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.

Case in point

The last of the saints de glace served his revenge cold today.  A hailstorm hit Le Maffay around 5pm, wiping out the spinach crop and disarming a few tomatoes.  The butterfly lavender plumb fell over, and the strawberries were pounded into mush, or worse yet, down into the horse manure that has been their fertilizer these past few months.  Gather ye strawberries while ye may.

Before:

After:

But the green caravan is now gone, trailered out with Emilie and Romain and Pierre-Yves’s help this evening.  Here it was this morning around daybreak.  Now it is no more.

Saints de glace

Journées grises au grand Maffay, un post en français et anglais pour mémorer les saints de glace de l’année 2009.  Il est parfois des périodes dans la vie où des evenements surgissent comme une dernière gélée, coupant court la fructification des journées clémentes de pré-printemps, refroidissant la terre où la germination a pris son cours, incitée par un avril doux.  Aujourd’hui 13 mai est le dernier des saints de glace, Saint Servais; après aujourd’hui, ceux qui travaillent la terre peuvent semer dans l’espoir de recolte, si ce ne sont pas les pluies, ou la secheresse, qui posent problème par la suite.  Le seul métaphore que je peux trouver pour essayer de trouver le logique dans ce qui arrive, ces-jours ci, à tous ceux que j’ai cité autour de Darcy, à la famille de F. et C. à la Bigotais, à nos chers voisins d’en face, à celui d’au milieu, est celui des saints de glace.  Parfois dans la vie il n’y a pas d’abri des forces de la nature, et c’est dans les périodes de gélée tardive, soudaine, inattendue, que nous sommes mis devant le choix de continuer, ou se replier dans la terre.  Je me suis lévée tôt ce matin, le dernier des saints de glace, en pensant à ceux autour de nous qui souffrent et vivent et rient et pleurent, parfois tous à la fois, et suis allée dans le jardin.    Les semences d’avril ont resisté, les fruits sont bien accrochées dans les arbres, les asperges prennent des formes gracieuses et étoffées.  Pour cette année au moins, le jardin a passé les saints de glace.  Et j’y prends espoir pour nous tous qui traversent des épreuves de gel en ce moment aussi.

In France i’ve always been counseled not to plant anything until after the Saints de glace.   These saints mark the end of the waiting period for the last of the late spring freezes, which wreak havoc in gardens and can destroy the stone fruit harvest for an entire season.  The patron saints of may 11, 12 and 13 are Mamert, Pancras and Servais; today, May 13, is the last of the saints de glace, and people who cultivate may now go ahead and plant with the assurance, if not for buckets of rain, or drought, or invasive bugs, that there will be a harvest.  The metaphor of the Saints de glace is the only one that seems to fit right for what so many people around us are living through these days, everyone of whom i wrote in the note about our dear Darcy, the family of F+C, our neighbors at La Bigotais, and all our neighbors here at Maffay, especially the news of our good friends from across the courtyard.  Sometimes in life there is no shelter from an unexpected freeze, and the green tumbling motion of spring suddenly stops, and turns the world into black and white.   You never know ahead of time, and then one morning you wake up and are faced with the choice to find a way to go on, or fold back into the earth.  I woke up early this morning, thoughts filled with those who are suffering, living, laughing and crying and sometimes all at the same time, and went into the garden on this last day of the saints de glace.  The fruits are green but well-attached onto their branches, April’s seedlings have reached the air unimpeded by frost, and the asparagus has taken on a gracile port, branching out from its first tentative spears.  This year, the garden has passed the saints de glace, and this gives me hope for those of us who are living through hard freezes this May.

Saving rainfall

Rain in Bretagne is a prized commodity:  without it we would have nothing to drink but chouchenn, and we would no longer know how to appreciate blue skies.  We love the rain so much that for the past year and half we’ve been collecting it, in a big 6000l box, saving up for a dry day.  And then one day last week, HP Energétik³ came over to plug in pumps and water lines and fix leaks and by the time they’d left, we have the means at our disposal to extract the rain and use it to flush the toilets and wash our clothes and water the garden, in the even that it ever stops raining enough to need a supplement.  During the course of their visit, Simon Olivier and Michel also managed to staunch the bleeding of a small boy who tried to carve a bamboo twig with a shiny new Henckels knife, so we can indeed attest not only to the quality of their plumbing and solar work, but the quality of their first aid kit leaves nothing to be desired.  I don’t have a good picture of the pump yet, but it’s red and shiny and deserves to be photographed so it will be soon.

Florabella

It’s May 6, grandma Mae’s birthday, and we’re adrift in flowers here:  the wisteria, the weeds, the lilacs (the white ones above sadly are not from our garden, happily they are from Yves Roullier’s garden and he’s promised me a start), the colza, the apple blossoms, the lilies of the valley, a profusion of strawberry flowers and the promise of the first roses opening up by this weekend.  Aunty Izzy needs some flowers today, here they are.

Green(house) envy

Gaël et Romain ont fait leur serre le weekend dernier et lundi je suis passée prendre des photos dudit château de la surpousse, maison clôse de tendrilles verdoyantes, moi-même yeux verts d’envie (mais il faut le dire haut et fort qu’on emprunte le serre de Jean-Luc et Sandra, donc on n’est pas à plaindre).  Voici quelques aperçus avant que cette grande cage de lumière ne s’auto-bâtisse de branches grimpantes, et les grappes de tomates ne fassent rougir le soleil de gourmandise.

