Well we’ve just had the third anniversary of our move here which
apparently is a critical one. A number of people told us when we first moved
out here that those who are not going to make it give up and return to the UK
within or around 3 years. We love it out here and can’t imagine living anywhere
else, the lifestyle is wonderful and we love our house and we have loads of
lovely friends in the area and good neighbours.
Obviously we still miss family but we try to see them as often as we
can.
Jeanne stayed home to water the plants and look after the cat and the chickens. It’s easy enough to get a neighbour to look after the chickens but it is too much of an imposition to get people watering the garden for us, this makes winter an easier option for a holiday as we could put Dusty in a cattery - or maybe a house-sitter is the best solution when we want to go away together anytime. We’re open to offers!
Dusty the cat
Dusty continues to thrive and has probably become a little
less adventurous. She no longer tries to go out late at night and happily
settles in between 8 and 10 pm. Nor does she seem to wander off and get lost as she did. A few weeks ago she came
back smelling to high heaven, she appeared to have rolled in some farmer’s fish
fertiliser and we had to shower her to get it off!
Chickens
Our new pullets have been laying well and we are mostly getting
5 eggs a day from them plus the occasional ones from the bantams. It’s actually
quite difficult to use up 3 dozen eggs a week so we have been giving some away
to various friends, then we hit a spell where production went down and some
days we only got 1 egg! However we are now back up to at least 5 a day. We gave them all coloured leg-bands so we
could tell them apart and now I think we should name them after their bands,
hence Blanche for white, Vera for green (vert), Jeanne for yellow (jaune),
Violet for purple and Cyan for the pale blue. However on the days when they
don’t all lay we haven’t got a clue which one has missed out. The eggs are delicious
though, so visitors are in for a treat.
One of the chickens (Blanche) developed a problem with her
foot, it became swollen and we understand it’s called Bumblefoot. We watched a
YouTube video and read up on how to treat it and it looked horrendous involving
scalpels etc. You can’t really take chooks to the vet here as they’d think you
were off your head as the vet costs 40 euros each time and a new chicken is
only 9 euros, the usual solution to these mishaps here is to dispatch the
chicken; our next door neighbour offered to do it for us. However I did go to
the vet’s to enquire and they recommended an antibiotic that I put in their
drinking water for 5 days. We also bathed her foot every day with antiseptic
solution and applying Savlon. After a few days the swelling underneath reduced
but it became swollen on top like a boil, so we lanced it. When it looked like it needed doing again a
few days later we lanced it again but then we could feel a mobile lump of
something so we cut her skin with sterilised nail scissors, removed the lump
and dressed the wound with surgical tape. Blanche has now stopped limping and
the swelling as gone, I think we can add ‘chicken surgery’ to our CVs now! She’s still laying despite the trauma.
Sadly one of our elderly bantams (Beryl the Belgian) appears
to have gone blind in one eye. Other than that she seems OK and is eating and
drinking, at least one of the other bantams stays with her to look after her
during the day and she usually roosts close to Lily resting under Lily’s wing
at night. It’s quite touching really as
all our books say if a chicken starts failing the others will pick on her but
this has not been the case so far.
Renovations
We have been pressing on with our gradually decreasing list
of jobs; we had someone round to quote for doing our drive which is our last
major piece of work that we need outside help for but we’re unlikely to get it
done now before this Autumn as everything shuts down in France in August.
We bought some modern English storage heaters to replace
the ancient electric heaters that came with the house. We know so many people here with full gas (in a tank not mains gas) or oil central heating who find it
incredibly expensive so impossible to run that we decided (after advice and
demo from Doug Ibbs of the Grand Designs Creuse House fame) that supplementing our wood burning
stoves with a few strategic storage heaters on cheap night-rate electricity will give us sufficient warmth for
the few weeks it’s really cold in winter and be a better long term solution than gas or oil. Rhys is busy installing them at the
moment and they look good, nothing like storage heaters used to be like.
Produce
Our orchard is starting to settle in but is not very
productive yet though we got 3 apricots which were delicious but not enough to do
anything else with. We should get some apples and pears later in the year as there are
a fair few small ones on the trees at the moment. We are likely to get a bumper
crop of grapes this year as the vines are looking very heavy with fruit. We’ve
had loads of plums – over 10 kg – off the first plum tree and more to come off
the second and I’ve made some new jam. I’ve also made apricot (with bought apricots),
redcurrant and blackcurrant (home grown) jams even if I say so myself they do
taste much nicer than shop bought ones, delicious with a warm croissant for
breakfast. The gooseberries, which are red here, not green, only gave us enough
for one dessert but again were delicious, the same with the raspberries and
strawberries - not enough to make anything sizeable yet but good to eat in small
quantities. We’re currently eating tomatoes, peas, beans (broad and
haricot) and courgettes from the veggie plot and have got potatoes, onions,
beetroot, sweetcorn and carrots well on the way but I don’t think we’re ever
going to make the fully ‘self-sufficient’ grade. I suppose if we ever got
desperate we could live on egg and chips or Spanish omelettes for a few weeks!
We’ve had some very hot weather - into the upper thirties C - but also a lot of rain, so we end up with a proliferation of weeds and we spend hours weeding, so now we know why so many of the local farms and vineyards dose everything with
‘Roundup’. We’ve had to follow suit on non-cultivated areas like the drive as
we just can’t hand weed everything but we do stick to hand weeding around the
fruit and vegetables as we’re trying to be as organic as possible.
