Up The Garden Path

Update on Cucumbers

2011-08-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

I am dreadful at updating from previous posts and for this I apologise. Today I received a comment from Carrie asking me how the frozen cucumber experiment went. I'm sorry to say that it wasn't the greatest of successes! We did, eventually, defrost the cucumbers and I think we could have used them for soup. However, I'm not mad on cucumber soup (tasteless) and I didn't have the necessary ingredients for gazpacho so we gave them to the pigs. The pigs were very happy.

I'm sorry not to be more positive. I've noticed that a lot of people have come to my blog via a search of "how to freeze cucumbers". In future I will make even more gazpacho soup - which freezes/defreezes beautifully - and leave it at that.

This year we have once again had a good crop of cucumbers but with a mixed quality of fruit. I imagine that this is something to do with the drought during the spring - although we did water the veggie patch and the cucumbers are under plastic. We've got plenty for the time being but some have not developed in the centre at all. Happy pigs again.

If anyone has a good freezing cucumber recipe please let me know!

Noisette at work

2011-07-29T02:30:00.000-07:00

Noisette has been a boon. Normally at this time of year Max performs dangerous acrobatics with a strimmer on the side of the moat. Noisette has changed this totally and as a result my heart beats at a much more regular pace.

We move her approximately every two or three days and this gives her a chance to cut everything within reach (boy, are we careful where we put her!) Now that the field at the back of the house has been cut we can put her at the top of the bank. Being a mountain goat she thinks nothing of the steepness of the bank and just makes her way down eating everything on the way. The brambles at the bottom are next I hope. The photos a bit dark so you can't seem them but they are thick and grow at the rate of knots!

Yes, she's earning her keep.

Local lamb

2011-06-30T05:24:00.001-07:00

We buy very little meat from the supermarket nowadays. We have our own pork, our own chickens (if the fox doesn't get there first) and each year we buy a lamb from our neighbour and have it butchered locally.

Martial raises his lamb on organic principles although as he's basically a small holder he doesn't bother with official tags; he just gets on with it. His herd of sheep have won prizes in the past at local agricultural fairs and he is rightly proud of them.

This year's lack of water has a trickle down effect (curious phrase under the circumstances as nothing is trickling at all around here). First of all one of Martial's wells has dried up and he is having to water his sheep and poultry from the town water which is expensive. Because his second well is almost dry he has cut right back on his vegetable growing - he doesn't want to have to spend money on watering those as well and will instead tuck into some of the surplus that he has conserved from previous years. The price of feed has rocketed sky high - when you can find it that is. He told us that most of the local farmers will get so little for their cereal products that they are cutting their losses by turning it into winter feed for the cattle. There is almost no straw since the wheat is so low and of course hay is scarce as well.

Although the cost of raising his sheep has more than doubled he has kept the price down to last year's level because if he doesn't sell them he'll have to carry on feeding them. This year we have bought two.

Martial is a small holder and very relieved he's not raising meat on a large scale farm. He came round last night to help us tag Noisette (the goat) and told us that at the end of the year he expects a number of farms to be out of business. The future does not look great.

So, if you can, buy your meat locally from a farmer. I realise this will come under the heading of luxury for many people so why not get together with some friends and share a 10kg pack? It will taste better and you will be helping your community's farmers.

The Fox

2011-06-10T00:18:00.000-07:00

Living in the countryside has many sides to it, both good and bad. Personally I find the clean air and lack of town noise outways most of the bad. We grow a great deal of our own food, both fruit/vegetable and meat.

Max hunts with the local chasse and our freezer is supplemented with a few pheasant, rabbit, haunch of sanglier (wild boar) and chevreuil (deer), if we are lucky a hare. Only a certain number of pheasant, deer and hare are allowed to be shot each year and the hunt is issued with a "bracelet" for each animal in their quota. If you shoot an extra one, even by mistake (ie if you have one bracelet and two people each shoot a hare at the same time), there is a fine. (Yes, it is controlled.)

In return for his hunting invitations Max joins the local chasse for the occasional battu which are held throughout the year to keep down the foxes. Make no mistake about it, there are a lot of foxes, they are a nuisance and they do a great deal of harm. The battu are usually, but not always, requested by the farmers and the dates and areas concerned are posted at the Mairie.

This is the sight that greeted us when we went out to feed the chickens this morning. I make no apology for the photos although I have tried to keep them "long" shots. Believe me, close up they are not nice.

Our chickens are shut in at night. The fox dug his way into the pen and forced the door of the hut open. Several were left in the pen but we found two on the lawn outside; in addition, as we can't find them, he must have taken one adult and one baby back with him (or eaten it here I suppose).

Obviously I can't be sure, but we were told that this was probably done by a young fox. An older fox takes a bird back to the den. A young fox is learning the joy of killing and "plays" with his new skill until all the fun is lying on the ground around him.

Even the three chicks were taken.

In all we lost five chickens and three chicks. We have informed the head of the local chasse who will come and see us later today. The next battu is not for a few weeks but I for one will welcome them.

The fruits of our labours

2011-05-17T13:01:00.001-07:00

It's that time of year. Everything is starting and from nothing at all we are suddenly bubbling over with things to bring into the kitchen. The asparagus, as always, started us off but we only cut the spears for six weeks so that the plants have a chance to regenerate for next year.

Then the early lettuce from the greenhouse which I planned to have ready for Easter - and amazingly it was!

Now it's the turn of the cherries. We always know when they are ready because "les voleurs" arrive in ever increasing numbers. We don't mind too much - although we used to! A lot of the trees seem to have grown from pips dropped by the birds and these don't taste great. The really deep red cherries are only on a couple of trees and we grab these when we can. I'm not a supporter of fiddling with nature but if scientists insist on modifying genes and what have you, then perhaps they could sort out the genes in the birds so that they take the high cherries and leave the low ones for us. Now that would be really useful.

Although we eat most of what we pick, this year, if we pick enough, we'll put some in jars and sterilise them so that we can enjoy them later in the year.

And of course it's strawberry time as well. We picked these this evening:

There's nearly two kilos there and we've picking the same amount every two days for the past week. I don't make jam as we don't eat it in large enough quantities to make it worthwhile. However, even I can't eat this amount of strawberries - well, not really and not without really bad consequences! - so I've started making a strawberry coulis which I freeze in plastic cups.

I've discovered the most amazing Delia Smith recipe for strawberry cheesecake ice cream however I prefer to make it plain and use the coulis to pour over afterwards. It really is delicious! If you want to try it you'll find it in the Summer Collection - it involves roasted digestive biscuits and hazelnuts...are you sure you can resist?!

The swarm in the hive - part two

2011-05-10T11:31:00.000-07:00

We got back to our neighbours to sort out the colonies in the abandoned hives this afternoon. There were two and both had built comb all over the place.

The first one we opened turned out to be without any queen and no brood whatsoever. We had already tied most of the wax into frames (lots of honey in them too) so we put them into a nuc and closed them up.

The second hive was a different kettle of fish. The main box was sitting without a floor on a tyre - see above. We knew that there was a stack of wax built onto the roof and that another pile of wax was lying in the tyre. We opened it up carefully.

With our hearts in our mouths we carefully turned the lid upside down. So many bees and we still didn't know if the queen was in the lid or in the tyre - or not there at all perhaps. Very gradually we removed plaques with honey and put them to one side and concentrated on the plaques with brood - this is when we knew there was a queen present so long as we hadn't already killed her. This is all fresh comb and there was a reasonable amount of brood - about four plaques - so we reckoned the queen was probably up here somewhere and not down in the tyre. Tying wax - which is heavy when it has brood and honey in it - into frames is not easy. We did our best and I just hope we improve with experience.

The reward was great. Having put four frames of brood into a nuc I suddenly saw the queen still on the lid. We managed to catch her and having put her to one side we had a moment of reflexion on what to do. There were so many bees!

We finally decided to put the colony back into a big hive. We didn't have one with us so we had to make do with the various elements around us. Brood box, crown board and roof were no problem. The floor we found was rotten and fell apart so we made do with another roof. We then put the frames of brood into this box and surrounded it with frames of honey which I had bought up with me.

The discussion and finding the bits and pieces took approximately five minutes. During this time the bees had found the queen in the cage and were gathering around her. It's amazing how nature works so efficiently! In the picture above you can just about see the cage - look at the breeze block in the middle; the cage is under the pile of bees on top, at the front on the right. (OK, you have to know exactly where it is to see it!)

We put this DIY'ed hive just behind the original placement and once the frames were organised we dropped the queen in over a frame of brood. The picture above was taken less than five minutes later. The bees have found her majesty and have started signalling to the other bees who are now marching out of the tyre and into the hive. This has to be the best part of hiving a swarm - or colony in this case.

My only regret with the whole exercise was not marking the queen. It doesn't matter. We know she's in there and next week we'll take another look to see how things are going.

In the meantime there is the orphaned colony to deal with. More thought is required but I suspect that we will go back tomorrow and unite the two. I would be happier if the colony with the queen had more bees to forage and bring in food.

This final picture is the rest of the comb that we couldn't save or fit into frames. Despite being able to support a huge weight of honey or brood - not to mention bees climbing all over it - comb is incredibly fragile once you start trying to manipulate it and breaks easily. The bees are all over it because there is so much honey in there. We will work out tomorrow how to save the honey. I rather suspect that we won't regret it!

Our work was further rewarded when we drove back down through the wood and past our neighbour's house. He was waiting for us and he and his wife called us in for an apero. This is not to be underestimated. Firstly the glasses are HUGE. Secondly it was fizzy. Thirdly having finished more than I normally consume in a week my glass was refilled.

Forgive me if I leave you now - hic...hic!

More Muscovy

2011-05-04T12:51:00.001-07:00

Mason came out today with her twelve babies. Since the one we hatched was named Brian (born on Easter weekend) the ducklings have been awarded the title of the 12 Apostles. It's all the fault of Monty Python mad children.

They are very sweet and fluffy. It's slightly alarming that she has chosen to sleep on the bank tonight. Hopefully if the fox comes (he last visited three weeks ago and took a chicken) she can just tumble them all down the hill and into the moat.

Tomorrow, if the weather holds, I'll inspect the hives and try and sort out the two in our neighbour's garden.

New Life Up the Garden Path

2011-05-03T11:37:00.000-07:00

Our Muscovy (Mrs Mason and her husband is Mr Fortnum) has been sitting for ages. Finally today we saw her babies. The larger one in the front is Brian - born one week ago in the incubator. Mrs Mason has taken him (her?) in without a murmur.

The chicken came out yesterday with her four golden chicks. Gorgeous.

Wild Bees

2011-04-30T03:26:00.001-07:00

I finally went up with Max to look at the bees that have taken over some abandoned hives in a neighbour's garden. The hives themselves are fairly rotten although one of them might be usable for this season and another brood box in fairly good condition was lying next to them (fairly good is a relative term - it's fairly good next to the one that is crumbling!) But inside these abandoned hives the bees have been busy constructing comb wherever they can.

The two colonies have clearly been there for a while and look strong and healthy. They are far enough away from our own hives that there is no risk of cross-contamination if there are any diseases lurking around. Each time we come back I soak the hive tools and the gloves in a bleach solution.

All we have to do now is transfer the comb into frames and then into a hive in better condition. I think we have a fifty fifty chance of being successful - as usual it all depends on the queen being transferred and we are unlikely to know this for sure for some time.

But there was a bonus today. Some of the comb was stuck to the roof of the hive and we took the opportunity to take some of this away with us. Honey in the comb was part of my childhood but you don't find it very often nowadays. It's harder for the bees to produce as they have to build the fresh comb as well as fill it with honey but I suspect too that people just don't like eating wax with their honey and there is very little demand. I usually put four small frames (which fit into one normal size super frame) into each hive after the OSR honey has been taken off and we keep it carefully for people we know appreciate it.

But today's comb honey doesn't come neatly packaged:

Just dripping in golden goodness.

A busy day

2011-04-28T11:22:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we took another 25 kilos of honey. This makes a total of 45 kilos of spring honey from four hives. For us, that is a good harvest and certainly the artifical swarms played a part. If the bees swarm, we lose about half the honey.

So today I spent the morning bottling the liquid gold. It takes time and organisation. We don't have a handy little tap so the ladle is used - lots of drips. I start with a bowl of water and two (clean) sponges to mop up drips and also to wipe the jars clean. The photo shows a frame of honey, totally capped with wax, just before it went into the extractor. In case you are interested, one frame such as this holds approximately 2kilos of honey.

Then we had an afternoon building shelves - or at least Max and Ralph did. Last week I visited our neighbour who is selling her house. She has given me all her preserving jars which is a really generous if you check the prices. However, we need somewhere to store so many and we finally sorted out a shed and put in some DIY shelving.

In the past I have used these jars for chutneys and tomato ketchups, but I have never preserved fruit and vegetables. Since she also gave (yes, GAVE) us a steriliser and burner, this year will be one of new experiences and experiments.

Max took the opportunity of emptying the shed to wash the empty bottles so that they would be ready for filling in two weeks. We buy red wine "en vrac" and then bottle it here. We have carefully kept bottles for this purpose. The wine is a good table wine and buying it this way is a lot cheaper. Please note - the picture shows a bottle collection of many months!

Spring harvest 2011

2011-04-27T01:27:00.000-07:00

The same day that we inspected the artifical swarm we also decided to collect some of the spring harvest. The oil seed rape is very early this year and you are advised to harvest the honey as soon as the petals start to fall so that it doesn't crystallise in the frames - at which point you can't get it out. We only took the frames with the honey covered with wax so a second harvest will be needed this week.

It was a fun day. Some neighbours have young children and they came over to help us with the extracting. Everyone takes a turn spinning the honey out and watching it run from the extractor is a great reward.

And of course they bought an empty pot with them! For once we managed to keep all the bees out of the kitchen while we were working which made it a more relaxed operation. We took a honey bet on how much there would be - the prize was honey of course - and the final score was 23 kilos.

Artificial Swarm part two

2011-04-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

Well, it worked! We went down to the hives earlier this week and had a quick look. Sure enough, there was a small patch of new brood in a very busy hive. We didn't look for the queen herself as it seemed pointless to upset the bees during the OSR season but we did take the opportunity to put on a super.

The original hive is obviously less busy - less bees - but there was fresh brood so the queen is still laying. We have decided not to unite these two hives. I have two queens arriving shortly and we will replace the original queen and then work on building up both colonies for the summer harvest.

We also did an artificial swarm with a second hive back at the house. It was packed with bees and brood but queen cells were there in force so we decided to deal with it in the same way.

In case you are wondering, the blue mark on the bottom of the hive means that we found and marked the queen. Blue was last year's colour - this year, 2011, is white.

Artifical Swarm

2011-04-02T03:31:00.000-07:00

We inspected the hives yesterday. At the house the wild hive was ok but nothing special and the other three were bringing honey into the supers. Lots of brood but, surprisingly, no queen cells. We left them to it and went to our out apiary. There the hive was heaving and with queen cells a-plenty. Since we had no extra equipment with us we went back the house to get things ready and make a plan.

We have always bottled out of doing an artifical swarm in the past. If you don't know exactly what you are doing it is disturbing to try and work it out with thousands of bees getting understandably angry and pinging you. This time I was determined. The weather this morning was perfect - sunny and almost no wind at all. I took out Clive de Bruyn's book and made notes. I sat down and talked it through with Max. We prepared a hive with floor, box, frames, crown board and lid and off we went.

This is what we did.

1) Moved the original hive onto the ground and replaced it with the new hive. In this new hive were frames of both drawn and undrawn foundation. The drawn foundation was placed so that there was space for one frame between them.

2) Found the queen in the original hive. This took some doing but the whole exercise depends on finding the queen. We placed the frame she was on into the new hive together with the bees on that frame. We also checked that there were no queen cells on this frame.

We then replaced the queen excluder, the super with honey its frames and the lid.

3) We relit the smoker! This is a fairly typical exercise but actually it worked to our advantage as it gave all the flyers time to go back to the new hive and settle down.

4) The original hive was placed about three metres away. We then went through all the frames and removed all but one queen cell. We chose the largest cell and were careful not to shake this frame at all as it can damage the larvae.

5) We closed up this hive.

So now we have a queen from 2010 in a nearly empty hive but with all the flying bees still going back to this hive with nectar. She has a frame of brood which will hopefully keep them in that hive - de Bruyn says that without a frame of brood they are more likely to abscond - and she has the super with some honey in it.

Close to this hive we have a hive with one queen cell and frames full of brood and honey together with all the non-flying bees. Gradually these bees will start to fly and bring in nectar; in the meantime they have plenty of stores in the frames. The brood will start to hatch to boost the numbers. With any luck the queen cell with hatch, she will mate and then start laying. This will take time. What they definitely cannot do at the moment is swarm - they don't have a queen and they can't fly.

And the point of this? Well, if we had left everything as it was the old queen would have swarmed as soon as a new queen had hatched. I would have lost all the flyers and lost a good deal of the honey harvest. I hope very much that I have fooled her and the bees into thinking that they have swarmed already. In a week or so we will check again to check she is still laying and there are no new queen cells.

Will it work? We'll see!

The Smoker

2011-03-27T06:14:00.000-07:00

As you know we take two (last year three) weaners each year to raise for meat. Although it started as an experiment four years ago it was a huge success and we now do it annually. Last year we took two Berkshire Blacks and a British Lop cross for bacon. The pigs are killed here by a local debiteur and then, after cleaning them and cutting them into two, he takes them back to his premises for hanging and subsequent cutting.

Last year we asked him to give us more larger joints so that we could smoke them. However, we didn't have a smoker. Small problem! I looked all over the internet and finally came up with an idea and some dimensions for Max to put into practice.

Over the years Max has recommended our local charpentier to a lot of people. He is a charming man, in his late 70's (my estimate!) and his work is exceptional. And solid. Max asked him to quote for supplying the wood and explained what it was for. We heard nothing for two weeks then a phone call out of the blue asking Max to go and collect "it" - bring the van. When he arrived he found this work of art, enormous and solid awaiting him. Slightly alarmed because we couldn't afford to pay for it Max just stood there open mouthed. Monsieur Billy laughed and explained that he had made it as a gift and a thank you. A real case of what goes around comes around.

Max bought it back and was followed by two of M. Billy's workmen - it took all four of us to carry it from the car into the shed opposite the kitchen. We felt slightly ashamed when we saw it next to our "burner" but it works a treat.

I have prepared hams for roasting before but they taste nothing like the ones that have been smoked first. We have just finished smoking so bacon backs - one will be used tonight for lardons in a pasta sauce. The other I hope to slice for breakfast.

Potatoes 2011

2011-03-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

I have planted less potatoes that in previous years partly because last year the Colorado Beetle was so dreadful. Yesterday I put in one row of Pink Fir, two rows of King Edwards and I still have two rows of Maris Piper to plant.

If anyone has a dream cure for Colorado Beetle I'd love to hear it! Too many to squish by hand - a vacuum cleaner might do it but the cable isn't long enough! Any ideas?

Bees - New Season

2011-03-23T07:41:00.001-07:00

I have just spent a week in London and was pleased to find lovely weather on my return to Anjou. I have been keeping a sharp eye on the hives during the past four weeks and noticed four of the hives plus the wild hive bringing in pollen. The other two were just flying and not bringing in very much at all.

They say that the first inspection should wait until the flowering currant is in blossom and certainly it is now. So this week we have eaten our first asparagus of the season, planted our potatoes (more to follow in another post) and today, done the spring inspection of the hives.

Straight away I should say that one of the hives has been abandoned. Lots of honey left behind but not a single bee, dead or alive, nor any brood. Is this Colony Collapse Disorder? I don't know but from what I've read it's showing at least some of the signs.

