Tag Archives: lettuce

Monday 5th March 2012 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday about the snow.

At about 15:30 this afternoon the heavens opened and for a couple of minutes we had a snowstorm.

Not totally unexpected either, because between about 14:00 and 15:00 the temperature dropped from 8.3°C to 4.1°C – quite a dramatic fall in temperature in such a short space of time – and it carried on dropping too.

Having spent much of the morning doing computer things, I went out to move these tree stumps that are in the way of where I want to put the compost bins. But rather than spending all of the time moving the stumps, I spent much of that time taking the handle out of an old abandoned spade to put in the garden fork.

That’s another tool handle broken – I’ve lost count of how many just recently. I’ve no idea what’s causing them all to pack in.

However, when I was at Bricomarche the other day I noticed a pile of tool handles. I shall have to go and mortgage my life away.

“But why did it take so long to change a tool handle?” I hear you say.

Probably because the handle in the spade was well stuck in and in the end it was a job for the angle grinder to cut away the neck of the spade. As for the fork, that involved drilling out the broken bit of handle and that wasn’t as easy as it might have been either.

But now the big tree stump is out, and so are a couple of smaller ones. I didn’t have time to remove the rest so that’s a job for tomorrow, always assuming that I can see them through the snow that is forecast to fall tonight

Another thing I did was to plant the lettuce. Did I mention that I bought a dozen baby lettuce plants on Saturday? A dozen cost €2:95 and the price for 6 – also €2:95. So seeing as a dozen lettuce all ready at the same time would overwhelm me, I planted 6 and gave 6 to Liz at the Anglo-French group this evening.

What I will be doing is buying a few small lettuce plants every few weeks and running them throughout the year.

A big mistake that I made last year was that I left the final lettuce out in the open and the frost got to them even though they were stiull going. I’ve therefore planted this lot of lettuce in the cloche with the strawberry plants and put the glass (really two old caravan windows) over them to keep the bad weather out.

And the lettuce from September onwards will also go into the cloche to see how long they will keep in there under cover

I also bought a few packs of seeds from ALDI and LIDL – €0.29 and €0.49 a packet depending on size. Not many varieties but enough to keep me going. I imagine that temperatures of -16°C have done for the seeds in store from last year.

I also need to think about seed potatoes, onion sets, garlic and shallots. It’s getting to be about that time.

All in all, things are starting to become busy around here. I need to put my skates on.

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Saturday 27th August 2011 – I’ve found a really interesting …

… plastic bag to wrap all of my tools and electrical bits into when I put them into my suitcase. And I’d love to have a remote camera in there to take a photo of the face of the security guard when he opens it. No sense of humour, these people. Am I the only one to notice that all of the humour and levity seem to have gone out of life these day?

But not to worry. I’ve also put a protractor, a set square, a set of logarithm tables and so in inside the suitcase. They are in a plastic bag labelled “Weapons of Maths Instruction”.

OK – I’ll get my coat.

And so it’s Saturday. And just for a change, I haven’t been shopping. There’s nothing I need to buy before I set off from here on Tuesday to go to Paris. And so I had a very leisurely breakfast – interrupted from my reverie by a large Ford Transit that came bouncing down the track here. “What does Simon want at this time of the morning?” I uttered. But a second glance revealed that the vehicle had French plates. “Is Terry back already?”. But no, it’s the baker in a different vehicle delivering the bread. That livened up the day.

So now wide awake and shipshape, I started to pack. Bill has lent me a big suitcase and Strawberry Moose fits nicely into it. Then, I’ve fitted all of the tools in there, some of the electrical stuff and also the slow cooker. Now I need to fit the rest of the electrical stuff, all of the paperwork and some clothes in there too. I’ve also sorted out some clothes to take – all colour coded and with logos on. I’m into colour-coding and corporate clothing and all of that stuff.

This afternoon I carried on working outside for a change. I finished off the pointing on the wall – at least all that it’s feasible to do right now until I take off the rest of the corrugated iron roof.

I’ve reached right up into the apex of the roof as you can see and over across to the other side of the roof. That’s over half of the roof finished now and while it would have been nice to have found the time to do all of it, I’m reasonably satisfied with that.

It won’t take long to do all the rest and then fit the wind turbine.

Once I decided to retire for the day, I took down the ladder and fitted a couple of tarps over the bit where there’s no roof.

This is only going to be a temporary measure while I’m in Canada of course. Once the rest of the wall is pointed and the wind turbine is up, then I can roof it over properly.

Considering it’s Saturday, I’ve been extremely busy today and I’ll be glad to have a decent lie-in tomorrow – I’ve earned it.

Tomorrow if the weather is nice, it’s the Virlet brocante – one of the best in the area and I’ll go for a look around. I also have to plant some winter lettuce and cabbage and there’s some post to deal with – a few letters, two things to proof-read (one for Dave and one for Rhys) and half-a-dozen e-mails to reply to. When I’ve done that I can knock off because that will be everything that needed doing before I leave.

What? Up to date? Me? Perish the thought.

And in other news, at weekend I usually allow myself a handful of sweets. So this weekend I’ve finished the last of the root beer flavoured sweets because next weekend I can buy some more. They are only on sale in North America.

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Monday 18th April 2011 – I’ve been gardening today.

Well, after all it is the full moon. Before lunch I planted all of the main crop potatoes – I put 64 into two of the raised beds – the last two that I installed the other week. I’ve had to be careful how I planted them because the baby lettuce that I bought the other week – they are in one of those beds and I’ve had to fit the spuds all around them.

After lunch I planted this week’s seeds – things like cauliflowers, broccoli, carrots, courgettes, beans, peas and so on – they all went outside and into place. In the smaller cloche I planted into small pots some more peppers, chilis, cucumber and gherkins. And there are already some of those sprouting up from a fortnight ago. I’ve also weeded out the strawberry patch in the mega-cloche. That’s doing really well in there and it’s a mass of flowers, looking like there might be a bumper crop, and quite early too. But then again, this magnificent spring has a lot to do with that.

But there is a down-side to this magnificent spring. When I finished weeding and planting, I gave everything a thorough watering. And with no rain for 14 days, all of the casual water, that in buckets and bins and tubs about the place, that’s all gone. All that’s left is my rainwater for household use and there’s just about 150 litres or so of that remaining. I’m drying up and this could make things difficult here. I shall have to start a rain dance if it carries on like this.

But there’s still some water for a shower and at 36.5°C I had one as well. And then off to St Eloy and the Anglo-French Group where I set everyone an exercise – I’d found some old notes that I had made, with useful French phrases that are used in everyday life. And so I set everyone to translate them from French to English, to keep them out of mischief.

And so apart from working on the Newfoundland web pages this morning, that was my lot. Tomorrow we are in the studio at Radio Tartasse again. Don’t the months come round quickly?

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Saturday 26th March 2011 – For those of you concerned …

about my physical welfare, I didn’t have a solar shower today.

And it’s my own fault anyway. Although this morning was slightly cloudy it didnt look too bad at all. I went into St Eloy les Mines and did some shopping there and (just for a change spent a few bob too.

And in the Carrefour they had trays of baby lettuce for €3.99, so I bought one. I was expecting about 10 or 12 but in fact there were 25 all told, and you can’t leave that many in the tiny tray. And so I thoroughly watered one of the potato beds and planted them in there, thinking that I can plant the spuds around them and they will be long gone before I need to uproot the taties.

And of course, that was the cue for a torrential downpour as you might expect, and that was the summer over. I came up here with a coffee, crashed out, and am I going to have an uncomfortable night as I spilled a mug of coffee all over my bed settee as I keeled over and now it’s all wet.

At the footy tonight there was just one match, the 1st XI against Montel Villosanges. And Pionsat won with a most bizarre goal.

A beautiful ball over the top of the defence that set up a chase – two Pionsat attackers against two of the Chimps defenders. But the keeper got to it first, just outside his area, and he fairly whacked the ball as hard as he could – straight into the face of a Pionsat attacker. The ball ricocheted off his face, went back over the keeper’s head and with one bounce it went straight into the net.

Yes, you can tell that things are going Pionsat’s way for a change when they can win matches by scoring goals like this.

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Monday 16th August 2010 – We start off today …

… with a couple of photos that features the inside of the roof, by way of a change.

Don’t mind the loose lath that is on top of the wall just there – we will be moving that in due course. But the rest of it looks pretty impressive.

You’ll also notice the black damp-proof membrane up there. That’s to stop the snow drifting in underneath the tiles and falling inside, something that’s a real problem around here in winter.

You can see that we have extended the walls by mounting breeze blocks all the way up and we’ve put chevrons on there.

You will also notice the cross-beam that we fitted to the wall of the house the other day. The chevrons are supported on that. The cross-beam goes all the way across the wall of the house and it’s a good job that there were three of us to lift it as I remember it being flaming heavy.

From the outside, however, it looks even more impressive. We had quite a few tiles left over from when we did the roof of the house and so we nailed the laths to the chevrons and popped the tiles onto the roof of the lean-to.

We didn’t have quite enough as you can see if you look at the top left-hand corner, and so we’ll have to go and pick up some more tomorrow. But we aren’t ‘arf cracking on with the job and we can be proud of this.

