Funny weather !

It's been a strange year weather-wise, warm and very dry in March, April and May, some very hot days in June then July and now the start of August have been pretty mixed and, in the last week, very wet and cool.

My diary tells me that it was warmer on 15th March than it was on 6th August ..... I was watering the fruit trees in March and hoping they weren't too wet in August.

Who needs a Minidigger ??

We had been considering hiring a minidigger for a weekend to pull out a hedge and dig some foundations for a retaining wall in the garden at a cost of about €300.

But Adam came to visit and, after I'd chainsawed out the top, he ripped out the hedge in two hours with his hands as part of his training programme for the new hockey season. Useful things children !

La Récolte at La Basse Cour

La Récolte = The Harvest for my English readers

One of the things that we wanted to do when we moved to France was to spend more time gardening and growing our own food. With some good results:

 

Our potager has been one of the most enjoyable things that we've done at the house this year and we've grown the following fruit and vegetables this year (with some French translations where I know them):

Dwarf French Beans                        Haricot Nain
Broad Beans                                   Haricot Rame
Runner Beans                                  Haricot Grimpante
Lettuce (Mixed Salad, Ashbrook)    Laitue
Carrot Early Nantes                        Carotte
Rocket                                            Roquette
Basil                                                Basilique
Coriander
Pepper (Jalapeno, Salad Bowl,        Poivron
  Long Red Marconi)
Beetroot                                          Betterave
Cornichon
Melon
Pumpkin                                          Potiron

Spring Onion
Spinach                                           Epinard
Courgette
Leek                                               Poiron
Tomato
Potato (Cara, Chérie)                      Pomme de Terre
Onion
Shalot                                             Eschalotte
Garlic                                             Ail

Strawberry                                     Fraise
Raspberry                                      Framboise
Black, White and Redcurrants        Cassis, groseiller
Gooseberries                                 Groseille a macqueraux
Blackberries                                  Murier

And, on the way shortly:

Peaches, Nectarines and Walnuts

 Water supplies have been important through the dry Spring:

 

And, this week, we have begun lifting our major crops of potatoes, this is about half of our early potatoes Chérie, around 45kg:

And red Shallots and rose Garlic:

Le Tour at Redon

One of the big events the blog missed during its absence was the arrival in Brittany of the Tour de France at Redon for a stage finish on 4th July.

We got to the town at about 2pm, there was great organisation and easy parking and we were able to walk the last three km of the course before taking up station on the inside of the final corner – a 90 degree left turn 500m from the finish opposite a fixed camera position. We unveiled our Union Flag; it was sunny and blisteringly hot and the crowds were huge, some Brits and Aussies around but mostly French locals. The caravane was the usual mad mixture of French brand advertising plus, for some reason, the sapeurs-pompiers in three cars advertising the jobs they had available. 

Here's a box of salted snacks on wheels ....... very French !

 

 Following the excitable commentary in French on the loudspeakers was a challenge but I managed to get the story of the breakaway that was charged down by HTC, the excitement in the crowd mounted as the last gendarmes roared through and then the TV helicopters came into view and finally a vast roar from the crowd as a blur of cyclists shot past riding unbelievably quickly. You may have seen the coverage – this was the stage where Mark Cavendish nearly came off on the last (our) corner and trailed in fifth, Tyler Farrar won for Garmin and the US on the 4^th July and a Cofidis rider did a spectacular somersault 10m away from us (we never saw it in the melee). It was chaotic on the course afterwards and, although we got the result on the loudspeakers it was only afterwards that we pieced together the story of what happened via the ITV4 coverage although, despite the camera shot panning across us and going through frame by frame, the speed was so great you can't see us or the flag ...... :o(

Anyway here are some of our pictures:

Geraint Thomas leading the peloton into the final corner trying to set up the win for Edvard Boasen-Hagen of Sky

 

Garmin’s leadout team bringing Farrar through, Cav just visible on the right

Cav with Boasen Hagen on his left and Thor Husovd in yellow

Team Sky car – our Union Flag got a wave from the bus driver and one of the other team cars stopped off to give us a drinks bottle

France got really excited when Thomas Voeckler held yellow right into the Alps but another year passes without a French TDF winner …..

