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.

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: