permaculture in brittany

Surveying our Forest Garden

2012-01-22T20:49:00.000+01:00

This week, I ’ave been mainly planting trees! On our Christmas visit to visit familyin England, we collected this year’s order from Martin Crawford at theAgroforestry Research Trust. We’ve also sourced trees at local pépinières (nurseries) but they don’t dosuch arcane arbres as the blue bean (Decaisnea fargesii) hence sourcing treesfrom afar as well as locally.

It’s a real pleasure to convert long hours of reading,decision making and plan drawing into digging holes: from coloured circles onthe forest garden map into tangible trees. We are starting to imagine what it might look like in five,and then ten, year’s hence; it’s exciting.

When we returned from our seasonal travels, we quicklyplanted the bare-rooted trees into some soft earth in the potager. We could’ve planted them all in the forest garden in just acouple of hours excepting that we need to construct robust tree guards toprotect them from our Ouessant sheep, who’ll share the field for a few yearsyet.

The sheep look fluffy, act nervous but don’t let thatdeceive you: they’re cunning bastards. They’ve overcome several of my previous efforts to keep them out andeven learnt to walk on two legs in order to nibble at overhanging branches. Never mind the ring barking of trees byrabbits and squirrels, these ~~cuddly creatures~~ bastards would reduce ournascent forest garden to dead sticks under an hour, if it wasn’t for thepallet palisades.

Not quite in an authentic permaculture design order, as allthe surveying should have been done before the design ‘proposal’, but weprofited from the loan of a laser level and the annual Halloween visit of ourtechnically-super-competent engineering friend, Kristen to create a contour map.

The laser level was very easy to use:up-a-bit, down-a-bit, beep, beeb, beep, take the reading. While we cooked supper, Kristen dabbledaround on the computer and produced this useful contour map (see top image). What was interesting to bothKristen and I was that we were both massively deceived by the amount of fallover the length of the field. That’sto say that, by eye, we thought the difference no greater than our own heightbut ended up extending the measuring rod to its limit, well over doublethat.

This information will helpus in digging fish-scale swales (according to Toby Hemenway) tokeep our trees watered in the dry summers evermore typical in Brittany.

Making compost in 18 days with Geoff Lawton

2011-12-31T18:02:00.004+01:00

Building up layers of different materials

cold composting bins

We cold compost, which is to say that we add material to ourcompost piles as it arrives from kitchen or vegetable plot and it mouldersaway, decomposing slowly. Wealternately use four adjacent boxes and when the compost is about ready, weempty that box and riddle it to remove uncomposted material, which goes backinto a fresher pile. It takesmonths to make compost this way but is relatively low maintenance.

if you just add water at the end, it won't soak through evenly

The alternative is hot composting, which involves creating a large pile all at once (which heats up) and then turning it regularly tomaintain the heat. We've triedit before but were inspired to have another go after watching the very specificadvice from permaculture hero Geoff Lawton, on his new video, Permaculture Soils

His informing belief is that “it’s not the soil itself, it’sthe soil life that is the most important element.” He teaches us to inoculate the soil with bacteria by using avery diverse mixture of compostable materials such as different manures (thenitrogen component) dried grass toppings, green grass clippings (providing the‘yeasts’) along with shredded and partially rotted wood (food for fungi).

six days in

He talks about adding activators, such as urine, comfrey,nettles, yarrow, fish or animal remains to kick start the decompositionprocess. He also mentions addingcharcoal for its surface area (I’ll blog about what I’ve recently learnt ofbiochar soon). The whole lot should be wetted (see below). One needs enough material to create aminimum of one cubic metre in total, otherwise it won’t get up to the necessarytemperature.

Cat enjoying the warmth generated by the compost process

We gathered pig manure, chicken droppings, rabbit pelletsand sheep poo. We added wheatstraw and fresh grass clippings, chipped wood and comfrey leaves and litres ofwee collected from our urine-separating compost toilet.

He talks of having 25 parts nitrogen to 1 part carbon but,as I wrote in my recent article for PermacultureMagazine on our compost toilet: “The ideal carbon/nitrogen ratio of30 : 1 is often quoted but rarely explained. It certainly doesn’t mean 30 times as much straw as solids;in fact, both faeces and urine contain carbon and nitrogen in their chemicalmakeup… Don’t bother getting thescales and tape measure out as you search for the correct amount.” It’s a learning process and you’ll findthat too much nitrogen means that the pile gets too hot and reduces in volume,losing goodness to oxidation. Toolittle and your pile won’t get warm enough to kill weed seeds and break downthe woody material.

8 days and the colour is beginning to change

There are two criteria to measure, that’s the moisturecontent and the temperature. Forthe first, grab a handful and squeeze: it should just drip. For the temperature, he tells us toshove our hand in. TAKE CARE, asit can get really hot. Be sensibleand open up the pile a bit and get a feel before you actually touch it. At 60ºC, you wouldn’t be able to leaveyour hand there. We actually useda meat thermometer and pushed the whole thing in, probe, dial and all, leavingit for a few minutes before retrieving it and looking at the temperature. We tried it in several positions in thepile. Aim for a min of 50ºC max70ºC, ideally between 55 and 65. (Above70ºC is beyond the limit of life for our decomposing bacteria and the processbecomes anaerobic.)

10 days

Construct your pile, cover it up with old tarps or plasticsheeting (leaving an air gap at the bottom) and leave for four days. Then unwrap and turn the pile. We used a pitchfork and rebuilt thepile alongside itself, trying to put the stuff that was on the outside on theinside and vice-versa (if you see what I mean!) Wrap the rebuilt pile up again and, from then on, the pilegets turned every two days for the next fortnight, reaching its maximumtemperature on the second or third turn, i.e., 6 or 8 days into the process,when it should attain the ideal of around 60ºC. Geoff’s claim is that, if you get it right, it gets hotenough and decomposes without losing volume.

16 days and the heat has reduced but we're seeing fungal growth

The photo sequence shows our experiences with our first twobatches. We now think that themoisture content is vital and ended up adding a lot at the start to pass thesqueeze test and a bit during the turning process. We think we had proportionally too little nitrogen on thefirst batch, maintaining volume but not being fully composted at the end andnever quite getting up to the desired temperature. We overdid the nitrogen in the second version, getting gooddecomposition but losing a lot of volume.

This last photo shows our second attempt, at the end of the process. It's much darker, has decomposed more than the first but we've lost volume.

We can generate or get access to the necessary amount ofmaterial to build a cubic metre pile and it’s very useful to create such aquantity of compost in just 18 days or so, so we will keep trying.

Helping out and being helped

2011-12-10T14:09:00.001+01:00

our new woodland walk

I’ve spent a day helping out our local vet. While he rushed around in his Citroën camionette dealing with poorly cows, Itamed an unruly hedge in his garden using my chainsaw, assisted by asprightly octogenarian called Monsieur Galet. I never got to know his first name, an etiquette of respectfor his age, but neither did he get to know mine: nothing to do with etiquettebut rather because he couldn’t get to grips with its un-Frenchness. Despite repeating it several times, henever did grasp it, so, for a day, I became “eh-ho”.

we left this fallen tree in situ, there's a way past by the roots

It’s not as if we don’t have enough to do around thesmallholding and, now we’re in winter, in our woodlands but this dayswork for Hammadi was willingly given and is another example of the many localexchanges we have going on here. It’s also the time we host volunteers and we’ve just had two weeks ofgold-star-top-drawer volunteers Sue and Andrew. Suckers for punishment, they came for aweek in February and asked to come again for a fortnight.

Andrew built us our lovely bridge that links an existingpath from the entrance, through a parcel of wild cherry, oak and goat willow,into another parcel of predominately ash, which is carpeted in bluebells inspring. For some time, we havewanted to continue and create a complete nature walk that takes people throughall the different parts of the woodland, leading them safely back to theentrance.

Two paths diverged in a yellow wood ...

One Wednesday, child-minding 10 year old Camille, we wentfor a tramp round the woods armed with long canes with coloured rag tied to theend. By shouting and waving theflags, we were able to plot a path, leaving a trail of garden canes to markit.

During their visit, we spent four days in the woods withAndrew and Sue, hacking brambles, pulling roots, removing overhanging branchesand some trees, finally rubbing our heavy-duty tripod lawnmower over thepath. It looks great; we couldn’tbe more pleased with it. I reckonthat the hard work being done, it won’t take too much maintenance during theyear to keep it like that.

The next job, and one to be done at the kitchen table, is todraw up a map so that holidaymakers in our gite can independently find the woodand navigate around the new path. If they walk quietly and keep their eyes and ears open, they might seesome of the wildlife along the way, such as roe deer, this fire salamander ormaybe even a wild boar (we’ve got plenty of signs of visits but actuallyencountered one face-to-snout yet).

fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra)

Fattening pigs on acorns

2011-11-25T08:22:00.001+01:00

Two weeks of Andrew and Sue volunteering comes to an end andanother article in the post, it’s time to catch up with some blogging:

Our pig farming neighbours, Paul and Christiane, haveretired this year. Ever sincewe’ve kept pigs ourselves, we’ve done an exchange with them, whereby I managethe English-speaking guests in their gîte and they give us all the cereals thatwe need. It’s an elegantsolution. What I give is just asmall thing for me (a few minutes on the computer replying to emails, preparingcontracts and cycling down to translate on their arrival) but enormouslyimportant for them (most of their rental income comes via me). En revanche, considering thescales involved, a few bags of ground mixed cereals is nothing for them but ofconsiderable value to us (compared to the price we’d pay at the localagricultural merchants for similar).

We overfed our first pigs, and to lesser degrees the secondand even third year before we got it right. The key point was a little bit of advice in Starting With Pigs by Andy Case, “feedpigs by eye”. It’s good advice butrequires a level of expertise that only years of experience, and a few fatpigs, can give. In the second year,we started weighing out their food, following a regime from the breeder. The ‘problem’ is that, as they liveoutdoors, they have access to a whole lot of natural nutrition and we can’tmeasure how much of it they eat; so one has to learn to feed by eye. We now give our pigs about a third ofthe cereal ration of their barn-raised cousins … but we do still give them somecereals.

There has been lots of building work going on as the newowner brings the buildings into conformity with the latest welfarestandards. When I went round tocollect the last few bags of feed, that would see our pigs through to the daythey left for the abattoir, the machine couldn't be made to work and I leftempty handed. What could we do?

I was missing the oakey obvious: When we give holiday guests the introductory tour ofour permaculture smallholding, we come to the pigs, where I point out what alovely area they have to free range in. I explain that the pigs eat a surprising amount of grass, root around(for roots!) and benefit from excess of cherries, plums and apples as they comeinto season, and finally acorns from the four mature oak trees that surroundthe paddock. I even tell them thatin Spain, there are pigs that are fed exclusively on acorns to make the very best quality jamónibérico.

It’s been a very good mast yearand there is an abundance of acorns. We bought a clever rolling basket device (called a nut wizard) from MartinCrawford at The Agroforestry Research Trustand started to hoover up the acorns. We’ve also been making lots of apple juice. So we finished our three pigs on a dietof acorns and apple pulp and they seemed very happy and suitably heavy.

There are so many acorns, we’ve carried on collecting andwill try to store them to feed to next year’s pigs before the acorns start tofall again.

Eco-construction, economics, climate change and peak oil ...

2011-11-05T12:44:00.001+01:00

“The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.”

Jacques Chirac.

I was looking for a suitable quote to kick-start this blogon some eco-construction stuff. Ididn’t find anything I liked for the context I wanted but, with Europe infinancial chaos, I thought this ironic, coming as it does from a ex-presidentof France (’95 to ’07) currently on trial for corruption during his time as mayor of Paris. The trail is taking place in his absence as the poor dear issuffering memory lapses and is too unwell to attend.

the mix ascends by tractor and bucket

I avoid political ranting on this blog, which is meant tobe an easy-going chronicle of our stumbling progress on our Breton permaculturesmallholding, promoting our holiday cottage for rent but it’s hard toignore what’s going on in Europe and the rest of the world at the moment.

Didier setting out some levels

We’ve got a nascent ‘Transition Town’ group not far from us and I’ve offered to get involved, so I’vejust re-read Part One of The TransitionHandbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins. It’s reminded me that, incomparison to the twin, linked threats of peak oil and climate change, ourcurrent economic woes pale into insignificance. However, our politicians once again fail to rise to thechallenge and can only exhort us to throw away stuff that still works (such as your car) and buy morestuff, stuff we don’t really need and which consumes valuable energy andresources to manufacture and transport.

hemp and lime floor

By the by, we had a climate change activist and his soncome and stay recently, on their cycling route from the port of St Malo to thesouth of Brittany, where they are going to start a community farm project. With the gite booked, we had them inour house and decided not to charge: the idea of freely giving weary travellersshelter and sustenance seemed satisfyingly human. After dinner he asked if we could watch the English TV newsand I had the strangest experience of looking at John Jordan on the television being interviewed on BBC’s Newsnight and turning to see the same head sat in our armchair watching himself.

all work and ... a large lunch !

I firmly believe that one shouldn’t rant about problemswithout offering helpful solutions, so my advice to European governments is toask their peoples to start looking down the backs of their sofas to see if theycan find any lost change. It’sseems the ever-efficient Germans have been the first to do this, ‘finding’ an amazing 55 billion euros they didn’t think they had. Start pulling those cushions out!

… and to finish off with some eco-construction : work onthe barn continues (update soon) and we’ve also been helping out friends. Bruno and Audrey have a very uneven butsolid wooden floor in their attic, which will become their bedroom. Audrey’s dad, Didier, was maitre d’œuvre for the day and Bruno andseveral friends and neighbours (me included) mixed and raised up by tractor andbuckets, a porridge of hemp and lime for Didierto level. This light but strongeco-‘concrete’ sets hard over a month or so and consolidates the floor, leavinga flat surface. The beautiful oldoak boards remain in place as the ceiling of the rooms below. Why ‘eco’ ? Lime is produced at a much lower temperature than cement(less energy) and absorbs CO2 as it dries/cures. Hemp is a bit of a wonder plant and requires no chemicalsduring its cultivation.

We’ve also helped Bruno and Mélanie top off their strawbale house with a green roof. Another convivial team effort, we planted hundreds of sedums into asubstrate of earth and pouzzolane (volcanic rock). Our influence was to tell themabout famous English gardener Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘drifts’. The idea is to plant large, smoothedged clumps of similar plants together in a satisfyingly uneven drifts. I’ll post more pics next summer, whenthe plants have expanded to fill the gaps and come into flower.

Helping French friends out is always a pleasure, particularly as good food and wine is inevitably implicated along with music round the bonfire on the green roof day.

Mél and Bruno round the bonfire

We’re awaiting the arrival of the first of this season’swinter volunteers later today. Andrew and Sue came for a week last year but have booked for two thistime … we’re clearly not working them hard enough!

Quoi de neuf ?

2011-10-20T22:37:00.001+02:00

The Tarot Brothers and friends playing jazz in a boat

What’s been happening, haveI fallen off the blog? So much todo … sometimes too much to do. Thenew issue of Permaculture Magazineis out today carrying a five-page article on our compost toilet, with our weblink at the end. So, it’s hightime I reconnected with the blogosphere and published our latest news.

We’ve been‘permacultured’! A few weeks ago,friends Flo Snook, husbandAndy and twins Sol and Jacob came to visit us, all the way from Brighton intheir venerable van. Flo has justcompleted her permaculture diploma with Brighton Permaculture Trust(congratulations!) and took time out to wander around our Brittany permaculturesmallholding, pen and notebook in hand. She talked to both of us and her leaving present to us was a notebookfull of her permaculture analysis and suggestions. It's an exercise I thoroughly recommend: we found it really useful to have a freshset of trained eyes take a long hard look. She picked up on ‘overwhelm’ as a limiting factor to ourmany projects.

Which is one of the reasonsthat we’ve made special efforts to have some quality downtime recently,including a picnic on the beach and watching a jazz quartet in a narrowboat.

For picnic fayre, we turnedto Elizabeth Davidfor inspiration and an idea that I’ve wanted to try for some time:

Shooter’s Sandwich

Take a large, thick, excellent rump steak. Do not season it, for that would causethe juice to run out, and in grilling it keep it markedly underdone. Have ready a sandwich loaf one end ofwhich has been cut off and an adequate portion of the contents of which hasbeen removed. Put the steak, hotfrom the grill, and—but only then—somewhat highly seasoned, into the loaf; adda few grilled mushrooms; replace the deleted end of the loaf; wrap the loaf ina double sheet of clean white blotting-paper, tie with twine both ways,superimpose a sheet of grease-proof paper, and more twine. Place a moderate weight on top, andafter a while add other weights. Let the thing endure pressure for at least six hours. Do not carve it until and as each sliceis required.

Instead of the weights, Iused a pair of building clamps and a couple of wooden boards, which worked atreat. It makes a damn fine picnicsandwich.

Normal blogging to beresumed very soon, with updates on the barn conversion and other eco-buildingstuff; how to (almost) make hot compost the Geoff Lawton way and how to efficiently collect acorns to feed to pigs.

The definitive guide to how to sex a rabbit.

2011-09-25T22:30:00.001+02:00

One learns a skill, doesn’t use it for 12 months and ends uphaving to learn it all over again (at least if you possess an age-deterioratedmemory like mine). After ourrecent medical emergency (see my last post) I was very aware that today wasmarked down as VHDvaccination day, sexing and separating; we were also childminding.