La Basse Cour – One Year On

I realised this week that it’s one year since I piled the cats, the Dyson and too many things that had escaped the removal van into the Honda and headed off to Portsmouth to follow Barbara to La Basse Cour and our new life in France. The cats have done pretty well out of it, an endless supply of mice, loads of sunny stones to lie around on and almost limitless fields and hedges to hunt in. And we’ve done pretty well too.

Adam and his fiancée Charlotte came over this week to stay for their visit since last summer - when they were helping us fix the ceiling above the stairs – and were amazed at the changes and difference. When you live with something day in and day out it’s sometimes hard to see the overall picture but compared to a year ago the house now has two bathrooms, walls, ceilings, floors, tiles, doors, a fire and is really rather a nice place to live. They saw all that and reminded us how much we’d achieved in the year. The weather has been exceptional too since they arrived and we’ve declared a holiday for ourselves :o)

The blog has suffered a three month hiatus – no excuses for that except that it seems a lot easier to write regularly when it’s not light until 11pm and there’s not so much to do in the garden. I’ll keep things up to date from here and try to spend a bit of time catching up on the things that have happened since April.

Full complement again at La Basse Cour

« Ta femme, elle est arrivé hier ? » I was asked by Christophe, our gardien (goalkeeper) as I arrived for hockey on Sunday.

“Yes, she’s reading the paper in the car and she’ll be along to watch the start of the game”

“Does she speak French?”

“Yes, a bit, not quite to my level but she says she can understand everything I say in French”

“That’ll be good - because we can’t!”

Barbara’s flight, scheduled at 09:40, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport at 09:41 on Saturday morning. One minute late after over twenty four hours travelling – pretty good going! I’d left home at 4:15 to drive to Paris via Nantes, Angers, Le Mans and the manic Paris Boulevard Peripherique at 8:30 on a Saturday morning as half of Paris was leaving at the start of the Easter school holidays. Driving a French plated car makes me feel less conspicuous on the road but also, on the evidence of the first week, means other drivers now treat me like a native driver rather than with the wary caution accorded to a Brit driving on the wrong side of the road. The sun came up huge and brilliantly red in a clear sky as I drove past Le Mans and the drive was straightforward and easy until Paris as almost all long-distance road trips seem to be in France as long as you avoid a) Paris and b) the start and end of major holiday periods. We came back via a cross-country scenic detour from Laval that was a bit more scenic and cross-country than planned but showed Bretagne off to its absolute spring best and the recent warm weather (we had four days with temperatures above 25C last week) has had the farmers rushing out to cut the first grass of the year for silage.

Hockey on Sunday was a six-pointer against Carquefou, after surviving Christophe's joke, a shot that hit the post and a couple of desperate goalline clearances we went behind to a breakaway goal – the usual sort of bumpy breakaway goal that playing hockey on a grass rugby pitch tends to produce. Chris – our other rosbif player - equalised right on half-time with shot that was going wide until the goalkeeper deflected it in. It was clearly going to be our day after that and a dribbly scrambled goal fifteen minutes into the second half put us ahead. This was enough to win the three points but the defence ended patched-up as I got a big blow to the right knee from a stick (painful !) and Jean-Christophe took a hard ball on his right knee. That puts us clear in second place with one game to play.

We spent Sunday afternoon working in the sun in the potager and planted French beans, broad beans, peas, potatoes and set out the strawberries brought from Victoria Road together with a dozen new French stock I’d bought the previous week.

April already !

Gosh – a quarter of the way through the year, how did that happen ? And a busy week last week that achieved a lot but left me realising how much I still have to do here.

I had a visit from two women doing a survey for the commune on waste collection (did I use the yellow sacks - yes, did I know which day the collection was - yes, how much rubbish – about 25 lites a week etc.), They said at the end that, from next year, we’d get a new micro-chipped bin and residents would be charged by weight for their waste collection. Which I’m quite in favour of as we re-cycle or re-use as much as possible although I’m surprised that an issue that causes so much light and heat in the UK seems to be coming to such a rural area as Noyal Muzillac.