So my day has been spent in non-stop cement mixing – load after load after load, with a slight break to go to the quarry for more sand. So I’ve mixed a ton and a half of sand since the other day. No wonder I’m exhausted.

And so when we knocked off I went round the garden, weeded the carrot patch, pulled up some carrots, beans, spinach and a courgette, and sowed some lettuce and parsnips.

After crashing out I made tea – lentil courgette and split pea curry, with carrots spinach and beans. All followed by fresh strawberries. And it was gorgeous.

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Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

Lunch today consisted of the usual salad butty only today it featured home-grown lettuce and home-grown radish as well as all of the other ingredients.

I’ve been using home-grown garlic and home-grown herbs for a while but today was the first time that I had pulled something important out of my new vegetable patches for food purposes. I’m well-impressed by how well they seem to have grown and while the taste at the moment is a little insipid it will improve over time.

In fact the lettuce would have definitely done with another fortnight in the ground but things are getting rather tight in the lettuce bed and it needs some thinning out, so pulling up a usable lettuce to eat was probably as good a way as any of making a space for everything else.

But in the greenhouse the tomato plants that have been dormant for ages have now started to go berserk. Rather too late now to expect anything profitable but never mind. It also seems like there might be some pepper plants coming up now that I have bought some, and another pea plant is now emerging from underneath the soil. That makes a grand total of two.

I went round and had another look at the digger today. This is what it looks like, in case you have forgotten, and it’s huge!

I bet it made short work of the rubbish.

I’m eager to see it back in action shovelling the stones into place but there seems to be some kind of difficulty about that and I don’t understand why.

I have to have the stones delivered by a lorry as I need over 30 tonnes of the stuff and 15 trips with the Sankey down to the quarry at Montaigut is a little too much. I have the number of someone with a tipper but they can’t give me a precise date for coming to deliver the stuff. And I need to know a precise date as I need to have the digger driver here to shovel the stuff and spread it out.

I can’t believe that it’s so complicated. Arranging a one-hour spec for a lorry to deliver two loads of stones seems the simplest thing in the world to me. But at least it gave me time to pull up all of the roots and brambles and thistles that were lying around in the way. And I also met the farmer who has taken over the field next door from the late Farmer Parrett. We had a nice friendly chat too.

In other news, the Zionists intercepted this aid convoy and stopped it delivering the supplies to the Palestinians by the simple expedient of murdering the aid workers. It’s high time someone put a stop to this behaviour and if the west is refusing to intervene then you can’t blame Hamas and the rest of the Arab world for having a go.

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Thursday 27th May 2010 – One of the things I did today …

… was a job that I had been putting off for a while.

well, not exactly putting off but one that I keep on meaning to do but always forget about – until today, that is.

When I did the lean-to roof back in August I did the guttering but due to the lack of stock in Brico Depot I couldn’t do the downspout so I just had a length of pipe shoved in there. After several months of this I suddenly remembered about the downspout when I was in Brico Depot once not so long ago and as they had the stuff I stocked up.

I prmoptly forgot about it and the occasional flashes I had always seemed to occur when I was too busy to do it. Even the tempest blowing it down coincided with something else of urgence that I had to do.

But not today! I was wandering somewhat aimlessly around the place this morning after my customary 2 hours on the computer and so I searched out all of the stuff and did it.

I’ve not finished off the bottom as I don’t know what I’m going to do with it. I have it simply draining onto another piece of guttering and that runs away down the field as a temporary measure.

I’ll now have to think of more permanent arrangement to complete it because I can’t leave it like this. It’s a waste of water for a start.

I’ve also done some more gardening. I’ve put out some of the aubergines and planted some spinach and more radishes. I’ve also sown a few lettuce seeds in a pot to create some kind of succession. The radishes that I planted 6 weeks ago are looking good and I reckon that on Monday it will be lettuce and radishes from my own garden.

To finish off, I’ve started boarding the back wall in the bedroom where the wardrobe is going to be, and as you might expect, I don’t think that I have enough OSB boards left over from when I did the barn floor. That’s a disappointment.

Still, it’s almost the weekend and I can nip off into town and buy some more to finish the job. But it is depressing that I always seem to run aground just when I’m in the right kind of mood to press on regardless.

In other news, we were in the studio on Tuesday recording our programme for June. We didn’t have a guest because the guy I was trying to contact didn’t call me back. So of course, he called me back yesterday. Our programmes that we recorded are for the month of June so today I received an e-mail from a Tourist body telling me about events in the Puy-de-Dome in … errrrr … June.

You can’t make up this kind of nonsense, can you?

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Tuesday 6th April 2010 – I think …

… that Spring might actually have made it.

