More garden pix

I’m trying to catch up on photos here and am going to toss out a few pictures from the garden over the summer, because it has set rhythm to our days and kept us from getting scurvy, especially now that the tomatoes in Sandra and Jean-Luc’s greenhouse

are doing what they were intended to do.  We’re finally having a few dry sunny days, and i actually have to water the garden, which was the stuff of dreams back in July when the grass had to be mowed more than once a week to avoid jungular heights.  We’ve harvested all the potatoes (i should add a small caveat lector:  when i say harvest, you shouldn’t have images of major quantities of food, because the garden is very small this year and as it’s only the second year we’ve been gardening, all our techniques are still very rudimentary and under constant debate.  Next year, T. promises, we’ll live off the land.  Right, i say.  Go dig, young man.), we’ve snacked on peas, we’ve harvested most of the squashes

but there is hope of a late season harvest there too; some purple snap beans will be ready to eat in about a week, and we’ve had seven (7) chioggia beets,

of whom i can only write glowing homilies and next year am planning to plant much more.  We’ve had cucumbers, a decent amount of zucchini both round and straight, and it seems to be a good year for yellow tomatoes.  The one thing that seems to really thrive here at Maffay, and avoids getting eaten by slugs (and which Gabriel also tries to avoid eating) is swiss chard:  the glorious rainbow brights, that Jenny sent along two years ago.  We’re eating lots of that in tourtes.  Our corn is spindly but we have had at least four good ears.   There were the first pears from our little tree, and M. Honoré brought by peaches from theirs, and M. Roullier brought by the first pears from his and we made a crumble.

My triumph however has yet to turn red, but seems to be headed in that general direction:  before leaving Venice last October we tragettho’d across the canal to a market, and i bought a bag of little round red peppers.  I turned some into hot pepper jam, and saved the rest for seeds.  And even though i also sowed jalapenos and corno di toros, the only seeds that sprouted turned out to be these round red italian peppers from Venice; we have two plants, decked with a respectable number of small peppers that are still green but threaten to redden soon. 

If anyone knows their name, i’d love to hear it.  Our other italian import, from Alberta’s garden at Fattoria Ormanni, are the little succulents called ‘carciofi’ which i looooove, and seem to be happy here at Maffay too, in the big jade pot with the other sedum and the contorted filbert, the picture is still on the mac but i’ll put it up in awhile.

And our attempts at chou romanesco and broccoli have yielded one tiny head of broccoli, but it’s perhaps too soon to tell.  The cabbage patch did yield a scene of garden carnage though, one morning after admiring the lacework that the brassicae had become, i realized it was the work of caterpillars.  So i put on rubber gloves, Gabriel helped by pointing out the caterpillars with a stick, and went out squishing them by hand, which is really disgusting and a very good memory aid for putting row covers on next year.

Jane and Ed’s Home

It’s almost official, the process has now entered into the doldrums of waiting the two months for the final signature at the notary’s, but Jane and Ed will soon be our neighbors in Dingé.  As of next June, they’ll be home.

Home

It takes a heap of living, someone pithily said,

To make a house a home.  I would postulate instead

that you have to live around a bit before you can find your way

home.  Jane started out in a home in Bloomington, a lovely moniker

for a town in a farming state, a very hopeful sort of name.

After that there were many other houses, some with pianos,

some not, some with hedgehogs, most not.  A few had cats,

and one was pink.  She and Ed are now looking for their home.

We did some reconnaissance, trying to imagine Jane and Ed

in houses that we would visit, picture Jane in the garden

drinking a mug of tea, or Ed reading the New York Review

of Books, wondering how the light would fall on the breakfast table

in January on Jane’s yellow provençal tablecloth, in which room

Ed would set up a corner to listen to the BBC and smoke a cigar.