The three busy busy hives were in great condition. Although we only found the queen in one of them there was so much brood in the others that there is clearly a queen present. The brood boxes were in fact very full of honey and brood although there was no evidence of queen cells.

The oil seed rape (or colza) is just beginning to come into flower one kilometre away so, with the full boxes, we have put a super on each of these hives. I'm aware this is early but I would rather be too early than too late and risk swarming. Mind you, I said that last year too!

The wild hive is difficult to assess as we obviously cannot look into the main body of the tree trunk. However, we looked down from the top and there are plenty of bees. If there is brood present it is further down but I've never seen brood in this hive so I am not worried. This is a colony that we leave to its own devices and are grateful if there's any honey for us later in the year.

Then we went out to our "out apiary". Frightfully grand name for one hive a few miles away. We collected a swarm from a friend last year and they asked us to leave it in their garden. It suits us well as it is far enough away to benefit from other crops. The queen in this one wasn't marked last year - it's a very "flighty" hive and when we found her she was very quick to move off so we didn't worry. Today we found a hive stuffed full of honey and brood and the queen, still quite flighty, conveniently placed for marking, which I quickly did. However, if the possibility arises I will change this queen. The bees are very quick to be irritated and I suspect if I can requeen with a calmer strain this would help. I don't like being pinged by dozens of bees when I'm inspecting a hive.

Finally I should mention the second weak colony that I mentioned earlier. A bit of history. Last year, just after we had collected the honey harvest, I discovered Foul Brood (not sure if it was European or American) in a hive. Although I hadn't come across it before I recognised it immediately. It is a requirement to inform the local Agent Sanitaire d'Apiculture if you come across this nasty disease and rather alarmed I telephoned him straight away. He came round that afternoon and it was an education in itself.

First of all he inspected all the other, apparently healthy hives first and confirmed that they were indeed in good health. He then put a disposible cover over his bee suit and told me that from now on I was not to touch anything of the diseased hive. He would do it all and would leave me his disposible suit and gloves for burning.

We set up a fresh nucleus hive with undrawn wax on the frames. He then put a white sheet in front of this hive and bashed all the frames from the diseased hive onto the sheet. The frames, empty of bees, were put into a large paper sack for later burning. The next job was to find the queen. How he did this I do not know. She was unmarked and there were literally thousands of bees all over this white sheet. However, after a couple of minutes he became very intent and there she was. He scooped her into the fresh nucleus hive and within minutes the bees began their march into the hive.

Everything was gathered up scrupulously. The frames and the sheet were in the sack for burning, together with his suit and gloves. The hive, floor, crown board, lid, etc were immediately given the once over with the flame thrower. The hive tools and my gloves were soaked in a bleach solution. Then the formality of form filling and reassurance that Foul Brood can be picked up from other bees during foraging and has no reflection on the beekeepers ability. He was in fact pleased that I'd a) recognised it and b) informed him - apparently not all beekeepers do.

I couldn't possibly say that I was pleased to find this disease in one of my hives but the silver lining was a couple of hours of one to one instruction from a real expert.

I checked this hive, as instructed, three weeks later and sure enough there was food and brood and the queen which I marked. However, by now it was October and I was worried the colony wasn't strong enough. There was nothing I could do but wait.

Today's inspection found a very small colony and the original queen. I fear it won't survive. I'm tempted to put a frame of brood and young bees into the hive to help it but suspect it will be too late. I also don't want to disturb the stronger hives just at the beginning of the OSR season.

All in all I'm happy that we have four strong hives at the start of the season. Let's hope it continues well!

Bees - New Season

2011-03-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

Noisette

2011-03-06T02:53:00.000-08:00

A friend of ours has just moved house. She is downsizing and moving from a country setting to a small village. Her dilemna? What to do with Noisette. Her solution? Call Jean and Max. Simple really. Her logic? Well, you don't have a goat so you probably need one. Hmmm.

Actually, cutting the grass and the brambles on the banks of the moat is a real pain and involves the most appallingly dangerous acrobatics whilst juggling with a machine. Being a mountain goat, Noisette could well eliminate the annual risk to life and limb. We agreed to take her.

We collected Noisette on the day of Le Crunch. Rugby fans will know that this was the big England/France match for the Six Nations. When we arrived Nicole's son (approx 30) was firstly very helpful with getting the goat into the van and secondly very excited about the match. The discussion was short as we were worried about what Noisette would do to the inside of the van.

As we left, the son told us that he had explained to Noisette that we would probably speak to her in English and she wasn't to worry. I asked him if he had also explained that animals at Grand Gennetay are expected to work for their living? "Oui, oui, pas de probleme." Had he also explained to her what happened if she broke her side of the bargain (I was enjoying this!). He looked a little perplexed. Nicole muttered "Mon dieu!" and explained more fully where Noisette was going to be living and where we find our food.

I was, of course, joking. I am not squeamish about eating our animals as I think this blog shows, but I couldn't possibly do so when we had been given what was effectively a family pet.

The good news, apart from the outcome of the match, is that Noisette is cutting the grass very effectively. We will move her down to the banks of the moat shortly.

New start in the garden

2011-03-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

Today heralds a new start in the garden. It was a beautiful day and, apart from general maintenance, the first day we have actually done any constructive work towards this year's produce. This is a photo of the main veggie patch this morning:

The plastic sheeting is left over from last year and needed to be lifted so that we can reuse it this year. The greenhouse is fine after its wonderful overhaul last year. However it needs a clear out (Sunday's job).

This year I want to add an extra bed in here. We have too many paths and where there are paths there are an abundance of summer weeds. I don't mind using glysophate before I've sown/planted but once veg is in the ground I don't like to use it at all. So, my grand plan is to have an extra bed, thus cutting down on the paths between them.

I know the rotovator is the bain of all good, sensible gardeners but in this case we used it. I am quite sure the penalty will be paid later on but I'm hoping it won't be too bad with the help of the plastic sheeting.

Max turned the soil and by the end of the afternoon we had a well turned plot. Tomorrow I will put the plastic back and start planning what is going where.

One surprise that greeted me while I was weeding the asparagus bed:

I don't think I've ever seen asparagus shoots this early. More frost is forecast so I piled a stack of soil over the top to protect it for a bit longer.

Fruit - A new discovery

2010-07-19T02:49:00.001-07:00

One of the things I love about living here is the abundance of fruit. The cherries kick off the year and we then have fresh fruit right through to about late September. The strawberries this year were abundant - for three weeks we were picking between 500gms and 1 kilo every two days. Then came the raspberries; again three weeks of picking a huge amount but I didn't weigh them (difficult when they are already eaten!). Now we are eating mirabelles (both yellow and red) - not quite so abundant this year but never mind - and the figs have just started to ripen (shhh - don't tell anyone!).

In the vegetable patch I have water melons with golf ball size fruit - I planted 20 seedlings and about 15 are doing well so we'll be feasting on water melon later in August. I also have 15 regular melons but they were planted late so are still developing.

The peach tree is heavy with fruit which will be picked shortly and the pear trees also promise a good harvest.

But the biggest surprise this week was a new discovery - bear in mind we've lived here for over 10 years now. Two days ago I was inspecting the bees and suddenly noticed that the tree behind the hives was full of a small plum like fruit, green/yellow in colour. Definitely not a mirabelle and the taste is delicious. I'm guessing a plum of some sort and am not too bothered which sort so long as it tastes good! Harvesting them will be fun though as they really are a metre from the hives!

Last night two friends came for supper and I had approximately no notice. The joy of being able to go into the garden to find supper. We feasted on French beans cooked with onions, salad and cucumber. We decided that courgettes would be too much. For pudding we feasted on ice cream and honey straight from the comb. Perfect!

Video of bees marching into their hive

2010-07-05T08:24:00.000-07:00

I transferred a strong colony from a nuc into a larger brood box this afternoon. It was a bit of a game as I was on my own and it involved a second colony (weaker) also being united. It always amazes me how the bees march into the hive to find the queen.

I tried to take a video - it wasn't terribly successful and as you can see I didn't know how to turn it off at the end. But if you watch you'll see them almost running out of the smaller box and into the bigger one. Enjoy!

Mange Tout

2010-07-05T01:02:00.001-07:00

The peas have been a disaster this year. I think it must have been the seeds themselves because I have had no trouble with beans or mange tout. I planted the peas in two separate places and a total of three plantings (or sowings I suppose) and only about twenty came up at all (about 10 per cent so not good) and the crop on those has been bad.

The Mange Tout however are brilliant. They are growing so fast and producing so much that it's hard to keep up. Feast indeed but how to preserve them? Freezing isn't ideal but it does appear to be the only way so I did an experiment and we ate the result last night.

Basically I blanched them for 30 seconds and then left them to dry slightly in the colander. Into the plastic bag and into the freezer as quickly as possible. I only put in a small amount - enough for two people or three at a pinch. To use them I put them straight from the freezer into boiling water and just gave them another 30 seconds before removing into the colander.

There is no doubt that they were not as good as fresh mange tout. However they weren't bad as a side vegetable. By that I mean I wouldn't use them as decoration around a piece of duck but they tasted delicious. They were only in the freezer for 48 hours so perhaps they would lose more flavour or break down more if they were there longer. We'll see - I have so many that freezing will be a necessity.

Bee Season

2010-07-05T00:27:00.000-07:00

Nature really is amazing. When our eldest son was here in mid-June I had a look at the hives and although all was well and as it should be the supers were mediocre. Filling but slowly. I had another look exactly seven days ago and the situation was just the same.

What a difference a week makes! We opened the hives yesterday and to my astonishment the supers were filling to the extent that all but one hive needed another super. Hmmm, shortage of supers then! I can't judge how the harvest will be in comparison to last year but at least there will be a harvest.

A few years ago I exchanged a stack of sailing charts for some 12 frame Dadants and other equipment. This meant that we were able to expand our apiary and they have served us well. However, Dadants come in two sizes, 12-frame and 10-frame and we had a mix. This isn't great as I seem to spend a lot of time needing the other size super regardless of what I've put on the trailer. So last week I bought two new 10-frame Dadants and have put two of the bigger ones up for sale, together with one of the nucs we created this year. This is the nuc when we opened it up yesterday:

It was very hot yesterday and one of the hives was busy taking a breathe of fresh air:

There is something unbelievably fascinating about bees. I know there's a stack of publicity about honey bees at the moment and that's wonderful because it means more people are becoming interested and more are becoming beekeepers. That's got to be a good thing and perhaps one day it will be quite normal again to have a hive at the bottom of the garden (or on the roof).

A good yield so far and our first rabbit...

2010-06-26T00:32:00.001-07:00

It's funny how the garden catches up with you. One day you're lucky if one of the lettuces is big enough to stretch to a couple of mouthfuls and the next you are feasting on fruit and veg. Everything has been late this year because of the long winter and the late cold spells. I think we still are running a little late - I am sure the elderflower was later than usual - but with enormous benefits it seems to quantity.

We were still picking cherries in June and I know for a fact that hasn't happened before. And what a crop. We thought last year was good but this year wasn't only good in terms of quantity but in quality as well. I suppose the fruit starting ripening late and then with a sudden burst of sun and heat at the critical moment it all burst into ripeness. The cherries have never been darker in colour nor sweeter in taste. Once again the birds left us plenty and for once we could reach them from the ground - indeed the branches were so heavy they sort of came down to greet us!

And then the strawberries - for three weeks we were picking about 3 kilos per week. Not bad when there's only two of you to eat them - and at the weekend we were good enough to share them with our youngest son (he's away at school during the week).

Right now we are feasting on raspberries. The yield isn't quite so magnificent but I am picking about two kilos a week so I can't complain. Certainly enough to accompany ice cream or yoghurt.

And what about the vegetables? Well, of course we are still fighting the rabbits and I had to put netting over the courgettes - all the leaves were eaten one night. But all the same we are eating our first baby courgettes, baby and medium sized carrots (the sweetness of a freshly picked carrot...), and of course lettuces when we beat the rabbits to them. Also potatoes left in the ground last year (by mistake) have given us a few tasty meals.

Chard will be on the menu next week and for some time to come, mangetout are in flower so hopefully they will be eaten soon, French beans likewise.

The tomatoes will be later this year and also the melons and water melons. Cucumbers are still without flowers but enjoying this sunny weather. Onions are doing well. The pumpkin plants look fantastic.

I could go on - aubergine, peppers, chillies, brassicas. But they can be a subject for another day.

The fight against the invasion of rabbits goes on but they are two down. One was taken by a dog, the other by us. Stir fry rabbit for lunch yesterday was delicious.

Elderflower Cordial Recipe

2010-06-19T03:12:00.001-07:00

Having had a fairly sheltered childhood there are many things which, thankfully, didn't come my way. One of these was the possibility that citric acid might be mixed with powdery drugs to make them go further - or so I'm informed by our local pharmacist who refuses to sell me any despite having known me and my family for over 10 years.

May is traditionally the month for me to make Elderflower Cordial and this year I was determined to make plenty and freeze it but that required an element of forethought. The result is that I bought three packets of citric acid when I was last in England and have kept them safely in the cupboard - there should be enough for next year's cordial as well.

The fact is citric acid is not essential but in my opinion it does make for a better result - more bite to the taste. Anyway, I made about six litres and they are safely in the freezer awaiting hot summer days.

I was amused though to see that other English have come up against the problem of obtaining citric acid in France. I honestly had no idea that it was used by drug users until the pharmacist explained - I insisted on an explanation and he was good enough to at least look embarassed when he told me so I am fairly confident he was accusing me of anything; just following the rules - but since then I have heard it from several nursing friends.

So the moral of this story is buy your citric acid in England if you plan on making Elderflower Cordial in France.

My recipe is in fact that of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and is as follows:

Ingredients:

20–30 freshly picked heads of elderflower
Zest of two lemons and one orange
Up to 400ml freshly squeezed lemon juice (6–8 lemons, depending on juiciness)
Up to 1.5kg granulated or caster sugar
Tartaric acid (optional)

Shake any insects off the elderflowers, then place them in a large bowl with the lemon and orange zest and pour over enough just-boiled water to cover them completely (about 11/2–2 litres).

Cover and leave for at least 4 hours, or overnight, until cold.

Strain the flowery liquid through muslin, a clean cotton cloth or a jelly bag, gently squeezing it to extract all the juice.

Measure the amount of liquid and pour it into a saucepan.

To every 500ml liquid, add 350g sugar, 50ml lemon juice and a heaped teaspoon of tartaric acid if you are using it.

Heat gently to dissolve the sugar, stirring occasionally.

Bring to a gentle simmer and skim off any scum.

Let the cordial cool, then strain once again through muslin, cotton or a jelly bag.

Pour the cordial through a funnel into clean bottles, filling them to within about 2–3cm of the top.

If you want you can freeze the cordial for later use. If you use plastic bottles, only fill to about 5cms from the top and don't tighten the lid until after the liquid is frozen. Alternatively use ice cubes containers or ice cube bags.

Rabbits

2010-06-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

We went to a friend's house for supper on Tuesday and started talking about the rabbit problem. She remarked that they don't worry about the lack of wildlife between her house and ours (16kms) because they know when they come up our drive they'll see plenty. She's right, we have buzzards, lapwings, owls, snakes (could do without those), lizards galore, hares, hedgehogs and, of course, rabbits.

I can't be squeamish about this but the rabbits have to go. We have been invaded by them for the past three years and I've had enough. I don't mind sharing the excess veg but it seems that we are getting less than our fair share. Electric fences are apparently not strong enough - although it keeps the pigs in their paddock - so we've decided the only solution is to shoot them. Max has held a French shooting licence for a number of years - frankly I wish we'd decided to do this earlier. I went into the veggie plot this morning to find a baby rabbit munching away at the beans. Lettuces are worn down to the bare minimum and carrots, well, what carrots?

I'm afraid I feel complete sympathy with Mr MacGregor and rabbit pie will be on the menu as soon as possible. Beatrix Potter clearly didn't grow her own.

My wonderful bees

2010-06-07T00:39:00.000-07:00

I feel that we have definitely taken a step up the beekeeping ladder this year. If that sounds like pride, well, it is and no doubt it will be followed by a colossal fall but let me explain.

Last year we had so many swarms we had difficulty hiving them all. It was entirely our fault because we simply weren't experienced - or confident - enough to take the required action at the required moment. "Go away and think it over" is good up to a point - the point being that the bees are following a timetable of their own and will happily carry on regardless of the shortcomings of hesitant beekeepers. This year I knew it would happen again unless I worked it all out in advance in my head so that action could be taken on the spot.

Because of the cold weather we were unable to open the hives until late April/early May. We were thrilled to discover that all our colonies (four plus the Wild Hive) had survived the winter and were busy bringing in pollen and nectar, the brood was expanding and all was well. However, the Oil Seed Rape period also bought a sudden onslaught of queen cells. This year I was better prepared. Still not confident enough to risk all the colonies I decided I would divide two of the hives by putting a frame of brood with a queen cell, together with nurse bees and frames of honey, into a small 6-frame hive. As I couldn't find the queen (she was unmarked) I couldn't do a proper Artifical Swarm so I knew I'd still have a swarm from the main hive but at least I had a back up.

From the other colonies - the two I didn't touch and the Wild Hive which I can't manage in the same way - we had swarms as predicted but as we were here we were able to rehive these as required.

So at present we have four main hives and the Wild Hive, plus four small hives containing either collected swarms or the divisions. We went through these last week and were thrilled to discover brood in all of them and were also able to mark the queens - I think I need marking practice though as the blue mark is more like a blue streak!

The next job is to combine weak colonies with strong ones and I hope to do this later in the week. Photos will follow and I'll try to keep up to date from now on.

Full speed ahead - strawberries

2010-06-07T00:29:00.000-07:00

Just because I haven't been blogging, don't think I haven't been sorting out the vegetable plot. It's all a bit late this year because of the long winter - can you imagine we are still picking cherries and it's JUNE? Once again we have a good crop - more than we can eat - and the birds are needless to say helping us to eat them. Strawberries have been amazing too. Each day we have picked about 1/2 kilo. Since there are only two of us here during the week guess what? Yum. At the weekend we have to make a huge effort to share them but somehow we manage.

These are the strawberries I planted in the autumn of 2008. Last year we had a good crop. This year we've had an amazing crop. They are in the new vegetable plot (started in 2009) under a plastic sheet to keep the weeds down. I believe that I am meant to replant strawberries every two years so in the autumn I'm going to move them over a bit to where the potatoes are currently growing. This means the ground will be relatively weed free, well manured and in reasonably good nick. The plastic sheet will be reused (it's one of those heavy green ones usually used for hedging) and I'll take runners from the current plants. Hope it works or my name will be mud this time next year!

Cleaning the Greenhouse

2010-03-06T08:55:00.001-08:00

This was the greenhouse this morning. Just to remind you, it was hit by a tornado several years ago and a lot of the glass was broken. We decided then to replace the broken glass with sheets of plastic that we had and for the past five years that has been ok. However, plastic deteriorates with time and sunlight and it has now got to the point where you can't see through it at all. Coupled with the fact that at the back of the greenhouse we "boarded" it up with planks of wood, well, it was time to sort it out.

Oh yes, and the grime...

You can see above how the grime collected between the panes of glass (above right where you can also see the black boards at the back) and also, worse, between the glass and the frame (above left - really disgusting!). You don't need to read the books to imagine what is hiding in all that grime - I'm quite sure some of it was moving...look at the cluster of eggs we found hiding between the plastic and the glass:

So we have established that it needed a really good clean! In order to do this properly all the glass had to be removed. Some of you may have heard that there's been a bit of a wind in France recently and playing around with glass is something to be done in calm weather. Today was the day. Not a breathe of wind, lovely sunshine, perfect.

