Funny ole winter.

Flowering comfrey 311215

   Happy New Year!

   Generally up to now it has been a mild winter with only a few days when it has been really cold. Yes, there have been a good number of frosts and the early morning temperatures have been below zero on occasion but the sun has shone and the weather has varied between mild to warm. The photograph was taken on the 31st December 2015. I have never seen comfrey in flower in December let alone at the end of the month. When will winter really strike I wonder? Now (08/01/16) it is raining and it is a persistent shower with the occasional heavy burst of rain and there is standing water about the place.

   In the poly tunnel I have sown peas and two types of early onions. The onions are a salad type and can be sown at this time of year. I guess I am taking a chance but hey if you do not you never know if you can succeed. In the outside garden the garlic is thriving and the winter cabbage and the leeks are doing fine as well. The ground as I write this is once more at the saturated stage and there are puddles of water on some of the beds. 
   Experience has show that early January is too soon to sow seeds like tomatoes and onions. You watch this year I will regret not having sown them. So what is to be done? Not a lot when the ground is so wet and it is impossible to do anything outside of the poly tunnel. Having said that I have a pear tree that I want to move before the workmen move in to prepare for the new fosse septique. Cannot do that though if it is raining! There are still tree onions in an outside bed and they are now looking dormant. They will need to be dug up and separated before replanting in February. The tunnel is as prepared as I can make it. Compost has been spread on the beds and I water them now and then to keep them moist and encourage the worms to do their work. I await the showing of the peas and spring onions!
   Looking forward a little to the end of January beginning of February when it will be the time to look out for onion sets, shallots and seed potato and the season will be really getting underway.

The New Year begins

   Happy New Year! Christmas has gone and 2016 has started and this is the first posting of 2016. 2015 ended with a freezer disaster with me loosing two turkeys and three chickens. Fortunately none of them were required for Christmas. My seed holding has been sorted and I have a good idea of what my sowing and planting for 2016 will be. It will be a year of unusual tomatoes with a bit of luck! I have been given some seed that will produce blue tomatoes. That seems to be as bad as violet potatoes! 

Morning moon 271215

   I often wonder if the phases of the moon affect sowing and planting. The picture opposite was taken on the morning of the 27th December 2015. There is a whole raft of stuff about the subject and here in France there would seem to be quite a following.
   In the garden once more not a lot done. I have cleared off the bean poles, late I know and I am wondering whether to leave them up or not. Most of the leaves have now been raked up and put into a leaf compost heap. Due to the mild weather I have managed to pull a couple of turnip/swedes and I cannot say that I prefer them to swede. Never been a keen fan of turnip. I guess the turnip/swede would be quite good in soup and stews but mashed, no. I still have a few carrots in the ground and really must use them up. Also I have winter cabbage the size of footballs. I have to admit to planting F1 hybrids here bought from the local market as my own plants failed. The winter leeks are now of an edible size and the few purple sprouting plants are now recovering from the late attack by white butterfly caterpillars.
  The better part of two years old leaf compost has now been spread over the poly tunnel beds. An area has been prepared for a sowing of white spring onions except these have a bulb and are not like White Lisbon and yes they can be sown now.
  On the animal front I can report that our eleven hens produced 2554 eggs in 2015 (Jan-Dec) with sixty either soft shell or laid outside the coop. That is approximately seven eggs a day! What have we done with 2500 eggs??? The geese were processed and one eaten for Christmas dinner. It was quite nice but I am not convinced they are worth the effort. The decision has been made not to raise geese or turkeys next year.
  I am keen to get cracking with early sowing but I need to resist sowing tomato seed too early. Last couple of years I have sown it around the middle of January and ended up with plants ready to put out before the last frost has happened. I will sow some lettuce soon. That has worked well.
  Still lots to do. Need to take herb cuttings and sort out my three herb beds which are now two or three years old and some plants are getting a little long in the tooth. So upwards and onwards!
   

The goose is getting fat...

Home made mince pies

      Another week or so of not much activity in the garden. I have raked up a lot of oak leaves and dug out the celery but that is about it! In the poly tunnel I have pulled the remaining beetroot, cooked them and pickled them. So for after Christmas day to accompany the cold cuts we will have home grown and home made pickled beetroot, pickled onions, sweet chutney and pickled eggs!
   There are lots of tidying up jobs to do but the days are short and by the time I get to get outside the day seems to be all but gone. I know, excuses excuses, however, it is time to turn to planning next years planting and sowing. I will be looking for something different to try to grow and there will be the usual - potatoes, onions, shallots, leeks, beetroot, haricot vert, runner beans, squash, pumpkins, courgettes, cucumbers and umpteen varieties of tomatoes to mention a few.
   In our animal world all is well. Geese are looking good, ducks look happy and contented The rams are still showing too much interest in the ewes but the ewes are now tending to stay away, thank goodness. The chickens are now looking like they have finished their molt and the average lay is six eggs a day.
   It is unlikely that I will write a blog entry next week so a Happy Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers where ever you are in the world.

Little done, little to say...