Asperges

It’s spring, and the garden presents a wonderful opportunity to indulge in one’s obsessive side.  Asparagus are this year’s pet project, and it’s the closest i’ve yet come to realizing where Gabriel gets his charming tendency towards OCD.  I put in the asparagus bed back in late March.  First, you have to take a pickaxe to the ground and get it all nice and broken.  Then, a layer of sand.  Then, a layer of horse manure.  Then, a layer of regular dirt.  Then, a layer of leaves and things dredged from the drainage ditch under the oak tree across the road.  Then a layer of cow manure.  Then another layer of dirt.  Then, you lay out the asparagus ‘turons’.  Then, you put down two more layers of dirt, water it all, and then put some hay on top to insulate it.  Then you leave on vacation and hope that it will rain.  And it does, and a month later, the first sprout comes up, and then you think:  maybe i should scratch around a little bit in the dirt and just see if the rest of them are going to sprout, and you do, and they are, and then you put down a layer of potting soil over the last layer of dirt.  And then every day you go out and look to see what’s grown.  And if it’s been rainy and warm and a little sunny, the asparagus start preening themselves out a little more every day.  And now, in early May, all of the turons have sprouted, and next year, and the years after that, we’ll have an asparagus crop…

Also, Sandra came over a Saturday ago, and we refreshed the dirt in the greenhouse and tilled it and planted the tomato plants which i’d seeded back in March, and put in lots of basil (which the slugs have attacked, more whining and requests for solutions on this later) and hopefully we’ll have tomatoes soon, and a plethora of non-slimed basil.  And she helped me dig out the corn bed, and with Gabriel we put in wheelbarrows-full of regular dirt, a layer of horse and cow manure, more regular dirt, then a layer of potting soil, and then i mushed up the leftover roasted mackerel from lunch and put a little bit under each mound of corn seed.  This sounded like a good idea, and it’s being confirmed ever day, not by the corn, but by Pierre-Yves’s little dog Pirouette who noses around and eats rotting fish to his heart’s content.  But, again, there is a silver lining:  when he digs up the piles, it allows me to see that the corn is indeed sprouting, and maybe, if left unimpeded, will grow.

Otherwise we have raised beds this year thanks to Jacky, initially four and now five after some wheelbarrowing, and loads of dirt and manure – one has potatoes, ratte de touquet, one has fava beans, one has chioggia beets and atomic red carrots and bright lights swiss chard, and dill, and one has peas, and the tomato bed i’m not planting yet because it’s not the saints de glace yet, although i want to.  The new bed will be that fractal-like cauliflower, broccoli, and somewhere i need to make room for the squash and zucchini.  There are also two pictures in there of the planted sewer bed, because i finally weeded it and it looks the way it’s supposed to and the aquatic iris have just begun to flower even though they’re not flowering in the picture.

Rallye

I was sawing away at something upstairs today when Gabriel ran in and said, “mama, a race car!”.  So we went out into the courtyard, and a Porsche 911 drove by.  Truthfully, our road is tractor-wide and dusted with a covering of cow dung and rocks, and seeing a nice car go by is relativey infrequent.  Also, as Rich can attest, it’s a blind corner to turn down to Maffay, so we could watch the cars up on the road to Sens pass by the turnoff, back up, then take the left down to Maffay/La Chevrolais.  Our other favorite moment was when Pierre-Yves drove by in the opposite direction in his speedy red Italian charger, off to the northern corn field for a spin in the dirt; the shot of the day would have been to see the tractor attempt to share our tiny road with the yellow Ferrari, but they must have met up down by our neighbors to the south, in La Chevrolais.  The Ferrari was Gabriel’s favorite, i think there was a Simca as well, and a Volvo, and four Porsches, three of which passed by the turn and had to reverse.

Also Gaël and Romain started building their greenhouse today, it’s kind of like Versailles only with a see-through roof.  I got the rest of the shower wall up, Gabriel helped plaster it just as night began to fall; earlier, i’d finished the next to last layer on the bathroom floor, and cut and laid the osb spacers between the heating coils in my bedroom.  It was so nice to actually work on the shower instead of whining about it, that i felt a little guilty.  We went over to Jean-Luc’s for what may indeed be our very last shower dehors…

Cip hunts the charolaises

Happy birthday Gramma Sally!  and Happy (late) birthday to Willy…

The cows set themselves free from the barn last weekend and escaped into the pasture to taste the grass.  They like the living room window, and we like to see them through it – we call it our “cow tv,” and they like to walk up to the barbed wire and see themselves reflected in the glass.  Cip got in on the game, and hunted them from the safety of triple-glazed windows, scratching at the glass like a tiger in a cage, or waving at them, depending on one’s perspective.  It was so nice to have the cows back.  This year’s batch is friendly and curious, more so than the skittish group last year.  Maybe Gabriel will actually make more progress in teaching them to play soccer?  Then Pierre-Yves came and put them back in the barn, it’s still too early for them to be out.  But Cip, Gabriel and I were happy that they were back with us, even for a little while.

Almost spring

Our people in the West are under snow, so here are some pictures of spring from Maffay from the past few weeks.  Gabriel is expressing interest in plants, not so much in the actual digging of holes and planting, but in the selection and general love, and has taken to charming the nursery lady to get, for example, a free Griselina because he ADORES it; a picture of some of the plants he’s chosen for his birthday is included in the gallery.  The garden changes every day or hour and in these last few days before the equinox, the din of mating birds sounds like the constant hum of the périphérique in Paris.

Huge news of the last weeks:  we’ve joined the 21st century, or rather, have caught up with a slight lag behind the innovations of the 20th, by installing a brand-spanking lovely dishwasher in our kitchen, which will greatly enhance our ability to invite people over, once we no longer have a bed in the middle of our living room and the kitchen table in the hallway.  Also huge changes have happened upstairs, thanks to Simon and Olivier, and Malin and Simone for loaning their very skillful Men, but you’ll see pictures of that soon.  And, the other, wonderful news:  the mobile home is gone.  Pictures, really, i promise, will come soon.