First Frost

We had our first frost this morning, Brittany has avoided the frosts that have affected the UK in the year to date but today we had a proper white frost covering.

The cold weather brought the birds to the feeders in numbers this morning. I've got a new add-on for the camera; a radio controlled shutter release that allows me to set up the camera on a tripod next to the feeders and retire to the warmth of the barn with the control transmitter and pop off a few pictures whenever anything comes close.

Here are the first few efforts:

Advent at La Basse Cour

For the last three years we've been working right up to Christmas so our decorations have never seen the light of day. They've been securely stored away until this year when we've finally had a chance to decorate the house.

The Mairie has encouraged everyone in the village to put up a Christmas Wreath or Crown on their door for Advent. We're a bit short of evergreen foliage at LBC so we mounted a raid on Angela and Jim's tall hedge for some fronds, this took longer than planned as we were intercepted by Armand, who lives opposite, with a bottle of wine (it was 2:30 in the afternoon ....). Armand will be 83 shortly - if that's his secret I'm going to start drinking wine in the afternoon!

Here's our contribution to the Noyal-Muzillac Christmas wreath display:

And some more views of decorations inside and outside the Barn:

The old lantern niches in the barn illuminated again

The space under the stairs is perfect for our Cherry Blossom Christmas Tree

Our illuminated Christmas Star on the end of the Barn is attracting attention from the road

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

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:

Add caption

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.

A September to Remember

The summer weather has been really good here - it was dry and sunny through most of June and July, August was disappointing but September has been fantastic. We have had no rain since 30th August, the days have been sunny and the evenings remain warm and light.

The sunrises and sunsets have been remarkable - our morning walk last Tuesday was enhanced by an flypast of the International Space Station (ISS) which came over our shoulders from the west and flew into the brilliant sunrise. (See ISS to find out when to see the ISS next where you are).

We are blessed with dark skies here and last night the new moon formed a brilliant sight in the last of the evening sunset.

Peachy Girl and Onion Johnnie

The old peach tree that has appeared to be on the way out since we bought La Basse Cour (the trunk has a huge hole nearly right through it) failed to produce any peaches last year. This year it has surpassed itself and we've been eating the most wonderful peaches for the last four weeks. Hopefully our cold store will enable us to enjoy fresh peaches for another couple of weeks and then there will be frozen and, the greatest gift to a cold winter evening, peach chutney.

The shops and markets are full of "Oignons de Bretagne" and "Oignons Rose de Roscoff" at the moment. I think I can just remember, when I was about 5, seeing one of the "Onion Johnnies" who travelled over to the UK (in the days before cold storage, lorry shipments and supermarkets) with strings of onions for sale. We're storing ours in the traditional way this year:

923 Days

Here's how we normally describe to people how we ended up at La Basse Cour:

"We knew we wanted to move to this part of France, we'd been to the Morbihan many times before and we did lots of research. We saw 14 properties in 6 days and this was the last of the 14. It had the best aspect and most potential of everything we saw."

We usually also add, slightly ruefully: "we were looking for a project - maybe not this big a project."

With a fair bit of experience of renovating houses in the UK we set up a budget based on what we knew, what we extracted from "knowledgeable" artisans, experience from our whirlwind renovation of the house attached to the barn, some research and a fair bit of guessing.

Timescales are always a difficult thing to estimate - when did you ever hear someone say their project came in 6 months early? So, in the words of a former colleague at work, our schedule was "perhaps more of a wish than a plan". I thought it would be 18 months, Barbara 15 - allowing for a few weeks off work for UK visits, one holiday in three years and a new hip we took 27 months.

923 days of our life.

Budget was close to our first projection thanks to Barbara's wide-ranging procurement and tight accounting, doing the work on a self-build basis meant we came in below the architect's projection.