On Tuesday our car had it’s contrôle technique test (French version of the MoT). I’d warned when I booked that it was a véhicule étrangère but it took ages as they (we) tried to work out which piece of information had to go where in the admin database, they looked up the settings for an English car on another database for the diagnostic machine, searched for an adaptor as the diagnostic plug on the car is different to a standard French one (no idea why as all the cars are made in Swindon) and they worked out why the speedometer output was wrong on the diagnostic (of course it was outputting in mph not kph). But, they were very friendly about it all throughout (I think it was something a bit exotic in their lives!)  and there were just two advisories – uneven tyre wear at the front and a split blade on the rear wiper (not part of the test but they checked it anyway). Otherwise, he said, it was “impeccable”. So I have the certificate, the sticky badge in the front window (for the gendarmes) and we don’t need to do that again until 2013.

Then off to Vannes to the prefecture to register the car in France. I reached the office at 10:45 to find it was shut with a group of cross people outside and a sign stuck to the shutters saying that, due to too many people (52) being in the queue at 10:37 they had shut the office for the rest of the morning to deal with the backlog. Unbelievable !!! What planet are these people on!! And it’s not open in the afternoon. That will be simply so there’s no danger of them going one minute into their two hour lunch break or risk going one minute over their 35 hours this week. I’ve avoided getting righteous or xenophobic on the blog about French bureaucracy so far but there is a limit!

So, early start again next day and it was chaos in the prefecture. It was 8:45 when I got in and I was number 40, they were up to 97 when I’d finished so I’m sure they closed the doors again after I left! I had all the documents necessary and the certificate of conformity from Honda was worth its weight in gold again. It was free from Honda UK but every other document I’ve read said that you have to pay the manufacturer around £100 for one. I have a receipt slip and the registration document will follow in the post and then I can get the new plates made, change the insurance and the car will be in its French plumage.

The Permis de Construire for the barn has come through approved with three provisions; usual ones about getting the fosse certified and any new services (electricity/ water) having to be connected at the boundary in accordance with the suppliers regulations plus one saying that we have to plant trees that are “haut tige” – I think that means high standard shaped trees (but not sure what “high” means, 3m or 6m??) – at a density of one per 150m2. For our terrain this means about 20 but of course we have planted 16 already if arbres frutiers can be considered as haut tige, maybe we can claim they are arbres floraisons. We’ve got another four already in pots as well. Actually I think this provision is to delineate our terrain with the house from the surrounding agricultural land and I feel that’s quite a good way to do it. I took the accusé de réception (receipt) into the Mairie on Saturday and briefly met and shook hands the mayor who was on his way to perform a marriage ceremony.

The postie came round to talk to me this week and said our grounds looked good, that it must be a lot of maintenance work and would I like to buy his ride-on lawnmower that he’s selling. I thanked him but said we had already ordered one ;o) I’m looking forward to it being delivered as the grass cutting is fast becoming an epic event, the last cut took six and a half hours and two re-fuels. The field has a very vigorous growth of dandelions and I counted the number of dandelion heads I cut on one strip (478) and there are about eighty strips so that’s 37,500 dandelions on our grass. And I cut the same number down last week and I’m sure it will be the same number next week – that’s 100,000 dandelion flowers on our field in three weeks!

Sunday hockey was off down the autoroute to Angers in our bilingual car – Chris and I talking in English in the front and Adrien, Max and Denis in the back speaking French with little front-back interchanges in French. One or two problems with directions coming from the back in French but we got to the University pitch without drama and won 5-0. The team didn’t play so well but the defence is playing OK as a unit and getting used to me passing to them at the back (rather than thrashing the ball forward all the time) and so Christophe our gardien only had two kicks all game. That puts us second on goal difference but a long way behind the runaway winners Laval.

And the highlights from March:

Maximum Temperature:  23C

Minimum Temperature:   -2C

Frost days:                   8

Rain days:                    3

First flowering dates:

Nectared Nectarine        10^th

Peach                           15^th

Nectared Nectarine        18^th

M27 Crab Apple            19^th

Polonais Apricot           24^th

Field plum (Quetsche?)  25^th

Sunset Apple                26^th

Golden Hornet Crab       31^st

Victoria Plum                31^st

First swallows               16^th

First cuckoo                  3^rd April