We look after our 9-year-old neighbour Camille on a Wednesday—herday off from school—as her mother has just started up a new business in anearby town.

Rabbits quite like being stroked but they don’t like beingpicked up, so they make rather bad pets (and frequently suffer because of this). Our vacant chicken tractor wasconverted into suitable rabbit accommodation by the addition of a mesh bottom(to prevent foxes digging in and them digging out) and we had a large dog boxavailable too. The idea was totake them out one at a time, vaccinate them and then sex them, males to the‘chicken’ tractor and the females to the dog box temporarily. Once they would have been all sorted, aquick clean of the rabbit tractor and all the females go back in.

I lift a rabbit up by the scruff of its neck , supportingits bottom, place it on the top of the dog box, then Gabrielle takes over,encircling the rabbit with her hands and forearms. I pull a tent of skin up behind the neck and then aimbackwards, inline with the rabbit, so to speak—piercing the skin to administera subcutaneous injection of 0.5ml of Lapinject. I learnt this technique by watching the vet treating a poorly cat of ours. If one goes across the rabbit, there's a possibility of going into the skin and then out the other side again (as I've done, a couple of times!)

I then tuck its head between my knees and open the backlegs, lightly pressing either side of its genitals to see it we have an ‘inny’or an ‘outy’, with Camille watching on intently, eager to give her opinion.

I finishedthis exercise with several scratches to hands and forearms ... and somedoubts: as I said in the beginning, it’s been a year since we last did this. I popped inside for a healing andcontemplative cup of tea to accompany a search around the Internetfor some more clues on determining the sex of a rabbit.

This is the best and clearest advice I found. We checked them all again and found we had made one mistake, a girl in with theboys. The problem is that if onepresses too hard, one can make an ‘inny’ appear like an ‘outy’, if you see what Imean. What we’ve never noticedbefore, and this websitehelped us to identify, is a pair of leporine testicles (rabbity bollocks), which is really useful.

To be blogged about very soon: more eco-building stuff;French jazz in a narrow boat and how to make the best picnic sandwich usingwoodworking tools.

Bunny Back from the Brink.

2011-09-16T08:22:00.002+02:00

what's up doc ?

Last week, we lost one of our litter of eight youngrabbits. She went downhillsuddenly and so we isolated her in the empty chicken tractor. Another one was also off her food andhunched up, so we took her away too. They were only ten weeks old and the recently bought vaccines were stillin the fridge. We were scared: wasthis myxomatosis or viral hemorrhagic disease (VHD)?

The info from our two books and the Web seem to beexclusively directed at pets, rather than rabbits kept for meat with frequentadvice to rush your bunny to the vet, not economically viable for us.

There was nothing we could do for the first one and, havingread up on the symptoms of these two horrible diseases, I thought it would be agood idea to conduct a DIY autopsy (not so strange as I’m used to gutting and skinningthem under different circumstances). The liver was in good condition but the small intestine was blown uplike a balloon: back to the Internet. (Click here for pictures of a healthy andan VHD infected liver)

bunny tummy massage

Happily, it didn’t seem to be VHD but perhapsgastrointestinal stasis or bloat. We followed instructions to massage thepatient’s belly, monitoring her temperature, keeping her warm and hydrated andtrying Simethicone for flatulence, we even gave her an enema. (If you’re interested, the Simethiconewas bought at a pharmacy, in capsules. We cut the end off a capsule and sucked the contents into a syringe, toadminister by mouth to the rabbit).

As I said, we can’t possible call a vet every time one ofour animals is in less than top form and part of being a smallholder islearning how to recognise signs of bad health and treat them ourselves and, ofcourse, how to keep them healthy by good husbandry. By happy coincidence, our lovely vet, Dr Hammadi Mouhli,called me to tell me that he was in our area and could he come by toburdizzo-ise (vasectomise) three male lambs (as previously requested) so weasked him to take a look at the remaining poorly rabbit as well. ‘Grosventre’ (big belly) he pronounced and diagnosed a case of Coccidiosisinfection, prescribing Metoxyl in their drinking water.

By the time I’d passed by the surgery the following morningto collect the prescription, she was already looking a little better. We took no chances and haveadministered the medicine but wonder whether our own efforts had alreadytreated her and what, in fact, she was suffering from.

happy bunnies

Tweet, tweet …

2011-09-05T22:23:00.000+02:00

I’ve been tweeted and re-tweeted, tweeted twice in fact,twit-twoo. I’m not a twitter, merelya blogger, so hardly cutting edge but one must move with the times. So, although I enjoy writing articlesfor magazines, I write on a computer rather than with a fountain pen in a moleskinnotebook, I’m no literary Luddite.

Permaculture Magazinehave decided to put quite a lot of effort into publishing more articles on theInternet rather than increasing the size of individualmagazines or the frequency of publication (still afrustrating wait for each quarterly magazine). I continue to writearticles for their magazines but have now started writing for their websitetoo.

My first effort shows how to make a barbeque out of an old oil drum, aided by my diminutive assistant, 9-year-old neighbour Camille (here dressed up in her dad's work wear).

My latest offering is how to press your own applejuice. Either go to the magazine’s website and scroll down to ‘Readers’ Solutions’ or click here.

I sent the text and photos off and then my thoughts turned to the nextproject. However, no sooner than it waspublished on the site than my step-daughter, Christina, emailed me (from herBlackberry) to tell me that she’d been alerted to Permaculture Magazinetweeting my nascent article and that she’d re-tweeted it to her Twittingfollowers. I’m not sure I fullyunderstand.

She signed off with, “Can't wait to try some of the juice!” For all this electronic wizardry, she’llactually have to come and see us, it’s not as if I can email the apple juice toher … or could I ?

Like Ducks to Water

2011-08-30T13:23:00.001+02:00

From egg to table ready in ten weeks! I'd been meaning to post updates on the progress of our ducks but time has flown and they now reside in the freezer. With a hen as a mother, they had to learn to swim by themselves and they took to it ... well, like a duck to water !

Almost as soon as they could waddle, they would dabble about in their drinking water and we gave them ever larger receptacles to play in. The video above is of them still in their chicken tractor nursery.

They moved to more spacious accommodation and benefitted from a large fenced area to safely free-range within. They got the lid of a child's sandpit to swim in. The delightful commentary in French is supplied by our 9-year-old neighbour, Camille.

The intention never was to let them onto our pond. We've read too often how ducks generally trash and mess up any pond they're put on but we were keen to see them on a larger expanse of water and couldn't pass by such a photogenic moment.

After about thirty minutes of fun, the ducks would climb out. We got in the habit of putting them on the pond once a day and, in the end, they would get out and return to their paddock all by themselves, only needing one of us to close the gate the next time we passed by.

We're going to re-evaluate and re-design the duck raising infrastructure for next year. We need to have a water supply close to their enclosure to allow frequent changing of their bath without having to cart heavy watering cans and buckets about and then use gravity to take the duck-poop-enhanced dirty water to our potager.

Learning to Scythe with Simon Fairlie.

2011-08-24T22:58:00.000+02:00

Students mowing an orchard early one Sunday morning

A few years back, I sold our fully functioning petrolstrimmer and with the money bought a pair of ash-handled scythes withrazor-sharp Austrian blades. Idon’t think we’ve done too badly since and (sharpening aside) it’s always readyto go and one’s never caught short for lack of fuel, 2-stroke oil or strimmerstring. Like most things, though,there’s only so far book and video learning can take you and so I recently signedup for a scything course hosted by Brighton Permaculture Trust and run by SimonFairlie, vendor of our scythes.

Tai Chi, with sharp knives!

After the classroom stuff and an interesting history of thescythe, we ventured out onto the closely cropped lawns of Stanmer Park. The idea wasn’t to cut anything but topractice the moves: think of a Tai Chi group wielding machetes. Although it wasn’t the aim of thisparticular exercise, it was satisfying to see tiny green shards displaced by awell executed pass.

We then moved onto an area with grass around six inches highto mow. There were arborealobstacles and slopes and, while I wondered whether a flatter, more even surfacemight have been more inviting for our first efforts, this was a ‘real life’scenario. Simon and his twoassistants wandered carefully among us, offering advice and honing our blades.

peening

More classroom stuff, including the importance of peeningand honing to keep the blade sharp. Learning how to get the blade to the required sharpness and maintain itis as essential as learning how to scythe properly. Even with a good technique, scything with a blade that needssharpening is hard work and puts unnecessary strain on the wooden snath(handle) but if the blade is really sharp, you can cut grass even with a lessthan perfect stroke.

For the second day, we were invited to start at 7 in themorning and I think even Simon was impressed by how many of us managed to rollout of bed early enough to join him in a community orchard with the dew stillon the grass. In ages past, a teamof scythesmen would start work before daybreak. There is more moisture in the plant and so the stems arestiffer and thus easier to cut with a swing of a scythe.

Once we’d tidied up the orchard, Simon showed us how to makea rack out of a couple of A-frames to dry the cut grass into hay. He then gave us a very useful talk onmanaging grassland to feed stock throughout the year, the spring excess savedas hay to feed through the lean months of winter.

red arrows show my nice straight windrows chez nous

Since I came home from that trip ‘abroad’, I’ve taken to anew regime, getting out of bed earlier and doing half-an-hour’s scything beforebreakfast. I’m getting better atpeening and honing and regular practice is improving my scythe strokes but I’mnot sure how long I can keep getting out in the field so early. The rewards are great as the exerciseand deep breathing (out through the mouth on the cut, in through the nose onthe return) feels good and seeing the morning sun wash over the oak trees while being serenaded by birdsong is sublime.

Simon explains the different blades

Buy your scythes and accessories from Simon Fairlie’s TheScythe Shop.
Mr Scythe International: Peter Vido

The Vido family showing us how it should be done.

Don’t give up on us, baby …

2011-08-11T13:46:00.004+02:00

bouncing bunny

Our rabbit didn’t do toowell with her first litter back in March. Gabrielle had the very unpleasant experience ofdiscovering mum in the process of eating, or at least biting into one of hertiny charges and was forced into rescuing it from maternal fangs and thenputting it swiftly out of its misery. Horrible. Several dieduntil one day I found the remains of the litter all cold.

We did some research and itappears that ironically, considering their immense capacity to procreate,rabbits can be very poor mothers. It also seems that a mother rabbit eating her offspring is not fullyunderstood and isn’t linked to babies being handled (a common claim). The advice seemed to be to forgive herthis once, and maybe even a second litter, to see if she’d come good.

We took her to the buckagain, round neighbour Annick’s house and, three weeks later, she presented uswith a litter of eleven. Over thenext few days, we lost three and I wondered where we were going this timearound but then we started to see signs that the remaining baby bunnies wereputting on weight. Except one.

Once they had fur and werebig enough to scamper round the nest box, we noticed one little scrap was halfthe size and had his head held to one side and an eye closed. He didn’t seem at all stable whenmoving around. Then, one morningwhen I went out to feed mum, I found him outside in the run, soaking wet (ithad rained overnight) cold to the touch and barely breathing.

When keeping animals, onesometimes has to intervene, as Gabrielle had done above, and perhaps it wouldhave been kind to put this rabbity runt out of his misery. What I did was pick him up and raceback to the house, where Gabrielle took him into the bathroom and warmed him upgently with the fan heater but he refused her attempts to feed him. Once he was warm and dry, we tucked himup with the rest of the litter. There was little else we could do and I was convinced that I’d find himdead the following day.

He has remained very muchalive! We treated his eye withdrops and he has grown a lot, almost catching up with the others. Unfortunately for my reportage, inmoments of stress, I tend towards an ambulance man rather than a Don McCullin so I don’t have photos ofthe rescue from hypothermia but you can see how well he looks now in the photo above.

Part 2 – The Tree Returnsfrom the Dead

first shoots of recovery

Back in March, with the treelayer of our forest garden finally planned, we had to move a couple of trees including one sweet chestnut (variety: Marron de Redon). A bit late to be mucking tree rootsabout and getting a bit to big to move anyway, we would need to keep its rootswell watered. We had not a drop ofrain in April. After a fortnightof parsimonious precipitation, we had another thirty days sans une goutte de pluie.

I managed to keep it, theother newly planted trees and the sixty five hedging plants going with too manytrips carrying heavy watering cans. When all seemed to be ticking over nicely, I turned my attention toother things and I found one day that all the leaves had dried up, turned brownand were just about to fall off. Itold Gabrielle and tried to be philosophical but it was still verydisappointing. I gave it a realsoak and left it, not really thinking that there was any way back.

The tree wasn’t dead but hadgone into self-preservation mode. Large leaves like those of the sweet chestnut transpire a lot of waterand as the roots weren’t taking any up, the plant shut down. With a big boost of water, it’s wokenup again and is enthusiastically chucking out new, bright green leaves. I won’t let it down again and will keepa close eye on its progress as I’m not sure I’d get a second chance.

a second spring for this chestnut

Strawberry Fields Forever …

2011-07-28T10:32:00.005+02:00

mara des bois strawberries

Wild alpine strawberrieshave a concentrated burst of aromatic flavour yet are frustratingly tiny. Wouldn’t it be great if you could getthat same intense taste in a full-sized strawberry? Apparently you can, with a French perpetual variety calledMara des Bois.

Strawberry beds need movingand replanting every three years as plants become diseased and yieldsreduce. Fresh plants from adisease-free source should be planted in a new bed. As I didn’t get my plants until this spring I have been verydisciplined, removing the flowers so the plants use all their energy toestablish their root systems before they go for gold and give us theirdelicious berries next year. (Ifyou plant in the autumn then you don’t need to do this as the plant has alreadyestablished itself over the winter and spring before fruiting begins.)

borage towering over strawberry plants

I am interested in companionplanting but I like to really understand why something works. Many sources quote, time and again,that borage is a great companion for strawberries. But, when I tried to dig a little deeper and find out whythis should be so, the evidence is thin on the ground. I’m suspicious that people arerepeating each other endlessly, rather than writing from a position of realknowledge, a bit like the bunkum about throwing away mussels that refuse to open after cooking. Beware the unsubstantiated ‘truth’!

Despite my growing doubts, Iwent ahead and planted some borage on the edge of the new strawberry bed. It’s a great plant, the bees love it andthe flowers are both beautiful and edible. The problem with borage as a companion for strawberries isthat it is a big sprawling plant and very quickly totally overwhelmed my newstrawberry plants so I took out the all but one. (The bees still benefit from other borage plants elsewherein the garden.)

If you know why borage is a good companion plant forstrawberries and how they should be planted to benefit rather than overwhelm,please post a comment.

strawberry between a rock and a hard place

And to something that doeswork: for the last few years I have used a neat little trick that I learnt fromSepp Holzer (The Rebel Farmer and Sepp Holzer’s Permaculture).He observed that the strawberries that did best for him were sited near torocks and he worked out that the rocks acted like storage heaters for thetender plants. I found some flatblack stones and tucked them around the plants and it seems to benefit theproduction and ripening of fruits.

We must be patient to seehow my strawberry bed performs next summer. Mara des Bois are resistant to flowery mildew and areperpetual (fruiting from May until first frosts) yielding up to 1kg per plant.I have high hopes for the flavourand the yield from my fifteen plants. Plenty enough fruit for topping ourmorning muesli, making jam, ice cream and pies and Stuart’s favourite:macerating fresh strawbs in Cointreau and sugar. Delicious!

Gabrielle

Cob, oak window frames and squeezing in stairs …

2011-07-14T09:01:00.004+02:00

cob ball test

I spent all day yesterdayworking outside my comfort zone. And that after a fitful night’s sleep when I was either staring at theceiling with elements of the barn renovation circling mobile-like around myhead or dreaming about them. Exhausting!

Having taken down several oak beams and with new,engineered I-beams on order, I have to chisel out pockets in the wall for themto sit in. The dry earth that’sbeen removed gets remixed—with the addition of water and some straw—to sealthem in. I’ll also need this “cob”to fix a new oak window frame. I’ve only ever worked with this material at friends’ houses (mostrecently on Bruno’s and Mélanie´s straw bale house build) and have never beenin charge.

The weight of responsibilityis heavy: the mix must be right. Too much clay and I’ll have cracks, too much sand and it won’t holdtogether. My reference guide isBuilding With Cob: A Step-by-Step Guide by Adam Weismann andKaty Bryce. Perhaps I’m worryingtoo much, as I’m reusing the earth from a wall that’s already stood for over ahundred years but I ran a couple of tests anyway. The standard one is to half-fill a jar with the soil and topit up with water, shake vigorously to thoroughly mix the contents and leave tosettle out. The other one involvedmaking a fist-sized ball and then dropping it from waist-height. If the ball breaks up, there’s not enoughclay and if it pancakes, too much. Mine held its shape (see photo at top). I thenleft it while I attended to other things, with the intention of taking a photolater. This abandoned ball of mudin the middle of a path caused nine-year-old neighbour Camille to laugh as shecame to see what we were up to: another example of the eccentricities of herEnglish neighbours.