In order to clean the glass I armed myself with a bucket full of the hottest water I could bear, a thick spongey cloth (this is glass remember and the edges are sharp - I have found four cuts on my hand from this job but nothing serious), two towels (for drying the glass - it's slippery and difficult to replace when it's wet), a toothbrush and an old scrubbing brush (the type used for dishes). All were required.

Max had other items - a flat headed screwdriver for removing/replacing the "W" clips and a nice collection of swear words for when the same clips flew out and hit him in the face - several times. (Also, a slightly peeved expression because he'd read my previous post about the greenhouse...)

The grime between the panes of glass was so thick that it took a fair bit of scrubbing - this was the job of the toothbrush. The hot water eventually soaks through the dirt so often I'd come back to one that "I'd prepared earlier". The scrubbing brush and the toothbrush were also used for cleaning the bits of frame normally under the glass - again, dirt had built up where the water runs down in gulleys. Yuck, Yuck, Yuck.

We took it slowly. First the roof glass was removed, cleaned, the frame cleaned, the glass replaced. Then the same process with the side glass.

This is the moment to introduce the hero of the day in action...(drum roll please)...

This really is not a one man job. Apart from anything else those pesky clips kept falling on the ground just when the glass was being held in place. However, we learnt something today - this is a job that is easier than we thought. Yes, it takes time and patience and has to be done calmly but it really was worthwhile.

This is the greenhouse as we left it this evening...

It's not finished yet - you might notice that the front on the right has no glass at all. All in all we need 14 new panes of glass (none of which were broken today) which we will get cut this week. I rather fear that will be the moment we discover it would be cheaper to buy a new greenhouse; I'll let you know!

Spring is in the air

2010-03-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

It's official. After the dreadful storm last week (all the hives lost their roofs which were found floating in the moat - the bees were unharmed) the sun has come out. This has happened before but today it's different. Let me explain.

On the face of it, despite the blue sky, it is still very cold. The temperature this morning when I woke up was a meagre 3 degrees. Not exactly T-shirt weather. But the day warmed up and this afternoon when I walked the dogs I found I was being buzzed - as I walked through the field about 20 metres from the hives a continuous stream of bees were whizzing past my head and not all of them bothered to detour around me I might add!

Curious, I took a look at the hives and sure enough the entrances were all frantically busy with bees rushing in and out; most exciting of all was that many of the bees were carrying pollen so there must be some food around somewhere.

Now of course I didn't have my camera with me and by the time the dogs had walked what they considered a reasonable minimum distance and I'd got my camera from the house, it was already a degree cooler and the bees were on their way home. So the photo above shows activity but not the mass excitement of 40 minutes earlier.

It is still not warm enough to give the bees a liquid syrup feed but it is important to keep an eye on the weight of the hives (by hefting them) because this is the time of year when bees starve very quickly. We keep candy on top of the crown boards and it is still being taken down into the body of the hive. I hope that in a few weeks time it will be warm enough for us to open up the hives for their first spring inspection. For me, the first inspection is the beginning of spring and brings so much to look forward to. Of the six hives (including the wild hive) I am hopeful that four have colonies that will survive through to the spring; the other two are touch and go but I haven't given up!

But it wasn't only the bees who were actively showing signs of spring. More good news was to follow. On my way home I collected the eggs and was pleased that once again we had two - although hens lay less eggs during the winter, we have been worried during the past two weeks because we were getting one egg if we were lucky. When Max got home I told him I'd got the eggs and he was astonished - because he had collected two before he went out. And then there were two more this evening from our young hens who are obviously just beginning to come into lay.

Looks like eggs are back on the menu!

This year's pigs - Berkshire Blacks again

2010-03-02T01:59:00.001-08:00

Berkshire Blacks

You may recall that we first raised pigs two years ago and it was a great success. We were fortunate to have been recommended Berkshire Blacks - they were easy to look after, friendly and gentle and, ultimately, delicious.

Last year we wanted the same again but unfortunately the breeder lost her piglets during a dreadfully cold spell so instead we had a pair of Gloucester Old Spots x British Lop. They were much bigger and equally friendly - less gentle purely because of their size. However, we had tasted the best and although the meat from these two was excellent, it missed a certain je ne sais pas quoi.

So this year we were back searching for the Berkshires. First stop the original breeder but she has decided to retire from pig farming. She put me in touch with the couple who have bought her Berkshires and I was able to order three weaners. The great news is that this couple are as keen on Berkshires as we are and are hoping to keep them for years to come; and they only live about two hours away from us. Perfect!

So, without more ado I invite you to click on this link and see what Esme produced last week. Clever girl!

The Greenhouse

2010-02-25T01:01:00.000-08:00

A few years ago a tornado came through our garden. It started down in Bordeaux and followed a path north. When I say "through our garden", you could actually see the path of damage that it left with untouched trees and fields on either side. Our neighbour's barn roof was found in our moat. We were lucky that the chimneys fell away from the house and not through the roof. It was an exciting night.

Not surprisingly, our greenhouse was damaged. Max managed to save most of the glass and we put clear plastic in the "glass beyond repair" areas. Unfortunately the clear plastic is now opaque and I made a policy decision to get it all sorted out. It will also give us an opportunity to clean the grime out from the glass overlaps - they really are disgusting and no doubt harbour all sorts of government health warnings.

This sort of thing seems to have a sort of dance routine. When I suggested that we sort out the glass Max immediately pointed out that finding glass that precise size would be impossible. The glass came with the frame.
Glass-cutting places?
S'pose so...but we'll never find the clips to hold the glass in. It all comes as a kit.
Er, greenhouse accessories?
Won't find them.

You get the idea. Anyway, if anyone else is thinking of changing or replacing greenhouse glass I can recommend Two Wests & Elliot for the clips. I ordered them over the phone and they arrived within the week. For your reference, they are called w clips and z clips.

Now for the fun of getting the glass cut!

Honey update

2010-02-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

The honey from 2009 was excellent. To our astonishment we have sold nearly all of it via the local market and are keeping the last few pots for ourselves. I hope that we have made enough money to upgrade at least two of our hives. I would prefer them all to be 10 frame Dadant and at the moment we have 3 which are 12 frame. This simply means that the supers from one size don't fit the other and it was very frustrating last year finding we'd taken the wrong ones out to the apiary. Also, realistically, a 10 frame is just a bit lighter than a 12 frame so easier on the back.

I took advantage of the brief blast of sunshine last week to look at the hives and heft them - lifting the hive to see how heavy it is gives you an idea of how much honey is left inside for the bees. This time of year is critical as the bees are just beginning to enjoy slightly finer weather but there isn't any food for them so if the hive is low on stores they starve to death. I put a block of candy on the feeder boards of each hive and this hopefully sees them through to the appearance of the first food in the spring. The feeder board is placed between the main body of the hive and the lid and the candy sits on a hole so that the bees can get at it from underneath.

Of course the wild hive presents all sorts of problems. There is no feeder board with a convenient hole so the candy is placed pretty much amongst the bees. Needless to say getting it there upsets them (although I like to think they appreciate it when they realise what it is I've given them!) and they were getting just a touch irritated with me. I was only wearing the veil (not the trousers) because usually bees are quite sleepy at this time of year. Famous last words - there was nothing sleepy about these bees! Still, the job was done and hopefully the candy will help the bees through the rest of the winter.

Freezing potatoes, tomatoes and onions

2010-02-16T05:02:00.000-08:00

Well, it's been a while. I went to London in September and when I got back I just lost the oomph for blogging. This was partly because there was just so much in the garden - 2009 was a mega year for fruit and vegetables. We ate most of the fruit as it came off the bush/tree, but the vegetables were so plentiful, preservation was required.

For once I didn't make any chutney. In our house this goes down as unforgiveable! I just never got around to it, partly I suppose because I actually had some work during the chutney making period so that took priority.

So, how to preserve vegetables? The great thing about the garden nowadays is that if you have a question you just tap it into a search engine and up comes the answer, or 110,000 of them, in an instant.

I have frozen potatoes successfully in the past, both as par-boiled (for roasting) and mashed (for re-heating and serving) and I did the same this year. However, I did store about 20 sacks (each containing 5-10 kilos) of potatoes in the barn and we are still eating these. Despite being stored in the cold and total dark, they have all started sprouting but not turning green. They still roast, boil and mash well so until they go green or rotten we'll eat those and keep the frozen potatoes for that period between none left and first earlies.

Tomatoes also freeze successfully and this year I just froze them whole. They are wonderful for pasta sauces - I just take them out of the freezer, run them under the tap (which makes their skins slip off easy as pie), chop them roughly and throw them in the pan. Easy.

Onions - well this was a new one on me. We had a fantastic crop of onions and shallots and as well as plaiting some I discovered that I could freeze onions - just chop them up and put them in a plastic bag. Use them straight from the freezer. I added a bag to the pasta sauce (and the faithful tomatoes) last night. It was excellent. However, remember that onions have a high water content so when they defreeze they are not quite the same consistency.

Honey Harvest 2009

2009-08-28T01:50:00.000-07:00

Ten days ago we finally managed to harvest our honey. I had promised my friend Alex (who raises Alpacas) that if we could time it right she could come and help us. Tuesday suited all of us and Tuesday it was.

The day was perfect. You need fine weather when you take the honey from the bees and we certainly had that. Perhaps a little too hot for comfort but that is better than wet and windy!

The whole process took about four hours. We started by removing the supers from the hives.

This hive was one of our best - both these supers had nearly totally full frames (the supers are the smaller "boxes" on top of the bigger green box).

The other excellent hive was the one we have dubbed the wild hive. Again we had nearly two complete supers although we were unable to take some of the frames from the lower super as it was attached to the main log!

Most of this year's harvest came from these two hives although all of the hives produced something.

Before we put the supers into the trailer we had to brush as many bees as possible off the frames. Not always easy as the bees aren't too keen on being deprived of their honey!

Last year we used the wheelbarrow to take our honey harvest back to the house - but that was last year and since then we've actually had rather a lot of sunshine and the bees have been able to collect just a bit more honey! So this year we hitched up our trailer and took it into the field.

This photo was taken right at the start when Max was lighting the smoker. Each time we put a super into the trailer we covered it as much as possible with the sheet which you can see at the front of the trailer. This didn't really fool the bees as the smell of honey was so strong but it did stop them from getting back onto the frames. The trailer was double stacked with supers and we were VERY excited!

Back at the house the fun started. Max put the air compressor outside the kitchen and reduced the pressure to a minimum. Using this he and Ralph were able to blow the remaining bees off the frames. By this time we had closed all the doors and windows into the kitchen as we had heard stories of clouds of bees arriving during the extraction! Ralph bought the supers in and Alex and I started the extracting.

A word here for first time honey extractors - put newspaper down on the floor as much as possible. If not you have honey dribbling onto the floor which is tedious although not the end of the world. What is a bore though is when it is walked in and then carried all around the house. I also found it useful to change into flipflop style shoes as they could be washed easily when I did inevitably walk in honey.

In the pictures above Ralph and I are scraping the wax off the first frame. The bees close the cells once it is filled with honey and the water content has been sufficiently reduced (water content is a subject I am not qualified to explain but if the cell is closed the job has been done). From this point on the job is a sticky one!

We all took a turn with the extractor. There are two types of extractor: radial and tangential. The difference is in the placement of the frames: in the radial extractor, frames are placed so that they have an edge to the edge of the extractor; in the tangential the frames are placed with a side to the edge of the extractor. I haven't explained this well but you can google for images of both. In practical terms it means that with the tangential extractor you extract one side of the frame and then turn the frames around before extracting the second side. One day we will be able to upgrade to a radial I hope but in the meantime our small three frame tangential does just fine and it wasn't long before the liquid gold was running out of the tap into the storage buckets.

This is what we do it for! As the honey comes out of the extractor it passes through a fine nylon gauze which catches the worst of the bits and pieces - bits of bees, wax cappings, general debris. This bucket takes 25 kilos of honey and we filled two of them. We then filled two more smaller, 3 kilo, buckets and a couple of pots straight from the extractor for Alex, us and a couple of other friends. Plus the four honey combs we took a short time ago, each weighing nearly 500 grams. In all then, we probably had about 60 kilos of honey. Oh joy!

We left the honey in the storage buckets for a week to allow it to settle and for the air to come to the top and then Max and Guy potted it up while I was in London. This is what I saw when I walked into the kitchen last night:

The lady who gave us all those seedlings earlier in the year also gave us well over 100 honey pots, with lids. Glass honey pots don't come cheap and she has saved us about 40 euros - you know who you are and once again, thank you!

My job today is to order some labels so that we can sell some of the honey to friends who have been asking for it. In the meantime we will store it somewhere cool and dark.

Mayonnaise

2009-08-08T04:19:00.000-07:00

One of the disadvantages of growing your own vegetables and raising your own meat is that it's easy to become the most dreadful snob about food. Usually this is good - I very rarely buy out of season vegetables now and when I do they are French grown, local if possible; the result is that we eat a much wider variety of vegetables. I am very particular about what meat I buy now. I don't often buy chicken as we eat our own but when I do I only buy "Label Rouge" standard (I think this may be equivalent to the Red Tractor label in the UK but I'm not sure; suffice to say it comes with certain guarantees about living conditions and feed quality). Burgers - well, let's not even go there! I buy the beef and mince my own. Don't get me wrong, in other people's houses I eat what I'm given and it's always delicious. I am only talking about my own personal shopping preferences.

However, one thing I simply don't like/won't eat is shop bought mayonnaise. I'm sure that some makes are better than others but they simply don't compare with homemade. Fortunately I can usually pass on the mayonnaise without causing offence and it's only a subject of conversation if I am at home making it. The reaction is always the same, "I know it's much nicer but I just don't have the time to make mayonnaise and shop bought is just as good." (Yes, there is a contradiction in that sentence but that is the reaction!)

The fact is that mayonnaise is very quick to make and the ingredients are usually in the kitchen already: egg, mustard, sunflower oil (or other oil of your choice), salt/pepper and a teaspoon of curry powder if you want it. I don't use olive oil as I find the taste is too strong - unpleasant even - but other people do and another option would be half and half. For the hardware, a balloon whisk is easier than a fork but either will do the job and a Kenwood mixer is even better although I only use mine for large quantities. The most time consuming part of home made mayonnaise is washing up the bowl and whisk. My 15 year old son makes mayonnaise for me if I don't have the time or if I've forgotten to do it - it really is that easy!

If you've never made mayonnaise before, please give it a go. I may not be able to convince you that it's better but it's got to be worth a try.

MAYONNAISE:

1 egg yolk
1 generous teaspoon mustard (I use French Dijon mustard, not the grainy one)
200mls sunflower oil (or other - see above) - add more or less oil according to the quantity required
Salt/Pepper to taste
1 teaspoon curry powder if you want it

Put the egg yolk and the mustard into a bowl and whisk together. Add the oil very slowly, a dribble at a time, whisking all the time. Keep dribbling in the oil and keep whisking until you have the quantity you require, by which time the mayonnaise with be quite thick. Add salt and pepper to taste and the curry powder if you want it.

CURDLING: Personally, I have never had this problem. I don't think this is a reflection of my brilliance in the kitchen; rather I think it's a reflection of how easy mayonnaise is to make. If you are worried about curdling though check out the internet first because there are remedies for curdled mayonnaise involving a second egg yolk and a bit of patience.

Final note: Personally I don't keep mayonnaise overnight. I believe you can keep it in an airtight jar in the fridge but bearing in mind the presence of raw egg I prefer not to do this.

Tomato Ketchup and Friends

2009-08-08T02:58:00.000-07:00

I recently had a request from my friend Polly in Ireland for my recipe for Tomato Ketchup. I say friend but needless to say this is a very modern usage as Polly is someone who I have never met apart from "on-line". My children find it extraordinary that I have "on-line friends". They warn me of the dangers of such things although surely they must realise that I am not an obvious candidate to be taken in and duped into running away with someone I've met on a blog about gardening or knitting. Anyway, as far as Polly is concerned I have thought hard about my childrens' warnings and simply can't see anything suspicious about someone who also has a garden requesting a recipe for Tomato Ketchup so here it is:

I am a great fan of Hugh F-W and the following is basically his recipe but I can't always get the spices he suggests so I put in what I have in the cupboard. This year it is as follows:

3kgs of ripe tomatoes, roughly chopped
4 large onions, sliced
1 red pepper, pips removed and then chopped
200mls cider vinegar
100gms brown sugar

Spice bag: 1 star anis, cloves, chopped up chilly pepper (I put in three this morning - I'll let you know if that was a mistake - see below), 1 cinnamon stick, peppercorms,

Put the tomatoes, onions and pepper into a large pan and simmer until really soft. Liquidize and then rub through a sieve. Put the result back in the large pan and add the vinegar, sugar and spice bag. Bring to the boil and then simmer for as long as it takes to reduce to a pulpy mix. Put into warmed sterile pots and store. You can use bottles but be aware that the ketchup thickens as it cools and what pours in might then refuse to come out again!

If you are using homegrown tomatoes you might like to plan a larger tomato area for next year. 3kgs is a huge amount and in our case represents about a week's worth of tomatoes. Luckily this year is a good one for tomatoes (unlike the past two years) and also I planted many more than usual so we can still have a tomato salad for lunch - anyway the cucumbers need eating at the moment!

I think it's safe to say that 3 chilli peppers were too many! It is delicious but VERY hot!

The swarm revisited

2009-07-24T02:16:00.000-07:00

This morning was lovely and sunny so Max and I went out and dealt with the swarm I had collected with Ralph on Wednesday evening. By dealt with I simply mean fix the comb they had made in the box onto a frame.

Unfortunately (sic) in the wild bees don't make their comb in frame size pieces; it tends to be sort of oval shaped with curved edges. So attaching it to a frame is rather like trying to put a jigsaw together with pieces from different puzzles. In the past I've leant the comb against the central wires and then tied string around it (other people use elastic bands but I never have any big enough). This works up to a point but any rough handling means the loose pieces of comb just drop down.

I read on the BBKA Forum about someone's father who used to use chicken wire. We have plenty of odd bits so I decided to give it a go. Using a wired up frame Max fixed a piece of chicken wire to one side and so created a sort of envelope.

You can just see in this rather bad photo the central wires underneath the chicken wire.

Up at the hive we then slipped the comb in between the two sets of wire, pressing gently so that some of the wax would be attached to the chicken wire. We closed the envelope with three pieces of string - not easy tying knots in rubber gloves!

You can see very clearly in the brood in this "wild" comb. I don't know if we were quick enough to save it - the bees cover the brood to keep it at the correct temperature - but failing all else they will rearrange this frame as they want, filling in the holes with more wax. There is one potential problem: will the bees be able to leave a gap between this frame and the neighbouring ones or will they become stuck together? Time will tell and I am quite certain the bees will work out what's best.

In the meantime the swarm was happily sitting on the three frames I'd put in the box on Wednesday evening. We didn't take these out to check but I hope very much the queen is doing her bit and laying lots of eggs! The photo below is looking down into the hive. Not a huge swarm but satisfactory nonetheless!

It's started...

2009-07-23T01:05:00.000-07:00

The season of plentywhen every day brings a fresh tomato or two, an enormous lettuce, a courgette or six and of course cucumbers. Remember last year? Well, I fear this year might surpass that quantity.

I don't mind as next week also sees the start of the visitor season starting with 17 over the weekend. I am on cooking duty for the first three days (these guests are well trained and understand rotas!) and hope that most of the food will come from the garden. I just hope they like cucumbers and potatoes!

