Cross-Channel dash

We did a flying visit to the house in early October - it was nearly ten years since we bought the place, and we're still driving to garden.  The only real difference is that now we're doing it with two gardens, in two countries, not just going abroad to do so!

It had clearly been very wet (again) in our absence, but the neighbours told us that the vendange had been wonderful; a late warm, dry, spell had really ripened and sweetened the grapes, and the weather for the harvest was lovely until the last day.  We believe them, but the plant growth and sogginess of the ground says that an awful lot more rain had fallen since our last trip.

I'm not sure if that's why so many spiders were in the house; several people have said the wet is driving the spiders indoors, but we tend to have "indoor" spiders anyway.  I do know that we had an extraordinary number of corpses in the sink...  With one live spider sitting there; I'm guessing it wasn't a freak occurrence that killed them all, but cannibalism?  Either way, the remaining inhabitant was evicted pretty promptly!

We had mixed weather while we were there, but enough nice warm sunshine that we managed to weed the worst of the potager, and I tried to cram in a season's-worth of deadheading into an afternoon...

Needless to say, I failed, but I made a pretty good stab at it.

We noticed that the neighbours had cut down their hollyhocks, but our one by the door was still flowering beautifully; it went against the grain to cut it down while it looked so good, so I left that as a job for the next visit or even next year.

Hollyhock by the front door

The bindweed spot-spraying with the new product seems to be working, and I curled up all the patches I found whilst weeding into neat little balls so that when growth starts next season we can target just those clumps.

The warmth and moisture meant the garden looked lovely; autumn colour was fabulous, but some unseasonal flowering added to the interest.  One iris was flowering in the new "iris garden" we'd planted outside the kitchen window; I don't remember that happening before.

Iris germanica "Lady Snowflake"

And Jean-Luc had managed another cut of hay - that doesn't happen without a lot of additional rain; we're happy that the pré looks tidy, as there's almost no chance we will manage to tidy around the edges again this year.  We also ran out of time for walnut-drying; David collected a huge number of nuts, and that was a fraction of the fall from just one of the trees, but they need a couple of days outside in the warmth to dry out.  The boxes we brought back to the UK with us were starting to sprout, so I don't think we will have a good result to go back to where they're concerned...

Some of the walnuts; trying to dry them very quickly

We did a trip to Troyes to look at shower trays/enclosures and vanity units, and I think we could find something suitable pretty easily - there was a good choice, and the prices seemed very reasonable.  I don't know where you'd find an equivalent in England - I'm sure places must exist, we just haven't found them.  If we were looking for a trendy acrylic basin, no problem, but ceramic seems harder to find.

It's been a good while since we seemed to spend half our time schlepping around huge Brico-Dépôt-type places, but we don't miss it at all.
David "cleared" the gutters with our new ladder; it's taken us nearly ten years to get around to buying one [our part of France doesn't seem to have the 'buy one from the internet + free/cheap delivery' options that we've become spoiled by at home], so we were both very pleasantly surprised that there were a couple of bits of broken tile and no other blockages.  I guess we're just lucky that there are no sycamore trees nearby, and that conkers don't blow very far in the wind!

The bark I'd put down in the cour anglaise has worked its magic: there were very few weeds, and the ground looked tidy and I could tread there without the half-inch layer of mud on my shoes that makes it so much fun sometimes.

Finally, some sad news: Bernadette is undergoing radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and is very unwell.  We're desperately hoping for good results for her and Jean-Loup and their family.