in the yard, so we have room for our guests’ cars when they arrive on Sunday.

I seem to have spent most of what little energy I have looking for my set-square, an essential tool for door-making. Now it is found (not by me) I have no more stamina for the heat. Besides, in here there is a fan and it is relatively cool.

An Enormous Egg

The hens are in full lay – four hens, four eggs a day, which is great.

But today, one of them laid a truly huge egg. I am surprised she could walk at all. It is almost certainly a double-yolker.

When they were coming in to lay, we got a couple of double-yolkers amongst the tiny little pullet eggs. But those weren’t as big as this one. It weighs almost three ounces.