And how has it turned out? You be the judge - here are some before and after pictures:

The Barn in July 2010

And the same view four years later in July 2014

The eastern end of the Barn - September 2011

Eastern end of the Barn July 2014

Another view of the staircase and kitchen

North-east end of the Barn - September 2011

Same view in July 2014

Looking towards the west end of the Barn - July 2014

and the same view in July 2014

North wall of the Barn - new windows, roof and pointing

Our oak dining set has returned from storage

Living area furnished by Barbara, John Lewis and Wren Living - July 2014

Staircase up to the mezzanine level

Lean-to with asbestos roof - July 2010

 In July 2014 it has become the utility room 

923 Days

Up the Amazon Without a Paddle

We subscribe to an English Language French monthly paper called "Connexion". It's useful for keeping up to date with changes to the ever increasingly complexity of the already complex French Tax System, reading Simon Heffer's acerbic Francophile column and generally getting an English language view of life over here.

If you don't know Simon Heffer he writes for the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph and, although Connexions doesn't espouse a political line of any sort, contributions to its letters page ould easily be written by the same people who write to the Mail/ Telegraph.

"France would be such a lovely country if only these French would just make it more like Surrey" - you get the idea.

Like some UK papers it does specialise in reporting the barmier things that are in the news - "Men in Toulouse strike for right to wear skirts" was a memorable one. So,when it arrives one or other of us usually produces a Victor Meldrew like "I don't believe it!" as we read thorugh the articles. The trouble is it's getting harder to tell "Barmy" from "New Government Policy".

Once such example was a speech made by Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti in April 2013 where she attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly".She went on to propose that free shipping of books should be made illegal as it undercut local booksellers (Amazon and other on-line retailers in France are already restricted to a maximum 5% reduction below the "official" price of books).

Not just a bit of populist political rhetoric or a shock story to be reported; the policy was introduced in early 2014. There's a general distrust here of globalisation and global businesses - at least in our distant part of the country.

Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has already attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly". - See more at: http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=5097#sthash.thMYgpoM.dpuf

Culture Minister Aurélie Filippetti has already attacked Amazon for its pricing, saying it “slashes prices to get a foothold in markets only to raise them once they have established a virtual monopoly". - See more at: http://www.connexionfrance.com/news_articles.php?id=5097#sthash.thMYgpoM.dpuf

Now, from my user's perspective Amazon operates on a Pan European basis, my UK account was seamlessly available when I first logged on to Amazon.fr, deliveries ordered off the French site often arrive from Germany, Holland or the UK and several times it has been cheaper to order books from the Amazon UK and pay the postage rather than order through Amazon.fr. Which is a pity as it will surely restrict the development of e-commerce in France and thus increase the number of people like us who frequently shop outside France from the comfort of their Internet link. We may not be typical French consumers today - but we might be in the future.

Blogger's Block?

I'm not sure if Blogger's Block exists (it's like Writer's Block only not so literary and with more pictures .....).

But I've had a strange long period when I've not felt able or prepared to post. It's particularly strange as the posts I've not posted (if you see what I mean) relate to finishing the Barn and moving in - complex. Of course, as I said to Gérard, a project like this is never finished but we got over the final crest and are now living in the barn.

Proper pictures and descriptions to follow shortly.

Flood Defences

I've blogged before (Springtime!) about the groundwater levels around the house, since the major storm on 23rd December we've again been suffering from water seeping out of the ground and coming across the driveway. One of the tasks we've had on our "to-do" list for a while is to get an interceptor drain dug to pick up this water, at the same time we wanted to put a concrete floor in our outbuilding known as "The Grange". We had asked Kevin from Furniss Terrassements back (in 2011 he had laid the flooring in the barn and dug the drainage that has progressively dried out the stone walls).

The weather has been foul of course and the time that Kevin was with us distinguished itself with rain, hail and - bizarrely - two sunny lunchtimes when we could sit outside.

The before picture - as Kevin gets to work the groundwater covers the drive

The new Grange floor installed

As the ground at the back of the Grange slopes up the drainage ditch was deep

The water level in the ground is evident in this picture taken before the drainage pipes were connected

18 tonnes of gravel turned up for the trenches and to re-surface our open area

A big improvement ......

As the drain is connected the water starts to flow ...

And flow and flow ....

As soon as the drain started to work the surface water disappeared all the way along the drive. Of course its hydrographics and physics and somewhere along the way I've probably done the equations to describe what happened, how fast the water flowed and what volume comes out every hour. But still - like machines that harvest peas and how planes fly - knowing the "how" doesn't take away the "wow".

And, after all the rain recently, the drain is still flowing and the drive is still dry.