"double carré en bois"

The next task was to assemble an oak frame that will straddle the cob wall and receive the window. Using some drawings from a local association dedicated to the preservation of old buildings with original building techniques, I’d fabricated the individual pieces some time ago. I got the same drawings out, cleanedout the mortises and shaved the tenons until I could dry fit everything. Dry fitting is an important step as Irenumbered the pieces three times until I had them in the right position: notgreat for my self-confidence and making gluing up stressful, with much checkingand re-checking of the frame against the drawings.

And, as if that wasn't enough for one day, I had to designthe stairs. One works out the“total rise” from finished floor height of the entrance hall to the sameupstairs and divides it by 220mm (maximum individual rise for each step). One then rounds up to the nearest wholenumber (each step must be the same to avoid tripping and falling) andrecalculates to obtain the actual rise, which will be less than 220mm.

where the stairs will go

The treads, or “goings” arenext. I need to avoid a beam that I can’t remove (maintaining 2 metres head-height) and then I can’t go toofar over the width of the building, as that won’t leave enough room for passageto the bathroom. I had visions offuture holidaymakers staggering, bleary-eyed, for a nocturnal wee andwalking (falling!) straight down the stairs. After much measuring, drawing, pondering and surfing, Ifound the solution: a “Z” or “S” shaped winder.

Have in mind a ceilidh orbarn dance caller, this is how it goes: one step, three winders to the right,two steps, three winders to the left, two steps, do-si-do and take your partnerby the hand. I then phoned Simonat stairbox.com, gave him the dimensions and my credit card number andrelaxed. Being of a nervousdisposition though, having scoffed lunch, I dragged Gabrielle out to the barnto confirm I had everything correct. I hadn’t! I might haveremembered the thickness of the floor but I’d forgotten 200mm of floor joists …oops! A hurried phone call toSimon and we recalculated and added another step and all was well. A cold feeling ran down my spine as I imagined getting thestairs back to France, offering them up and finding them short.

[An aside: why am I buyingstairs in the UK when we live in France? Buying local is ethical, I know, but the price difference on some thingsis astonishing and it fits it (by the skin of its teeth and the help of Simon)with a planned trip to see my mum.]

So, you see, theeco-renovation of our cob barn is well under way to provide further holiday accommodation but not without some tears and tantrums!

Taste.

2011-06-30T09:10:00.002+02:00

Bruno's and Mélanie's daughter Jeanne

We eat like royalty here

Italians believe that home-cooked food is better than just about anything else and a restaurateur would be flattered to hear that his food was almost as good as mamma cooks. In contrast, I used to think that going out to eat was really special but then I’ve also been known to buy a supermarket ready meal in times gone by. As I’ve neither moved in elevated circles, nor got deep enough pockets, I’ve been tantalised by the mystery of how good a Michelin-starred meal would taste or, for that matter a bottle of wine that only Premier League footballers, or the Queen of England, could afford.

Of course, I only have my uneducated proletarian taste buds and it would probably be a terrible waste but I no longer care. I have tasted manna and it is delicious!

Gabrielle honed her cooking skills bringing up her daughter Christina as a single parent and can whistle up a tasty chicken leftover risotto when all I can seem to find in the fridge are the makings of a cheese sandwich. We live in a country that prides itself on the quality of its food and whose citizens believe they are the best cooks in the world. And we produce our own food too.

So all the ingredients are in place and it is still, and always, a pleasure when we realise that most or all that is on the plate in front of us is food that we’ve raised and cultivated. We had one such moment last week, as Gabrielle has started digging up clean, round, Lady Crystal tatties, podding peas and pulling carrots and we garnished the plate with a pork chop from last year’s Tamworth/Bayeaux piggies: de-lish !

Mine's a Guiness

Our friend Bruno joined us for a day’s help in the barn renovation/conversion and although it was hot and muggy and not an Irishly-wet winter’s day, Gabrielle served up Irish Stew and dumplings. Bruno is a great guitarist and he and his singing wife Mélanie adore Ireland, its culture and music but, despite several visits and many pints of Guiness sunk, he had never tasted Irish stew. Gabrielle started with a neck filet of our own mutton and a Delia Smith recipe which she jazzed up, improvising—doodley-be-bop-pah—with a bit of Dijon mustard, garlic and a sprinkle of herbes-de-Provence. And he’d never heard of, nor could understand the concept of, a dumpling.

Oh the pride and pleasure in hearing a French man go ga-ga over food cooked by our fair English hands! He was in raptures and we were proud. We’ve got recipe books from all around the world on our bookshelves but English (and Irish!) cooks and cuisine have no need to be hiding their delicious light under no bushel.

Time flies !

2011-06-19T17:44:00.004+02:00

I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read and all the friends I want to see.

John Burroughs (American naturalist and essayist 1837 –1921)

I write to relax; it’s a welcome change from the physicality of smallholding. But it’s been two weeks since the last blog, which says more about how busy we are than any lack of intent. Oh, to have a few more hours in the day or an extra day each week! So what have we been up to?

Shearing sheep: I might know my way about a sheep according to the Bowen method but shearing less than ten sheep a year means that I still have to remind myself what I’m doing and we start off with Gabrielle reading feet positions to me like a dance instructor, “move left foot closer to sheep’s shoulder, turn toes of left foot away from sheep, turn heel of right foot away from sheep," and so on. I also have a habit—of which I’m aware—of putting off things that I’m apprehensive about and there has been much procrastination before I finally took the plunge once more into the woolly depths.

It was also time to refill the freezer with mutton and we slaughtered a Ouessant hogget born February last year and one of the Suffolk cross ewes we recently bought. The meat on the Ouessant is outstanding but butchering the two, it’s clear that there’s a whole lot more meat on the bigger sheep. We’re going to let our Ouessant ram run with the remaining Suffolk ewe this year to see what we get IF our diminutive ram can rise to the challenge, so to speak. Come to think of it, President Sarkozy is shorter than his wife Carla Bruni, who is now pregnant, so maybe he won’t have a problem. Note: joking aside, it wouldn’t be a good idea to mate a larger breed male with a smaller breed ewe, for fear of her bearing a large lamb she’d have difficulty giving birth to.

Barn renovating: Work continues to create another gite for rent. Attaching a pair of pulleys, I chainsawed through the old oak beams (excepting the three tied into the A-frames) and lowered them to the ground. I’ve then been up on a scaffold tower with a medium breaker to release the stubs from the walls. I’m off tomorrow morning to order some timber I-beams so that I can install a new flat, rigid floor of tongue and groove poplar.

Supervising new ducklings: The day our ducklings hatched out, there was one egg that stayed resolutely closed, even though cheeping could be heard from within. There was a little cracked patch on the shell and I decided to help things along by opening up a hole. I then thought better of interfering and decided to leave well alone. Although it's usual for all the eggs to hatch out the same day, we’ve had previous experience of four eggs hatching out on four successive days and, less happily, of a mother hen eventually leaving the nest to escort her babies outside, leaving an egg, with an almost complete bird inside, to go cold.

Trapped like a Chilean miner our last duckling emerged two days later, none the worse for its ordeal. And, in true Ugly Duckling tradition, it’s not yellow like the others, so we’re not sure what it’ll turn into, not a swan, that’s for sure.

Writing articles: Despite all the action, I do occasionally get time to write and have two more articles recently published: “How to turn waste wood into business” in the summer edition of Permaculture Magazine and “A quick class” in the June edition of Country Smallholding Magazine. Both are under the rubric “Magazine Articles” on the right and, if you click on them, will open/download as PDF files. Bonne lecture !

things are not as they seem !

2011-06-05T16:45:00.001+02:00

There once was an ugly duckling,
With feathers all stubby and brown ...

As far as one of our big red hens is concerned, things are not quite as they should be. She's been sitting patiently (a little longer than usual) on a clutch of eggs. These eggs are special, in that they need moistening on a daily basis, so we have a plant mister next to the chicken tractor for this task.

The eggs were due to hatch on Tuesday next. Doing the morning rounds of the animals today, I lifted the hen off to spray the eggs and was surprised to see a mess of broken shells and cute baby ducklings.

The original idea it was that Gabrielle wanted to try ducks for the first time this year and thought hatching them from eggs would give us tamer (therefore easier and more pleasurable to manage) ducks than buying ducklings from the market. We don't have a mother duck and had read that ducks can make poor mums and that a chicken will do a good, if not better, job of it. As soon as one of our large chickens became broody, we bought eight Aylesbury duck eggs for a euro each and tucked them under her.

Why the plant mister? A duck will leave to eat and return to the nest each day with wet feathers, so we'd read that one should moisten the eggs if they are beneath a chicken.

And what does mum think of it all? Fiercely protective if I try to lift her off to have a look and seems to be very proud of her new offspring. A case of instinct overcoming any poultry prejudice. Heaven knows what she'll think when her 'chicks' head for the water.

Hard Graft

2011-05-29T22:56:00.004+02:00

sweet Mirabelle plum grafted onto a damson tree

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that, rather than being a slick ‘how to’ guide to permaculture full of achievement and success, it’s actually a traveller’s tale along a stony road full of mistakes and ‘no shows’, with, it has to be said, the odd moment of glory.

This is just such a rare moment. We’ve attempted something for the first time … and, amazingly, it has worked. We grafted hardwood cuttings onto existing fruit trees and rootstocks and, after a tantalising delay, they’ve all sprouted big healthy leaves.

I would say that the large majority of all fruit trees that you’ll come across are grafted, that’s to say that it’s not a tree that’s grown from seed but rather two trees, in the parlance of stolen cars, “cut and shut”. The top bit gives you the fruit you want and the rootstock determines the terminal size of the tree, thus you can have a Granny Smith apple that is a dwarf tree, requiring a stake all it’s life to support it, or a Granny Smith that grows to a full-size tree, which you’ll be climbing with a ladder to harvest it.

grafting demonstration

In December last year, we took hardwood cuttings from a Mirabelle (sweet yellow plum) and a tasty yellow cherry that we have (no idea of its name) then wrapped them in a plastic bag and stored them in the fridge. In February, we went to a local event run by a club, passionate about their local apples, called “Mordus de la Pomme”. We were able to buy hardwood cuttings from an astonishing range of local apples along with porte-greffes (rootstocks). There were thick catalogues of apple varieties and plenty of posters and diagrams to explain what to do along with enthusiasts demonstrating grafting techniques.

huge choice of cuttings

We bought a couple of dwarfing rootstocks and a couple of ‘twigs’ of Reinette d’Armorique and Rouget de Dol. The rootstocks were planted in a pot of earth and the cuttings stood upright in a pot of moist sand, both of them being put in a shady place, so as not to dry out.

Like goes with like (stones or seeds) so cherries and plums are interchangeable, as are peaches and almonds but apples go with crab apples and pears on quince rootstocks. In March, we used the cleft graft technique for all the grafts, cutting off a branch, or chopping the rootstock off square, then creating a cleft with a froe or pocket knife (as appropriate). Taking care of your fingers, two decisive cuts with a sharp knife form a tapered wedge at the end of the graft (scion).

cleft graft

A flat-bladed screwdriver holds the cleft open while one positions the scion. The idea is to line up the vascular cambia (Google it: I haven’t got the space to explain everything!) which is rather precise. The old guy at the fête de greffes had a great trick. If you angle the scion relative to the branch into which it’s being inserted, he reasoned, at least one part must be in the correct position. That’s what we did and, despite taking some time and having us both concerned, ALL the grafts have taken. Proud permaculturalists are we.

By the way, you don't need to buy a special knife, nor grafting pliers, nor grafting wax, nor special tape (strips of polythene and and masking tape work fine) so put away your cash while you make your first attempts.

apple trees onto dwarf rootstocks

Mirabelle plum and yellow cherry onto damson

Registering our gratitude.

2011-05-15T09:37:00.004+02:00

Alastair (waving) and Gabrielle after a hard days work

I can no answer make, but thanks,
And thanks, and ever thanks …

Bill Shakespeare 12^th Night Act 3 Scene 3

That’s pretty much the gist of it : thanks to a lot of friendly people—and a few sheep—who helped us process a huge pile of felled tree into neat stacks of cut and split logs to heat us through next winter.

We thinned and tidied up a parcel of our woodland—where the bluebells are unrolling their beautiful spring carpet more and more each year—to let in more light help some of the better trees to fatten up. Thanks to Mélanie and Patricia for helping drag out the felled trees and stack them for collection.

We clear-cut another parcel of about a third of an acre to replace its sycamore monoculture with a mixture of black locust (false acacia) silver birch and sessile oak and thinned a mixed section (of Corsican pine and some broadleaved trees). Thank you to Andrew and Sue for helping to extract and stack that wood.

Volunteer-less, after a late cancellation, I asked neighbour Paul (recently retired from a lifetime farming pigs) not only if I could borrow his tractor and trailer as I usually do but if he could help me. We did seven very full trailer loads together and I collected a further three on my own the following day, so a big remerciement to Paul.

Now we had a big pile of wood to process. Firstly artist Alastair, fine artist of international repute, helped create a long installation which, whilst not having an actual ‘meaning’ per se, is meant to evoke cosy evenings in front of a roaring log fire and entitled, “I’m knackered”, at least that’s what I think he said. Thank you Alastair.

Clive and Wendy turned up next and while Clive and I chopped up the thinner lengths, Wendy and Gabrielle spilt the larger logs of Alastair’s art installation. Clive also started barrowing up logs to where they would be stacked. Vielen dank!

Running out of helping hands, I got the sheep involved (extra photo to allay your doubts that our sheep can stand on two feet) but they were slow workers and spent too much time chatting. So when Merle and Darrell came to look after our permaculture smallholding when we had to dash to England for family reasons, Darrell made a damn fine job of creating a very French woodpile.

Merci beaucoup!

That left a residue that I attacked piecemeal myself until, Kev, a holidaymaker in our gite, came to see what all the activity was about and, rather foolhardily you might think, asked whether he could help; that’d be a ‘yes’ then.

Muchas gracias!

A huge job that we couldn’t possibly have done without all that generous help … thanks and thanks and ever thanks ...

Asparagus tips.

2011-05-08T21:12:00.001+02:00

Asparagus inspires gentle thoughts.

Charles Lamb, English essayist 1775 - 1834

While it is true that our now well established asparagus bed is a true herald of spring and lovely thoughts accompany the arrival of this royal vegetable I have also, this season, been experiencing more murderous musings. The reason is the arrival of the main enemy of a good healthy crop, the aptly named asparagus beetle.

asparagus beetle

I first came face to face with this troublemaker a couple of days ago when I saw one climbing on a fresh spear and, as I didn’t exactly know what it was, I just shooed it away instead of squishing it. It didn’t take long to get a positive ID on asparagus beetle, as it’s small but quite distinctive with a black and white spots on its back and a red under body.

Now I knew what I was dealing with, my next task was to try some way of ridding myself of this pesky critter. As with many infestations, actually picking the buggers off and despatching them is a really very effective method but this isn’t always possible or desirable so I also wanted to find an organic spray I could make myself.

I was delighted when I found this recipe for marigold spray, which claims to repel the beetle . I’ve already got lots of marigolds coming up like weeds in the garden so it was the perfect choice. Marigolds (calendula officianalis) are a bit of a wonder plant. They attract beneficial insects and pollinators and repel baddies in garden, the petals are edible in salads and cakes and an oil infusion is the basis of a healing and soothing lotion or balm. Basically no garden should be with out a few as they are so easy to grow and go on and on all summer. The cheery colour of their orange petals really does gladden the heart and now I was learning that they were going to help me in my battle against this bad beetle as well. Result.

I made up the mixture over night and the next evening sprayed it on the asparagus. It didn’t totally repel them that first day but it lessened the infestation considerably. I repeated the spray treatment the following morning and evening and this morning there were none on the asparagus at all. I am really happy with the results and am planning to make up some more but I am also killing on sight and taking no prisoners.

petunia added to our asparagus bed

Another unexpected ally is the petunia flower much beloved of the urban window box. I’ve never been a lover of this most popular of bedding plants and I generally speaking find annuals of this kind blousy and fussy and a waste of money. But it turns out that it’s also a bit of a wonder in the lexicon of companion planting (scroll down to petunia) and particularly good against asparagus beetles. I have planted and sprayed, surveyed and squished and I seem to be winning!

So to bring us back to more gentle thoughts: asparagus on the plate. This BBC Good Food web page has over eighty recipe suggestions and we can vouch for two of them. A tasty entrée with blanched spears sprinkled with cheese (we substituted mature cheddar) and wrapped in our home made Parma-style ham and, with only a couple of weeks to go before the end of our season, a divine way to combine a few spare asparagus spears with sun-dried tomatoes and black olives to make a perfect summer lunch or sublime portable picnic food. They're both very easy and totally delicious. I hope you enjoy them. Gabrielle

Busy, busy bees.

2011-04-29T20:35:00.005+02:00

Albert Einstein is reputed to have said that, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would only have four years life left. No more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.” In their fascinatingly worrying book, A World Without Bees, Alison Benjamin and Brian McCallum reckon that, “In truth, it is more likely to have been French beekeepers who put these words posthumously into Einstein’s mouth a few years ago during a battle to get a pesticide banned from their country.” Whoever said it, what is it all about?

Bees are in crisis!

A bee being busy chez nous

It seems then, it is a responsibility to raise bees but it’s also been a longstanding dream of Gabrielle’s to add these tiny beasts to our livestock. With so much going on, and ducks also on the list of this year’s ambitions, I thought a breeding pair would be enough but talk was of a swarm, thousands of the buzzy buggers. Registered for our sheep and pigs, we would also have to inform officialdom of our beekeeping and get yet another holding number. Fine, as long as I don’t have to ear-tag all our bees!

