Anything to Declare ???

Here's a picture of our shopping basket that we brought back from Southampton last week:

It's an eclectic mix of things that either we can't get in France, cost much more here or where we just prefer our familiar brands.

This often gets a strange look at the Waitrose checkout - are we perhaps moving to an uninhabited island, preparing for a Nuclear War no-one else has heard of or simply just a couple of ex-pats back in the UK for a week?

Red Sky at Night ....

A dull day today held a real surprise at the end of the day with a spectacular cloudscape and sunset over our field:

Sunset - November 17th 

First Fire

For the record we lit our first fire of the year on November 5th, only the small one at present but we've had all three chimneys swept by Gérard in preparation for the winter.

Another Great Harvest

Crab Apples - Golden Hornet and an unknown variety we bought from the rescue bench of a local Nursery

Currently being made into Apple and Chilli Jam.

Off with the Old and on with the New

La Basse Cour doesn't have many remnants left of its life as a farm; the mangers we have rescued and re-used as dividers in the outside barn, the wide doorway we've glazed ..... and the open dutch barn.

We've struggled to work out what to do with the barn which, from some aspects, towers over the house. Cost rules out demolishing it and rebuilding a three bay garage, usefulness rules out demolishing it and clearing the site, it's appearance rules out doing nothing. As usual when we have a quandary like this now we do two things: copy something someone else has done and ask Gérard, our roofer.

Our friends Sue and Steve who run a gite business in the next village have a similar looking barn and they've clad the sides very neatly in wood and made a large workshop and garage, we went to look at it. Gérard came up with two options and also told me how to frame out the old and bent frame so that the cladding sits straight.

Stage 1 is replacing the old rusty steel sheeting with new steel profile sheets anodised and painted in the same colour shade as the windows in the house.

We have a rare tradesman working for us - one that turns up early. While we were in the UK Gérard left a me message on my phone saying he'd start on Monday, the roof was delivered on Thursday and Gérard called me on Friday to check it was all there and said he'd pop over that afternoon to have a look. In the event he turned up with Aurélian and Sébastian and they set to immediately removing the old panels and installing the new.

Over the weekend the partly installed roof is a bit of old and a bit of new:

The previous owners were resourceful people, we've found lots of examples where items from around the land have been pressed into use; there's an elegance to finding and using branches with exactly the correct 90 degree bend and twist in them to serve as hooks when pushed into a gap in the stone walls. The roof on the barn is just the same, the ridge panels have been "homemade", the guttering supports are bent metal and each piece of the old gutter is individual as again it's been bent into shape on-site.

The Walnut harvest is in

It has been an exceptional season for the walnut tree, it's the last into leaf and flower of all our trees and enjoyed the warm June and July. The cooler and damp August helped the nuts to swell and September's warmth ripened them. The result has been the best harvest since we've been here - 50kg and counting...

Appellation LBC Walnuts drying in the late autumn sun