But in addition to the vegetables we have a bonus this year for some of our favoured visitors. After harvesting the honey from the Oil Seed Rape we put four small honeycomb frames into one of the hives. On Tuesday Max and I did our usual check of the hives and to our total surprise these small frames were full. We exchanged the frame for an empty one and now have four of these wonderful honeycombs waiting to be devoured.

Our generosity definitely does know its boundaries though. One of the honeycombs is in the fridge but the whereabouts of the other three is a VERY well guarded secret!

Swarm Collection

2009-07-23T00:31:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening at exactly 8pm the telephone rang. I know it was 8pm because I listen to a radio programme every evening at 8.02pm and I was wondering which member of the family had decided to deprive me of that possibility.

But I was wrong; it was in fact a lady about 20kms away who had found my details on the internet where I am listed as "willing" to collect swarms of bees. She sounded a little stressed to say the least and on closer questionning it appeared her friend had been stung twice that afternoon when they'd discovered a colony of bees living under a wooden box that they use as a garden seat. The box had moved slightly and life heated up a bit.

At the time Max was busy trying to persuade a light switch that at only 8 years old it really should carry on functionning so instead I took our son Ralph. Early evening is a good time to collect swarms as the workers have come in and you have a good chance of collecting up most of the bees. We packed up the car with the usual equipment: bee suits, gloves, boots, hive tool and brush, swarm box, smoker and fuel, matches, sharp knife, basket and sheet, camera. As it turned out the only thing we omitted was a garden spade and I have to admit it never occurred to me it might come in useful!

When we arrived the two ladies came running out of the house and were indeed stressed and very worried. Ralph and I gathered up everything and got changed by the car then went down to the bottom of this wonderful garden which they had created out of a farm field. When I remarked on the green grass (ours turned brown some weeks ago) she told me there was a number of small streams running underneath the land down to the river; the farmer next door never had to water his crop of maize for the same reason.

The swarm collection was straightforward. You can see in the pictures where the swarm was situated.

The bees had obviously been there for a while because there was quite a lot of comb and sealed brood in the nest. Ralph cut the comb off the bottom of the box and having gathered that we brushed as many bees as possible in there too.

The spade, in case you are wondering, was used to scoop up a number of bees sitting on the ground. A couple of shovels and they were in the box. The rest we left to march up the sheet which I always consider one of the marvels of swarm collection - and also reassuring as it confirms the presence of the queen in the box.

The march can take a while and when the two ladies saw us sitting on the grass waiting, they came over with handfuls of fruit which 30 seconds earlier had been on their trees. Apricots and juicy, tasty plums which were delicious.

Back home Ralph put the hive in our field and opened the entrance hole at the front. Now all that remains is to fix the comb onto a frame. Unfortunately it's raining this morning but perhaps this evening or tomorrow we'll be able to do that. It's important to do it as soon as possible otherwise the bees just carry on building, starting with the roof!

A year of fruit

2009-07-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

We have now lived here for 11 years and I can only remember one other year like this one for fruit.

There were so many cherries on the trees that even the birds couldn't eat them all, leaving more than enough for us.

Strawberries were the next delight and although we didn't exactly struggle to eat them all we came very close to striking strawberries from the luxury fruit to be savoured list. We only had a few raspberries but then we only planted them a few short months ago so they are forgiven.

For the past two weeks we have been gathering mirabelles - small yellow prunes with enough flavour to eat raw but not enough, in my opinion, to bother cooking with. We had so many that this year we squeezed a lot and now have about three litres of juice in the freezer ready for sauce on the ice cream. The pigs love mirabelles and we gather about half a bucket for them each day. (They also loved the strawberries!)

Our peach tree, which has struggled to provide more than one edible fruit per year, has this year gone mad and there must be at least 30 peaches which, if I don't pick them today, will be devoured by the wasps - I just hope they will finish ripening off the tree.

The pear trees are in danger of breaking their branches despite the fact that I thinned them vigorously.

And finally the fig trees are promising HUGE amounts of fruit.

Our real worry are the six new trees we planted in the autumn - four apples and two plums. They are showing severe signs of thirst despite having masses of water during the winter and regular watering by Max and I now. If we can get them through to the winter I think they'll survive - but there's August to deal with first.

Water priorities

2009-06-29T04:07:00.001-07:00

We've not had any rain for a while now and the heat is currently over 30 degrees. The lawn has turned brown and the garden is suffering. So what should we water as a priority?

First of all, forget about the lawn. So it's brown; so what? That means it doesn't need mowing and as soon as there's a decent fall of rain the green will come back.

Brown lawns don't matter but the pear trees are kept well watered and the plants in the beds benefit.

Priority should be given to fruit trees, the vegetable patch and the greenhouse (if there's anything still in it). When you water do it properly. It's best to water in the evening so that it doesn't evaporate so much and the plants will have a chance to use it. They also won't suffer from leaf scorch if their leaves are splashed.

A lot of my vegetables are planted through a plastic fibre and I put the hosepipe underneath this so that, again, the water goes into the soil and doesn't have a chance to evaporate. If evening watering is impossible then this can be done during the day although it's not ideal.

Holding the hosepipe over the plant (be it vegetable or flower) for a couple of seconds is not going to do much good. Think about it: if you are thirsty you drink an entire glass of water - or two even; a plant is the same. The soil around it needs to be well soaked, not splashed. (Bear in mind too that if the soil is dry it takes longer to soak in.)

Lavender thrives in dry weather.

We tend to give the fruit trees a dustbin of water each once or twice a week. The roots are further down and they suffer less - but don't be fooled; if they don't get water they will start to show signs of stress, not this year but next year or the year after.

Flower beds - well, this is a matter of personal opinion. Personally I only water these if absolutely necessary as I give priority to food and if the moat dries up again then these will have to take their chances. However, flower beds represent an investment of both time and money and also provide food for insects as well as hideaways for birds; it would be a pity to lose them. Again, if you water your flower beds do it thoroughly and either early in the morning or in the evening. We use a spray system and each bed gets approximately half an hour once a week. They all get thoroughly mulched each autumn and this helps to maintain moisture during the summer. We also have a lot of plants that flower in May and June so by July they don't need much watering. Again, if they die back now it doesn't matter.

This flower bed is watered twice a week for 30 minutes. The grass benefits too!

The most important thing is to think about your watering and make sure that every drop counts. The rivers around us have dropped very low again and I get infuriated when I see the farmers watering throughout the day - at least 30 per cent of the water evaporates and with a bit of forethought and, yes, extra effort they could set the system to water during the night. Once again the level of the moat has dropped dramatically in the past week and although I don't think it will dry out again this year it does make us think a bit.

Bees and borage

2009-06-24T10:47:00.001-07:00

Bees love borage - two years ago I sowed some in the vegetable patch and of course now it's there to stay - and spreading all over the garden. As the bees love it so much and it gives, I believe, a lot of nectar, I will leave it there until the flowers are finished and then clear it out. I love the blue and it sort of helps take the eye away from the weeds!

Generous friends

2009-06-24T10:25:00.001-07:00

My husband came back the other day with boxes full of seedlings. He works sometimes for an English lady not far from here and she is an amazing gardener. This year she has a surplus of seedlings and instead of throwing them out she threw them, metaphorically at least, into his car. But not only that - she took the time to write instructions for each lot. And better still, clearly knowing how instructions tend to go missing (the washing machine does wonders for instructions in back pockets!) she wrote them on the boxes! Tomatoes, celery, brassicas, chard (which I'd forgotten to sow this year) - not to mention a huge bunch of beetroot and some rocket.

I potted on some of the tomatoes and they are very happy in the greenhouse until they are big enough to go in the garden - we also need to clear a space for them but that's in hand. The rest of the seedlings are waiting outside the kitchen next to the hosepipe so they get a decent water quota in this hot weather. They will be planted out when they've grown a little bigger. I've also asked Max to build some sort of frame over which I can put cabbage white proof netting - I am DETERMINED not to eat any more caterpillars this year! A huge thank you for your generosity.

I'm excited about the tomatoes (Gardener's Delight). For the past two years we've had a pretty measly crop of tomatoes and with the wet weather just about gave up. Hopefully this year the weather will give us a couple of dry days at least and with all the tomato plants in the garden we should get a decent crop. Quite apart from using tomatoes in salads I love having too many as they get cooked up and frozen for future tomatoe sauces. I also try to make a few pots of tomato ketchup - you will never buy ketchup again once you've tasted home made...even my children say so!
You can see a couple of melons growing next to the tomatoes in the greenhouse - we bought four at the local market and as an experiment I planted two in the greenhouse and two outside. No prizes for guessing which ones already has little tiny fruits on them.

My family and other vegetables

2009-06-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

Only my husband could send his 15 year old son into a sex shop without realising what he was doing. They were in Angers collecting some upholstery supplies for me and Ralph got bored (there's only one person working in the shop and it can take a VERY long time). So he told Ralph to go and check out the toy shop 50 metres away. It didn't occur to him to wonder why there would be a toy shop in such an out of the way place - he of all people (he used to be in the toy business) knows that there are few enough left in the town centres; and of course Ralph didn't think - he is after all 15. Off he went and in he went. The French don't like using anglo words very much so the very fact that this was called a Toy Shop should have been a clue in itself but of course Max hadn't really done the thinking and the name of the shop had been partially hidden behind another sign so he'd missed the rest of the sign, "Votre Espace Coquine", altogether.

Which brings me to the potatoes. We've started digging the Charlottes. A little early but with every plant there are at least six enormous orange slugs. At the end of the line we turned around and there was an army of them marching off in disgust. However, this afternoon I dug the ones out of the flower bed and there wasn't a slug to be seen. Why the flower bed? Well, the soil is very poor and it just seemed a good way to break up the soil and get lots of lovely manure in there all at once. I'll plant it out again in the autumn so it looks nice next year. We still have about eight more slug lines of Charlottes to go. These are in the new veg patch and quite a way from the moat so perhaps the frogs haven't come up this far. Also, the chickens don't go in there because of the electric fence - next year we'll plant potatoes outside of the fence.

Anyway, they all need storing so I was back in the workshop afterwards making my potato sacks. They are about 45cms x 60cms and after filling them we store them in a cool and very dark shed. I bring them into the kitchen as I need them and store them in the big vegetable rack covered over with a large feed bag - again cutting all light. This last is considered eccentric by the family but on the whole it prevents them from going green.

I've also been dealing with some of the garlic. Max rigged up a rack in the barn (see below) where we've put most of it but I suspect that some won't store for too long (they'd started bolting) so I've taken the smaller ones and any others that looked a bit ropey or had bolted and roasted them. I then put them into jars in olive oil. Oh, yes, delicious! Well, ok, they won't store for long either but at least we will have enjoyed them!

Onions - how to store surplus

2009-06-19T06:18:00.000-07:00

Last year I had too few. This year I probably still have too few but they are beginning to bolt - produce seed heads - which means they won't store very well. Even this family can't get through enough onions to avoid mould so what to do?

I have been leant a couple of books recently and completely by chance I found a little note saying that you can chop up onions and freeze them in plastic bags. Just like that! So we pulled the first lot and my wonderful husband and equally wonderful 15 year old peeled and chopped and then bagged. I did help - I put them in the freezer; but actually I was weeding at the time so I'm forgiven!

As I've only just put the onions into the freezer I don't know how well this works but when I use them I'll let you know if there's a problem. Can't think that there will be though.

Just to be clear - according to the book (sorry - can't remember which one but it could have been "Preserved") you don't need to blanch them; simply chop or slice them and then freeze as they are. When required cook from frozen.

Obviously it would be sensible to freeze them in small bags as a half kilo of chopped onion goes a VERY long way...

Broad Beans

2009-06-13T03:27:00.000-07:00

One of the great things about growing your own veg is that your "fussy" children start eating vegetables they otherwise turn their noses up.

One of the disadvantages of growing your own veg is that your "fussy" children suddenly discover the delights of vegetables they didn't previously like.

Both statements are true! I love broad beans but my children didn't. Notice the past tense! Now they go as soon as they are cooked. The ones in the shops tend to be not fresh and also much bigger in the pod. I pick mine quite young and tender. There is no comparison.

The biggest problem with broad beans is black fly but actually I tend to ignore it. It comes, it devours and it finally goes away leaving horrible rubbish on the pods. But let's face it: we're not eating the pods and the beans inside are not affected. I do rinse them under the tap but then they are boiled - and as far as I'm concerned a little bit of dirt just adds to the flavour (I hope!).

So this picture is the third lot I've picked in two weeks and finally I managed to get some into the freezer for future enjoyment. The picture shows the pods in all their black fly glory. Just remember...it's what's on the inside that counts!

I've included the honeysuckle because it smells fantastic. We brush past it as we go from the car to the kitchen, disturbing the bees but absolutely loving the smell.

Freezing potatoes

2009-06-06T03:36:00.000-07:00

Last year I experimented freezing potatoes and I've been meaning to post the results. I tried two different systems and both have worked well:

1) Mash potato: I cooked and mashed as normal and then bagged cold mash potatoe, about 500gms per bag. To reheat I thaw and then heat the mash gently in a saucepan allowing the water to evaporate. If it then gets too dry I add either water or milk (I know, a bit silly allowing it to evaporate first but that seems to be the only way). The important thing is to mix it really well.

2) Roasting potatoes: Couldn't be easier. Peel the potatoes and parboil them. Then put them into bags and freeze. Roast them from frozen. The only thing you have to deal with is the fact that in the freezer they will stick together and so you have to separate them as soon as possible once they've started cooking. Also remember that the water on the outside of the frozen potatoes will make the hot (really hot) fat spit more so be careful.

I will be repeating this again this year - honestly, you can't tell the mash potato has been frozen and the roast potatoes are crunchier.

More Pigs

2009-06-06T02:59:00.000-07:00

Last year we kept pigs for the first time. It was a great success and hugely enjoyable. Whilst dispatching them bought a lump to our throats we had always treated them as a practical exercise - we looked after and fed them and in due course they would return the favour.

The meat is excellent. I now know that I had forgotten what flavour in meat was. When we were getting low on sausages (they went quickly!) I bought some from the supermarket and mixed them in with our own without telling anyone. Ralph guessed with the first mouthful what I had done and I was duly reprimanded; but the fact remains, there is no comparison.

We still have plenty of pork in the freezer but it is going down fast. As we don't go away in the summer it works best for us to collect the young piglets in the spring and raise them through the summer. They are then slaughtered in the autumn which is also better as it is cooler by then. So at the end of last year I contacted a breeder and ordered two more piglets - this time they are Gloucester Old Spot/British Lop and again they are lovely.

They are very different in character to the Berkshires - less gentle and more demanding when they see us in the veggie plot which is just next to their field, especially if we are picking strawberries which they love. They dig much more too - we couldn't believe that in just two weeks they had turned most of the field. Every few weeks we extend their pen so that they have a new patch of grass and they love it. They run up and down the grass, they roll in it and occasionally they stop to eat it. The next day it will look as though someone's been over it with a lawn mower. By day four it's a muddy patch with perhaps just a thistle showing.

Our friends no longer look astonished and tell us we are mad when they see the pigs for the first time. They are too busy enjoying the rewards.

The new veggie plot

2009-06-06T02:35:00.000-07:00

The new vegetable plot is now as stuffed full of promising things as is possible in a first year. There are plenty of weeds too but we left reasonably wide strips between the veg beds so on really calm days we can put round up over the worst of these. The strawberries, tomatoes, courgettes and cucumbers are growing through plastic sheeting which will obviously help with the weeds and the potatoes have such a wonderful amount of leaf that the weeds are more or less in the dark. The raspberries for some reason seem to be weed free for the moment. The peas on the other hand, well, let's just say it's hard to tell where the weeds finish and the peas begin!

I didn't realise until we started work on this new piece of land just how well cultivated the first plot is. For a start the soil just looks better in the old plot. It seems to be much more crumbly and easier to dig. It's also much easier to put tomatoe spirals into as I discovered this morning when I tried to put three more into the new plot. They went down about 8 inches after a lot of prodding around and putting my full weight on the spiral. I then did the same in the old plot and nearly buried the entire spiral as it just went in so easily!

Of course the old plot has had masses and masses of farmyard manure worked into it over the past ten years. I do wonder if that means that the new plot won't give such a good yield of veg and fruit but so far we've had a fabulous crop of early strawberries and there are already small fruits on the tomatoes. And the spuds will be ready soon - I had a poke around this morning and there are plenty of little ones just under the soil.

It's a lot of work starting a new vegetable plot from scratch and I know that I took a lot of shortcuts so I will suffer more weeds than I should but on the whole I think I am well pleased. Previously this piece of land had been a pasture for sheep and cattle; I suppose now it's the same, but for us.

Aren't they sweet!

2009-04-29T09:38:00.001-07:00

We hatched some chicks on 1 April and they are beginning to become quite adventurous. Here they are at three weeks old, enjoying the sunshine. They were all sitting on the ledge cuddled up together. Four golden and one black who's been named Obama - well, what else!

Hiving a swarm of bees

2009-04-29T08:36:00.001-07:00

We were quite busy last week catching swarms. This is the first swarm which very conveniently came to rest in a low branch of a pear tree in the garden. Our son spotted it - or rather he heard it as buzzing around before it settled it made a fantastic noise! Subsequent swarms involved ladders and straw baskets but we forgot the camera. Suffice to say that we now have an additional three colonies and are waiting to see which of these are strong enough to continue on their own and which need to be united with another colony.

The swarm settles in the tree

Contemplation! Unfortunately we didn't get a shot of Max cutting the branch and lowering it into the box. I think our cameraman was preparing to do a runner!

Oh boy, did they buzz around!

All is calm -the first bees have found the queen in the hive and are fanning, indicating to the others where to go. It's amazing watching the swarm just march up the stand (well all right, the plastic box!) and straight into the hive.

Problem solved

2009-04-20T01:37:00.000-07:00

I had a couple of hours last week - between rainstorms that is - and weeded the new potato patch. This is going to be an arduous exercise through the coming months as we didn't really clear the area of weeds very well and then we put the rotavator over it. Still, potatoes are a good veg to start with as all the earthing up helps with the weed clearing - sort of.

I got into a rhythm of weeding a line and earthing up as I went along. All was going well, Radio 4 was keeping me company and the rain held off. Then the chickens arrived just as I finished. Previously I've not minded. They clear the grubs and leave manure at the same time. But as I watched I realised they were getting their richest pickings by unearthing all my hard work. This was not good! I gave chase and they went elsewhere. I redid the job and went in just as the rain started.

The following morning I went out and once again a whole line of potato plants had been uncovered and some stems broken. The chickens were still locked up; this time it was rabbits! That was it. The electric fence which had been in our minds as a job to be done was bought to the front of the queue. The conversation was along the lines of:

"OK, I'll do it next week."

"No, today. Else I'm not planting another single vegetable and you can say goodbye to the French beans."

That was sufficient! We had a lovely afternoon which we thought of as "family time" and the two boys concerned thought of as "another chore". There were also a lot of laughs about not needing to fence the vegetables. "Why on earth are you fencing the vegetables Mum? They can't get out you know." But I was determined.

We now have two strands at tripping up height going all the way around the new veg patch and so far it's worked. Not a rabbit in sight and although the cockerel did get in, he didn't try a second time! Result!

Broad beans, onions and chard

2009-04-09T09:54:00.000-07:00

I sowed the first of the broad beans just a few weeks ago and already they are coming up. I was worried that the intervening frosts would upset them but I shouldn't have been so concerned! I have now sown two more rows - I really do love broad beans straight from the garden. The rest of the family think they aren't worth the effort - all those pods to remove - but it doesn't stop them eating them in great quantities!