The new phenomenon, Colony Collapse Disorder, is, as yet, un-hundred-percently-explained, although we do know that bees are stressed from many directions, such as pesticides, viruses, Varroa mites, aggressive Africanised bees, fungi or just trucking them thousands of miles to pollinate successions of monocrops.

I quote directly from Benjamin’s and McCallum’s book :

“The mountains of southern Sichuan in China are covered in pear trees. Every April, they are home to a rare sight: thousands of people holding bamboo sticks with chicken feathers attached to the end, clambering among the blossom-laden branches. Closer inspection reveals that children, parents and even grandparents are all pollinating the trees by hand. It is a ritual they have been following for more than 20 years, ever since pesticides killed all their honeybees.”

Jean shows Gabrielle where to site the hive

Take a moment to consider their reality and wonder how that would work out here. Can you imagine the local job centre filling their vacancies for ‘fruit tree pollinating’ for the minimum wage?

Having read loads, Gabrielle is interested with the Abbé Warré method of raising bees but we have decided that the best way to start is with a mentor, step forward local apiculteur Jean Meilleur, and thus the simplest approach seems to be to go with what he’s used to, i.e., a standard French Dadant hive. Once we know what we’re about, bee-wise, and when we have a need for a second hive, we might then build a Warré hive.

Ready for the bees to move in

The kindly Monsieur Meilleur met us at the supplier of beekeeping equipment to help us choose the right things, even negotiating a little discount for us. He then followed us home to help us find the right location for the hive, where our bees wouldn’t bother our neighbours. I’ve painted the exterior of the hive in white , mounted it on a couple of concrete blocks and smeared some “charme abeille” (bee perfume) inside to attract passing swarms. If this plan fails to work, then Monsieur Meilleur will bring us a swarm when he next has one. It’s still a little early in the year for a swarm but we’ll be sure to post news when our bees arrive.

New website address for our blog

2011-04-24T13:11:00.000+02:00

We’ve moved! Our new address (URL) is now, more simply, www.permacultureinbrittany.com The old address should redirect automatically but you may still want to update the address in your favourites or Atom/RSS reader.

If you link to us, would you be so kind as to update your settings, merci !

Thunderbox is Go !

2011-04-18T22:44:00.001+02:00

With the arrival of spring, and perhaps an overambitious expansion of our projects, our workload approaches overload. We’re finishing work no earlier than 8pm each evening and only then thinking of what to cook for supper. I’m not complaining, nor after sympathy, just saying how it is. I have a pile of unread books and magazines but it’s as much as I can do, in bed with a chamomile tea, to read three pages before heavy eyelids descend and I’m obliged to give up. Perhaps it was circumstances such as these that inspired American writer (1895 – 1990), Lewis Mumford to argue that

“Today, the degradation of the inner life is symbolized by the fact that the only place sacred from interruption is the private toilet.”

So here I am, trousers down, taking a few contemplative minutes out alone with just my favourite French eco-building magazine for company … alone that is but for Julie, the deputy editor of said magazine and Clive, lecturer and head of the photography department of Sheffield University, quelle horreur ! To blame is the infamous sens de l'humour anglais.

I write magazine articles from time to time and had been promised three lucrative pages to write about our compost toilet and grey water treatment system but the financial climate has changed and the editor’s edict is that Julie must cover everything in Brittany to reduce costs (and thus my income!) Therefore, Julie had come over one evening to take some photos and ask us some questions and with my oh-so-funny English sense of humour, I suggested a photo of me seated, reading their magazine. The poor woman was most disturbed when I dropped my trousers but who goes to the toilet wearing their jeans? Surely art is authenticity? I kept my underpants on but she was clearly so unsettled that the photo was blurred when they looked at it at the office the following day. The editor was, however, taken in by this jolly jape and Julie found herself back at our house for a second go.

By this time, we had the last of this winter’s willing volunteers, Clive and Wendy, staying. Clive is a bit of a whizz, to say the least, with photography so Julie’s office Nikon got handed over. I had prepared myself with two sets of underpants, so allowing even more authenticity while maintaining my modesty. Not only did Clive adjust the complicated digital camera settings as he went, he then impressed everyone with some deft touches on Photoshop to change the colour balance (fluorescent lighting) and make me look (so I like to think) very much like George Clooney.

With respect to my occasional magazine articles I referred to above, I’ve another published in the latest (summer) edition of Permaculture Magazine. Buy it to read all about our good friend Rick Mehmed. “How to turn waste wood into business: How one man changed the face of wood recycling in Britain”.

Next blog : introducing bees to our permaculture smallholding.

Beetles

2011-04-11T22:49:00.001+02:00

Worm or beetle, drought or tempest, on a farmer’s land may fall,

Each is loaded full o’ ruin but a mortgage beat’s them all.

Will Carleton, American poet

oil beetle

While in today’s financial climate, no one would dispute the malignant weight of a mortgage, Carleton’s couplet suggests that worms and beetles are bad too. Was he a rep for an agricultural chemical company in between penning poems? I jest, of course, and there are plenty of bugs and beasties that do for veggies but they’re not all bad. Permaculture teaches one to look at these creatures in terms of equilibrium, rather than extermination but I also enjoy the aesthetic.

Maturity and living in the French countryside has diminished any fears I may’ve had in the proximity of creepy-crawlies, which have been replaced by an appreciative fascination. For my recent 50^th birthday, I received Richard Mabey’s new book, Bugs Britannica. Like his other ‘Britannica’ books (Flora and Birds) Mabey doesn’t give you a regular identification guide but penetrates the lives of Britain’s bugs via history and folklore, prose, poetry and art along with the more usual natural history approach. So, while I first turn to my Collins gem Insects and the Internet for identification, I quickly turn to Mabey’s book for an altogether more fun approach.

First up is some oil beetles we came across during a recent wander in our woods. Our ones were very blue and had heavily textured head and thorax, so I reckon they are Meloe violaceus. It can’t fly or even run very fast (hence I was able to get in close with my camera) and so its trick to escape the dustbin of evolutionary elimination of the weaklings is to exude nasty blistering goo (the ‘oil’) from between the joints of its legs, so putting off anyone higher up the food chain. Not an endearing quality, you might think, but it has been well used in ‘traditional’ (should that be ‘barking mad’?) medicine. To quote from Mabey’s book (and so you’ll see what a fun volume it is) :

In Spain, where the beetle is known as frailecillo (‘the little monk’), it is still used, immersed in bottles of olive oil, to ease sciatic pains. A stronger concoction of bottled beetle was also used to burn off sores and carbuncles and to treat ‘wounds made by a mad dog'. In Germany, powdered beetle was added to beer to make a drink called kaddentrank, which put a sick person ‘into a sudden and great sweat’ and so drew forth the injurious ‘humours’. No mention of an oil beetle suppository though!

the dumbledor

Next up in our beetle hall of fame is the Dor beetle, Geotrupes stercorarius, also known (Harry Potter fans sit up and pay attention) as a dumbledor. It is a dung beetle and needs to eat its own weight in dung each day. Its eggs are laid in dung buried underground.

Permaculture-wise, we thus have holes helping water infiltration into the soil, manure buried underground to feed hungry pasture roots and less dung on the surface means fewer nasty flies that bother cattle and horses. When all said and done, a fine worker. It’s a shame that they suffer from stock worming chemicals: chemicals that kill intestinal parasites in cows and sheep also go on to reduce the dung beetle population. We’ve been following a program for the last two years or more of not worming our animals and keeping them healthy with herbal supplements and moving them onto fresh pasture often. Which is why I was very happy to see this chap. Even though s/he is dead (allowing the photo close-up!) it suggests that they are about.

Stop Press: next blog, how a photo of me sitting on our compost toilet made it into a national French magazine!

Renovating a natural hedge.

2011-03-30T22:06:00.006+02:00

To the west of the building plot for our future eco-house, was a hedge with four unevenly-spaced mature oak trees linked together by an unbroken ball of brambles that swamped and concealed everything else. Last autumn, holiday makers Clive and Wendy asked for something to do. Only they can tell you whether they regret asking!

With sturdy gloves, secateurs, loppers, a rake and a billhook, they cut and dragged away the bulk part of the brambles and then further equipped with my my favourite hedgerow identification book, some sticky tape and a marker pen, labelled the plants left standing.

We have hawthorn and blackthorn (bien sûr) field maple, briar rose, holly and a thing we can’t identify until it comes back into leaf. It was time to retreat to a comfy chair in front of the wood stove and do some swotting up. As always, I thoroughly recommend the BCTV range of books and pulled Hedging by Alan Brooks and Elizabeth Agate from the bookshelf. I’d also picked up some excellent guides produced by the Conseil Générale for Côtes d’Armor (look under “Les publications disponible”) at a local agricultural show a couple of years back. Oh, and, of course, a shufty around the Internet too.

In France, as in the UK, rural ministries have handed out subsidies to rip out hedgerows and are now giving subsidies to replant them … so much for moderation and forward vision! That said, soon-to-be-retired-pig-farming-neighbour Paul said that in his youth there were so many hedges (enclosing tiny fields) that a farmer could spend all year just maintaining hedgerows (for no reward) but he accepts that perhaps too many were ripped out. It’s a question of balance, of course. He also pointed out that the hand that giveth also taketh awayeth: yes, there might be subsidies to replant hedges but, at the same time in France, satellite imagery allows the subsidy-giving agencies to subtract areas under the shadow of, say a venerable oak, from the area of the field to be subsidised, leading a farmer, logically, to shred or fell said tree … doh!

We wanted to reinstate a mixed natural hedge for the aesthetic and to increase biodiversity. The range of plants would be chosen with the ultimate goal of laying it to produce a livestock-proof hedge. We eventually cut everything hard back, even the field maple and some well established trunks of hawthorn, which should re-grow. We filled the gap with seventy small plants, which had had their bare-roots dunked in a fungal dip of friendly mycorrhiza. We have planted Sessile oaks, crab apple, common dogwood, sea buckthorn, guelder rose and cherry plum (myrobalan) along with the hedging staples of hawthorn and blackthorn. Buds and leaves are already appearing and we’re keeping it well watered, and will start mulching it with grass cuttings as my gardening job gets properly underway. I’ll post photo updates as it gets established.

Who wears the trousers round here ? (by Gabrielle)

2011-03-14T09:04:00.001+01:00

Denim skirt by Gabrielle

Surely I'm not the only woman that finds buying clothes difficult? Even as a young woman the fickleness of fashion frustrated me and some trends have tried my patience beyond belief: low rise jeans, pointed shoes and thong style knickers to name the shameful. I tend towards a traditional shape, not suited by most modern designs.

I’m always on the look out for good solid work-wear when I’m out in the garden, working in the woodland or generally getting messy and dirty in the studio and workshop. I want good quality, reasonably priced and stylish stuff and it can be a devil to find. My daughter Christina has upped the anti by embarking on a year-long quest to only buy ethical clothes.

Christina is a self-confessed fast fashion junkie but after watching a documentary on UK TV recently she has had a Damascene conversion. She was so shocked by the conditions of work in sweatshops, not only in the Third World but also just a few miles away from her home in East London that she decided there and then to stop buying into to this insidious system. Co-incidentally, around the same time, I watched a powerful documentary on French TV “Je l’achète, je le jette” (I buy it I throw it away) that exposed some very uncomfortable truths relating to global cotton mass production. Due to high demand and crop failures last year, prices are now rising and shortages are being predicted and un-organic cotton is the dirtiest crop in regard to its use of pesticides, so there are several reasons to make do and mend.

The modern term, apparently, is ‘to up-cycle’: to turn some old cast-off into a great new thing. My source material came from my lovely husband. Stuart has a limited palate of clothing that basically consists of jeans, work trousers and old shirts, usually with bits of hay attached … and that’s on a good day. He gets though a pair of 501’s a year on average and the latest rejects had landed on the laundry floor, from whence I reclaimed them and turned them into a new work skirt for me.

It’s an old technique and there are dozens of good tutorials on the net. I like this one, especially with its humbly apologetic list entitled “Here is some stuff I found out the hard way”. Whilst it’s not as glamorous as this wonderful dress by Gary Harvey it feels great to wear it and looks a lot better than the tatty old trousers I had before.

Denim Dress by Gary Harvey

The right place

2011-03-08T10:31:00.015+01:00

Neighbour Robin helping me move a false acacia tree

Sometimes, you actually have to put something somewhere so that you can find out that it’s in the wrong place. If you follow the permaculture design process as laid out by Patrick Whitefield, you go through five stages (base map, site survey, questionnaire, evaluation and design proposal) before you get the chance to put a plant in the ground. And then it’s in the wrong place … how did that happen?

I accept the possibility that I’m incompetent, a second-grade permaculturalist or an under-skilled designer. Or maybe it’s just part of the learning process and I’ll make fewer mistakes the more I design and perhaps even the experts still make mistakes but their gentle egos prevent them telling us. Fin, bref, we’ve got some trees in the wrong place.

As our forest garden plan evolves, we have changed the position of several trees. At this stage of the design process, still on paper, changing things is allowed. In Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Produce Edible Crops Martin Crawford recommends that we “keep the design on the go for several months, perhaps only coming back to it for a few minutes from time to time.” The photo shows me “moving a tree” with just my fingertips; you can see that this is the ideal stage to move trees.

Sometimes though, it’s not until something is in place that one realises, for various reasons that it’s in the wrong place and have to reach for the spade…

We’d planted a pair of false acacias (also called black locust, Latin robinia pseudoacacia) to frame an entrance onto our property but didn’t at first realise how large a tree they become and how quickly they grow. They were sucking water and nutrients from beneath a living willow fence/hedge we’ve planted and, as the “fedge” comes into leaf again, we can see the effect on those rods nearest the tree. So that tree had to go and as the forest garden design calls for one, we thought of “treecycling” it.

Now you don’t have to have read Robert Kourik’s Roots Demystified to guess that a big tough tree—especially a pioneering, quick growing one—has big tough roots. Quite frankly, it was a b****** to dig out. But a young tree is no match for a determined man with a long sharp spade and a bilingual lexicon of swear words to help him along and, as the air turned blue, out it came.

Gabrielle and the repositioned False Acacia tree

I asked neighbour Robin to give me a hand and, with Gabrielle on the lighter end and in charge of steering, we walked it into the field of pasture that will become our forest garden and plopped it into a big hole I’d dug earlier. 5ft 2ins Gabrielle helpfully adds scale to the photo of the repositioned tree.

For any of you who’d like to learn a few French swearwords (gros mots) to help when moving trees, I’d recommend working on a building site for a few days, although I’m not sure that the straw bale house build where I learned mine necessarily implies that they’re environmentally friendly cusses.

2011-02-28T11:58:00.000+01:00

An author's note inside The Sheep Book for Smallholders by Tim Tyne advises that the book "is not a veterinary manual, nor is it a miserable catalogue of the numerous ways in which a sheep may choose to die..." So, you see, sheep don't have the best reputation for staying alive but, touch wood, the worst problem we've had in nearly four years of keeping a small ovine flock is one case of summer mastitis, which had a favourable outcome. Perhaps it's to do with them being a rustic race (Ouessant) and living outside all the year.
Still, one can't help worrying about these allegedly fragile creatures, which is why I've uploaded this little video of this year's lambs—two boys and a girl (with one more due soon). Please have a look and give us your opinion of how healthy they look!

Volunteers : the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2011-02-20T17:32:00.010+01:00

Our call for volunteers last winter was incredibly successful and I suppose led, if not to complacency, then to assumptions and an over-reliance on this free help. We created a supra-“list of things to do” with our volunteers and anticipated a moment, perhaps in early March, when we would survey, through tired eyes, an incredible list of things done. It was not to be.

Two couples had to cancel, both victims of the current economic climate. One poor chap lost his job and so their five-year plan to become smallholders, and their more immediate plans to visit us, rudely evaporated. The other couple were thrown a pair of job interviews, too risky to let pass and they, understandably, cancelled too.

A young woman had booked a week with us and, just before she came, asked if she could bring along a chap she’d befriended while volunteering. Without another thought, we said ‘yes’ and lived to regret it. In retrospect, our failing was not to discuss and agree with him what we offered to volunteers and expected in return. To be brief, we mutually agreed that it was not working out and he left halfway through the week. Thank goodness for Sue and Andrew.

I’ll hand over to Sue now, to tell you of their week with us.

Andrew's bridge

Insomnia Leads to Brittany

Gully when full

Unable to sleep one night I got up to make a cup of tea and read. From one of my favourite blogs, an invitation to "volunteer in Brittany" jumped out at me and one click later, I’d found the ideal holiday for Andrew and me.

Pulling the plug

A few weeks later we arrived at Stuart's and Gabrielle's smallholding, to a warm welcome from our hosts and an excellent supper of pork chops from home reared pigs.

The following morning we all went to the woods to start work, smashing through a ball of brambles to open an access way between two parts of the wood separated by a gully. A section had been filled in to allow a passage (once the recalcitrant brambles had been dealt with) and a buried pipe connected the ditch. Except that the pipe was blocked, creating a substantial amount of surface water.

