We’re still here !

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. 

Rhys went to the UK for grandson Dylan’s first birthday; he is staggered how much he’s come on since we saw him in April but obviously children do change so quickly at his age. This picture is of big Charlie and little Dylan together for Dylan's birthday celebration.

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.