Broad bean seedlings

Onions, garlic and shallots are also coming along nicely. The garlic and half the shallots went in during the autumn then I put in two more beds of shallots and onions in the early spring. All are doing well. Last year I didn't really have enough so this year I have tripled the quantity!

Garlic and shallots

To my delight the chard has overwintered with very little help from a plastic tunnel and is now in great leaf. Given the three weeks of sub zero temperatures at the beginning of the year, I wasn't really expecting it to survive. However, over Easter we will be eating one of our favourite chard recipes: ricotta and chard filo parcels. It's a great standby for vegetarians too.

Chard - it looks a bit pathetic in the photo but it's doing well!

First crop is in the kitchen

2009-04-08T02:14:00.000-07:00

Every year my mother-in-law comes to stay in late May for a week or two. The advantages of May are great - especially for an octogenarian who cannot see. The weather is warmer (believe me, in our house that matters!), the frogs are singing, the flowers are beginning to smell and we can often eat lunch outside. Unfortunately, though, late May misses the asparagus and this always upsets her, especially as it is the way with asparagus that there is always plenty more after the six week picking period but you have to leave it to feed the plant!

So perhaps the asparagus is the real reason she has come to stay for Easter! Yesterday I picked the third bunch of the year and we all enjoyed it at lunch. There is nothing like freshly picked asparagus: for us it's usually the first crop from the garden so it heralds the beginning of the vegetable patch year; when we are kind enough (sic!) to share it our friends are always amazed that we grow it thus giving us a feeling of both brilliance and largesse - although we don't often share it so the largesse is false; and actually it's not difficult to grow so the brilliance isn't exactly genuine either...oh well!

It won't be long before we start eating the lettuce from the greenhouse - oh I do love spring!

Bees - vocabulary problem!

2009-03-30T08:52:00.000-07:00

A quick update and correction on the wild bees we have housed.

First off it has been pointed out to me that these are not a swarm but an established colony and of course I was a fool to describe them as a swarm. We were asked by a friend to collect a swarm and once in my head it stuck. But a colony it is. So Polly is right - even in this lovely climate (let's forget the last two summers!) the bees do not swarm in March. OK, my head is hung in shame. On with the update.

I have changed the super for a make-do brood box. We put a brood box on but of course it has openings and was no good. Instead we have put brood frames into two supers, one sitting on top of the other to give the height of a broodbox. If these bees do come up then we will be able to transfer the frames to a proper broodbox and go on from there.

Now, on to the second subject...

I have been criticised by someone here in France on another forum (this was the person who pointed out my vocab was way off). He doesn't explain very well but his comments are as follows:

"What can I say apart from it was not a swarm if it had taken up residence in a tree it was an established colony. It certainly was not from this year and why should it swarm from the tree in April? Had you had someone of experience and qualifications, not necessarily a keeper of bees long term, but a beekeeper with you it would have been easy to remove it and prevent it returning to the log. It is no different to a summer swarm in, say, a wall easy if you know what you are doing. If the bees are still in the green hive I wish you the best of luck in trying to manage it this year. I thought the bees used the suns position above them to build their comb in a true vertical plane. I always enjoy your postings as there is so little to bring cheer these days. I wish you well in your endeavours. I rest my case."

I have enormous faith in bees and less faith in my ability as a beekeeper but I do try and do my best. In an ideal world I would far rather be working alongside another beekeeper but unfortunately this isn't possible. I am always open to helpful suggestions (which seem to be lacking in the words above) - indeed I welcome them. Thank you to those of you who have taken the time to comment, both on the post and by email. Like I said constructive criticism is welcome and even more so is advice.

Donald the goose...

2009-03-25T11:20:00.001-07:00

Remember this?

My, hasn't he grown!

He now has his very own pen in an outhouse for nightime (too many foxes around) and during the day he has a great time walking around "his" patch (he's not penned but seems to have adopted an area) and of course, swims very happily on the moat!

Bees again!

2009-03-25T10:28:00.000-07:00

I had yesterday all planned out. Basically, to work all day and really get ahead with a chair that is promised for Tuesday next week. Things didn't work out that way...

On Monday Max took a call from a friend of ours saying that there was a lot of trees being cut down in a wood near her and there was a swarm of bees - could we collect it? Well, yes please and for several reasons. Firstly we've never taken a swarm before and getting some experience with a swarm at ground level is always better than one twenty feet up in the air! Secondly, I really want to increase our number of hives this year and swarms, if you can get them, are free. Thirdly, well, the chair is well on the road to being finished and I could work a bit this weekend...

So off we went. A-L wasn't there but a retired neighbour had been asked to look out for us and he solemnly took us to this swarm...which had flown away. A little disappointed we removed what remained of the honey comb and decided that wild honey made the trip worthwhile.

However, it turned out that Roger knew of a second swarm, this one inside the trunk of a tree which had been felled and, if we didn't take it the forestry company would simply gas the bees. (And I thought killing bees was illegal...) We went to have a look and realised very quickly that there was no way we were going to be able to get our hands through a hole the size of a tennis ball and remove a swarm of bees who had most likely been in residence for many years! Yes, they seemed quite docile but we were 100% certain that any enforced eviction order would soon change that!

Disappointed, but still looking forward to the wild honey, we went away swarmless. Roger rang us in the evening. He'd spoken to the forestry people and they were quite happy for us to chainsaw the trunk and take away the log with the swarm inside. The fact that the trunk is about a metre in diametre and we were talking about a log approximately 1.5 metres long didn't seem to worry Roger one bit. His 70+ years are not for nothing and he'd worked out a system to get it into the back of our (small) van.

Max went along this morning early (before the bees were awake was, I think, the theory!) and the operation was carried out after plugging the entrance with a piece of wood. Of course, Max and Roger could only estimate how much space the bees had created for themselves on the inside; they didn't want to cut right through the middle of the swarm and nest. Roger tackled the trunk with his chainsaw and was clever enough to notice that the sawdust changed indicating the proximity of the bees. So he moved up a bit and tried again. In this way they managed to cut the log leaving the nest inside completely intact.

There was, however, a hole at both ends where the wood had rotted so bees started to get a little interested in the proceedings - still very calmly though. Max put a cotton sheet at each end. That was the easy part of the operation; now for Roger's cunning system to get this trunk into the back of the car. It turned out to be a tractor with a grab.

The log rolled out of the car and lifted upright in the field. The top hole is cleary visible, as is the bees side entrance

When Max came back we then managed to roll it out into the field near the other hives and lift it upright; we put a lid temporarily on the top hole to stop any heat from coming out (the bottom hole I'm not worried about - all our hives have open mesh floors which are presumably the same thing) and then took the wood out of the entrance hole. A wedge under the front will prevent it from toppling over. So far so good.

The bees natural entrance

However, the top lid was not ideal as it had plenty of gaps between it and the trunk and I was worried that all that precious heat would be lost out the top; the nights are still cold at the moment, something had to be done.

We hummed and haahed and finally came up with a solution that "will either work or it won't". Max cut a piece of wood to fit over the trunk and cut a medium size hole in the middle. We then screwed this to the trunk. On top of this wood we put a super (which is where hived bees store surplus honey, ie. ours) with frames and then the crown board and finally the lid.

Max standing next to the final des res with adjoining larder.

We hope we have created an ideal home with attached delux larder for these wild bees. There is no guarantee they will stay of course; in fact they will almost certainly swarm in April and as far as I know we will have no way of preventing it as we can't get into the nest. If they go we will at least have the most amazing tree trunk to keep us warm in the winter - after extracting any remaining honey of course! I'll keep you posted on how this "hive" continues.

I have an ETSY shop

2009-03-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Just in case you are interested in my working life I now have an ETSY shop: L'Atelier du Grand Gennetay. I've put a link in the side bar or you can look at it here. Please don't hesitate to let me have your comments - I need all the help I can get! If you are interested in reading about my working life (it's actually pretty dull!) you can go to The English Armchair Abroad

Bee Season

2009-03-22T07:15:00.000-07:00

We finally opened up the hives this afternoon. Last year I lost a hive, leaving me with just one after the winter. But we restocked and finished with four hives. Then the original hive lost its queen - I suspect that the bees had replaced the old queen and the new queen was very possibly eaten by a bird on her mating flight. This hive was in serious trouble and it was getting late in the season for the bees to raise a new queen so I decided to buy a queen that had already been mated and introduced her successfully - so successfully that this hive, the weakest of the four in September, is now the strongest!

Today's inspection was the first of the season and an opportunity of looking for trouble and hopefully averting it. During February we had a dreadful storm that took the lid off one of the hives and I was worried about this one. However, there was brood in all four hives which means that there is a queen laying in each one. First box ticked.

Another thing to look for is adequate food. I still have sugar candy on all the hives and we replaced the almost empty ones. There is also plenty of honey and pollen in all of the hives so I am reassured. I believe though that a lot of hives are lost at this time of year because winter stores are low and there are not many nectar giving plants around. At the moment, though, we are ok. Second box ticked.

The third box I can't yet tick because I don't yet know. This is the dreaded varroa box. This horrible parasite lives off the bees and weakens them making the colony weak and eventually unable to survive. I put anti varroa tabs in each hive during the autumn for six weeks and then I did a follow up Oxalic Acid treatment in December. At the next inspection I will put in test floors - these slide in underneath the open mesh permanent floor and after a week you count how many varroa have fallen through. A small number is "ok" - it's believed that all colonies have some varroa - but a large number requires treatment.

The next inspection will be in approximately nine days, depending on the weather. Not cold, not too windy and no rain.

Feeling virtuous

2009-03-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

For years now, five at least, I've been talking the talk and carefully avoiding the hard work.

We have four flower borders on the lawn which I created about 10 years ago. My parents were selling their house and I was taking some plant cuttings from the beautiful garden. I did a trip to England and came back with about 80 cuttings all potted up. Most of the cuttings came from the borders in the picture on the left but I've included the picture on the right as it is the pond I fell into when I was about four and my brother insisted on taking his brand new watch off before he pulled me out - the watch had been a Christmas present so the water was COLD!

Nearly all took and many have seeded and developed. Anyway, I dug the flower beds in a hurry and although I was pretty good about clearing the roots I was working in a field that had recently been cow pasture. So very fertile but full of perenial weeds.

The borders in June showing many of the imported plants.

I realised very quickly that the only solution would be to start again but as the beds developed it seemed a real shame to empty them out. I also didn't fancy more back breaking digging and no-one else wanted to do it! Clearly a rotation was required and today we cleared, more or less, the first bed. More or less means that as there are two pear trees, one at each end, we've cleared between them. We solemnly dug up old friends and split them up and replanted elsewhere. We took out as many weed roots as possible and we have covered it in wonderful manure from the farm next door (same cows!).

Finally, so that we won't be tempted to put plants and flowers back in before the autumn, I've put in some seed potatoes. This is my cunning plan for improving the soil and it also uses up a few more of the seed potatoes. I'm hopeless at mounding up potatoes and instead I put "stuff" directly all over the potato beds. "Stuff" includes, in no particular order, garden compost, manure, leaf mould, straw. Usually about three doses is enough to keep the tubers covered and prevent them going green and the result is that once all the potatoes have been removed from the bed the soil is absolutely wonderful.

Once this first bed is replanted we can clear the second bed - more potatoes if my plan works! - and so on until all four are done. I just hope it isn't like painting the Skye Bridge!

A Mixed Week

2009-03-01T08:22:00.000-08:00

The list from last week is definitely shorter but not as short as I would like. However, one reason is because I was working on a client's chair and that is better than no work at all - therefore no complaints!

We haven't got around to putting more chicken eggs into the incubator and I still haven't bought the broad bean seeds. Still time so no worries.

However, the first lot of potatoes (Maris Piper and Aloe) are in. The figs are pruned and the bees food (sugar candy) has been topped up where required. We bought far too many seed potatoes so we will start work on a second potato bed this week. We also need to fence off this whole area against the rabbits. Anyone tried doing this with an electric wire?

I also did an experiment fluid sowing some carrot seed. It's still too cold to sow them outside so I scattered some on a piece of paper and left them covered in the window for a few days. As soon as they started to show signs of development I put them into a mix of cornflour and water and now they are sown in the greenhouse. I've started off the second lot and hope to have them in by the end of the week. I've read about this technique for years and have never tried it - I'll let you know.

One sadness to report. The second goose (Dipstick to his friends) hasn't survived. I came down on Thursday and Donald was making a dreadful racket. His little friend was lying lifeless on the floor of their temporary home. We were not totally surprised. Dipstick took a long time to get out of his egg (hatching time I mean) and despite running around with Donald and seeming very happy he wasn't growing as quickly as his big brother. Donald is growing visibly by the day. Two days ago we were very worried about the attention he was getting from Tickel - Ralph's Teckel or Dachsund. Today however, Tickel actually ran away from him. Whether this was fear of Donald or anticipation of trouble from Max or me I don't know; it won't be long before Donald is the bigger beast though.

Jobs for this week: The extra potato bed; fix the pigs' fencing as they arrive in two weeks time; finish weeding the flower beds and put the manure on them. That should be enough for the time being!

This week...

2009-02-21T07:26:00.000-08:00

This week will be busy so let's hope the weather keeps warm as I really don't like getting cold fingers. Jobs to do:

Turn the potato patch again - Ralph spent nearly two hours putting a covering of manure on it as it's a new patch with no oomph in the soil at all.

Weed the flower beds - there's a fair few of them. They need a really good clean out of invading unwanteds too. Some grasses that seed far too quickly for example. They also need a heap of manure this year.

Prune the figs - every book gives a different piece of advice but we're going with February

More eggs, chickens this time, into the incubator. A fox took one of the cockerels and a hen earlier this week and we need some replacement back ups. We are also getting low on meat birds.

Buy and sow the broad beans - the packet I'd stored in the kitchen drawer had been bored into by some sort of weevil, reducing the packet mostly to sawdust!

The potatoes are chitting but it won't be long before we start putting them in.

And finally, the bees are out in force. It's too early to open the hives up yet but during the warmth of a sunny afternoon we watch the workers bringing back enormous amounts of pollen - probably from willow and perhaps hazel? I don't know.

Cleaning up

2009-02-21T07:09:00.001-08:00

Once a year I clean the windows in the house - usually in the spring but if we have a celebration coming up (last year it was a cousin's 65th birthday) I time it accordingly. If you only do them once a year they might as well be seen.

Last year, thanks to my son's ant farms being sited just in front of the kitchen window, I never managed to clean the kitchen window. On pain of death would I move those ant farms and the windows stayed grubby. Today we were looking at the difference two years' dirt makes compared with only one year's. This reminded me that the greenhouse glass had never been cleaned and it's been up for nearly seven years! So this afternoon Ralph (the same son) and I went up with buckets, sponges and one of those rubber window cleaning thingys and set to. A few bulbs coming up outside the front of the greenhouse suffered the inevitable boot treatment but I'm sure they'll forgive us.

The result is amazing. I had no idea how dark the inside of the greenhouse had become! I am now determined to replace the glass that was lost during a tornado that swept through our garden about five years ago. The plastic we put in (temporarily!) has long since lost its transparency. Unfortunately, whenever I mention new glass to Max he mutters about not having enough clips to hold the glass in and the cost of the glass will be more than the price of a new greenhouse (well, ok then....!).

I also spent some time taking out all the old plastic flower pots that have been shredded by time and goodness knows what insects. Also, all my seed packets have been shredded - my fault for leaving them in there but what on earth is in the paper and foil casing that provides such irresistable nourishment for these insects?

So the greenhouse is looking almost pristine and I have a great feeling of a job well done! I've already put some mesclun seeds in there and in a few weeks time I'll put some early carrots in there to try and get an early crop.

Outside in the veggie patch I've weeded all the beds and planted all the remaining onion sets. For anyone who's interested we've put in: Red Comred, white ones that I've lost the name of, and two types of shallots: Longor and Mikor. All the garlic, onions and shallots that I put in last autumn are coming up nicely.

This weeks jobs include weeding the flower beds and turning the potato plot again - this time with manure on it. Photos later in the week as there's nothing to see yet!

New Life, New Noise!

2009-02-18T00:48:00.001-08:00

A couple of people have asked me how the gosling is getting on. He is very sweet and has become very attached to our 15 yr old son - or perhaps it's the other way around! I took him out of the incubator after 24 hours; our house is always on the colder side of no heat at all and I thought the incubator would at least keep him warm. I then transferred him to a box and put him next to the Everhot where again, he was snug as a bug.

However, he has grown in both strength and stature at an alarming rate. I realised the box was too small when I caught him trying to jump out of it. In addition, the noise...oh the NOISE! Cheep, Cheep, Cheep, Cheep. All day, all day. And I do spend a lot of time in the kitchen! So yesterday we bought in the pen we made for baby chickens and put him in there in the playroom - next to the kitchen so I can still hear the noise but it is one step removed from the oven! He wasn't pleased at all but seems to be resigned to his new home. In the meantime, the second egg has started to hatch and perhaps tomorrow or Friday there will be two of them in there together - I just hope the bigger one doesn't bully his baby brother!

One thing that is worrying us - and if anyone has experience we'd be grateful for advice - is when to put them outside and introduce them to water. I feel that for the next month it will be too cold but I'm well aware that if they had a goose mum they'd be wandering around already and probably following her onto the moat. So, any ideas? Max thinks we should start with the bath but I've told him if I catch him in the bath with a real live goose I'll post a picture on here!

New Year, New Life

2009-02-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

Needless to say, when push comes to shovel I prefer to be a warm weather gardener which isn't very good if you are trying to be self-sufficient! However, we are enjoying enormously the fruits of our 2008 labours: vegetables from the freezer, apples still in the boxes and of course pork in the freezer. We also have a number of chickens in the freezer as we had a large number of cockerels and, finally, we have been given a leg of wild boar by the local gardien de chasse. And of course we are getting plenty of eggs from the hens.

At the end of last year I put some onions and garlic in the vegetable plot and now it's about time to plant the next lot of onions. But it's so cold out there that the motivation factor is dreadfully low! However, we have started to prepare the new potato plot. Against all advice we have rotavated this area and I am quite certain that we will be regretting this for a fair few years as all the chopped up roots of bindweed come back to haunt us. But Max can't dig at the moment (he's just had his carpal tunnel operation) and I dug so much last year that I just couldn't face it. So out came the rotavator.

We still need to fence this second vegetable plot area. We have a large rabbit population here and I am not happy to plant one for me and twenty for them. So the fence is on the "to do" list. We have, however, bought our potatoes and onions for planting and this year I'm also going to plant some Jerusalem Artichokes. I thought I would put them at the end of the pigs' enclosure so that when I've dug them up the pigs can take whatever I've missed.

But things have been happening up the garden path despite my laziness. To our astonishment one of the hens became broody over Christmas. We found her tucked away in an outhouse between the drying machine and the wall, well hidden and out of the wind but still very cold. We left her alone and on 24 January she suddenly appeared with four chicks. (That mean that she kept them warm in temperatures of -10 degrees during the night and not much warmer during the days.) Sadly, only one of the chicks survived beyond three days but it is wonderful to go out and see them wandering around the yard, mother hen gently lifting her wing whenever the chick needs to warm up or get away from some terrifying object; a human being for example!

Soon after Christmas also we were given two goose eggs, one at the beginning of the week and one a few days later. We put them both into the incubator on the days that they were given - in other words there was a gap of about five days. This morning I was tidying up the room and suddenly noticed one of the eggs had a hole in it. On further inspection I heard wonderful squeaking noises and sure enough a couple of hours later the gosling popped out. I might say that he (well, he's a he until he proves otherwise!) is a lot stronger than the chicks we've hatched and a lot bigger too!

