Snippets

We had a lovely visit to France last month - we'd gone for Alasdhair and Maria's wedding [which was lovely, and about which I will post another time], but stayed on for a week's holiday.

We [David, mostly] finished putting the subsoil back into the trench left by the wall that M. Milesi had built for us.  We started to transfer the compost heap there [in the four or five hours that we moved the upper layers, we didn't come across any broken down matter!], but stopped when we realised that if we bought the long-debated shredder it might help to speed up the whole process.

So we've put it on hold, and we have a chipper/shredder on order [it will cope with all the hedge trimmings, too] that, fingers crossed, will fit in the car easily...

If not, we checked that the hopper removes without too much bother [four bolts], so it will still be easier to transport than if we had needed to use the trailer.

I'm desperately hoping that the shredder will make light work of our current compost 'mountain' and will prevent future build-up...

When we've finished moving the compost, I'll post again about the trench [too many photos at the moment to cope with the thought of going through them; I'll sort them out in Picasa and then should be able to face it].

We continue remarking about the weather - the Canal de la Restitution is much lower than it was on our last visit, but still massively higher than we would expect at this time of year; it's been great for planting [although it went really hot for four days] - warm and wet, just what the plants love - but there has been more flooding.  We saw horses up to their 'armpits' [there's probably a technical term, and that's probably not it?] in water in their field, which worried me, but the level was dropping all the time, so when we saw them later only up to their 'elbows' [vide supra re: technical term], I was a lot less concerned for them.

Philippe who owns the place next door [he's not really our neighbour, as he lives about five miles away] said the daughter of a former mayor of the village had her house (on the way to Chatillon) destroyed by hail stones about the size of an orange, and there was a tornado that hit less than 20 miles away.  We're more glad than ever that our valley seems particularly lucky when it comes to the worst of the weather!

We did have some weather-related damage - the bells stopped; odd that the absence of sound impacts us more now than the bells themselves ever do.  We also had "thunder storm stops play" when we were planting - it hadn't stopped raining, and we were desperate to get the remaining plants in the ground before the heavens opened - but it felt that the lightning was getting too close, and I don't want to be hit for a third time!

[OK, it wasn't dramatic either of the other times, but I have learned (the hard way) not to use a telephone during a thunderstorm - huge blue flash, Gibbs-slap to the side of the head, temporary deafness; not bad for a strike, but better avoided in my experience.]

Before the rain set in as though we were in England, we had a couple of days of low 30s, and a low of 18.5°c [weather when the shutters don't open for fear of letting in more heat; the only downside of really efficient insulation], and it only dropped out of the 20s because of the first thunderstorm!

All the plants are settled in, the ground is still very damp, we watered them in well so we are hoping that they will all survive.

It's so odd seeing France much greener than England; our hay was shoulder height on David, with no sign of a break in the weather for Jean-Luc to cut it - we only saw one field of cut hay the whole time we were there, so we haven't missed out on his attentions.  The (few) walnuts are between a petit-pois and a marrowfat pea in size, whereas I would expect them to be (nearly) full-sized by now - one recipes calls for green walnuts and suggests 25 June as a harvest date - not a chance!  The elder flowers were out at about the same time as I previously when I made some liqueur; I'm not sure I hadn't left it a little too late, but I was waiting for a day when they were dry [should have picked them when we first got there, but we were prioritising the plants at that point] - we shall see.

I'm trying to espalier train the plum seedlings David had moved to near Philippe's "hangar" - not sure that's what I should be doing, but I can't let them get huge, so I've got to try to 'tame' them before that happens.  Philippe thinks I'm mad, but in France we just don't see smaller trees over there like we do here in Kent.  It may be a crazy idea or it may just be a function of France being huge compared to England when population/square area is calculated - I will get around to looking up online whether I should be doing it, and if so how, but we're always so pushed for time when we are in France that I often find out later what I should have done.

Oh well, as long as I don't kill the trees, we're good!

We had a bike ride-through go through the village as we were scrambling to get last minute work done on the Saturday.  My French Googling abilities are unequal to the task of finding out what was going on, but there were a lot of motorcycles heading past the church.  I kept thinking "oh, it will nearly be finished, there's no point going to look" for a good five (if not ten) minutes, but eventually I went to peer through the elder bushes.  I counted 95 bikes go past, so there must have been hundreds.  I do wonder what they were up to.

The trip was only slightly marred by missing our Shuttle, and the following one that we were booked on being subject to hour-long delays - could have been worse, and they did bring round water as we were waiting, but I'm not sure why they gathered our details.  David said we might get a refund of some sort [I voted for unlikely; we've waited for over four hours without even an apology, so an hour doesn't seem to merit anything] - which we didn't.  I guess that Eurostar has different standards they apply.