Awesome Autumn

Although autumn has been with us for several weeks, some of its symptoms are only just here. Trees have mostly only just shed their leaves, following beautiful colours, the weather is mostly still warm – in the twenties C for the last couple of weeks with night time temperatures still consistently above 10˚C and a forecast for them to continue to at least the middle of November, with just the occasional showery day.

 

Unfortunately, I have been suffering from excruciating sciatica for about 4 weeks, following a very minor fall in the garden whilst cutting down some of our huge old Cupressus Leylandii hedge plants. We wanted to open up the view from the back garden to see more of our own land from the house, and a patch of next door’s at the back, where we get a nice pastoral view of their sheep and chickens grazing, and a few wild rabbits emerging from the brambles occasionally. The Leylandii also shaded the garden a lot and takes a lot of nutrient form the soil, which is not brilliant anyway. So we’ll replace it at the back and left side with a better fence that we can still see through, but will stop the chickens and sheep from coming into our garden. Anyway I’ve been going to a physiotherapist three times a week and having lots of tablets and it’s slowly getting less severe. Hugely frustrating though, not being able to do much during the lovely weather we’ve been having.

Elsewhere in the garden and fields, the trees and two new hedges we planted are doing well, in that almost all of them have survived. The big water tanks feeding irrigation systems have helped a lot, but some of them are showing signs of chlorosis – yellowing of the leaves due to all the alkaline stone in the ground. 

Speaking of stone, Jeanne is becoming a dab hand at pointing, which she’s been doing to the remaining wall of the old grange, soon (?) to become a garden, while I’ve been out of action. Just need a bit more to strengthen the bottom (you point old stone walls with lime fom the top down) and then the tiles on the top levelling and setting in properly.

 

The wall I’ve been building next to the new gates (which you can just see on the right of this picture) came to a stop, of course, so I’m getting very frustrated losing all the great weather when it  should have been moving on.  We'll be making nice beds for the corner on the right to match the left, but the cost of the Italian Cypresses has rocketed since we put the ones in on the left of the drive.

 The hens are continuing to thrive, presenting us with lovely eggs every day, and Dusty doesn’t like the darker evenings, but is coming in on her own once it gets dark. We had a fair crop of grapes, some of which is now juice and the rest is fermenting into wine, and another huge crop of walnuts, so the squirrels will be happy with those we don’t collect.  Around us the wine vendange – for cognac – was completed and the farmers went back to harvesting arable crops so we’ve had massive combine harvester in the lanes and tractors pulling trailers full of sunflower seeds and corn (maize) to the co-operatives. That’s more or less finished and they’re all busy ploughing, harrowing and sowing seed on their fields at present.

We just had a small success with our insurances – we changed the car and house ones to the people who do our health insurance, and have saved over 500 euros for our trouble – good news at this time of the year when everyone’s broke with all the taxes coming out.  Another was that my old car got through its Controle Technique – equivalent of the MOT test – a couple of weeks ago, so good for another two years, hopefully.

We’re ready to light the fire each night but haven’t had to much yet, and Pierre the stone mason says he expects have the fireplace and chimney in the dining room renovated by mid to late November, so we’re banking on there being some more good weather then – needs to be warm and dry for a couple of days while it’s out of action.

All the events for locals in autumn and winter are starting up now, so we’re booked in for a musical night out next weekend, a seminar in a couple of weeks, another musical evening in December and a weekend in Paris before Christmas, so far.  It’s all go here all the time!

Best wishes everyone.