All drained

Andrew and Gabrielle started to clear out a gully and, sure enough water began to move slowly towards the riverbank. Taking a breather from chainsawing, Stuart poked his nose in and started pulling handfuls of leaves from the end of the pipe. Suddenly a muddy tidal wave surged forward filling Andrew's wellies, the warning shout too late. It was very satisfying to see the difference as the waterlogged area drained.

I got my first taste of the Kelly kettle and so began my quest to make a cup of tea for us all in the wood. My first mistake was to only get half of the boiled water in the pot … oops! After a lunch of home-made broccoli and blue cheese soup, bread, cheese and beers, we went back to the woods. At the end of the afternoon it was back to our gite with its wood-burning stove, long hot showers and then over to the house for another excellent evening of good food, wine and chatting. That night we slept really well, no chance of insomnia here.

Learning to spin

The second day involved more tree felling and pole-sawing off lower branches of some of the standing pines. It was very satisfying to see what a difference four people could make in such a short time. At my second attempt at tea making, all went well until I put out the fire by spilling water on it as I lifted the kettle. Half marks awarded : tea to drink but no top ups again.

The third day began with a sausage making session using home grown pork. It was really good, especially learning how to tie a string of sausages and is something we'd like to do at home now.

First skein of wool

While I taught Gabrielle how to spin, Stuart and Andrew started building a bridge for another woodland ditch. Andrew’s just retired from working as a carpenter/joiner, so Stuart was happy to defer to Andrew, scavenging for suitable old timbers while Andrew designed it.

Bridge building

Saturday was our day off. We drove to the coast to get our fix of the sea and then on to Dinan where we looked at the arty shops. Having felt that we'd "eaten out" every night with Gabrielle's great meals we had a simple supper of bread, cheese, sausage and fish soup eaten in front of the wood stove.

Sunday was our last day working and we were back in the wood. Stuart and Andrew installed the bridge and added the handrail, a small oak Stuart had felled for the purpose, Andrew then stripping the bark with a draw-knife and carving a snake's head at one end. Gabrielle and I cleared brush and stacked logs. Tea making time arrived : failure again leaving the cork in the spout 9risking an explosion!) and needing help to stop the fire going out.

Andrew using draw knife

Afternoon teatime would be my last chance at conquering the Kelly Kettle. I used extra dry kindling, so the fire took well, the water boiled, not a drop was spilt and we all had full mugs of tea and top ups too, hurray !

Oak handrail

It was at this point that Gabrielle came over the bridge and presented me with a certificate and my tea maker's badge !

Andrew and I enjoyed our week immensely. Gabrielle and Stuart are excellent hosts, hard working and full of fun with a great deal of knowledge.

Proud girl guide!

The difficulties of photographing animals.

2011-02-09T22:33:00.005+01:00

I have a secret yearning to be a famous wildlife photographer. Actually, that’s not true at all, when I consider what’s behind those award winning shots: the before dawn starts, the endless hours stuck in a cramped hide, the repeated frustrations when the beast either doesn’t turn up, doesn’t behave as meant to or just turns his back and walks off away from camera. I am hampered by a pathological lack of patience (poor Gabrielle) a lack of seriously long lenses and other expensive equipment and the stubborn refusal of wild animals to cooperate.

Let’s take, for example, the sweet little Jenny Wren. This tiny bird possesses an enormous voice (which is what caught my attention) so perhaps I’d have been better off with a tape recorder instead of a camera. Belt hung compact camera to the ready, zoom to 300mm equivalent, elbow steadied on oak post and click. Spot the bird (hint: it's in the centre).

A better idea: we have a couple of peanut feeders outside our window and occasionally, despite some flappy bunting Gabrielle hung, we get one poor dear crash into the glass. It usually takes them a couple of minutes to stop seeing stars before they gather themselves and fly off ... just enough time for me to get my camera out. Telephoto lens? No, I got right up close to the obligingly concussed subject and used the macro setting, waited for it to open its eyes and click. By the way, it did fly away happily ever after.

And lastly, we’re proud to announce the first of 2011’s lambs and … it’s a boy! Photogenic he may be, but it’s difficult to get the detail out of the shadow with a black sheep. I twiddled around with the settings in iPhoto but then couldn’t resist making the grass greener and softening the edges!

Award-winning photographer? I think I’ll stick to the day job!

Learning to spin wool

2011-02-02T20:39:00.005+01:00

“It is not enough to say that hand-spinning is one of the industries to be revived. It is necessary to insist that it is the central industry that must engage our attention if we are to re-establish the village home.”
Gandhi Young India 1926

I’d like to dedicate this blog to our friend Val who is enduring some pretty nasty treatment for breast cancer at the moment. We’ve finally got around to spinning some wool and it’s on an Ashford wheel that Val kindly gave us a while ago.

We liked the idea of spinning our own wool but we didn’t know how and, being busy people, we’d only flirted with trying to find someone locally to teach us. Serendipitously, one of our latest volunteers is a competent spinner and turned up well equipped to teach Gabrielle, with her two wheels, along with a lazy Kate and a niddy noddy.

Sue teaching Gabrielle how to spin

We started the morning making sausages, then Andrew and I went off to our woodland to construct a bridge out of reclaimed timber (see next blog) leaving Sue to teach Gabrielle how to spin.

While pedalling gently, carded wool is teased into a hole and magically twisted into a thread, which is wound onto a bobbin. With two bobbins full and mounted on the lazy Kate, the spinning wheel is turned in the opposite direction to ply the two threads together, the wool being wound onto a third bobbin. The wool is then taken off the bobbin and wound onto the niddy noddy giving a lovely skein of wool.

Until I emigrated to France, just 6 ½ years ago, I was a townie,

Gabrielle learns to spin

a city dweller, un citadin. Woolly jumpers (more likely a polar fleece) and cuts of meat were something I went to the shops to buy. Now, we home rear practically all the meat we eat but, apart from a very rustic Russian-style hat that Gabrielle made me out of felt and rabbit skins, we still buy clothes. Can I now report to you that, in searching for independence and self-sufficiency along Swadedeshi lines, we’ve taken up our charkha and are going to start spinning our own clothes ?

Fashion fan Christina

Uh … No ! At least not anytime soon but Gabrielle is now inspired to carry on learning. Which is just as well for her daughter, who, might now have a vested (woolly vest?) interest in Gabrielle producing homespun woollen clothing. Christina, who admits to being a “fast fashion addict”, recently watched a (UK) television programme, Channel 4 Dispatches: Fashion’s Dirty Secret, and was horrified to see that sweat shops are alive and kicking and right under her nose in London’s east end. She’s written a very frank and self-aware blog wherein, realising her complicity as customer, has decided to pledge to “not buy any fast-fashion, or non-ethical clothing for a year.”

She’s set herself these rules:

· I must not buy ANYTHING that is not second hand or ethically made (so I don't have to give up shopping all together)

· I will research and investigate ethical fashion brands and alternatives to the high street.

· I will not accept the normal 'we are working towards better conditions' excuses from big brands when it comes to sweatshops. If there is any doubt that anything is made those conditions I will not go anywhere near it.

· I am allowed to keep and wear all of the high street clothes I have amassed up until this point (obviously!)

Niddy-noddied into a passable skein of wool

She’ll will be posting regular updates of her “struggle” as well as profiling ethical brands and ideas on her blog. I’m sure that Gandhi would approve of Gabrielle’s and Christina’s efforts.

Forest Garden

2011-01-25T18:59:00.005+01:00

Neighbour Camille holding a sapling upright during planting

Although it encompasses much more, when asked to explain what permaculture is, I turn to the concept of a forest garden, which seems (for me) to epitomise it.

Consider a field of cereal growing next to a woodland and compare the inputs and outputs. The arable field gets spread with muck or chemical fertiliser, ploughed, harrowed, sown, sprayed, sprayed again and harvested and then all that over again, impoverishing the soil. The forest, on the other hand, is untouched by human hand, soaking up sun from above and water and nutrients from below and producing way more biomass per year than the adjacent field.

Spreadsheet showing chosen trees

So far, so panacea, but the important thing (for us) is that we humans can eat a large percentage of the biomass created by the field of cereals, way more than we could from the woodland. The permaculture lightbulb (Gestalt effect!) moment is that we could design a woodland using edible plants, vastly increasing the proportion of biomass we can use. That’s the idea of a forest garden.

However, in his new book Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops, Martin Crawford disagrees:

“Is it permaculture? No. It’s sometimes one element of permaculture and people sometimes mistakenly call it permaculture … To avoid confusion, I don’t call my forest garden ‘permaculture’; I just stick to ‘forest garden’.”

So what do I know? Whatever nomenclature he prefers, I can thoroughly recommend his book which is a very clear ‘how to’ manual of temperate climate forest gardening.

Volunteer Patricia cutting out trees

Our own has been on the ‘list of things to get around to’ (i.e., it hasn’t even featured on the ever-daunting ‘list of things to do’) for a long time and Martin’s recently published book has proved a helpful incentive. A few weeks ago, our friend Kristen jumped on an overnight train and travelled all the way from the Aveyron to come and spend a few days with us. He’s just finished translating Patrick Whitefield’s How to Make a Forest Garden into French: Creér un Jardin-Forêt: Une Forêt Comestible de Fruits et de Légumes au Jardin.

A bit of a whizz on the ’pooter, he created a spreadsheet of our chosen trees (see above) with columns showing the names in English, Latin and French (remember, I’m reading an English book but ordering trees from a French pépiniériste) and other important things to take into account, such as fertility needs, shade tolerance and pollination requirements. He also played around with Google Sketch Up, creating a 3D-effect image with shadows that moved with the time of day. A great idea needing a lot of work but it would be a powerful tool for placing and spacing trees and shrubs during the design stage so that they get the sun they need throughout the growing season.

With no time to waste, we reverted to cutting out circles of coloured paper and ‘Blu-Tacking’ them onto a scale map of our field. Designing a forest garden is not a process to be rushed, so we left the plan to stew and took it out, from time to time, discussing it and moving the paper trees about. Our forest garden finally coalesced to the point we could order trees and start planting. Using triangulation, a 30 metre tape and some garden canes, Gabrielle and I converted the details on the scale plan into planting positions on the field.

Triangulating planting positions

The field is currently pasture and we will plant up trees (with sheep-proof guards) over this and the following winter, then start on the shrub layer a winter or two later. We’ll eventually remove the sheep when we find it impossible to protect our plantings, although we do plan to have chickens and ducks free-ranging, a rabbit tractor and have designed in a space for pigs, which will be overhung by fruit trees.

Dreaming of bees and kisses

2011-01-12T18:06:00.003+01:00

Hugh puckers up

Over a cup of tea, Gabrielle recounted her dream. The details are a bit blurry but, in essence, she was preparing a meal for me of fried bees in honey sauce and somehow the bees had ended up in the compost bin and I was getting increasingly annoyed as she tried to rescue these cooked bees whilst flirting, even kissing, downsizer-turned-celebrity-farmer and TV chef Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall. Amongst my readers, are there any Jungian psychoanalysts who could shed any light on this? Should I be worried? Should HFW be worried? What do the fried bees signify?

Grey squirrels were introduced to the UK from the USA in the late 19th or early 20th century. Now widespread throughout England and Wales, and some parts of Scotland, they are absent from France and the rest of mainland Europe except for a few scoiattoli grigi in Italy. The sting in their bushy tail is that they are notorious for displacing red squirrels. These impostors out-compete the native reds for food, can digest acorns, which the reds can't and also carry a virus, which does not affect them but is deadly to the reds.

So, you see, we have a healthy population of red squirrels which always cause a ripple of pleasure when we spot one bouncing round the limbs of adjacent trees. I haven’t the telephoto lenses, skills and patience of a wildlife photographer, so I was happy to grab this image the other morning. Grey squirrels can be cute too but there’s something especially optimistic about a red squirrel with his Tufty ears and russet coat, a warm dab of rouge on a grey winter’s landscape.

Incidentally, I once ate a grey squirrel, cooked by a tramp over an open fire in Chichester … it tasted a bit like chicken. Considering the damage they are doing to woodlands, I think it should be a duty of meat-eaters (I’ll spare the vegetarians) to eat a grey squirrel a month. Don’t turn your nose up: it’s free range, organic and would help to preserve trees.

Next up : I promise a more sensible blog as we plan and start planting our forest garden and building our Warré beehive.

Permaculture ideas : A help or a hindrance ?

2011-01-06T23:00:00.001+01:00

Permaculture is a design system. It involves looking at nature and seeing what works and how it works and then applying some of that inherent wisdom to how we design our own food production systems. One connects things, juxtaposes them, and then basks in their productive symbiosis, two for the price of one.

To the north of our potager (vegetable plot) we have our willow plantation, several rows of thirty two different varieties which, along with providing bees with an early and continuing source of nectar and rods for living willow structures, acts as a windbreak to our veggies from the cold dry winds that blow from the north. To the east, we have a couple of black locust / false acacia (robinia pseudoacacia) trees, which were principally planted to obscure the slabby grey wall of our neighbour’s house.

Both of these trees could be classified as pioneer trees—trees that move in first to untended ground, the first step towards natural reforestation—and are very competitive. They chuck out energetic roots that go hunting for nutrients and water. Serge, our helpful neighbour, has delivered us another load of chestnut planking that he has torn out of a building renovation and rescued from the site bonfire. This meant that I was able to enclose another four raised beds in the potager and in all the preparatory digging and clearing of the pathways, I discovered some roots.

N-fixing nodules on false acacia roots

Blooming scary, great long, strong ropes of roots, thick as a man’s wrist (well, finger, I exaggerate!) and running a long way into the vegetable growing area. One of the disadvantages of raised beds is that they dry out quicker and last summer was exceptionally dry, so to have tree roots pumping out what’s left of the precious humidity that remains isn’t desirable. But wait. The roots of false acacia are nitrogen fixing, feeding other plants … hmm. It’s a legume, so the roots have nodules (see photo) containing nitrogen-fixing nitrogen bacteria.

how far the roots stretched

So, the permaculture questions: do the vegetables gain more from the windbreak effect than the water they lose to thirsty willow roots? and do they gain more from nitrogen fixation than they lose from thirsty false acacia roots? In short, I don’t know but it’s an interesting conundrum. Practically, we plan to progressively remove the first few rows of willows, to retain some windbreak effect but at a distance and we only have two false acacias, so we’ll keep an eye on the relative humidity of the closest bed relative to others to see if the roots are unfavourably drying out the bed. For me, permaculture is a “work in progress” and all the more useful thought of like that.

Eco-Christmas Decorations

2010-12-24T21:12:00.002+01:00

I remember being very excited about Christmas when I was young. Every other year, we went to Letchworth Garden City to stay with Molly and Roy, my three cousins, our shared grandparents and Aunty Jan (blind sister of my grandmother). I in total, a happy house bursting at the seams with thirteen of us.

I must admit to having gone through a Scrooge “Bah Humbug!” stage but, after many years, I'm now reconciled to the end of the year’s celebrations. One of the essential elements of my childhood Christmases was an LP of my parents, Christmas Wonderland by Bert Kaempfert and his Orchestra and–yet another benefit of the Internet–I’ve downloaded it to serenade us. Gabrielle is unimpressed: for her it’s more neuralgia than nostalgia.

We’re unsure whether a real tree is more or less environmentally friendly than an artificial one. Gabrielle’s daughter, Christina had requested a real one, so we went to IKEA, for a free one. Free? One buys a Christmas tree for 20€, takes it back to the store in January for a 19€ reimbursement. The extra euro has been donated to l’Office National des Forêts. The tree, which was labelled as being grown in France, then gets composted. That sounds acceptably ecologic to me. The only slight catch is that the reimbursement comes in the form of a voucher to spend in IKEA but that’s capitalism for you.

5W LED lights

As the lid came off the box of decorations, it was inevitable that a couple of bulbs in the fairy lights didn’t work and we’ve used up the last of our spares. We couldn’t find any replacement bulbs for sale, so went shopping for a new set. I prefer multi-coloured garlands and Gabrielle white, and while I was comparing boxes in the shop I noticed that a string of eighty LEDs were only 5W and the more conventional lights 65W. That’s quite a saving of energy, so Gabrielle got her white lights.

I’m not sure such energy savings were on Serge’s mind as he dressed his house with festive luminance. I think he’s elevated the whole thing to the level of art. For me, art has to move the emotions and I always end up smiling when I see our neighbours’ house at night!

Serge and Noëlle's house

Gabrielle and Christina have made eco-crackers. The bangers were bought from eBay: under £2 for twelve. The wrappers are colourful pages torn out of old magazines, around toilet roll middles. The hats have been made out of odds and ends and cheap but useful gifts chosen for each person. Even the jokes aren’t new, sourced from the BBC's website, promising to be groanworthy.

Joyeux Noël !

Our home-made Christmas crackers

Working for someone else – Part 2

2010-12-23T19:33:00.004+01:00

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat

Please put a penny in the old man's hat

If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do

If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!

When I was in the six form at school, I got a temporary job over the holidays doing the Christmas post with the Royal Mail. After some sorting, we went out delivering and I got the plum posting as sidekick to the van driver, so got to stay in the warm cab for a large part of the day, lucky me !