An hour old

Two hours later

I have left the second egg in the incubator in the hope that it will hatch in a few days time.

So there's new life at Gennetay and very soon it will be warm enough even for me to stop making excuses and "get out there".

First socks

2008-11-21T11:30:00.000-08:00

Well, I've finished them. My very first pair. Read the post here.

I wouldn't normally post them here as they are made of bought wool (oh no, shock horror!) that I found at the bottom of a drawer; but for some reason Typepad won't let me post the picture. I don't think it's offensive but it's for you to judge!

All right so they're not perfect but I think they're fantastic!

Farewell Happy Hams

2008-11-18T09:15:00.002-08:00

Some of the pictures on this post are of a dead pig - please do not look at the pictures if you are of a sqeamish disposition!

The pigs are dead, long live the pigs.

And so they shall, both in our memories and, more practically, in our freezer and ultimately on our plates.

Before I go on I want to emphasise that the pigs did not suffer. They were killed by a professional debiteur who used what I believe is called a bolt. They were being scratched at the time by my husband. The photos below are graphic but please remember that this is reality.

OK. Speech over. Description now follows of what we did this weekend. First off on Friday Laurent arrived to slaughter the pigs. I was not there at the kill but went up afterwards to help with the initial butchering so that they could then be hung overnight before being cut up and "dealt with" on Saturday. As you can see in the photo, the pigs were hoisted onto a ladder to make his job easier and the first thing he did was to pass the flame gun over the entire body to remove the hair. They were then scrubbed and hosed down.

The pigs had to be gutted and the livers were kept for the pate and our Monday "Liver night" (more on that later).

And that was just about it for Friday. Our pigs were suddenly no more than a very fond memory and two carcasses. The real work began on Saturday morning at what my father would have called "sparrow fart".

We decided a month ago that we would ask Laurent to do the butchering. He is after all a professional and although Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has an excellent course available on his website we knew that faced with two large carcasses we would probably not do a very good job. Laurent was fantastic. He had so many buckets I lost count: pate, rillettes, sausages, fat, rubbish and fromage de tete. Meat and bones were put into each bucket accordingly. Two enormous pots were simmering - one for the rillettes and the other for fromage de tete (this is eaten cold and I can't really describe it but please, it is not the guts which is what everyone appeared to think - that is called andouillette and we had opted out of that option!).

Whilst we stood and watched and occasionally cut up vegetables Laurent got on with the job in hand. Joints magically appeared with and without bones; chops mounted up in a separate tray; spare ribs in another; did we want bacon? And how many hams were to be smoked?

As it turned out we didn't use the liver for the pate as only one was usable - the other had a small number of spots and we had to throw it away - and we wanted to keep the one we had for Monday evening.

By lunchtime we had bagged up all the meat except the sausages which needed to drip a bit to dry off and the rillettes and pate. And of course the Boudin - a close relative to Black Pudding and absolutely, utterly delicious! We put everything in the freezer and took a break for lunch. Laurent had very kindly given us some Pork Liver Pate and that was enjoyed with French Bread and salad.

Later in the afternoon he was ready with the rillettes and the pate. We only had eight pate bowls so we have bagged the rest up - it is frozen uncooked so this is not a problem. And of course the sausages...

These took a little time to bag up as we wanted five per bag (2 parents, 3 children) and there were a LOT of them! In theory I have been very organised as sausages are in bags of 5 and chops in bags of 3 (I can't remember the logic but at least I know how many there are!). The boudin came as three enormous sausages, each about two metres long; so these were cut into pieces about 30cms long and bagged.

Back to Monday night and the liver...

As I have never cooked pork liver before a friend very kindly agreed to come over and cook it with us and of course eat it with us! So we decided we'd have a degustation du porc, or a pork tasting evening. Whilst Joyce prepared the liver, I cooked some of the boudin and sliced some of the fromage de tete. I was determined that any produce was to be from the garden so my chard parcels were there, together with mash potato. There were nine of us in all and we started by drinking a toast to the Ham One and Ham Two - it seemed impossible to not mention them. And then the feast began. Everything was delicious although I think there was less enthusiasm for the fromage de tete. It's the sort of thing you would eat very happily if you had a blindfold on as it tastes delicious but looks less delicious than it tastes!

Right from the start of this project we have had people telling us that we wouldn't be able to slaughter the pigs (or rather, get someone else to do it) as they would become our friends. Well, yes, they did become friends but there was never any doubt in our minds of their final destination. We gave them a happy home, fed them, played with them and loved them. I wasn't there at the end but that was because I was worried that my reaction would stress the second one. I said goodbye to them in the morning.

New Raspberry Canes have arrived

2008-11-12T00:07:00.001-08:00

A little while ago I ordered some strawberry plants and raspberry canes from a company called Delbard here in France. I have been frustrated in the past buying from garden centres because they never seem to have enough of what I want and although I can order from them it involves a second trip which for us is a minumum of 30ks. The result would be six of one type of strawberry and six of another, when what I actually wanted was 20 of one type!

Ordering from Delbard seemed to be a solution and so it has proved. For a start I could buy the plants/canes bare-rooted which made them cheaper and made up for the small transport cost (six euros). The strawberries arrived a while ago and then last week the raspberries turned up. We had prepared the beds already - hard work for a couple of days with a mattock and then even harder digging out the perennial roots - and within 24 hours the raspberries were in the ground. Conveniently it rained the next day and they are looking very happy.

Bearing in mind that raspberries put out runners I decided to go for a few canes of three different varieties. Hopefully at the end of next year I will have more of each but we will see. My shopping list is as follows:

Framboise Magnific Delbard x 5 (July-August)
Framboise Himbo-Top x 3 (August-September)
Framboise September x 5 (mid-June - mid-October)

I know that most people make jam and delicious puddings with soft fruit but personally I don't. I prefer to eat fruit raw and with very few embellishments - personally I don't add sugar or cream although I realise I'm one of the few! To be honest, if I didn't have other mouths to feed none of the fruit would come into the house...my children are the same. In fact I have to hope that my children don't read this blog because one of them at least is very partial to raspberries and whilst he might not venture into that part of the garden very often he will make a bee-line if he realises that raspberries are to be found; birds are nothing compared to children when it comes to soft fruit in my opinion!

As a footnote I would like to add that from 40 strawberry plants I have had no losses. I was concerned about six/seven of them as they took a while to get going but yesterday each and every plant had healthy leaf growth and I am looking forward to a good crop next year...can't wait in fact!

New Vocabulary

2008-11-10T10:00:00.000-08:00

A quiz...what connects the following words or expressions:

Lazy Kate
Niddy Noddy
Rolag
Mother of All
Nostepinne

Anyone who has spun wool will be way ahead of the rest of you! All new hobbies and occupations have a vocabulary of their own but I am rather fond of the words I am beginning to use with my new found passion!

That's right. I did it. I have bought myself (pure indulgence!) a spinning wheel. My particular wheel is an Ashford Traditional and I bought it off Ebay from a lovely lady in England who just happened to live near Bath where I visited during half-term with my son. I gather I have been really lucky though as more experience spinners than me have said that buying a wheel on Ebay can be a very expensive mistake. Well, clearly the lady I bought from was the exception that proves the rule. So, I have a wheel and have barely stopped spinning ever since.

My first efforts were purely to learn to spin wool. So, lots of bumps, sometimes thick and sometimes thin but with no real idea of why! And it turned out I didn't like the colour mix of the result. The wool is from a Jacob Sheep so I thought it would be fun to ply the dark wool with the cream coloured. But no, I don't like the chocolate/vanilla effect!

But no matter, my second attempt is a lot better and I am looking forward to knitting this neck warmer tomorrow or Wednesday. Doesn't the wool look great on the bobbin? You can see specks of dark wool in there but I don't think that will be too noticeable once it's knitted up.

Actually, the neck warmer, Tudora, is the reason I decided to buy a wheel. The Tudora requires Arran weight wool and I simply couldn't find any in France. Sure, Ebay was an option(!) but I decided that homespun would be more of a challenge! And so it is!

The kitchen is now full of bits of wool and I think Max is expecting a sheep to be delivered next week after the pigs have been dispatched so that I have a ready supply of fleece. I can't imagine I'll ever spin a jumper but project number two is a pair of socks which I've never knitted before and see as a proper challenge. After that? I don't know but perhaps some Christmas presents?

This is the famous niddy noddy - an ingenious and very simple way of winding the wool off the bobbin and into skeins that can then be washed...

And dried over night in front of the oven.

I'll post a picture of the final article later in the week. Wish me luck!

Cooking Chard

2008-11-10T09:39:00.001-08:00

Polly in Ireland asked me for a recipe for her chard which arrives in abundance in her veg box. At the moment it ends up uneaten which is a shame.

Chard is handy as it's really cooked in two parts. You have the leafy green which can be used as a spinach replacement and also the white stem.

First the white stem: Cut it into smallish chunks and cook it until just tender. Then simply drain and add it to a cheese sauce - not too strong a cheese though as the chard stems have a very delicate flavour.
Another alternative would be to add it, in even smaller pieces (think chopped onion size) to a bolognaise sauce but here you don't get the advantage of the flavour.

Now the green leaves: My favourite is to make a sort of samosa so you need filo pastry and also a tub of ricotta cheese.
Cook a decent sized- handful of green leaf and then put it into a magimix with the ricotta and blend well. Add some nutmeg if you want as well as some pepper (salt too but I don't). Then brush one side of your filo pastry with melted butter and turn it over. (The buttered side is the outside.) Put decent/reasonable size quantities of the mix onto the pastry and then wrap it/roll it in any way that works for your shaped pastry. Here in France the filo pastry is round so I cut it in half first. The resulting parcels are oblongish.
Now you can either cook them straight away in a hot oven (200) for about 20 minutes (watch them or they'll burn) or you can put them in the fridge until you need them - up to 24 hours is fine.

I'm quite sure there are other possibilities but that's it for now!

Ah, I've just noticed that the link I've given to Polly shows the most wonderful picture of rainbow chard, which is, of course all the colours except green! I've never cooked or eaten it but assuming it's edible I'm quite sure you can use the same recipes!

Chinese Cabbage

2008-11-07T00:42:00.000-08:00

At the beginning of this year - well the spring actually when the gardening year started and with it our plan to grow our own vegetables - I gave some thought to how we could grow enough vegetables to see us through the winter. The summer is easy, especially here in France where the extra bit of warmth helps everything to grow so well...except tomatoes yet again! I have sown a small row of chard which is already in leaf and I will start picking it probably next week when our very last courgettes and aubergines will be finished. At the same time as the chard I put in some Chinese Cabbage seeds and these grew beautifully. My mistake was only putting in one small row and not doing successive sowing. Still, we live and learn!

We are not great cabbage eaters here but Chinese Cabbage is different. It is almost a salad but not quite; it is almost a cabbage but not quite. It can be eaten raw and is delicious or it can be cooked like cabbage when it becomes a good addition to the vegetables. Stir fry is another method I believe but not something I do much of.

I tend to shred it and then cook it briefly and add it to the potatoes - either boiled or mashed. If you add a generous dash of sweet wine or sherry it becomes a more luxurious dish! We all love it. On Wednesday night we had it with Toulouse sausages (big fat bangers to you and me!) and it was delicious!

Oh, and one last advantage is that although the caterpillars are all over the brassicas and the red cabbage, they don't go for the Chinese variety. Slugs do and the outer leaves resemble some very intricate lace work; but once you discard these there is still plenty for four people. Given my experience with the caterpillars I could almost grow to like slugs...

Caterpillar Sunday

2008-10-19T06:48:00.000-07:00

I am not a supporter of GM but since we are being forced to live with it I do think these scientists might actually do something useful. For example, persuade butterflies to produce caterpillars that do not need to eat brassicas. I'm quite sure they could be scientifically persuaded to eat something we actually want to get rid of, or at least have a lot less of, such as bindweed or Japanese Knotweed (yes, I know, I've heard). Until they do this I will be a mass murderer and I simply will not believe people who tell me they've never eaten meat in their life. I have resident contract killers in my garden in the shape of chickens and even they won't take on the job of eating the little leaf eating suckers. And as for vegetarians, well, what do they do when they find caterpillars all over the leaves of their broccoli?

This afternoon I happened to have my coffee cup with me so I stuck the whole lot in that and bought them back to show you. As the chooks won't have anything to do with them I've put them in the pig bucket. Incidentally, these photos don't include the ones I squashed.

Believe me, next year the brassicas will be under insect proof fleece and anyone found leaving it open will be given caterpillar cookies - and made to eat them!

The little yellow eggs - at least I can see these!

If they look a little squashed...well, they are a bit. Too bad. And this is only about one half of my "harvest".

How can I fight against this?

Actually, they are quite beautiful....aaaaargh!

Chicken Run

2008-10-17T02:43:00.001-07:00

Every morning when I go out to feed the animals the chickens are waiting to be let out of their pen. I usually drop some feed outside the pen so that the five small ones can come out and peck around without being bullied by the bigger ones - most especially the cockerel who really rules the roost with a charging peck. I've given up putting the feed in the feeder on dry days. I just scatter it around for them and they form groups - again, this avoids the cockerel beating them all up!

For the past couple of months we've been a little disappointed that we've only been "given" one egg per day. We are eagerly awaiting the adolescents reaching egg laying age (not long now) but in the meantime we still have the two original hens who should still be laying. Being novices we assumed (hate that word!) that either they were laying every other day or that one of them was no longer laying at all. It never occurred to us to look elsewhere for the reason.

This morning as we were walking back I absent-mindedly kicked a half an egg shell - rather like kicking stones on the path. Two strides later I realised what I had done so Max went on the hunt. Two minutes later he called me over and we found a wonderful pile of eggs - there must have been forty or more but the ones at the bottom of the pile had broken (yuck!) and soaked into the ground leaving 33 still in one piece.

Working on the basis that some of them must still be ok so we gathered up 30 of them and I put them all in a bowl of cold water to see if any of them would float. None of them floated to the top and only one or two looked as if they'd be floating in a day or two. I got rid of the latter, cleaned and dried the rest and then put a pen mark on them so that we use them first and only in things like cakes or omelettes where they are broken first. This way we'll know if I've missed any bad ones.

The chooks were already out of the pen by this time but for the next couple of weeks we're going to leave them in until lunchtime to see if we can get whichever hen it is to start laying inside again. The hen house is inside a large enclosure so they still have plenty of room to run around and to feed so they won't be deprived too much!

Omelette for supper and carrot cake for tea...

Spinning Around...

2008-10-16T01:11:00.000-07:00

So I went spinning and guess what I caught the bug...the spinning bug so not too bad.

Klara started me off on a spindle which is a good way to learn to draw the fibres from the roving (so many new words - thank heavens she prefers to teach in English!) whilst twisting it into yarn. Within minutes I had a piece of yarn - although nothing anyone would want to use! Gradually I was able to produce more even thread and after a short break I was allowed to move onto a wheel - yeah!

At this point it all became much more complicated. For a start Klara doesn't have a wheel; she has seven and they are all different and used for different things. I quickly learnt that spinning wheels have different set ups: Scotch Tension, double something and something else. Some wheels pull more than others. One wheel is perfect for spinning silk and other very fine yarns; another is good for chunky yarn; another is an all rounder and good, thank goodness, for beginners!

Spinning on a wheel is a lot more complicated than a spindle. You have to keep your foot going to turn the wheel as slowly as possible - in the right direction - and at the same time draw the fibres towards the orifice (horrid word) and onto the bobbin. Back to chunky, lumpy yarn!

By mid-afternoon my mind was reeling and I simply couldn't take in any more. But I had caught the bug. I came back with a spindle and some fibre to spin and, needless to say, a yearning to get a wheel. Oh dear!

My, haven't you grown!

2008-10-16T01:06:00.000-07:00

Oh that really annoyed me as a child! I was tall for my age and known, amongst other things, as Runner Bean due to long legs and constant running around.

Anyway, these two boys have certainly grown. Can you imagine that back in the summer they used to BOTH get into their drinking tub?!

Weighing the Pigs

2008-10-15T10:15:00.000-07:00

The dreaded day of dispatch is fast approaching. Last week I called a "debiteur" and it is he who will come to the house and do the dreaded dead. One of the questions he asked me (naturally enough) was how much do the pigs weigh?

Well, I had no idea. If this sounds amateur remember this is the first time we have kept pigs and every day contributes to the learning process. And anyway, how do you weigh a pig if you please? He's hardly going to stand still on the bathroom scales.

I did vaguely remember the lady who sold them to us mention a formula and for any other first time pig keepers I have managed to track it down. All you need is a fabric tape measure and a pen/paper. A calculator greatly speeds things up back in the house. Please note: All measurements should be in centimetres and the result is the live weight.

OK. First of all measure the girth of the pig. ie. Put the tape measure around the pig just behind the front legs. Make a note.
Next measure the length of the pig from the base of its tail to just behind its ears.

Now do the following simple maths: Square the girth measurement
Multiply the result by the length
Multiply the result by 69.3

So as an example: The Girth of your pig is 101cms and the Length 108cms

1.01 x 1.01 = 1.0201 (Girth squared)
1.0201 x 1.08 = 1.101708 (result multiplied by Length)
1.101708 x 69.3 = 76.34ks

This is meant to be fairly accurate but whatever its accuracy it's a lot better than trying to get him onto the scales!

Spinning a Yarn

2008-10-05T03:32:00.001-07:00

Well, I hope so. It is clearly a rush to the head and Max hopes it's curable and of short duration. But on Tuesday I am spending most of the day with a lady who will (attempt to) teach me how to spin wool. Why? Not sure at all and it may come to nothing but a pleasant day out.

One thing's for sure though. My visions of a beautiful old-style spinning wheel in our 14th century house are unlikely to come to fruition. All the people I have spoken to have told me that the modern wheels are much easier to use for a beginner.

I will take photos and notes and let you know how I get on. In the meantime, if any of you are spinners I would truly appreciate your advice and comments!

Broccoli Cheese - new recipe

2008-10-04T01:21:00.000-07:00

I know that the French have a reputation for wonderful cuisine: healthy, delicious, a people who truly care about their food and take time to prepare and then eat it. They don't hesitate at this time of year to go out into the woods and pick as much fungi as possible which is then turned into the most delicious je ne sais quoi a la fungi. However, I bet even they haven't tried this one...and to be honest I hope I don't ever again.

A while back I planted some broccoli plants, together with some cauliflowers and some red cabbage. More new vegetables for our plot although most people have been planting them for years. A week ago I decided the first broccoli was ready for eating but as Max was away I didn't cut it until Thursday. I bought it in and broccoli cheese was instantly on the menu.

Things started to go wrong when I cut it up. I've been very careful about picking off caterpillars. The first time I realised the leaves of the broccoli were being eaten I picked off nearly 100 rather beautiful multi-coloured caterpillars and gave them to the chickens - who weren't interested.

After that I realised a bit of method was required and picked caterpillars every two days. The multi-coloured ones have gone and I am collecting little green ones - the result of the Cabbage White butterfly I presume. I include the caulis in my caterpillar-harvest and thought I was doing quite well. But on Thursday evening as I cut up the broccoli a couple of small green devils dropped out. I picked over the broccoli fairly thoroughly and more fell out. I cut it smaller, to make the flowerlets easier to pick over, and yet more fell out. I had about 12 by the end of all this picking over but I was also fairly confident that I had done a thorough job.

Cooking revealed three more. They float up to the top and are easy to pick out. Not something I really wanted to know to be honest.

