Chilli Harvest

One crop that has always grown well at La Basse Cour is chilli peppers. No exception this year - we've harvested a huge number of beautiful fruits:

Foxes

The photo in the last blog post came out poorly in the published version.

Here's an improved version:

Night Pictures

We saw another wonderful pass over the barn roof of the International Space Station (ISS) last night. Although I've seen it many times now, I stop in wonder every time I see it. I'm working on getting a photo for the blog .....

In the meantime night photography is limited to our Little Acorn wildlife camera that we set up last week. Not much to report yet, the camera settings need a bit more tweaking but we have confirmed the presence of foxes at La Basse Cour:

Miracle Powder

Our pond isn't a natural pond. And it isn't built in the very best place for a pond.

It's in the open and it's not got any natural shade, the drainage water from the roof and the driveway runs into it. The water brings a level of silt with it and so when we have a hot summer the combination of the silt and the sun produces a strong growth of green blanketweed. Normally we have to periodically drag the pond every four weeks to clear it.

Then we were watching the best gardening programme on the BBC: Beechgrove Garden when they reported on their pond which had been treated with Ecosure Pond Clear Aqua Plus and had cleared completely. Fortunately we had a courier flying out (actually Jill thought she was coming to stay with us .....) so we got a couple of packs brought over for our very green pond.

It's worked very well:

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Un petit coin de Zen

We've had a long-standing interest in Japanese garden designs and Japanese gardens. We built two Japanese gardens in the UK and relocated some of our prized granite items to France with us when we moved.

In April we visited Japan on an intensive Temples, Shrines, Cherry Blossom and Gardens tour for some inspiration at the Adachi garden in Matsue:

And the Kokedera Moss Garden at the Saiho-ji temple in Kyoto:

What we've done at La Basse Cour isn't quite in the same scale but maybe we've turned a little part of Morbihan into a small corner of Japan:

The Natsume-bachi (granite basin) weighs 180kg and was brought over from our garden in Fleet

The pebbles for the basin area came from the quarry at Peaule, ex-SNCF railway sleepers aren't a common component of Japanese garden design but they work in this situation

Sparse planting of bamboo, Nandina Domestica, dwarf larch and a Heuchera complete the garden.