Yes, a glorious hot day, but of course we have had these before. What actually did the business though was that the temperature in the heat exchanger got up to over 50 degrees – the first time since as long ago as 8th September, would you believe – and in the 15 litres of water underneath the caravan window we had 32 degrees – easily and by far away the highest temperature since I installed a permanent thermometer a few weeks ago.

Yes, Spring might be here but this morning wasn’t. That’ll teach me to mess around with this 3D animation program until it’s starting to get light outside. The boulangere woke me up – at 11:30!

But as I said it was a beautiful day, and I took full advantage by planting the lettuce that I bought on Saturday. They’ve gone into a bit of a raised bed that isn’t covered off by a sheet of corrugated iron.

They don’t half look insipid when they are transplanted though and a really good watering didn’t seem to improve matters. They’ll probably need a day or two or three to revigorate.

And after lunch I started to dig out where I’ll be putting the megacloche. And that was none-too-easy as the whole area is honeycombed with tree roots. Of course I forgot to buy a handle for my pickaxe and unfortunately I broke my really good spade, leaving me with just a cheap one. I’ll have to scout around for a new one and it’ll have to be good. Cheap ones don’t last long round here.

I was interrupted by this TV presenter woman who wanted a chat. It seems that she’s serious about talking to us. Our fame must be spreading!

And would you believe it – it’s started to rain now!

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Saturday 3rd April 2010 – I didn’t feel much like it this morning.

I woke up with the alarm, just by way of a change, and heard the rain pouring down on the roof (15mm we had today). What a way to start the day! So after a while of vegetating I heaved myself out of bed and set off for Montlucon. Late

At Carrefour they were selling baby lettuce plants – €1:95 for 12 and that’s a bargain so I bought two dozen seeing as mine haven’t taken yet.

I also went to the huge sports shop – Decathlon – to buy some football boots. But firstly they were mostly sold out of the popular sizes. I tried on a couple of pairs of boots my size but they weren’t half tight and pinched my feet like mad so I asked the footwear assistant which ones she recommended for wider feet.
“How should I know?” was her helpful reply. “You’ll just have to try them all on and find out”.
As if I don’t have anything better to do! So that’s Decathlon crossed of my shopping list with their crap customer service.

Noz was quite interesting and I spent a few bob in there too – nothing special (except a proper tray small enough to go through the door downstairs amd with high edges to stop me spilling stuff). There were a few good films – an old black and white Study in Scarlet and a copy of Douglas Fairbanks’ silent movie The Three Musketeers. I passed on the obviously interesting and highly relevant Women In Cages and the astonishing “Dracula in Pakistan”. “A rare film from the archives of Hollywood” it said in the trailer. Well, what more can anyone say?

Next stop of course was the Auchan and I was behind a woman who had spent almost €200 at the checkouts. she couldn’t find her carte de fidelite so she said to the cashier “Put the points on that gentleman’s card” – meaning me! That’s not something that happens every day either.

At Brico Depot I had an encounter with a woman and her daughter. They were looking at dowelling and just happened to catch me on the head with a length.
“Look out!” cried the daughter to her mother. “You’ve just given that man a coup de baguette“.
“It’s okay” I replied. “I used to be married”.
“Ahhh” said the mother. “You’ll know all about coups de baguette then”.
Now my sense of humour has been described as “special” and so I was absolutely astonished to find anyone – let alone a French woman – who was on my wavelength. And imagine my further astonishment when 10 minutes later I collided with the same females.
“We meet again” said Mum
“Yes” I replied. And if you are still here in 15 minutes you can help me load my van!” I was rather loaded up with wood at the time.

But who should I bump into but Simon who was also looking for wood. It’s nice to meet friends and have interesting chats, but why just then? I was onto something with that woman I was sure.

But anyway Simon helped me load up Caliburn and we had a coffee together afterwards.

I told him about my adventures in the swimming pool last week and explained that I was off there right then, so he made sure I had his mobile phone number in case there was another swimming match.

I went to the baths via Virlet to pick up the village’s defibrilator (you never know – there might have been a swimming gala again) and I was half expecting to see a heavy contingent of medical personnel and a tonne of ice ready to dump into the swimming pool in case the water boiled, but no – my luck wasn’t in and I just had a quiet swim with the usual 20 or 30 people who go there.

But there is a swimming gala on Sunday afternoon 11th April. Unfortunately for me Pionsat are playing away so I shall either be at St Gervais or Charensat. But if anyone would like to join me for a rain dance on the Saturday night they will be more than welcome.

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EPIC HALL

The Poisoned Pen (or Poisoned Chalice, more like) – or my relentless struggle against reality