As I prepared the cheese sauce I went through the broccoli again - just to be safe - and there were no more. Excellent and no need to mention any of this to Max.

The Broccoli Cheese was delicious. Just right for a mid-week supper. We were thrilled with our first broccoli. We were looking forward to the second one in fact which needs cutting this weekend probably. And then the crunch came. Literally.

Did you know that the caterpillar of Cabbage White Butterflies are crunchy when they've been boiled for five minutes? Did you also know that they are very bitter? And finally, that biting one rather puts you off the rest of your supper?

It's too late for this year of course but some insect netting will be on my list to Father Christmas!

Clearing beds

2008-09-28T22:36:00.000-07:00

With the house to myself and beautiful weather I decided to start clearing the vegetable beds to make way for things that will be growing through the winter. With the passing of the autumn equinox we now have more dark hours than light and it's showing. The leaves on the tomatoes and courgettes are yellowing suddenly, mildew on the courgettes is suddenly worse - although this may be a coincidence. I have mentionned before that we haven't had enough onions in the garden this year and so I thought I would plant some now for harvesting in the spring. But I don't have much space!

So yesterday I cleared the main tomato bed to the delight of the chickens who followed me along the way picking up lots of delicious wriggly morsels! The tomatoes were planted through black plastic so that part was quite easily. However, on both sides of the plastic the weeds had taken charge and this took quite a while a clear. At one point a large stone that I was about to throw in the trailer suddenly hopped away towards the aubergines - it gave me a fright but frogs keep the slugs down so I have no complaint and shock passes quickly!

After the tomatoes I cleared the French beans and beetroot. Maybe I just grew more than normal but we do have the most amazing amount of beans in the freezer this year. Beetroot is harder to preserve but we'll probably eat it this week anyway.

The onion sets will go in later this week. I have three different varieties plus garlic: White Ebenezer (not surprisingly a white onion), Stuttgarter Reisen which has done well for us before, Griselle (shallot) and for the garlic Germidor which is a new one to us and has a violet coloured skin. 500gs of each so a fair bit of planting!

Leeks - disaster!

2008-09-26T00:33:00.000-07:00

A while ago I planted just over 100 small leeks. I love adding leeks to just about anything - a good substitute to onions when I've run out and a lovely taste all on its own.

But disaster. I noticed a week ago a few were still very undeveloped and skinny - sort of like Twiggy but in leek-world. I investigated and there was a sort of powdery white mould on the inside of the bases. I thought perhaps it might be a worm and as some were unaffected I hoped for the best. Then yesterday I saw orange spores on the leaves of just about all of them. Quick look in the book and sure enough they have rust. It doesn't affect the taste but it is incurable and the plants stop growing. So, I can eat what is there but they won't get any bigger. Some of them are still pencil size so we're not exactly going to get a feast out of them.

Now that all the children have gone back to university (they left this morning - I have the house to myself) I will have time to get the veggie patch sorted. Sadly the first job will be digging up all the leeks and deciding which ones will be worth keeping.

To add insult to injury, the leaves affected by rust (ie. all of them) cannot be put on the compost heap, but burnt. I can't even give them to the pigs as the spores will stay in the ground and come back to haunt us. AAAAARRRGGHGHHHGHH!

Think of me when you tuck in to leek soup this winter...

Ecocarders

2008-09-26T00:27:00.000-07:00

I have been a member of Entrecard for sometime. There are advantages and disadvantages but it is a way of getting my blog seen and, hopefully, picks up a few regular readers. This blog is still quite young so anything that spreads it around a bit is fine by me!

This morning I stumbled across a new entrecard link called ECOCARDERS. I have put the link under my Entrecard advertisement. The link will take you directly to a list of other eco bloggers (who are also all members of Entrecard, but that's not the point!). To help them get started I am also listing them here. I don't usually do this and if the list becomes too long I will delete it. But you may be interested in some of them!

New beds up the garden path

2008-09-20T01:51:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have not been idle ones Up The Garden Path although as autumn arrives and the days are shorter and the nights cooler, things have been slowing down - including the weeds thank goodness! This year has been a learning curve - or maybe I should say the last six months as we haven't been living from the garden for a full year yet.

Our freezer is packed full of vegetables and fruit and I hope very much that together with any winter veg we succeed in growing, this will see us through the winter months. But of course, some things were more plentiful than others. We will be sick of French Beans before the year is out but wondering where all the peas are. There are no Broad Beans left in the freezer at all and all the onions have been used up - although that's partly the fault of the family who insisted on THREE batches of chutney this year. I have enough stewed apples to satisfy the entire planet's desire for apple crumble and apple pie. Also masses of blackcurrant and blackberries - but no raspberries or strawberries at all.

In an effort to put this right I recently ordered 40 bare-rooted strawberry plants; 20 each of Gariguette and Manille. For the past week I have been frantically digging two 10 metre long beds in a new piece of land which we will use as a veggie plot extension. Ultimately there will be three beds there this year and then about three more in the spring (if I still have the energy!) Yesterday the strawberries arrived and I spent two hours planting them through plastic. This morning they are still standing so I must have got something right! According to Alan Titchsmarsh's book planting them now will give us a decentish crop next year. They are under plastic because I simply don't have the time to weed every single vegetable bed and I plant as much under plastic as possible. I have bought a strong green plastic than can be re-used for several years. As in most things, a compromise between saving the planet and saving my back/time.

I also ordered some raspberry canes - these will arrive next week or soon after and there's a rush on to finish the third bed!

I would like this new piece of land to be, as much as possible, permanent beds although at least one bed will be part of our annual crop rotation (all those onions!). So as well as the fruit there will also be a bed for artichokes - I have six plants raised from seed already and waiting - and also a new asparagus bed. I planted asparagus eight years ago but it has only ever given us enough for two people on a strict diet. I think I planted them all too close together. Whatever, we don't get enough and a new bed there will be to supplement it.

Goose Island

2008-09-19T00:47:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this year we had a visit from the fox who took our two remaining Donald Ducks. They were ten years old, walked with a limp and should have been dispatched long before; but our sentimentality wouldn't allow it. The winter was cold and for only the second time since we've lived here the moat froze to the extent that we could play ice hockey on it. Unfortunately it also meant that Donald and Donald couldn't escape into water when the Fox came to visit.

We gave Max some geese for his birthday and recently two small ducks have been added to our wildlife. As a result we have been humming and haa-ing about the winter and the possibility of a second visit from the Fox. Finally last month Pillock Island was decided upon. Max decided that a pile of rocks should be placed in the middle of the moat, surrounded by a wire netting to hold them in place, and a pallet put on top. It was a family affair with the two older boys helping their father and me taking the odd photo. The youngest very sensibly did his homework!

The pile of rocks were punted out (boy, they weighed a ton!) and dropped in place inside the wire. The pallet was put on top and Max even stood on it...briefly. It worked a treat and Dad was able to do his "I told you so" look as he'd taken a certain amount of helpful advice from his sons...and ignored it all.

But then, the island started to list a bit. And then it very gracefully sank. He hadn't counted on the amount of mud at the bottom which the rocks had disturbed and then sunk into! That was the moment it became Pillock Island although my naming ceremony wasn't appreciated!

My idea of four anchor rocks holding the pallet in place was scoffed at several times but finally a mixture of more rocks and the anchors was used to great success. We left some bread on the island and by the next morning both ducks and geese were happily using the island. Since then the geese have decided it belongs exclusively to them - hence the renaming of Pillock Island to Goose Island.

The fruits of our labour

2008-08-27T06:34:00.000-07:00

We are currently enjoying a good harvest of courgettes and I found this yummy recipe in Hugh F-W's book - even our non-courgette eaters love it and it goes well either on French bread or as an accompaniment to other things:

1 kilo courgettes, sliced preferably in a magimix or other slicer so they are uniform and fairly thin
3 fat cloves of garlic, crushed
olive oil

Heat about 4 tablespoons of olive oil in a large frying pan and fry the garlic for a couple of minutes. Then add the courgettes and continue to cook over a medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring most of the time. You want it to cook at a brisk walk and not at a gallop. Just before it starts to brown take it off the heat and serve. DELICIOUS!

I also have a large amount of aubergines at the moment and the family is getting a little tired of eating them; so yesterday I got busy again with the chutney.

As I make it in the bottom (cool) oven I can chop up vegetables one day and then leave it over night to cook. The next day it's all ready to pot up. Given how fast my children eat chutney - have you even thought of eating a chutney sandwich...no other filling except chutney - this seems to be a good way to save hours of stirring in the kitchen.

The next major job will be the apples. Our one apple tree has been here for much longer than us and to most observers is neglected and in need of a really good pruning. To us though it is the bearer of an incredible crop of large apples every year. We daren't give it the drastic pruning it needs in case the shock is too much for it! One day, I dare say, it will succumb to the great big orchard in the sky but for now we will continue to enjoy it.

These apples don't store well as they have so many insects all over them, but they taste delicious in crumble. So each year I stew up the apples and freeze them in one kilo bags for use throughout the year. This year we used the last bag in July so I was very satisfied! Again, I stew them up in the evening - on top of the stove though - and leave them to cool over night. Then they are ready for bagging in the morning and can go straight into the freezer.

Plenty of people told me that keeping a vegetable plot free of weeds would be hard work. Nobody mentionned that using the veg before it went off would also be such hard work. However, the pigs are happy - they get all the peelings from the vegetables and apples : piggy bliss!

Blackberries and neighbours

2008-08-20T03:17:00.000-07:00

When people ask me where we live I usually tell them "in the middle of a field". Of course it's not true but we are completely surrounded by agricultural fields and as a result we refer to anyone within three kilometres as a neighbour.

All our neighbours are extremely nice...bar one. A widow of non-descript age - perhaps in her 70's - and her son live rather too close for comfort; perhaps 700 metres away. They are known by all around us as "trouble" and indeed, by the local gendarmes. They are both, in my opinion, unhinged and spend their time causing trouble for other people.

An example - our immediate neighbour, a farmer, was clearing his ditches last spring and as he had all the machinery out, cleared a ditch that was blocked but is technically the responsibility of the commune. This is a ditch that flows downhill towards the road and it was overflowing at the bottom, putting water over the road. Our neighbour did a good job and was extremely careful not to damage the sides of the ditch. Not good enough for Difficult Neighbour. Quick as a flash the son was outside and complaining that our neighbour had done it at all. He called a Huissier - a type of lawyer - who turned up and in turn called the Maire. The Maire thanked our neighbour very much for taking the trouble to sort out the ditch and that was pretty much the end of it. But it leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

Yesterday I went out to pick blackberries. Half way down our drive there is a turning to the left which runs down to the road. Although our drive is private (we share it with the farmer), the 200 metre stretch of linking track is public; and of course it has the best blackberries. I've been picking these blackberries for ten years and never has anyone suggested that I am doing anything wrong. And never in ten years have I seen anyone else blackberrying. In other words if I don't pick them the birds take them or they rot.

One of my favourite puddings is apple and blackberry crumble using apples from our tree and wild blackberries. Every year I collect as many as possible and freeze them in small quantities - there's usually only a small quantity left by the time I've finished picking/eating!

So there I was picking happily in the sunshine when Mrs Difficult Neighbour arrived on foot. How sad. She had walked 500 metres especially to tell me that I had no right to pick blackberries that were not on my own land. She insisted I had to ask permission but when I asked from whom she couldn't say. After five minutes of listening to her I'd had enough. I told her that I was going to carry on picking blackberries; that I would happily give her some if she wanted them (she didn't); and that if she wanted to she could lodge a formal complaint with the Mairie but as I wasn't trespassing or stealing I suggested she wouldn't get very far. That was the end of it but only because I walked away and carried on picking.

I was in the village this morning and decided that I might just as well relate the rather dull story to the Mairie secretary (who confirmed that I'd done nothing wrong). I know it's silly but the fact is Son of Difficult Neighbour is trouble in a big way and not someone I enjoy meeting at any time. He's not adverse to driving cyclists off the road if they don't move over far enough and unfortunately, he's not adverse to driving up to our house to complain about whatever injustice he thinks we are responsible for. So I thought it would do no harm to let the village authority know what had happened.

The good news: I have 500 grams of blackberries in the freezer and will be out later today to pick more - from a different area perhaps!

Figs -- straight from the tree!

2008-08-14T22:40:00.001-07:00

It was F's 50th birthday a month ago and we gave her a fig tree as our figs do well here and she is always very jealous.

I remember eating figs as a child in Berkshire. We were lucky to have a south facing wall that lapped up the sun and the figs loved it. In the morning we would eat a couple before going off to school and then in the evening we'd eat as many as possible that had ripened during the day. It was a battle to reach them when they were perfectly ripe but before the wasps had found them. Oh the joy of a freshly picked fig!

Yesterday was the plantation ceremony for F's tree. Despite having a large garden finding a suitable spot wasn't easy. Figs need as much sun and warmth as possible - but so do grapes and all their south facing walls were taken by beautiful looking vines! We compromised in the end and set to, taking turns to dig the hole in the sunniest part of a walled garden about two metres out from the wall.

The French always laugh at us when we tell them how we plant our figs. It is a system well known to anyone who has looked in an English book on the subject but not to the French. Having dug a deep hole we put in a square tube made of concrete - more commonly used for access to water pipes - and put some large stones at the bottom of it. (If you have one available the drum of an old washing machine is even better than the concrete.) Then some good compost, followed eventually by the fig tree which had been soaked in water all morning; and finally the rest of the compost and some of the original soil.

The point is to restrict the roots of the tree so that it can put more effort into ripening fruit than into producing leaves. I might add that the French can laugh all they like but they do admit that our figs grow better than theirs!

Anyway, fantasy then took over and we all danced around the fig tree singing Happy Birthday. By the time we left I suspect F & T were confident that we are total lunatics - let's hope that this time next year they will have reason to change their minds!

Right that's it - I'm off to feed the pigs and gather a few of our own figs on the way!

Bees and Honey

2008-08-14T03:12:00.000-07:00

Last year we entered the world of beekeeping. Our son had met a beekeeper when he was 12 and was fascinated and it was really thanks to R that a year later we bought our first two hives and honeybee colonies.

However, last year was not a good year to start! We might have had a full 24 hours without rain but if so I was asleep and missed it. In any case, the nectar in the flowers and crops around us were saturated and of not much interest to the poor bees. We had to feed them huge amounts of syrup to build up their supplies for the winter but even so we lost one of the colonies - probably through ignorance as well as the meterological circumstances.

Our remaining colony came through the winter and built itself up during the spring - largely thanks to the oil seed rape in the area. With great excitement we added a super (which is where the bees put our honey as opposed to the brood box where they keep theirs) and gradually they started to build this up and fill it.

At some point the colony swarm. I was irritated as I had been checking the hive and as it's in our garden I pass it several times a day; but I neither anticipated the swarm nor saw it leave or in the area. That's life and again probably due to our inexperience. When a colony swarms you lose about half of the honey collecting bees so your harvest will be badly affected. That's the problem! In addition, I have noticed since this happened that there is very little brood in the hive which worries me as the colony will not be strong enough to survive the winter.

So we decided to take action on two fronts. The first was to harvest the honey already in the super straightaway. The second was to requeen.

We had a great time on Sunday extracting the honey from the frames. I bought a second hand extractor last year and was very grateful to have done so as it makes the job a lot easier and less sticky!! We left the honey to settle for three days and then yesterday we potted it up. Oh the joy of having our own honey at last! We have estimated 5.5 kilos - not exactly enough to make a fortune but certainly enough to keep us in honeyed toast for a while! )We can't resist calculating how much we might get in a good year)

The second decision to requeen was more complicated. It is late in the season to do this and we are taking a risk. I wanted therefore, to find a queen that was a good egg layer and would do her best to build up the colony in a short time. Strange though it may seem I bought a queen from Cyprus as they appear to have a fantastic reputation and the supplier is extremely helpful. She was sent on Monday and arrived TODAY by standard post. Not bad at all.

This afternoon we will start the process by making up a small nucleus colony (six frames instead of 12) and introduce the new queen still in her cage. After a couple of days we will check to see if the bees have accepted her and if so will let her out of the cage. Then about a week later we will re-unite the nucleus with the original hive.

If anyone is interested in the subject of beekeeping I do have some books in my online bookshop (run by Amazon). These are the books I have on my own bookshelf and the Clive de Bruyn especially is one I look at almost every week. Either click the link or click on the pile of books on the right of this page.

Red Hot Chilli Peppers...in my eyes!

2008-08-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite jobs at this time of year is chutney making. The French love it and I often take a small pot along when we are invited out to dinner. They look surprised, disbelief follows when they are told what to do with it; but they always ring up for the recipe afterwards!

I don't have any particular recipe, although I base it on Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's, but use whatever is available in the garden. Today's batch has aubergine, French beans, cucumber, onions, garlic, green tomatoes, green peppers and Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Well, one actually. Be warned, the juice from this vegetable gets into your skin and stays there. Washing hands, showering, gardening and more washing doesn't mean it has been removed...

My son and I sat in the kitchen together and chopped vegetables for half an hour enjoying the relative peace and quiet. We talked about the satisfaction of growing our own chutney - raisins excepted - and the very last thing I chopped were the Red Hot Chilli Pepper.

After getting the chutney into the oven (I slow cook it rather than cooking it on the top of the oven) I had a lovely day, sowing some Swiss Chard and some Chinese Lettuce, and transplanting some lettuce seedlings. Then it was off to a local church for a wonderful concert. On my return supper was underway and we had delicious spaghetti with a pesto sauce (Basil supplied by yours truly from the garden of course!)

At some point I must have rubbed my eyes; I can even vaguely remember doing it. BIG mistake! The sting was not instant but came on gradually and in stages. Each stage was just about bearable but then WHOOSH...it got worse. Finally I couldn't see and my youngest went to get some ice. Didn't help. Then Max suggested some cucumber slices. This was BRILLIANT. The cucumbers are in the fridge (in the hope that we will be able to use them before they go off) and were so wonderfully cool when sliced. The children thought it very funny to have Mum sitting there looking like a complete prune; needless to say one of them had his I-phone with him and took full advantage of the situation to take photos of me looking stupid! But it was worth it. After about two minutes the pain went and I could see again.

So, if you are foolish enough - or unfortunate enough - to get Red Hot Chilli Peppers in your eyes, cut some cucumber slices and they will help enormously. Alternatively, just wear this rubber gloves when you are cutting them up!

Our chicks have hatched

2008-08-07T06:44:00.000-07:00

You may recall from this post earlier in the month that we have had a mixed success with our chickens. The original three, two hens and a cockerel, are alive and well and providing us with two eggs per day. Perfect. In addition, I gave Max an incubator for his birthday and we have had enormous pleasure from hatching chicks from the fertile eggs. Sadly, we lost the second lot of chicks (although they were hardly chicks as they had reached the unattractive six weeks!) to an unseen predator and then we discovered that The Blue Team were all cocks and therefore for the pot. That's the resume in a nutshell!

As some of you know, my formidable mother-in-law (Blind Granny to her blog readers) is, well, blind and we thought it would be a treat for her if we hatched some eggs during her visit here. We duly put seven eggs into the incubator 20 days before she was due to arrive, secure in the knowledge that with a 21 day incubation period the eggs would hatch 24 hours after her arrival. Unfortunately, noone had told the chicks this although in the end it worked out better than we could have hoped!

The first one was born just one hour before Granny and the others (my sister-in-law, her daughter and daughter's friend) arrived. These were followed by two more that evening and one more the following morning. So they had the full on experience you could say. My niece's friend was entranced. She lives in London and has never seen the creation of life at such close quarters. She came running in and out of the kitchen (the incubator is in the playroom next door) to tell us what was going on. It was very touching.

