Perfect Symmetry

One of the things that we wanted to do when we moved the La Basse Cour was grow more of our own food. Despite the odd problems (Tomato and Potato blight, total inability to germinate many seeds last year, pigeons) this has been a big success and we've enjoyed a long list of fruit and vegetables grown by our hands. It's hard to pick out favourites but I do enjoy the excellent symmetry of growing leeks.

We practice vegetable gardening a l'anglaise which means we grow almost everything from seed rather than growing on small plants bought from Point Vert or the markets. Leeks are one of those plants that can survive for a time as bare root seedlings and so bunches of 10, 50 or (my record so far) 100 can be bought. But we prefer the seed route so at the end of March we start a short drill for leek seeds and, as this year, they germinate just as the previous year's crop is coming to an end so they are in the potager for exactly 12 months. We harvested our first leeks in October and our last ones at the beginning of May - that's six months harvesting for a quarter of a packet of seed.

Here is the very last of the crop harvested on 5th May - my readers in the North-East of England would probably regard these as scallions - but we were pretty pleased:

Last week and this week

Last week we were mainly painting:

The special Earthborn Claypaint finish being applied to the lime finished walls downstairs

The high level mezzanine area with finished wood and our Moroccan lamp

This week we have mainly been tiling:

About halfway through laying the 70 square metres of slate flooring

Tree Work at La Basse Cour

After the successful meeting with M. Le Maire we had the tree on the Talus taken down. Stuart and Sebastian, the anglo-french team of www.lejardinieranglais.com came and worked all day to cut down the ash tree together with a small oak, another ash leaning over the potager and the fir tree outside the main barn door. Oh and they cut and trimmed three other trees as well, ground out the fir tree stump and let us put all the brash through their turbo-diesel chipper to produce a huge pile of wood chippings for use on the garden.

First Sebastian climbed the tree to remove the top growth

It's a big tree !!!!

 

On its way down

Perfectly dropped between the Nectarine, the Plum and the Cherry .....

 The trunk dug itself about 50cm into the soft ground when it landed, any fanciful ideas we had about sawing the trunk into planks disappeared with the discovery of a split up the trunk.

One of the groundworkers inspects the tree

  

Steve loading the chipper

Jess inspecting  our work

Sebastian cutting dead wood out of the Oak

 On inspection the Ash was found to be about 85 years old, the oak will be older - probably at least a hundred years old. For the first time in some while it will have the chance to grow naturally without strong competition.

Bureaucracy - it's a French Word

Back in another life when I shared complaints with Lionel about some petty Japanese data requirement or other, I used to tease him that "Bureaucracy is a French word and the French are still the world leaders at it".

In December we received a Municipal Bulletin (a nice 32 page colour publication from the Mairie - not sure how much that costs a commune of 2000 inhabitants to produce). It was announced that a new local planning rule had been introduced requiring a Declaration Préalable (like a simple planning request) before a tree could be cut down on a talus - a field boundary. Stuart, our tree surgeon recommended that we take down a mature Ash tree to allow the adjacent Oak to fully develop - The oak is a rare tree that's never received the traditional local tree management method of pollarding. Fully mature trees are comparative rarities on field boundaries and we are keen to allow ours to develop naturally.

The Ash is the tree leaning to the right

So, down to the Mairie to confirm the new regulation, an informal meeting with M. Griaud who kindly printed off all the maps I needed, looked at the photographs I had taken showing the tree and said he'd look out for the application when I submitted it. All pretty straightforward ...

Next I received a letter from M. Le Maire inviting me to a meeting at the tree with the Tree Cutting Down Committee (my translation). All five members duly arrived in the Maire's car, spent fifteen minutes talking to each other and me about the tree and then disappeared promising a response in eight days.

When the response arrived it was not an agreement, rather a "Certificate of Non-Objection".

So that's an approval then ..... I think.

Hopefully it is as Stuart and Sébastien are in next Monday to take down the tree.

La Vie Sauvage II

After Lucien's solumn warning about Les Ragondins (Coypu) I saw one that had been killed on the road just over the way last week. I've seen them in the wild before but close up they are really big animals.

Pond inspections will be more regular from now on .....

Build Update - March

A remarkable thing has happened since I last updated the blog with the build status. We suddenly have a first floor – walls, rooms and doors; bedrooms, bathrooms and corridors.

The build has been assisted along since January by Steve the electrician who’s done plumbing, wall construction and door hanging as well as getting all the downstairs electrics and one of the underfloor heating zones running.

Adam’s done more plastering than he could ever have imagined – he probably wouldn’t want to be known as a plasterer but he’s really pretty damn good at it.

Barbara’s mixed, at the last count, 54 bags of plaster, that's about two tonnes of plaster as well as taping over a kilometre of joints between the plasterboards, cut insulation to fit into the walls, painted litres of PVA on the walls before plastering and kept us on track by planning each days’ work.

And we persuaded Ailsa, an old hockey friend of ours (well, not so old but we have had a lot of hockey experiences together over the years) to come out under the false pretence of having a holiday but actually she spent the whole week cutting and installing steel wall framing and plasterboard. She enjoyed this so much she was back three weeks later for another intense week of electrics, boarding out the lofts and yet more plasterboarding.

So, at last the rooms, the ceilings and the exposed timberwork that have been in our imaginations until now really exist. They’ve had to be in our imaginations as the architect never got to grips with the internal layout and so what we‘ve ended up with is entirely our work – and, in my opinion, it’s great.

When we first saw the barn in 2009 the height was one of the things that really attracted us and I think we've made good use of that, the bedrooms and mezzanine are really high and spacious and have some attractive and unusual roof lines.

Stop Press: Today we have finished the major plastering in the building, we started on 9th October so that's nearly five months we've been working on the walls and ceilings. It's a big job ....

La Vie Sauvage

"Yes, definitely, that was done by une biche"

Lucien is our neighbour opposite and my "Go To"  person for tricky gardening issues and we were on our field surveying a chewed branch on our juvenile Victoria Plum.

"Or possibly un cerf ...." he added less positively.

I wasn't so sure - we'd spent a month wondering what sort of animal had eaten the whole of the top of a young apple tree in the field before one of Dominique's cows got away onto our land and took off a matching amount of the crab apple next to it (the apples survived and are growing well now - just a bit misshapen).

Deer are an infrequent sight around our land, almost always absent between September and March when La Chasse (the hunt) is in season. Last Sunday a long procession of 25 of the ubiquitous white Peugeot/ Renault/ Citroen farmers vans came along our road - initially I thought that a White Van Owners' club had arranged a rally at Jean and Claudette's house but then I twigged it was La Chasse moving from one area that they'd frightened off all the wildlife from to another.

Lucien then took a look at our molehills - "Ahh, ils sont tres malin les taupes ...".  2011 was a good year for molecatching for us, Possibly the moles were a bit naive or possibly we had more time to set the traps but a few successes early in the year seemed to discourage the others. In 2012 the moles came back spoiling for a fight and took a positive pleasure in spiking our traps by pushing soil into them to set them off and then heading off in the opposite direction to push up another molehill. Another of our neighbours, Jean, gave me his advice last summer - "I don't bother with traps any longer - I just put broken glass in the runs" (moles are haemophiliac and will die if cut). After we tried this the moles showed their complete disdain for Jean's solution by pushing the broken glass out of the ground on top of new molehills.

Lucien then warned me that coypu were in the area and to watch carefully the banks of our pond in case they tried to move in. And, for good measure, that the year before we bought La Basse Cour there had been a fox's den under the tumbledown wine store.

With all this wildlife it's no wonder the cats look a bit intimidated when they go out in the dark winter's mornings ........