Some 32 Christmases later, I again have some temporary Christmas work. Sylvain’s free-range poultry farm in the middle of our village is working flat out to put a turkey, capon, duck, guinea fowl or chicken on all his customer’s tables and one (of two) of his ladies in the abattoir is long term sick, so he advertised for a preparateur/preparatrice de volaille. In the spirit of helping out a friend in the village (I go to a table tennis club with Sylvain and his sons) filling a small end-of-year hole in our finances and seeing another aspect of farming life, I signed up.

Having spent what seemed like the entire night looking at the luminous hands on my alarm clock, I arrived for work at ten to six. Seeing the light on in Sylvain’s kitchen, I wandered over. His dog was unsure of the stranger in the dark courtyard and, after a lot of barking, decided to bite me on the back of my leg … not the most auspicious start to my new career.

Sylvain is up at four to collect the birds, breakfasts around quarter to six, works until (an often late) lunchtime without a break and even then, his working day is barely half done. Evelyn, the stalwart préparatrice is the perfect employee. Eight years of working in the abattoir hasn’t dimmed her enthusiasm: she works like a machine.

Evelyn drawing a chicken

She’s a lovely lady but communication wasn’t easy in the beginning. I start knowing nothing. My teacher has the French equivalent of a strong Somerset accent, doesn’t articulate her words and all this against the roar of the mechanical plucking turbine, a noisy extractor fan and an echo. I think my French isn’t half bad but I reckon I understood less than 10% of anything she said, so I had to watch and try to work it out. Which would be fine, if her demonstrations weren’t conducted with lightening speed and sleight of hand becoming a professional magician. It’s a wonder I managed to achieve anything.

The poultry are handled calmly and stunned before slaughter, so I can assure you that the path from free range bird to oven ready is as humane as can be. It was very hard work and I now have even more respect for Sylvain and his staff.

The ironic ending to this tale is that on Christmas Day, we’re eating vegetarian (with Gabrielle’s daughter, Christina and boyfriend Bob) and on Boxing day, vegan (an invitation to dine with friends Virginie and Éric).

Photos show me during a brief tea break and my mentor, Evelyn, the latter taken by our friend Clive Eggington when he was last here on holiday with us.

Working for someone else – Part 1

2010-12-19T15:12:00.004+01:00

Chris, Bruin, Hubert and me

Hubert, one of our farming neighbours, has 54 cows that he milks twice a day at an impressively efficient one and a quarter hours each time. That’s every day, seven days a week. He also has to feed them (this time of the year, they’re off the fields), change their bedding, look after the cows that are resting prior to giving birth, the young females, new calves and during the year ploughing, sowing and harvesting forage crops and renewing pasture and … and …

Hubert is a very busy man. This is how food production works in our modern world. But not so busy that when Gabrielle put in a request for a trailer of fumier (manure) for her vegetable production and I asked for some hay (difficult to source this year, following a very dry spring and summer) Hubert would’ve said “non”.

Day One – logging with fearsome circular saw

His farm is on high, so we could see him coming from afar. Hubert had a large round bale of hay on the forks of his tractor, which was towing a trailer full of cow shit. With the bale under cover, the manure dumped, and Gabrielle away making coffee, I got my wallet out: “je vous dois combien ? In fact, he asked tentatively, if it didn’t bother me, he’d rather that I helped him prepare some firewood as he was too busy to do it all himself.

I’d already done half a day with him, chopping long logs with a Jurassicaly fearsome-toothed, large circular saw mounted on the back of an ancient tractor and had agreed to return for another go. This time, though, we turned up mob-handed. Gabrielle’s brother, Bruin, had come to stay and Chris, who’d previously volunteered came back for another dose of hard-work-for-great-food. Busy Hubert was therefore treated to a happy surprise when a van turned up and not one but three willing chaps jumped out.

4 o'clock cuppa

The Spanish are renowned for their siestas, the French for their comprehensive lunches and the British for the “tea break”. It’s a quest of mine to convince our French friends of the emotional and cultural value of a cuppa.

To that end, on the stroke of 4pm, Gabrielle turned up with our Kelly Kettle, teabags, milk (coals to Newcastle on a dairy farm!) sugar, mugs and a freshly-cooked cinnamon bread wreath. The lost time was soon made up with the renewed vigour that a tea break brings.

After a guided tour of his farm, we left a smiling Hubert with a huge pile of cut and split logs, bringing home two litres of very fresh full cream milk, which Gabrielle used to make crème caramel. Before us, we had beers and hot showers but, for Hubert, another two hours of work with his cows before the day was done.

Work in progress

It’s a bit chilli here …

2010-12-11T19:42:00.007+01:00

A polytunnel gives one a certain advantage in that you can get things going a little earlier within it than those planted outside but there are limits, unless you want to go to the bother of heating it. There comes a time when it’s cold enough to have a frost inside the polytunnel. Our last tomatoes have long since been brought inside and eaten or preserved but, alongside our winter salads (such as Green in Snow, Mizuna, Ragged Jack and some rocket and lettuce still hanging on gamely) we had one summer crop yet to harvest, our chilli plants.

The plants looked like Christmas trees, huge bushes of green hung with hot garlands of red, orange, green and yellow chillies. We had talked about harvesting the chillies, I’d even volunteered to help out but somehow it kept getting bumped to the following day.

Then we had a hard frost. If you’ve ever left a pepper in the very bottom of the fridge or in contact with the cooling element at the back, you’ll know that mushy squeeze that tells you it’s for the compost bin. The freezing, expanding ice crystals do for the structure and there’s no way back. One forgotten pepper in the fridge is one thing, but half a dozen plants that should have been stripped the day before is more than disappointing.

Was it a greenhouse full of ruined peppers that made Thomas Jefferson expound, “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” ? All was not lost, however, and we raided books and Googled around the world of chilli preservation to find ways of rescuing our soggy hot harvest. Here’s what we did :

Chilli chutney
Sweet red chilli jelly
Sweet green chilli jelly
Sweet yellow jilli chelly
Green chilli oil
Dried (in a warm oven) chillies.

My only complaint is that Gabrielle tried to use up the spares in every meal that followed and it comes to something when even the morning’s porridge clears the sinuses and makes your eyes water!

Gabrielle’s complaint is that all that un-gloved preparation left her hands red and burning and had her soaking them in lemon juice, then yoghurt in an effort to provide pain relief. This is no joke, when handling large amounts of chillies, latex surgical gloves are essential.

Blog updates

2010-12-02T16:14:00.003+01:00

Thank you to everyone who took the time to post a comment telling me that they could see the new layout in their browser. Based on what you've said, I'm going to keep it as it is.

As it is very cold outside, I've been exhausting my list-of-good-excuses in order not to have to go outside and engage with my list-of-things-to-do. One of the things I've done is to upload some articles and otherwise bring up to date, my magazine articles in the sidebar on the right. When you click on them, they'll either open or download as a PDF file, depending how you have you computer configured.

Unfortunately, it's 4pm, which is the time to venture outdoors to shut up the chickens, feed the rabbits and make sure the sheep have got enough hay and water. Happily, it's also the time for a cup o' tea, which will be very welcome when I come back indoors. Keep warm !

Rosehips and rosemary in snow

All work and no play …

2010-12-02T11:47:00.021+01:00

We’ve been on holiday. With livestock, it’s not that straightforward to take time off together, in fact, we haven’t had a proper holiday together since our honeymoon three years ago. Gabrielle took charge of the organisation, and a fine job she did too.

Merle and Darrell came last year as volunteers, became friends and have been promoted to house sitters and honorary smallholders. And so, leaving them in charge, we headed off towards Normandy, leaving the autoroute for a more cross country and coastal drive, a relaxing journey punctuated by text messages from my mother.

I must admit to being an Arsenal fan but quite how being obsessively fascinated by a bunch of petulant young millionaires kicking a football around fits with my permaculture principles, I’m at a loss to tell you. Call it an affliction.

Arsenal coach Arsène Wenger

When I’m not able to follow a match on telly, radio, or even via the Internet, my dear mum listens to her radio and texts me as the goals go in. We are trundling along the French countryside when my mobile buzzes. Gabrielle reads the message that Mum is sorry to have taken her eye off the ball but it’s half time already and we are beating Tottenham Hotspur 2 - nil: smiles all round, what a wonderful holiday this is going to be.

I receive three more texts. 2 – 1; 2 – 2; 2 – 3 … oh bugger. Thankfully my disappointment is short lived as we roll into Honfleur.

Gabrielle had booked us a room with a view: we looked out onto the beautiful old harbour. We drank, we ate, we went to the cinema, we visited the French composer Eric Satie’s house (he was clearly mad as a March hare) and, if you think November a curious time to want to take one’s annual holiday, we even had a touch of the Tropics. The movie at the top shows the room at the top of the Satie museum, and the music is the first of his Gnossiennes.

Naturospace is a tropical ecosystem in a building, home to a host of brightly coloured tropical butterflies, some as big as your hand. If you wear glasses, you’ll know what happens next. As I walk in from the cold, through the plastic screen into the Tropics, I get a white out and have to wait a couple of minutes until my specs warm up and the steam clears. There are no moats and no glass walls, they fly where they please and Gabrielle even had one alight on her hand. To keep the ants under control, Chinese quail run around the floor and finches sit in the branches: very permaculture !

Chinese quail

Do you know Magritte’s painting, Ceci n'est pas une pipe? Well, “this is not a shop”. Check out the tarpaulin covering this building under renovation in Honfleur.

After four days we headed back via Bayeux, where we saw the tapestry, had a very English afternoon tea in a very French patisserie and visited the D-Day landings museum before heading home through the sleet.

Thanks once more to Merle and Darrell for making it possible.

Are you having problems with my new blog format ?

2010-11-17T19:39:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will see that I've changed the template of the blog, with a picture of our pond behind the blog and a slightly wider page, which I think makes it prettier and easier to read.

However, it's a new fangled thing, Blogger-in-Draft, and Tim has reported problems seeing it.

If you are using Internet Explorer 6, why? If using Firefox, make sure that you have the latest version. For me, it works in Firefox and Safari but I'll think about changing back if it's a big problem, please let me know.

Timber extraction using heavy horses.

2010-11-17T19:17:00.001+01:00

As owners of a little bit of French woodland (11 acres / 4.5 hectares, to be precise) we are signed up to the Centre Régional de la Propriété Forestière, a wonderful organisation who help, support and advise owners of private woodlands.

They also organise free educational visits and I’ve already been on three this year, learning how to recognise soil types and so chose appropriate trees to plant; how to manage the relationship between woodlands and wildlife such as deer and wild boar; and how to recognise plants that indicate the soil and conditions where they grow.
They run over twenty of these each year but we had just one more marked up on the calendar: débardage à cheval, timber extraction using a heavy horse.

Gabrielle joined me this time, finding the subject matter a touch more interesting than soil analysis. A week or so before, the CRPF send through details of the meeting and directions of how to get there. We met up at 2pm, the hour when France officially re-starts the working day after lunch and then drove in convoy a short way to the wood.

Upon his retirement from farming, the owner had planted up 30 hectares of fields where he’d previously cultivated cereals with 70% sweet chestnut along with American red oak and some local oak and, in a wetter patch, 1 ha of poplar.
The 17 year-old trees were already impressively stocky and due their third thinning. The expert from the CRPF explained that this ambitious plan was made possible by fertile soil and good management. When thinning on an industrial scale, a whole line of trees might be taken out, which allows the large machinery to accomplish the task. Ideally though, the best trees are selected as “keepers”, then the tree nearest to it which is its main competition for nutrients and light is removed, then the next keeper 6 metres away is chosen and the procedure repeated. With this more random pattern of felling, the trees now too large to carry out as poles and the use of vehicles both difficult and undesirable (they compact the soil) the owner turns to one man and his horse.

In our post-modern age, I find it greatly pleasing that there is a real will to retain old country crafts and skills and, more than that, that we are turning to them once more, and for being really useful rather than just nostalgic whimsy. One modern touch: the collar plate is made of carbon fibre, the stuff they build Formula 1 racing cars out of.

After a too-long introduction and a badly-managed question session (“don’t feel obliged to ask yet another inane question, in fact, could everyone please shut up so we can watch the horse go to work”) Loïc Lejosne, aided by trainee Jérémie, attached a tree trunk to Shere Khan’s harness and, with a word of command and a flick of the reins, the tree was dragged away. Only four year’s old, Shere Khan is still a youngster learning the trade and so most of Loïc’s efforts were to try and slow him down so as to pace him for a day’s work.

Everyone loves a horse and it was difficult not to be inspired by such a solidly handsome beast and the fact that Loïc seemed unable to keep a smile off his face as he proudly explained his job, no complaints of burnout, boredom or blues at his workplace!

Gabrielle has told me that the Christmas present she’d like from me is a day’s course learning how to drive a heavy horse and cart.

Winter volunteering.

2010-11-07T19:21:00.011+01:00

Last winter, we had a very successful season working with some great volunteers which has encouraged us to do it all again. We’re offering free accommodation in our cosy cob holiday cottage and hot tasty meals on workdays in exchange for enthusiastic help from couples or single people.

By way of introduction, here is a guest blog, written by Russell and Laura, who visited us last February, deciding to do a hybrid week as volunteers/paying guests to give them more time to explore beautiful Brittany.

Over to Russell …

As we only had a week’s break and wanted to explore the region, we decided to volunteer for just three days. On the first day, we visited Erquy and Cap Ferrel to discover the spectacular rocky coastline and bays, take a walk around Sable d’Or and eat a variety of cheeses, coming back to a cosy evening in front of the woodstove.

Next morning we were up bright and early to harvest woodfuel from Gabrielle's and Stuart's 11 acre woodland. Laura and I collected the logs from where they had been felled, taking them to the track, where Paul, a neighbouring farmer could reverse in his tractor and trailer. With Laura and I working in the wood and Paul and Stuart transporting and off loading at the other end we soon had it all shifted; Gabrielle and Stuart will certainly be warm enough next winter. Our reward that evening was delicious home-reared roast lamb.

The following day we stayed closer to their permaculture smallholding and Stuart and I went off to slash and burn some bramble around the site of their proposed new house. With Stuart using a traditional scythe and me raking it clear we soon amassed a sizable amount for a good bonfire. After half an hour blowing my guts out and Stuart telling me I need more fuel I managed a modest fire that sparked and crackled away. It was only then when I looked over my shoulder to see that I wasn’t the only firestarter in the village. Plumes of smoke rose behind the chicken shed. I ran over only to see my sweet girlfriend standing over a blazing strawberry bed with matches in hand and pyromania in her eyes; I’d been out done. The short of it was that Laura and Gabrielle were burning the leaves off the plants which removes any diseased leaves and kills pests, all without harming the plant itself. I went back to my smouldering pile of embarrassment, dumped all the brambles on and finally got a blaze to be proud of.

Stuart wanted to superimpose a CAD image of their future hemp and lime house over a photo of the site for the planning application. To do this we had to mark a level height on the 4 canes that stuck in the ground, marking the 4 corners of the house. The technique used was rather intriguing and a very exciting opportunity for Laura and I to learn about using a bunyip level, a long piece of transparent tubing filled with water which is a very easy method of finding similar levels over ground. We were amazed how simple and effective it was [see here and here for the what, how and why of bunyip levels].

Our final day volunteering was a bit wetter than most, but Stuart must have realised the affect of the weather on a man’s soul and spent no time at all getting me to erect some stock fencing, getting me warm and spirited. Anyone who tells me that permaculture with animals is low labour needs to come and try putting a hundred odd posts into the ground to keep their livestock in! Stuart has done for all three of his sheep fields. It was quite a work out knocking just 10 in, but it was a great thing to do; I’ll never look at stock fencing again without feeling some of the pain. Later that day we finished constructing a sheep shelter made from reclaimed materials for the sheep to gather in during harsher weather.

The experience was uplifting and we want to thank Gabrielle and Stuart again for a wonderful time. It has inspired us to consider further volunteering and to start to think seriously about the way we want to live in the future.

Photos show Russell banging in a fencepost; creating a datum point to superimpose an image of our house on this plot; Stuart and Russell standing proudly by a finished sheep shelter and Laura serving up a rice timballo (cooked for us following several phone calls to "Mama" in Italy to get the recipe right).

Follow this link if you fancy volunteering yourself.

Pork Vindaloo and lard are good for you !

2010-11-02T20:20:00.006+01:00

Continuing my tale of how we’re learning, year-on-year, to process more and more of our pigs, which is how it should be. Because we are overwhelmed in porkiness when the carcasses come back from the abattoir we have been happy to pass on the bits we don’t know what to do with to our neighbour, the venerable Annick and her posse of cats plus scrappy dog Hugo.

Little by little though, we are reclaiming the bits we couldn’t cope with (I’m talking metaphorically, don’t think I’m knocking on her door asking for our scraps back!) and learning what to do with trotters, heads and the fat.

The lard has been a revelation. It seems that this rendered pig fat is having a renaissance. Try Googling “is lard good for you?” or, for the glass-half-empty pessimists amongst you, “is lard bad for you?”, to find out the new truth. From a sustainability point of view—both ecologic and economic—why buy vegetable oil produced far away, when we can use our very own pig fat, especially now that it’s not so very bad for you? And there is nothing better for flaky, tasty piecrusts!