The picture above shows the egg, still in the incubator, with the very first visual sign that the chick is on its way. It has bashed the first, all important, hole in the shell. The rest follows quite slowly but it is very important that you don't give it a helping hand by cracking the shell. During this period you can quite often hear a cheep from inside the egg.

There is nothing remotely attractive about a new-born chick but for me there will always be the awe of the miracle of life. This hideous little thing has been out of its shell for about as long as it took me to find the camera. I'm not quite sure what the piece of string is - nothing to do with the chick at all!

At this point we put some water in the incubator (in a shallow tray with pebbles so that the chick can't drown in it) and leave it alone for a while. It gets itself up and has a drink quite quickly, then flops down again wherever it happens to be (hence the pebbles) and slowly builds up enough strength to find its legs and start moving around. The lid goes back on the incubator in order to keep the heat in - there are more eggs still to hatch and, most importantly, the newly born chick must not get cold. The chick is quite wet when it's born and the warmth helps it dry out and become what we all think of when someone says "new-born chick"...cute and fluffy!

And so our chicks hatched. From seven eggs we hatched five chicks - not bad. The other eggs showed no signs of life and after a further two days in the incubator to be sure we threw them out. The first time this happened we opened the eggs to investigate but I don't do this anymore as it can be upsetting. Just as with humans and other animals, chicks can die in the egg for no obvious reason and it is not a pleasant experience to discover this when you open the egg.

The chicks are now ten days old. Already they are developing a character, interestingly en masse. When I put my hand in to change the water or give them food they all charge towards me at once. At the first sign of a camera they all vanish into a corner. When one lies down and "plays dead" the others stand around it and gaze. The first time I saw this I was really worried but of course s/he got up and they all danced, seemingly in delight at the joke they'd played. When one discovers he can do something, the others all do it as well - have you read John Wyndham's "The Midwitch Cuckoos"? It should have been the Midwitch Chickens, but clearly he'd never seen baby chicks!

They are still in the house although probably not for much longer. At this time of year the playroom warms up just enough for the smell to be over-powering and Eau de Chick is not our favourite to be honest! Also, it is usually warmer outside than in during the day. So we will bring round the chick house that my son made and put them out in the morning and just bring them in at night.

This lot will inevitably become known as the Gang of Five, or the Fab Five perhaps, and in due course we will ring them with a green tag on their legs. This tells us which "batch" they are from and therefore what age they are. OK, we are not exactly running a huge enterprise here with hundreds of chickens running around but it's amazing how fast older chickens start looking like their brothers and sisters. We are hatching chicks for two reasons: eggs and meat. A chicken will start laying eggs at approximately 120 days (depending on the time of year); however, if we need any of the birds for meat, or if we have spare cockerels, we prefer to cull them before this - at approximately 90 days. Hence, we need to know the dates of birth and the different colour rings tell us this.

The Happy Hams - progress report

2008-08-04T10:49:00.000-07:00

Having never kept pigs before this whole experience is a steep learning curve. Fortunately our Berkshire weaners are well behaved and have a healthy respect for the electric fence. They are making contented noises and seem to be growing well - albeit one is growing much faster than the other; he's known as the big brother. They come charging towards us when we arrive with a bucket in our hands and look very cross if we manage to get into the field before they've seen us; clearly that's very sneaky and just not on!

We were feeding them from an old ammunition box (don't ask!) and that was perfect as we could put it under the shelter when it was raining so that the feed didn't get wet and soggy. They seemed to almost climb into the box and had great fun at feed time. But of course they grow and more importantly they grow too big to share the box. It was a little like the time I noticed my baby son looked a little crooked in his babygro - I'd had to force him into it and it was only when I finally managed to do it up I realised that perhaps it was just too small! Ham One was clearly growing at a much faster rate than Ham Two and it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps this was because he was literally shoving his little brother away from the box. So now I put the food in about four piles on the ground. This works much better and I think Ham Two is beginning to catch up a bit!

I also had a fright ten days ago. I went out and Ham Two had what I can only describe as a hemorroid protruding from his backside. The next day it was much bigger. Internet quickly informed me that it was possibly the beginning of a prolapsed rectum - just what I needed - and to call the vet immediately. In the meantime Max spoke to our farming neighbour and although he now only has dairly cows he used to keep pigs. He reassured us that although we should call the vet, both pigs looked extremely well and happy and not on the imminent panic list.

Clearly the vet doesn't have internet and that's probably a good thing. He gave me some worming powder and two days later the problem was no longer visible. This probably also helped with the weight problem.

Unfortunately the vet didn't have any bright ideas on how to give worming powder to the pigs beyond putting it into their drinking water. As they spend a lot of the time splashing the water out of the tub and then wallowing in it this didn't seem a sensible idea. So I bought a large syringe (minus needle) and "injected" it into their mouths - it was brilliant and they loved it!

One day I'll get a photo of them looking at the camera...

Freezing Cucumbers

2008-08-04T10:18:00.000-07:00

I think I mentioned that I have had extraordinary beginner's luck with my cucumbers. We have harvested over 50 from six plants and I only hope I will be able to use them all. At the moment we are averaging two per day but my sister-in-law has just left so we have gone from being nine to six. Luckily we all (still!) like cucumber but even so, one a day is easily enough.

One of our "use up cucumber" recipes is Tzatziki. It works very well as a salad or as an accompaniment to meat. Here's my recipe but please feel free to vary the quantities at will - you might think an entire cucumber was excessive for example!

Peel and finely chop one cucumber
Mix it with three or four natural yoghurts (or one big one)
Add some finely chopped garlic
Add the juice of one lemon
Mix it up and it's ready to eat!

However, even this isn't enough to use up ALL the cucumbers!

Max is looking after a chateau/hotel this week. The owner is away on holiday with his family and Max is basically house manager/caretaker/trouble shooter. The evening meal is cooked by a chef who comes in each evening to provide the dinner ordered by the guests. He is a delightful man and last year, when Max did the same job, surprised us by presenting us with a "takeaway" gourmet meal on the day Max finished there. It was delicious and all my favourite things.

Max mentioned to Christian yesterday that he was worried I might be planning on buying another fridge as the one we have is stuffed full of cucumbers. "No problem", said Christian (well, actually it was "Pas de probleme", but anyway...) "Just freeze them!"

Oh ha, ha. I have been looking all over the internet to find out how to freeze the wretched things without all sorts of complicated manoeuvres involving brine. I don't have enough tomatoes to make Gazpacho but that's coming. Back to Christian and I happily give you his very simple and straightforward advice.

Peel the cucumbers
Cut in half length ways and remove the centres (which is where most of the water is)
Sprinkle both sides with salt.
Put in plastic bag, seal and freeze.

Just for the record an ice cream scoop is brilliant for taking out the centres.

I froze four this afternoon and will de-freeze one later this week to see how it tastes. Results will be reported here!

Storms knock us out!

2008-07-31T09:59:00.001-07:00

For the past three days we have had no internet connection at all after a real humdinger of a storm on Monday afternoon! Today we have at last been reconnected - although whether or not it will last I don't know as there are more thunder storms going on all around us; we seem to be just on the edge so perhaps it won't affect us!

Actually it's been heavenly. We have a house full of guests and just for once the children have not been able to sneak off to "check their emails". Instead they've been much more active outside - even helping me pick vegetables from the patch.

It's been very satisfying producing meals largely made up of home produce. Last night I "took the plunge" and cooked our first home grown chickens - two of the blue team. After Max had plucked and gutted them last week I put them in the freezer. I anticipated an element of heartache when I came to cook them but surprisingly that was not the case. I found that when they came out of the freezer they were just frozen chickens, nothing more.

There was almost no breast meat so I decided to casserole them with some of our onions and other vegetables. I put them in a slow oven in the morning and by the evening they were incredibly tender - delicious!

Anyway, once this lot of guests have left I'll be back online (storm problems accepted) and will show you my, er, glut of cucumbers. I don't think we'll have to buy another fridge but does anyone have any good cucumber recipes that can be frozen???

Lorna asked me in a comment on a previous post how the pigs are doing. The answer is fine. They are growing well - one much faster than the other - and are certainly developing their own characters. The big one is quite a bully at feed time but we have solved this by putting food in several different places so the little one always has another pile to go to. They love, I have discovered, the green beans I give them that have become too big and stringy for us - so nothing goes to waste at all!

Once again, apologies for the absence - I'll be back to catch up soon.

Up The Garden Path has received an...AWARD!

2008-07-24T08:08:00.000-07:00

I am thrilled to have been given an award by The Compostbin.
Given that this is such a new blog I consider it a great honour. The rules are that I pass it on to 7 of my favourite blogs. I can't, however , pass it on to The Compostbin. Here are my seven:

Pollys Peri-wrinkles & Piercings in Ireland. I drop in most days and Polly always makes me laugh.

France This Way. A fellow Englishman living in France (further south than me though).

Garendenny Lane Interiors, again in Ireland. She has a wonderful collection of fabrics which, as an upholsterer, I would love to get my hands on! More importantly she has just opened an on-line shop. Lovely things and I hope to send something to my sister for her birthday.

Thurston Market Garden. How can I possibly not include a gardener who also keeps Berkshire Pigs!

Hedgewizard's Diary. Full of wonderful stories and tips. You name it he grows it!

Obscure History. Slightly different this one. Some of the stories are sad; some are funny; some are just plain daft. But worth a look.

So there you have it! Take a look at these and I hope you enjoy them. Thank you again to Compost Woman for my award!

Farewell to the Blue Team

2008-07-23T19:53:00.000-07:00

Our first three chicks were hatched from the incubator in late-April and were followed a month later by eight more. They became known as the blue team and the yellow team because of the tags we put on their legs to remind us when they were born, how old they were and when they would mature into egg laying hens. That was the plan.

Unfortunately two weeks ago the yellow team were taken by a fox or other predator - during the day and with no noise, not even disturbing our dogs which is worrying - leaving just a couple of feathers. And yesterday a chicken farmer confirmed my worst fears - the blue team are all cockerels! And so they will be dispatched later today.

This will be a first for us and will no doubt bring us many regrets. However, we have raised these birds with a purpose in mind, knowing full well that if they were not hens we would eat them. They have had a fine time living in the open air and being well looked after. Their diet has been well supplemented by worms and other insects they have found in the garden and it has been a joy to have them following me through the flower beds while I weed. I weed, they feed on the bugs bought to the surface.

We have more eggs due to hatch next week. We timed these ones to hatch when my mother-in-law will be staying. She is blind and we thought this would be a surprise for her as she will be able to hold them before the end of her stay. She follows our life in France very closely (I write that without any of the usual daughter-in-law irony!) and was staying with us when I gave Max the incubator for his birthday. I sincerely hope there will be at least two hens this time - although comments about not counting chickens come to mind! We do still have our original two hens and one cockerel but I find that two eggs a day are not sufficient - especially when our sons start cooking brownies for tea! - and I really resent having to supplement them with shop bought eggs.

Crop Rotation

2008-07-20T06:09:00.000-07:00

Of all things I find this the hardest thing to sort out. It would be so easy if all things were planted on the same day and cropped on the same day. Simple to rotate then. Fortunately, vegetables aren't like that or we would be hungry for half the year.

Crop rotation is essential to growing vegetables to avoid the build up of pests and diseases which hide themselves in the ground and are more than capable of over-wintering and rearing their ugly heads the following year. Not all vegetables need to be rotated but it always helps if it's possible and for some it's vital.

I have done my best to organise my plot into beds and thanks to Max putting slates around them this has worked quite well - although we will have to change them as the hose pipe keeps catching on them. So I have a number of beds with different vegetables in each. So far, so good. But now I've dug up the potatoes what goes in next? I'm about to dig up the onions - what can I put in their place? And after the French beans are finished?

I spent this morning putting my cauliflower (Nautilus) and broccoli (Marathon F1) in the potato bed, together with some leeks (blawgroene herfst) that I bought yesterday. It seems I got it wrong!

I wish I'd found Downsizer first! This is the first time I've seen crop rotation simplified so that even I can understand and follow it - although it's a bit late for the caulis and broccoli unfortunately. Brassicas don't appreciate the ground left by potatoes as it is not firm enough. Well, at least I've discovered this in time to make sure they are well firmed in even if I can't move them. I think the leeks will be ok - I hope so as it took two hours to get them in!

So if you want some help with your crop rotation take a look at Downsizer and see if it helps.

Cucumbers

2008-07-20T03:43:00.001-07:00

I have never grown cucumbers before (where have I heard that phrase before!) but this year I put some seeds in a pot and they started to grow! Surprise, surprise! However, when I planted them out they didn't seem to be making much progress so in my new found enthusiasm for everything potager I bought three cucumber plants and stuck them in too. Hmmm, these didn't make much progress either so I just decided to ignore the whole lot and get on with the rest of the garden - broad beans were doing well and saved my enthusiasm from vanishing.

They say if you ignore something it will go away. Fortunately cucumbers don't know about this because quite suddenly they started growing at an incredible pace and were promising to overrun the garden. Rapid checking in every veg book in the house told me to pinch them out after a certain amount of leaves had appeared - but we were way beyond that. I also noticed that there were dozens of fruits appearing on all six plants but they were all tiny and only one - which by this time was a full size cucumber! - had grown at all. Several tiny fruits had turned yellow and were clearly not going anywhere but the compost heap. Decision time.

I finally spent a morning pinching out all the trailing parts of the plants. Truth be told I had no idea what I was doing but apart from anything else, they had to be stopped from taking over the entire patch! The results were extraordinary and almost instantaneous. Within a week rapid growth was showing in several fruits on all of the plants. Withing two weeks we were eating reasonable sized cucumbers. Now, three weeks later, I am picking at least one full sized fruit a day, if not two. I have a feeling that next week I will be picking more than that!

I am extremely pleased with this. We have a family arriving tonight for three days and then next weekend my sister-in-law and mother-in-law plus one daughter and possibly another child will be here for a week. Our eldest son will be arriving with them so the house will be full. Cucumbers will be welcome!

In the top two photos you can clearly see the two different types of cucumbers. The top photo is one of the plants I bought with a smoothish skin and the second, with an almost prickly skin, is one of my seedlings grown to fruition. In the final photo, I have put the flowers of borage in with the sliced cucumbers. These flowers are edible and I think the blue is so lovely next to the delicate green of the cucumber.

Breadmakers

2008-07-18T03:56:00.000-07:00

When we first moved to France bread makers had been available in England for a very short period of time. We'd seen them in America and tasted the delights but had not met anyone in Europe who owned one. Then one day I found one in a computer shop on one of our trips to England - it must have been an electrical store I suppose but I was in there because of the computer! It was a Panasonic and must have been mark one because a friend of mine has one that is very similar but with an option for crusty crust etc. I bought it proudly back to France and all our French friends laughed at me. Well, they would - the entire French population knows two things about England: it rains non-stop and the bread tastes like cardboard or cotton wool depending on how stale it is. I was nervous to say the least but fortunately had had the sense to bring back instant yeast as the French only had fresh yeast and after a few experiments - only one was inedible - I was confident enough to try it on our French friends. The joke was on them (finally!). They wanted to know where I'd bought this fantastic bread. Which bakery had I, an English woman, found which they did not know about. (The French will drive miles to buy good bread when the village bakery is not up to par.)

I still have my breadmaker and after twelve years service it is just as good as ever. I don't know precisely how the price of "my" bread compares to the baguette in the shop but it is cheaper. And anyway, it means that I don't have to go to our local bakery (7kms each way) each day (and no, frozen baguettes are not that great if kept in the freezer for more than 24 hours). Our efforts at self-sufficiency are not able to extend to growing wheat - we don't have the land for one thing! - so I will always have to buy the flour.

During this past week one of my oldest friends has been to stay with two of her three young daughters. We had a lot of catching up to do and with the wonderful weather we were fortunate enough to have, were very happy to do most of the catching up in the garden or the house - not the supermarket! The breadmaker was on twice a day with rolls for lunch (Mary Berry's recipe) and a brown grain bread for supper. Wonderful!

Chard

2008-07-10T00:36:00.000-07:00

A few years ago I was introduced to chard when we tried a veggie box scheme run in the area by a farm that employs handicapped adults. The farm is organic and is a great success. The box scheme didn't work for us as they couldn't deliver and we could never collect on the days specified. They changed it now to a shop which works much better.

Anyway, the chard made up a large part of the box and initially I wasn't too pleased - until I tasted it! It was delicious and has the advantage of being in two parts. You can eat the white stems with, say, a cheese sauce and then the green leaves as a change from spinach. Both are excellent. I might say though that I haven't yet managed to make the white stems in cheese sauce LOOK appetising but I am blessed with a 14 year old (the youngest of three) who will always try a new culinary effort and make a genuine yes or no decision about it. He loved it!

I was too late to sow any this year but found six plants in a local garden supply shop (I was looking for seed potatoes actually). I put three of these in a corner of the veggie patch but had no more room, so I put them in the flower bed. And this was the problem.

All the books say that chard must be watered regularly or it will bolt. The veggie patch was no problem as during the very dry June I was watering it anyway. However, the flower bed we try not to water so much and although it does have a sprinkler system it isn't yet up and running this year. So, guess what? The chard has bolted! It looks lovely though so I'm not too upset and of course I still have the three in the veggie patch.

If you are looking for a new vegetable experience I highly recommend trying chard. Next year I will grow it from seed as it isn't meant to be too hard to get started. You can also, in the UK at least, buy a sort of rainbow chard which has stems in a variety of colours. They look lovely but I haven't yet found them in France.

Happy Hams arrive up the Garden Path

2008-07-07T01:19:00.000-07:00

I cannot deny that our attempts at self-sufficiencyish living have been influenced by Rebecca at Sally Gardens in Ireland. I started reading her blog about a year ago and was fascinated by her life on the smallholding and in particular her stories about the pigs. It set me thinking - which as Max will tell you, is always a dangerous moment! The red light flickered in my brain and I thought why not? We have the space and as we both work from home, we have the time.

I am thrilled to say that our very first weaners - two Berkshire Black cross - were collected yesterday. I collected them in the back of our van (which now has a certain Eau de Pig about it!) and they were safely installed in their new home during the afternoon. I was advised to leave them shut in the ark with food and water until this morning and, as there is no door on their ark, I put two bales of straw in front of the door. Well, that didn't last long and very soon they had knocked it down and come to investigate the outside world. Stories of houses made of straw spring to mind - although this time it was the piglets that huffed and puffed!

Thankfully, they were still in their enclosure this morning. I say thankfully because 1) I didn't have any photos and 2) they touched the electric fence a couple of times yesterday evening with their backsides and although we saw their ears literally spark the pigs themselves were seemingly unaware that the fence was electric and should be respected.

They were much less timid this morning and although they still haven't eaten very much they have made a nest in their ark (I'll post a picture of this ark sometime - it's a very grand name for the shack they are actually living in!) and have started rooting around. They both took a carrot from me this morning which I decided was progress although it was probably just hunger! But it was lovely to see them looking a little more at home and making gorgeous snuffling noises.

The Happy Hams are 10 weeks old and we will lovingly look after them until November/December. They will then be dispatched, again with love and care, to the freezer and provide us with more than enough meat for next year. If the project is a success we will repeat it next year.

As much as I would love to say that the pigs will be organic I can't. I have found it unbelievably difficult finding organic, or even guaranteed non-GM, feed. That will have to wait for next time. In the meantime they will be fed all our leftover vegetables and will have a happy life in our field.

Now, I must go and buy a pair of welly boots and perhaps change out of these somewhat smelly clothes! And clean the car!