Sunrise over Champeau 061215

      The weather has been reasonable this past week. Mild, cloudy and the odd bit of sunshine. Ideal you would have thought to be getting on with tidying up the garden. Oh no fate had other things in store for me this week. So little gardening done, in fact really virtually no gardening done. 
     The sewerage from my house is dealt with by what the french call a fosse septique (septic tank) and the "grey" water, that is water from the sinks, washing machine, showers and bath is fed into a reed bed. Unusual. Normally it is fed into a sand filter bed. Well, luck would have it that the pipe leading from the water trap to the reed bed got clogged up and grey water became backed up. So I have spent all my spare time with a hose pipe stuck down the pipe clearing the blockage. Thank goodness the weather was mild. I would not have liked to have done this if it was really cold. Fortunately I eventually managed to clear it. 
  So what gardening job did get done? I cleared the reed bed of leaves and nettles.
   In the animal world all is fine. The hens are laying well again and even had a couple of days when eight eggs (out of 11 hens) were laid. The geese are getting fat, the ducks are being ducks. Soon be time to dispatch the geese.
   Hopefully over the next week I will get out and about doing gardening stuff. You watch the weather will change and it will be cold, wet and miserable and I will once again get nothing done! Watch this space!

Wet and cold

   Winter finally arrived with a bump. There has been a few of days of cold, frosty and wet weather and that has finished off anything left in the garden and poly tunnel that were not winter crops. So, no more sweet peppers and chili's. It also means that my tidying up came to an abrupt halt as I hunkered down in a nice warm dry house!
   So not a lot done. Cut a couple of outside cauliflowers before they were spoiled by the rain and colder weather. In the poly tunnel the sweet peppers and chili's have now been cleared out. Outside I made one of the vegetable plots a little bigger. This is to compensate for the loss of ground under the oak tree. The cabbages continue to develop well. They are starting to hearten up. The outside turnip/swede are slowly swelling but those in the poly tunnel look wonderful with nice large green leaves but the root is not yet swelling. One good thing that the arrival of the cold weather has done. The cabbage white caterpillars have all been killed off!
  In the animal arena the chickens are now back to laying reasonably well. There has been one day when seven eggs were laid but on average the daily count is four. The sheep, particularly the rams, have been a pain. They are determined to get amongst the ewes and one of the blighters jumped the fence. I had a fun forty five minutes rounding up the ewes with the errant ram and sorting them out! The geese are enjoying playing with a couple of dog play balls that I put in their water. I spotted one in the pond with the ball in its beak! 
   The days are short and getting shorter every passing day. Sunset is now around ten past five and sun rise around seven thirty. Christmas is just around the corner!
   

Ok where did the time go?

   Well I do not know! Time has flown once more and before I knew it I should have already written my blog by now. Now being fully fit I have been taking advantage of the warm and dry weather to get jobs done that should have been done in the September/October time frame. There is now only about one third of one bed left to fork/weed so I am feeling pretty pleased with myself. I have even managed to rake up the leaves under the old apple trees and cherry tree while they were still dry. Problem is the weather is about to break and as I write this outside it is windy with a drizzle in the air being driven by the wind. Day inside methinks!
   I have been harvesting cauliflowers in the outside garden. They are bigger and better than those in the poly tunnel would you believe. I mean they are as big as ones you would buy in the local supermarket. I am very pleased with them. The winter cabbages are starting to hearten up and there are going to be some giant ones! With the warm weather this autumn 

Outside cauliflowers

there has been an infestation of white butterfly caterpillars. I would not have believed it but there they were munching my purple sprouting. They seemed to have a preference for the purple sprouting. I wonder if it is because the sprouting is a non F1 seed variety whereas the winter cabbages next to them are?
  As the photograph below shows the weed pile is growing. I decided to burn the weeds this autumn rather than compost them as my weed compost heap is getting rather large.
  In the poly tunnel nothing much has changed. The turnip/swede are looking ok as are cauliflowers. The sweet peppers I

Leeks, purple sprouting, winter cabbage

 should really now take up as should the chili peppers. There is a useful crop of beetroot that I need to harvest. Looking to pickle these.
   With the change in the weather it is unlikely that I will get outside very much so the emphasis now changes to dealing with the gathered non hybrid seed. I have already podded the Champion of England peas and have other plants to do. Also I need to exam my seed collection and see if I need to get anymore seed. So still plenty to do!

Growing weed pile

Life gets in the way.

   Well despite my good intentions life gets in the way. Too many jobs to do and not enough time to do them.
   In the poly tunnel the sweet peppers are now dropping leaves which means it has got too cold for them. There is still one or two to pick but the end is nigh. The cauliflower is now bigger than a tennis ball and looking good. In the outside garden I have continued to clear tomato plants and put the poles away in the, for want of a better description, potting shed. All of the tomatoes are now cleared as are the haricot vert. Several beds are now weeded and forked over. Come spring, no doubt, the weeds will have reappeared. I have shortened two of the beds that had a small area under the shade of the oak tree. After a couple of years of trying to grow stuff in these areas I have called it a day. Too much shade and the oak tree is taking too much out of the ground, water and nutrients. The garlic continues to grow.  I have been picking up some windfall apples but have failed miserably to pick any reasonable number from my own older trees. Shame really but the Jerusalem artichokes are benefiting from rotting apples and the chickens have been getting easy access to them too. 
   In the animal world the last the meat chickens have been processed. They were all hens and came in at a good weight - 3.75kg, 3.5kg and 3.5kig. It looks like leaving them a couple more weeks after dispatching the cockerels has allowed them to put on a decent weight.
  To add to my burden the trees have been dropping their leaves and there is now a carpet of them on the lawn. One more job to add to the list.
  To my mind, unusually, there is a borage plant in flower in November. Do not believe I have seen that before!
   The 100 weight pumpkins I grew were cheerfully carved in Halloween lanterns and made a good display on the front of my daughters house.

Borage in flower

Cauliflower in the poly tunnel 

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