Where the books would go, how it would be to shuck oysters

in the kitchen, what it would be like to open up the mailbox

for news from the other side of the world.  This is meaty work

for the imagination, seeing someone else’s life into a house,

wandering through the furniture and knickknacks that the current owners collect,

the mousetraps, the shocking green paint, wondering how people could live

like that, wondering how Jane and Ed will make it home.

And then they were finally here, and we went out again, looking

at the houses with their eyes.  In Marcillé there was a dead nestling

on the garage floor, and swallows flying in and out of the eaves.  In Meillac

the stairs were medieval or the floors were covered in cardboard,

and three mousetraps guarded the electric blue walls, which were adequate

repulsion on their own right against any living thing, us included.  In Eancé

in the fields to the south, there was the big yard house, with eight apple trees

and gigantic sunflowers, stretching up through the raindrops, taller

than Anne and Anthony, who knows how to put words together.  In Dingé on Monday

we found the arched doorway house, with a wassail cup

carved into the chimney, and two plump cats prowling the courtyard.

On Friday, after making lists and checking and balancing and revisiting and seeing

things in different lights and measuring and plumbing and measuring

themselves up against the walls, Alice Jane made her offer.

The counteroffer came that same night, relayed over mobile phone lines

from Lyon.  Discord over the appliances, capitulation on the price.

(Jane and Ed will live in our self-same harmonic postal code; at 440, Feins and Dingé have perfect pitch.  In Dingé there is garlic from the coast at the little store, a great bakery with perfect éclairs, and a butcher shop whose rillettes have been judged the best in France, David to Le Man’s Goliaths on the subject.)

Jane and Ed will walk under the arched doorway in early July, into the little house with the wassail cup chimney, they’ll turn on the lights, and will be home.

(Le Maffay, on July 25, 2009, during the first of the regrouped poetry afternoons).

Ed wrote a great poem impromptu, in situ, about the chapel during their visit in May, but unfortunately i’ve stored it too efficiently and have to find it again before quoting it to you here.  But we’re very glad to have our Jane and Ed back.

Dog days

We’ve finally had about 2.5 days of canicule, so it feels at last like summertime.  I capitulated and tore out all the mildering tomato plants and made green tomato jam, and it’s rather good and has helped my perspective on tomato blight evolve into delight, deblight, because it’s an easy way to get a good supply of fat green tomatoes right in August when there’s nothing else to jam, in the lull between jars of plums and blackberry preserves. 

Plus the color is green like gooseberries and crunchy and you could think that you’re eating grapes, only they’re tomatoes, so it’s confusing, but in a very delicious way.

Gabriel lost his front tooth.

And we had visitors last week,

our friends Alain and Béa and Clément the aptly-named,

four years to the day from Alain’s visit with Laureen four years ago.

They promise to come back earlier next time, too many changes happen in that much time, but it’s reassuring to discover, in retrospect, that most of the changes are joyful good.  And, i put together the last piece of the kitchen, the counter under the courtyard window, which required 2 trips to Leroy Merlin and Ikea, with a followup to come soon, and we now have more storage but of course it’s already not enough.

Otherwise, we’re working (g in the sand pile, me on the computer in the new Office, which has also officially been inaugurated this week) and dreaming of… chickens.  More to come soon.

Combourg

It’s the cradle of romanticism.  Combourg is 12 kilometers away from us, on the road that goes through Dingé, which we have come to discover means ‘high, mythological land’.  The princes de Combourg had dominion over their vassals at Maffay many years ago from now, when the chapel had stucco on its walls.  We’ve been drawn to Combourg over the past months, visiting in May with Paul and Joyce and Timofee,

then driving through with Marie-Laure and Andrea on the way to the beach (and home again in the taxi when the car had to be towed),

and again in July with Jane and Ed on Jane’s birthday in the rain to look for houses,

then again today for a delightful reason that will soon be announced with a poem on this very site in ten days or so, when it will be official (the category on this post is a clue).

But today in Combourg, a circus was setting up, and so when we drove into the town by the lake, a Bactrian camel was snacking in the meadow under the spires of the château where Châteaubriand once moped.