The head has always been problematic; we tried making brawn one time and didn’t like the result. French, English and American butchers have different ways of dividing the carcass and the French cut off the gorge, everything below the jaw. Bernard, our boucher de campagne told us that we shouldn’t add it to the sausage meat because of all the (lymph) glands but didn’t explain why, nor suggest what we could do with it otherwise. Rather than go in the bucket for Annick’s cats and dog, Gabrielle patiently got to work with a sharp butcher’s knife and removed the glands and a lot of fat to leave an impressive amount of still quite fatty pork. A slow cook would render more of the fat off.

We’ve found Anjum Anand cookbooks to be very reliable, i.e., you follow her recipes and end up with something that you’d be pleased to be served in a restaurant. Her Pork Vindaloo (from Anjum’s New Indian) is a world away from the macho too-hot curries served up in British restaurants. Apparently, the colonising Portuguese introduced their Goan subjects to Carne de Vinha d’Alhos, a dish of meat with wine and garlic. The Goans adapted this, adding loads of spices and using vinegar instead of wine to create vindaloo. For the Portuguese and then the Goans, pork would be traditional and it was the perfect way to use our reclaimed meat. The vinegar and spice mix gives a distinctive flavour and, if you fancy making one, don’t feel at all obliged to go too hot with the chillies.

Another change this year, was the treatment of the leg we’re hoping to turn into Parma-style ham. We’ve tried both dry salt and brine and this year, we used a cleansing brine before immersing the pieces in the curing brine. (Photo shows a floating brine meter indicating the saltiness.) We also tried injecting (a slightly weaker) brine into the femoral artery, to get the cure right into the centre of the leg so making the flavour more even (this is called brine pumping). As usual, the instructions were either vague or ambiguous and I ended up on the phone to our expert physiotherapist friend Alan to get some guidance as to identify the artery from the vein. It seems logical now that he’s explained it: blood is pumped round the body under pressure, so the artery is the more rigid tube of the two. From our animal first aid box I took a new syringe, the end of which was a tight fit into the artery.

After three weeks in the brine, a day drying off in the breeze, then a week in the fridge to equalise and another day drying off in the breeze, it is now hanging up in our neighbours chimney for a smoke, another first for us. It’ll be several months before I can report on the result but hopefully it’ll be an improvement on last year’s attempt.

Soon: a call for winter volunteers and the start of the permaculture design plan for our forest garden.

A long day when just about everything went wrong …

2010-10-24T20:52:00.009+02:00

Mélanie and Bruno are autoconstructeurs, they have decided to build their own house, which takes a lot of courage, a lot of effort and a lot of learning and organisation. They’ve designed their own house along “bio-climatique" lines, so that its compact design and orientation towards the sun, along with high levels of insulation and good internal mass, means that its heating needs will be minimal. And it has a toiture végétale, a turf, green or living roof.

A lot of this stuff is relatively new to the building industry, thus they’re pioneers, often having to work out how to bolt it all together as they build it. Bruno and I have the same book Planting Green Roofs and Living Walls / Toits et murs végétaux but, in either language, whilst being long on general principles and lovely photos it is frustratingly (and litigation-avoidingly ?) short of accurate construction detail.

From the inside out, their roof has Fermacell boards nailed onto joists deep enough to slot in a straw-bale as insulation, with a breathable sarking board, then an air gap to allow moisture that escapes this breathing roof to exit below the waterproof layer. On top of wooden spacers are nailed sheets of OSB/Stirling board, which provides a structural surface over which is laid a geotextile then the EPDM “pond liner” membrane, then substrate and finally, beautiful, drought-resistant sedum plants.

No sooner had Bruno fixed the Stirling board with a “why-use-only-one-nail-when-it’s-this-easy” nail gun, than a chap who’s built straw houses and green roofs took a look at it, sucked through his teeth and pronounced the air gap insufficient. Bruno had decided to saw through the well-fixed boards, to add some more wooden spacers and refit 950 €uros’ worth of new board. I’m a man that easily panics when faced with this sort of crisis, unless the crisis belongs to somebody else. I can then become usefully calm and supportive. I also think that I project my fears onto such a situation (i.e., imagining how it would be if I woke up to discover that it was actually my problem) which is further incentive to get involved. Don’t worry, I said, between us, and using my British-made nail puller, we can remove the boards, add the spacer and nail them back on again. It took a fair amount of time and a lot of effort but that is what we did. Wouldn’t you think, after such a victory, that they deserved a break?

After an unfeasibly dry summer, autumn weather rained off the first two attempts to fix a date. Having left the tarp off for a day to allow the boards to dry, a heavy dew left them worryingly damp. But then the expert help (Jerome, the supplier of the materials) was late to arrive and it was very blowy, neither good for the nerves but nevertheless helping to dry the roof.

When we rolled the membrane out to cut it to size, we realised that Jerome had only ordered half the EPDM we needed … oops. Then there was an issue with the height of the flue pipe from their woodstove, with more delays, measuring, negotiation and worrying, during which, I drove Jerome to the tractor dealers who were going to rent us a fork-lift to lift the heavy roll of membrane onto the roof.

After finishing a very long phone conversation, Mr Hervé apologised that he had had to lend it out to a farmer whose own had broken down and was sorry that he hadn’t informed Bruno as he didn’t have his phone number. As we returned, the stove guy was leaving. That was before we’d discovered that the junction between two pipes meant that the collar didn’t fit and the stove guy had to be called up again, reluctantly agreeing to reappear after lunch. It was fast becoming one of those days when you want to return to bed, roll up into the foetal position, pull the covers over your head and hope it all goes away.

Perhaps I exaggerate. The day finished late with one (of two) roofs watertight—a significant step forward—but leaving Bruno physically and emotionally exhausted. Where do we find our hero at the end of such a testing day? Howling at the moon? kicking empty boxes around the worksite in frustration? drowning his sorrows with cold bottles of Stella Artois? None of these: I returned having popped home to do the evening rounds of our animals to find him reading a bedtime story to Liam and Jeanne. I think some sort of medal is in order!

A Feast of Mushrooms …

2010-10-18T19:01:00.011+02:00

I promised a mushroom recipe last blog and, as if to order, our sycamore stumps have given us first fruit, over a kilo (2 lbs) of oyster mushrooms.

In addition, our six-year-old neighbour Camille has been excitedly keeping us up to date with fungal developments on the field that adjoins her garden, a reliable source of field, fairy ring and parasol mushrooms (lucky us!) The thing is: what to do with them all. Frying them in butter and serving them on a slice of toast is always delicious but I wanted to explore other possibilities.

What better guide than Jane Grigson’s The Mushroom Feast with over 250 recipes? And what better person to buy me the book than my vegetarian stepdaughter, Christina? all the more fun as she’s not actually that keen on mushrooms. The book was bought as a challenge to see if I could convince her that mushrooms can be palatable, perhaps even tasty.

With cultivated oyster mushrooms and a handful of field mushrooms at my disposal, I poured a glass of vin blanc as aperitif and perused Grigson’s book.
Mushroom paste:
You’ll need some chopped onion, butter and oil, chopped bacon/lardons, chopped tomatoes, sliced mushrooms, a beaten egg, salt and cayenne pepper.
The method:
Brown the onion in butter, then add the bacon, toms and mushrooms. Once well cooked, liquidise. Mix in the egg and cook over a low heat until the mixture thickens (don’t let it boil). Season with salt and cayenne, tasting as you go.
To serve:
Spread generously on a slice of toast, or slice a baguette on the slant and dob a bit on each piece. Somewhat overwhelmed with the amount we produced, Gabrielle has also used it as a layer in the vegetarian lasagne we’re going to eat tonight.

In the hope of encouraging edible mushrooms, I’ve been collecting both field and parasol mushrooms and them chopping up and liquidising them with some water, then pouring this around the smallholding. (Just use one type of mushroom at each attempt). It’ll be a while but I’ll tell you if it works.

Photos top to bottom: fungus as food, oyster mushrooms cultivated on a sycamore stump, a baby, then adult, then chopped, then liquidised parasol mushroom.

Soon … more recipes with a porky vindaloo and the tale of a long day when everything went wrong for poor Bruno and Mélanie when trying to install their green roof.

Meat – A Benign Extravagance ?

2010-10-10T18:58:00.013+02:00

Back in 2002, whilst discussing “the sharp rise in the number of the world’s livestock, and the connection between their consumption of grain and human malnutrition”, George Monbiot, “concluded that veganism ‘is the only ethical response to what is arguably the world’s most urgent social justice issue.’” In his review of Simon Fairlie’s new book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance, he now “no longer believe[s] that the only ethical response is to stop eating meat.”

I’ve read it cover to cover and now lent it to our friend Kristen to read; I thoroughly recommend it. You’ll find Fairlie’s views honest and balanced, whether you are omnivore, vegetarian or vegan. You can get a flavour of it for free by reading online this article in the current edition of Permaculture Magazine.

For us, it’s that moment when all our year’s pork arrives in one day. This is the fourth year that we’ve kept our own pigs and we’ve grown in experience in their care and feeding and also in coping with 190 kg (420 lbs) of pork when it comes back from the abattoir. We had female pigs this year, which we now know put on proportionally less fat than the castrated males we’ve had before. That and increasing experience means that these are the first pigs we haven’t overfed (a very easy task with a pig!)

We asked Bernard (on the left) retired boucher de campagne (countryside butcher) to come and help with the butchery and Mélanie (below, on the left) to help Gabrielle with mincing and bagging. Bernard works very fast, so I had to ask him to slow down on occasions so that I could learn some of his techniques. When I asked him how it is he is so accurate with multiple blows of the cleaver, he explained that as a young apprentice, when there was a quiet moment in the butchers, his boss would mark pencil lines on a small stick of wood and get him to practice on that. I’m afraid that I usually hit a slightly different place with each blow so that by the time I’ve cut my chop free I don’t so much need a frying pan as a toast rack!

The more I read on curing pork, the more variations on a theme I find and there comes a time to stick the tail on the donkey (or should that the pig in the brine?) and work out our salty strategy. This time, we’ve bought a ready mixed salt cure with a touch of saltpetre in it and added nothing more than Demerara sugar and black pepper. We divided a whole middle into belly and loin and each of those into two. The belly had 5 days in the dry cure and the thicker loin 7. The pieces then stay in a fridge for a week to “equalise” which is (apparently) when the cure travels through the meat (so as to avoid salty edges and porky interiors, I guess) and then a further week air-drying.

At the same time, one back leg is in a brine solution to make Parma-style ham and this also needs to be maintained at fridge temperature. All very well but we don’t have a fridge big enough so I converted an old freezer that we were given into a sort-of-fridge by using a max/min thermometer and a electrical timer (the sort you use to put a light on at a certain hour). Through trial and error I got the temperature in the makeshift fridge to oscillate between 2 and 4ºC.

It’s only right that we should try and use as much of the animal as possible, so this year we’ve rendered the flare fat to make lard and done something spicily different with the heads, an item we’ve struggled with in the past.

Post Script : Click on the comments below to read some interesting stuff, links and book recommendations posted by readers and fellow bloggers.

Autumn’s definitely here …

2010-10-02T15:23:00.005+02:00

Blogging is enough for me. I don’t really understand Twitter but if I was about to “twit” (twoo?) I would say, “grey day drizzle … blogging excuse to stay inside … cooking lunch excuse not to blog … just fried pigs’ brains with sage leaves ’n capers, served on toast rubbed with garlic and drizzled with olive oil … broke no-alcohol-day resolution to wash it down with cold Sauvignon … reflect that life in autumnal French countryside not too bad."

The weather has taken a sudden change. After the driest of springs and summers, it’s a pleasure to see the rain again and timely after we’ve re-sown the back field. The temperature has dropped and that gave us enough of an excuse to light the first of the season’s homely fires in our wood stove, although we overdid it the other evening and ended up with windows and doors open, trying to shed a bit of excess heat. A few more warm days would be welcome to help establish the pasture seedlings before winter.

Autumn is mushroom season, and we’ve had our first meal of wild mushrooms. In Mycelium Running, Paul Stamets tells us that, “although we notice mushrooms when they pop up, their sudden appearance is the completion of cellular events largely hidden from view—until the inquisitive mycophile digs deeper.” So, if we were to probe under the old oak tree at the side of our house, we would find the mycelium of the shaggy inkcap mushroom, Coprinus comatus. When the conditions are right, it is this mushroom which pops its head above the parapet … only to suffer the indignity of being felled by my trusty (rusty?) Opinel and thrown into a frying pan with some beaten eggs. Free, wild, mushroom omelette. Left in place, these mushrooms “auto-deliquesce” into an inky mess.

It’s thus also time to take the wraps (black plastic bin liners) off the sycamore stumps in our woods that we inoculated with the spawn of oyster mushrooms last winter. As you can see, the mycelium (white fungus-y stuff) has spread throughout the stump and is ready to begin fruiting soon, supplying us with edible mushrooms while it slowly eats the stumps over the next few years. The trick is to keep the wood host from drying out—something that’s taken us a few attempts to learn—hence the bin liners. I’ll post pictures of our first crop, watch this space.

(not quite) Permaculture Pasture Improvement: Part 2

2010-09-19T18:30:00.010+02:00

It was way back in the beginning of April when I posted Part 1 and promised to “report how the new grass fares.” Well, I didn’t report and the grass didn’t fare but, for a change, it’s not my fault; I blame Iceland!

To recap and then cut the rest of a long story short: Last year’s pigs went to slaughter at the end of November. It was way too late to sow grass. As we didn’t want the soil to be bare over winter, our farming neighbour Paul suggested trying oats. We were even a touch too late for that and it didn’t get away (as his had done) but provided plenty of free food to wild birds and our roaming flock of chickens.

There was nothing else to do other than be patient and await a sun-warmed soil sometime in spring to get our chance to sow grass. We had a longer-than-usual winter and it was April before we had the conditions we needed. We sowed. It rained. The seeds germinated. Then we had a long and unexpected dry spell. The monthly average is 54 mm of rain (just over 2 inches) but we only had 16 in our pluviomètre, 12 of which fell on one day, with a rain gap of 25 dry days. So those tiny germinated seeds never got another drop of rain and died. I heard on BBC Radio 4 (therefore it must be true!) that this was due to the Icelandic volcano: all that material spewed out was creating a high pressure that was keeping rain-bearing low pressure systems away from Europe.

Now the oats sown back in November that hadn’t got away, had been turned in by the harrowing and rolling while sowing the doomed grass seed. And for some reason, they profited from the gap created by the grass no-show and we ended up with a crop of oats. Not at all what we planned but useful nevertheless as I cropped that petit à petit with my scythe and fed it to our sheep and pigs who were on very dry pasture due to a dry summer (not Iceland this time but the jet stream not functioning correctly)

This year, our pigs are in a different paddock and arrived here earlier, so are about to leave us. I wanted to plough and re-seed their paddock and also hoped to do the large field but was trying to balance that with the winter pasture needs of our sheep. So, having just facilitated the departure of some English guests at our neighbour’s gite, I accepted the offer of a cup of coffee from Paul and Christiane and we talked grass. A good two months earlier than last year and still it was apparently “presque” too late to sow grass, another two weeks was definitely not on. Pondering this later, I decided to ask Paul to help me re-sow the big field. I’ve used some poultry netting to fence off another area and the sheep can also make use of the pig paddock, which I’ll tackle in spring.

This is where any permacultural purists might disagree with my use of industrial pig poo and the plough. The use of the plough is generally thought to be a permaculture no-no due the loss by oxidization of organic matter. However, our soil is heavy clay and really needs to be broken up. Perhaps we could have achieved that with a sub-soiler but we also need a fine tilth to sow the tiny grass seeds, so Paul carefully manoeuvred his very big tractor around our very small (in modern agricultural terms) field. The first thing he did though, was to spray the field with lisier a slurry of pig excrement from his farm. As with many things, in industrial quantities it can become a pollutant. We needed to add some sort of fertility, don’t want to buy and apply chemical fertilisers and don’t have enough animal manure of our own to add, so a one-off application seemed the pragmatic thing to do.

The sequence of events was:
• Pig poo
• Rotating harrow (to bread up turfs)
• Plough
• Harrow (now we had a fine tilth)
• Hand sow (half the amount across, the other half side-to-side)
• Harrow (a lighter one towed behind the old Massey to just bury the seeds)
• Roller (to press the seeds into contact with the soil)
• Beer.
It’s due to rain on Thursday and we’ll be hoping for a few more warm days to germinate the seed. The plants should get away better in spring, having had the opportunity to establish themselves before winter takes hold.

I had some seed left over from the bag I bought from the German lady (see Part 1) and I have also a “Herbal” Dual Purpose Four Year Ley from
Cotswold Grass Seeds. Mixed together, what I sowed was:
several varieties of ryegrasses, fescues and clovers, along with cocksfoot, meadow grass, Timothy grass, ribgrass, meadow foxtail, golden oat grass, sainfoin, birdsfoot trefoil, black medick, chicory, burnet, yarrow and sheep’s parsley. If all goes to plan, we’re looking forward to an attractive field with a better biodiversity and very happy sheep.

STOP PRESS : Please click below and have a read of the comments, particularly the last two. Alan and Val have taken us to task about our approach. We've another paddock to re-sow after the pigs leave us next Monday, which is an ideal opportunity to try a different and altogether more permaculture approach to improving the pasture.

Eco-building: Swallows and Humans

2010-09-13T22:17:00.009+02:00

We have something to celebrate. On Friday, we went to our mairie
to pick up our permis de construire (planning permission) for our future eco-house. The plans had been finished for some time but actually putting in the application had stayed on my “list-of-things-to-do” for far too long. If you could see the five-part form, each part self-carbonated five times, with all manner of necessary items to furnish, you’d be sympathetic towards my procrastination.

As we walked into the porch of the mairie, I noticed a pile of bird shit by the door. Knowing all about Newton and falling apples, I looked upwards to discover two young swallows peering at me over the edge of their nest. With all the complication of our own application, it was ironic that Monsieur and Madame Hirondelle had simply turned up, and at the very seat of local government mind, with mouthfuls of wet clay and built their summer home with no hint of planning permission.

As you can see from the close up at top, their home is built from mud, reinforced with natural fibres, which is not a lot different from the house our friends Mélanie and Bruno are currently building.
The photos show Botmobil volunteers Cécile and Thibault squeezing a straw bale into position and then Fabrice, the professional, showing us amateurs how to apply an earth “body coat” render over straw bales that already had a coating of mud slurry as a primer.

This thick layer will dry off over a few months and receive the finishing coat next spring. It really is good fun slapping on the mud mix and massaging it into place with one’s hands. Fact one: lime and cement will dry and burn your skin; Fact 2: expensive skin products are based on clay; so spending a day mud plastering by hand left us all with very clean and very soft hands, which is not at all bad for a building site ☻

Everything but the kitchen sink …

2010-09-04T21:12:00.006+02:00

When you pack for a holiday, do you pack light or do you take a belt-and-braces approach and pack everything but the kitchen sink? Richard and Leigh arrived the other week in their very authentic (for rural France, that is) Citroën C15 van for their third stay in our holiday cottage. They win this year’s award for the strangest thing to bring on holiday (please imagine drums rolling for full theatrical effect): a reupholstered chair.

I’ve previously explained how I came by this venerable yet tired wooden armchair for a fiver and how Richard offered to restore its dignity, taking it away with them in the same loyal van last summer. He’s emailed me photos to show me the progress of his skilful work, including a recent one showing the finished article in his workshop.

The work is immaculate, the chair regal and the bill for materials a fraction of what it would have been to put it into a shop to have it done. Generous chap, he wouldn’t accept anything for his time, so we plied them both with good food and wine !

If you fancy staying on our permaculture smallholding for a week, please don’t feel obliged to bring a reupholstered chair with you … a deckchair or small stool will suffice ☺

Oh … Bugger !

2010-08-27T22:31:00.008+02:00

I’m thinking of renaming this blog. Something like “Cock-ups are Us” or even “Yet Another Balls Up” or perhaps just
“Oh … Bugger !” I’ve never claimed we were permaculture experts and I’ve even championed the idea that reading about our stumbling progress is a reassuring antidote to the modern fascination with garrulous, self-assured, TV-celeb experts. I have a double whammy to report today, a his and hers of underachievement.

I’ll start with Gabrielle’s: it’s that time of year when the Kilner jars are taken off the shelves ready to store Summer produce for the following year. Tomatoes, for example, are cooked and then passed through a moulin à légumes, then put into clean jars, new sealing rings added and the lids clipped down. Gabrielle then boils these for twenty minutes to sterilise (pasteurise?) jar and contents. The high temperature forces steam past the seals, so that, once cool again, a vacuum is created and the jars sealed as tight as a very tight thing.

So tomato, so good. We also have a glut of courgettes, which is not so surprising: I think anybody who grows vegetables will have loads of this easy-to-grow vegetable. Gabrielle fried off some onions, then added chopped courgettes and sweated them down before whizzing them to create a courgette pulp to be stored for winter consumption as soup, etc.

Within a day or so, hissing was heard from the Kilner jars containing the courgettes and they were leaking. Now you’d think that jars clamped hard tight with a new sealing ring would need a fair old pressure to hiss, wouldn’t you? It didn’t occur to me though, and I flipped the clip (if the lid stays on by suction, all is well) and the, by now, fermented courgette pulp exploded all over the wine rack and some shelves. Note to self: this sort of foolhardy investigation is best done in an outside environment, like Salisbury Plain, for example.

So we now partially understand, less acidic foods (like courgettes in relation to tomatoes, for example) apparently need higher temperatures in pressure-cooking equipment or longer boiling to safely preserve them. And now to my own faux pas.

We were in the workshop/storage room downstairs a couple of days ago—where the vaults for the compost toilet are—when Gabrielle pointed out a dark brown wet leak at one of the corners … oh, bugger! Unusually, i.e., completely out of character, I was amazingly calm about the whole smelly affair, philosophising that all pioneers encounter teething problems, that this experience would lead me to a deeper understanding, etc. We have two problems here, one is that there shouldn’t be that much urine there anyway, so the urine-separation plate needs some fine tuning and the other, the leak!

It was surprising as I’d used solid concrete blocks, parpaing plein, mortar with a waterproofing additive and special render made for waterproofing underground cellars and foundations. I had to empty the compost chamber (poo-ey!) and borrow a power hose to clean it all off, which was also the ideal tool to find the tiny leak. All is now sorted, with enough special waterproofing render applied to induce the Titanic to bob to the surface. Urine separation has been tweaked and we’ll see how we go. I will post details of the construction soon but why anyone would want to build one after reading this, goodness only knows.

Stop Press: Beetle Identified!

2010-08-15T12:33:00.007+02:00

The Internet comes up trumps again. No sooner had I posted yesterdays blog than our Somerset friend Val,no doubt with an input from countryside specialist hubby Pete, posted a comment suggesting that our beetle is a longhorn.

I also went hunting around the Web and found an identification service offered by the British Natural History Museum where I posted my queries and got this response. An American site, What’s That Bug, also replied to our request for help. “Your beetle is a Longhorned Borer Beetle or Longicorn in the Family Cerambycidae. We located a French website of longicornes and we believe your beetle is Corymbia rubra. [They have another page on the Lepturnae subfamily .]”

They continue: “The Garden Safari website discusses the sexual dimorphism of the species, and that indicates the coloration of your specimen makes her female. They indicate: ‘With the majority of beetle species the male and the female are almost identical. In a few exceptions, however, there are striking differences between the two genders. This is the case with Corymbia rubra, a species quite common on flowers in the gardens. The male is slender, brownish and has a black neck shield [protonum]. It seldomly reaches a length of over 15 mm. The female is bigger and more plump, reaching some 20 mm in length regularly. Her body is reddish, including the neck shield. Actually they do look like two completely different species! This particular species is very rare in the UK because the plants the larvae feed on are not indigenous in Britain. It is still often referred to by either of its former scientific names Leptura rubra or Stictoleptura rubra.’”

Accepting that there are likely to be variations on the theme, I reckon our beetle is …
Kingdom: Animalae
Phylum: Arthropoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Coleoptera (beetles!)
Family: Cerambycidae (long horns)
Genus: Corymbia
Species: Rubra

i.e., a female Corymbia rubra (also known as Stictoleptura rubra)
… and this particular one’s called “Doris”!

Meet the wildlife:

2010-08-14T18:00:00.011+02:00

A young hedgehog recently paid us a visit: a rare pleasure to see this usually nocturnal creature. It was slowly ambling along open pasture, quite the smallest hedgehog I’ve ever seen. It has been very dry recently, so we thought it a good idea to offer it a saucer of water (we’ve read that milk can give them diarrhoea) and a snack. It tucked into the cat biscuits, had a good slurp and then turned around and wandered off.

A young boy's interest in small crawling things seems not to extend much further than a wish to squash them. Horrible things. (Young boys, that is). Age and circumstance has made this particular boy look on these fascinating creatures in a new light. They seem to be big enough and slow enough for me to get a good look at, so that I can have a stab at identifying them. Whilst processing some firewood the other day, we came across this orange version.

My pocket-sized Collins gem guide to Insects got me the Cardinal Beetle and I thought I had my man (or lady?) but, on closer examination, there are a couple of differences. Considering that there are as many, and maybe more than 350,000 different species of beetle, a couple of differences is sure to mean a different Latin name. The lower legs of our one are orange and the hard front wings—elytra—don’t get wider towards the rear as do those of a cardinal beetle. If you are an expert coleopterist or otherwise know what our beastie is, please tell us by posting a comment.

And lastly, not so much wildlife as we deliberately introduced six roach into our wildlife pond back in April. No time has been lost in the watery world of fishy friendships as we are proud parents of about a thousand fry. They seem to be interested in Gabrielle’s feet and Gabrielle is equally interested in their piscatorial pedicure. If it works, we’ll offer it as an additional service to our holidaymakers, much like goat massage we used to offer.

Compost toilets

2010-08-06T00:49:00.008+02:00

I have been remiss in my blogging recently as I’ve been almost totally absorbed in a seemingly never-ending project to retrofit a deluxe compost toilet inside our house.
Our département (Côtes d’Armor) only allows grey water treatment using plants if the house has a dry toilet. Several of our younger French eco-minded friends have toilettes sèches that consist of a box with a toilet seat and a stainless steel bucket beneath (hidden by a curtain or door). This needs to be taken outside and emptied every few days.

Hmmm: it might do for camping but I’m not so sure other visitors to the house (like our mum’s for example!) would like to be so “involved” with the toilet. When on a course at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Wales, I heard the term “porcelain standard” and this is exactly what I’m talking about: i.e., how close does an alternative come to the reassuring familiarity of a white flushing toilet. We live on the first floor of our converted barn and the law of probability strongly suggests that it would only be a matter of time before I managed to trip and throw a bucket full of shite the length of the stairs. No, we wanted something more sophisticated.

I’m sure Meryl Streep would approve of our toilet as it’s straight Out of Africa: a long-drop pit latrine; a VIP toilet (ventilated, improved pit latrine) or a twin-vault composting toilet with urine separation. Whatever you want to call it, this is the cutting edge of dry toilet technology which we’ve designed and painstakingly constructed over some considerable time with the invaluable help of an expert on dry toilets, Andy Warren of NATSOL.

If you remember the song “There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza …” you’ll realise that one desired action implies a whole host of knock-on necessities. We needed to put the toilet where the shower was and then wanted to put the shower where the basin was, so the basin needed to go where the heater was and, to make this all fit, I needed to move a stud wall and pinch a bit out of the adjoining guest bedroom. Over the next few blogs, I’ll detail the eco-refit of our bathroom and although we’re really happy with the end result, I’ll be honest enough to tell you of a few things that we’re less that convinced by.
(Click on the photos for their original sources, I'll use my own next time !)

2010-07-24T19:12:00.007+02:00

In the meadow - what in the meadow?
Bluebells, buttercups, meadowsweet,
And fairy rings for the children's feet …
Christina Georgia Rossetti 1893.

After the earthmoving for the grey water treatment system had been completed, we were left with a patch of disturbed land to plant up. It’s a relatively uninteresting place that has never lent itself to be planted with vegetables, nor fenced for pasture.

During the site survey part of our original permaculture design process we obtained some old photos from the previous owner and you can see that the level of the land was a lot lower; it was an area over which heavy farm machinery had been driven and parked. Over time, and before we moved in, this had been filled in with what seems to be exclusively subsoil; the recent works haven’t improved that.

This presents us with two options: either we spend a lot of effort and energy in improving the soil or we find something that can cope with poor soil. Permaculture eyes might look on a soggy bit of field as an opportunity for growing willow rather than a drainage problem but these sorts of “solutions” aren’t always convenient. Rather than being slaves to dogma, we vote for permacultural pragmatism.

That said, the permacultural solution did suit us in this instance. Wild flowers love poor soil! I found this counterintuitive at first but I’ve since learnt that if the soil is rich, the grasses get going and swamp the wildflowers. Poor conditions inhibit the grasses and allow the wildflowers an opportunity to make hay.

I got into the rubbish soil with my broad fork then used a borrowed rotovator to smash up the hard clay into something resembling a tilth to sow the tiny seeds in. Neighbour Alan suggested his more powerful rotovator, an offer I accepted on the condition that he came too! Using broad fork, rotovator-with-helpful-neighbour and garden rake made me dream of owning a mini-digger along with a small tractor with several attachments. We sowed seed bought from Emorsgate Seeds using a plastic hand-wound seeder/spreader.

The result is delightful. Insect life has increased enormously and we hope that that might have a knock-on effect for our polytunnel and potager: by increasing the population of “good” insects that will eat more of the “bad’ insects that attack Gabrielle’s un-chemically-protected veggies. A splash of bright colours, no need to mow, we’re convinced and will expand the flower meadow this winter.

If you’re interested, this is the mix of flowers we’ve sown:
Wild Flowers:
Achillea millefolium - Yarrow
Agrostemma githago - Corn Cockle
Anthemis arvensis - Corn Chamomile
Centaurea cyanus - Cornflower
Centaurea nigra - Common Knapweed
Chrysanthemum segetum (Glebionis segetum) - Corn Marigold
Galium verum - Lady's Bedstraw
Geranium pratense - Meadow Cranesbill
Knautia arvensis - Field Scabious
Leontodon hispidus - Rough Hawkbit
Leucanthemum vulgare - Oxeye Daisy
Lotus corniculatus - Birdsfoot Trefoil
Lychnis flos-cuculi (Silene flos-cuculi) - Ragged Robin
Malva moschata - Musk Mallow
Papaver rhoeas - Common Poppy
Plantago lanceolata - Ribwort Plantain
Plantago media - Hoary Plantain
Primula veris - Cowslip
Prunella vulgaris - Selfheal
Ranunculus acris - Meadow Buttercup
Rhinanthus minor - Yellow Rattle
Rumex acetosa - Common Sorrel
Silaum silaus - Pepper Saxifrage
Silene vulgaris - Bladder Campion
Stachys officinalis (Betonica officinalis) - Betony
Trifolium pratense - Wild Red Clover
Grasses:
Agrostis capillaris - Common Bent
Alopecurus pratensis - Meadow Foxtail (w)
Anthoxanthum odoratum - Sweet Vernal-grass (w)
Briza media - Quaking Grass (w)
Cynosurus cristatus - Crested Dogstail
Festuca ovina - Sheep's Fescue
Festuca rubra ssp. juncea - Slender-creeping Red-fescue
Phleum bertolonii - Smaller Cat's-tail
Trisetum flavescens - Yellow Oat-grass (w)

How to make “hork” or “pam” from your pigs.

2010-07-10T21:28:00.005+02:00

One learns from one’s mistakes, a process that is illuminating yet uncomfortable. In France, on apprend en faisant des erreurs, which is precisely the same thing but is often shortened simply to on apprend en faisant, which I feel is all together more sympathetic to the poor pioneer, simply saying that “one learns in the doing”. All manor of important people have something to say on the matter : James Joyce says eloquently and charitably that, “mistakes are the portals of discovery”; for Oscar Wilde, “experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes” and Sophia Loren suggests that, “mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.” So we are in good company.

So what did I do wrong ? Our three hams have not cured and air-dried as we’d hoped into Parma-style ham. Having been suspended undercover but out in the open air for nearly six months, I shaved off some slithers from the end to see what it was like. It wasn’t Parma ham. The meat was certainly dry but rather sweet and almost completely lacking in salt. I delved deep into the leg with my butcher’s knife to find that the meat hadn’t got the hard texture of dried ham. It was raw meat. It certainly smelt OK, which as a modern chap brought up with fridges, freezers and consume-by dates seems astonishing for a lump of pork that’s been hanging up outside for so long. Whatever has happened?

I posted a query on the River Cottage Community pages and thanks to some helpful replies, I think I know what went wrong. In short, we had frozen the legs before unfreezing them and putting them in brine for a month. The cells in the meat are changed during the freezing and thawing process and that has prevented the meat taking up the salt cure. It had, however, cured round the edges enough so as to seal in the meat and keep it fresh.

The story so far: four years ago, we cured our first dry ham by packing the leg in dry salt for several weeks (time according to the weight) that worked a treat. The following year, we did the same but were bitterly disappointed when we opened the wooden box after a month to find the leg had gone rotten (we think that the salt wasn’t dry enough). The solution (deliberate pun!) was to put the next leg in brine. We figured that the brine would eliminate all air and get into all the nooks and crannies; that worked a treat too. But why freeze the meat? It was more convenient for us: we had vegetarian house-sitters during a Christmas trip to see ageing parents. And we habitually take small pieces of loin or belly out of the freezer to cure to make bacon and that has always worked, which kind of suggested that freezing wouldn’t be a problem.

Now that I’d investigated our un-cooked ham pretty extensively with a butcher’s knife, what should we do with the meat. We boiled a portion to see if we had ham, which is the precise moment we discovered a new meat product. The meat, boiled, was not ham but sufficient salt had got in, having a partial curing effect, so it wasn’t pork, neither! perhaps “hork” or even “pam”.

We’ve since used some of the meat in our World-beating Spaghetti Bolognaise sauce. We added no salt but the cure already there made the dish a touch too salty: not inedible, just enough to give one a thirst for some more Chianti. And the rest, we turned into chorizo (which we’ve had a lot of success with) and a garlic salami, for the very first time.

To come back to how one learns from one’s mistakes … allegedly. Our powerful, industrial catering mincer has a neck too deep for your fingers to get into trouble. But the plastic plunger falls annoying just short, leaving a bit of meat begging to be pushed in with the end of a wooden spoon … oops! And this is the second time I’ve done this. And if you want any advice on how to take a good photo, checkout my best effort at the top.