Tag Archives: peas

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?

Friday 8th April 2011 – This hot weather …

is still going on relentlessly and I’m now a deep shade of red. Working outside is clearly good for me. But it didn’t reach the 42°C that it said it did on the temperature sender outside. And after a few minutes pondering this, I suddenly realised the answer to that.

Yes, I’ve had a great big bonfire (rather too close to the exterior temperature sender) and burned tons of stuff that was lying around doing no good. Including all of the foam-rubber seat cushions out of the old caravan that the rats trashed while I was ill.

And I’ll tell you what – I’ve never seen anything catch fire so quickly and easily and burn so fiercely. It’s put me right off caravans. If someone were to drop a fag-end down the bed there would be no survivors.

As you can guess, the tidying-up has started and I’ve been clearing things up. Not much because I’m no good at tidying up and I don’t know how to do it anyway. But at least there’s a little more space now that a lot of stuff has gone up in smoke. And there will be more to follow it as I slowly work my way round, although this isn’t the solution to my storage issues of course. The aim quite simply is to try to make the place a little more presentable in case I have visitors this year.

As well as that, I’ve been in the garden again and I’ve planted the pea and courgette seeds that I had set to soak a couple of days ago.As well as that, I stuck in half a dozen sweetcorn seeds. They are out of date and did nothing last year, but I’m intrigued to see if anything might happen.

In other news, I had a nice hot shower this evening and I did the washing-up with water from the home-made immersion heater, with a temperature of 68°C. It’s quite impressive, this immersion heater and the insulation.

Saturday 31st July 2010 – Tomorrow the world!

tryffid squash plant greenhouse les guis virlet puy de dome franceI can’t get into the greenhouse for the moment because this monster is in the way. It’s supposed to be a squash plant and it does indeed look as if it’s quite a squash in the greenhouse.

That’s especially the case seeing as yonder tryffid is being backed up by another one of its ilk as well as a rogue tomato seed that fell onto the floor and is now likewise threatening to take over the world. It’s quite impressive in there.

tomato plants mega cloche puy de dome franceI actually have piles of tomatoes ripening in the mega-cloche, as well as peppers and chili but these are the plants that I bought at the St Gervais d’Auvergne plant fair. The ones I planted aren’t doing much. The brassica are doing well but the one surviving pea plant has turned brown and died.

Elsewhere in the garden the beans are going berserk (especially those I planted the other day), the spuds have gone wild and the carrots are doing the biz. The onions are now swelling at long last and the garlic is dying off so that will be ready to lift in early course.

Today is Saturday and just for a change there was a brocante at St Priest les Champs. It’s not natural to have a brocante on a Saturday – it’s like your body clock is all wrong when you have other things to do. But not to worry – it’s Pionsat’s brocante tomorrow. I’m still looking for a milk churn, and Liz saw one at St Priest today and rang me up to tell me about it. I went round there chaud-pied, as they say around here to have a look but it was only 15 litres and that isn’t big enough.

I’m also after a car CD player so I can build a unit to play all of my CDs around the house, and that’s not as easy as it sounds either.

Nothing of any use at Carrefour or at Lidl so it’s been a bit of a non-day today. But they were selling tubs of sorbet at LIDL for €0.89 and they looked ever so enticing and after all it has been quite a while since I had an ice-cream …..

Friday 23rd July 2010 – I went downstairs this morning …

… and found a mouse dying in the kitchen! My cooking isn’t that bad, you know. Anyway, I heaved it outside to join into the food chain and waited for Terry. He had gone off on a tour of sawmills to find some of the specially-shaped wood for hanging these tiles and so I carried on with some weeding.

When Terry turned up he didn’t have the wood because it’s no longer sold. Apparently it’s a fire risk but having seen last year how quickly ordinary household products catch fire some kind of fire restriction is totally unnecessary.

We started to cut the laths and voltige to cover this roof and made a start on fitting the tiles. With good weather we could have fixed them all on but it was not to be. We were having rainstorms every 10 minutes and they kept on driving us off the roof into shelter.

After Terry went home I sowed some more beans and peas and that really was my day. Tomorrow is shopping, Sunday is rest and then we are back at it on Monday.

Thursday 22nd July 2010 – It was a much better day today.

Only 18.5mm of rain. But this morning was far too wet to go up onto the roof and so instead we went to Montlucon to look at some trailers and so on.

The afternoon was still rather damp so Terry took some wood home to cut and I did some gardening. I’ve sown some more peas, beans, chicory and carrots, as well as doing some weeding in front of the house. And that’s about it, really.

In other news, TNS’s good win has been emulated by Bangor City who beat Honka Espoo of Finland in the Europa (formerly UEFA) Cup to progress to the 3rd round of the tournament where they will meet Maritimo of Portugal. I can’t think that it has ever happened before that two Welsh football clubs have reached the 3rd Round of their respective European tournaments in the same season. In fact I have to think long and hard about the last time that just one Welsh Club did. TNS’s win drew the Welsh Premier League to within a fraction of a seeded place in next year’s series of matches and maybe Bangor’s victory might be sufficient to ensure it. The Welsh Premier League clubs have never yet been seeded at all in the draw for the opening matches so history may well be made next season.

Monday 7th June 2010 – I had another gardening day today.

bean frame raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou can see in the photo that I’ve rediscovered my bean and pea frame, so seeing as I now have three pea plants and four bean plants ( and isn’t that disappointing?) I put it up so that they will have something to cling to. When I saw the lack of beans and peas this year then I needed something to cling to for support, but I hadn’t recovered the frame then.

The radishes I planted a couple of weeks ago are going berserk and the spinach is now coming up. maybe things are putting in a late burst.

I’ve sown another row of carrots in place too, and transplanted the first showing of cauliflower and the second showing of broccoli. The cucumber plants I planted in the small cloche and to do that I had to take out the trays of herbs. They are on the window ledge of the house for now.

herb garden verandah planters les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou might recall that I brought my herbs back from Brussels and planted them in a trough. I had some more in small pots and so I made up another trough and those herbs have gone into there. I’m putting them in troughs so that in winter I can take them indoors.

The mint I left in a pot and planted the pot in the trough for the simple reason that mint goes berserk and spreads everywhere if you don’t contain it.

The soil in the trough by the way is 50% compost from LIDL, 50% soil from when I dug out the earth beichstuhl and a dusting of wood ashes to give it all some potash.

So that was the afternoon. In the morning I was computing and before lunch I did a load of washing – the first for ages down here but you might recall that I did a few loads in Brussels when I was there and Liz kindly did a few loads for me while I was helping Terry.

This evening was the Anglo-French Group. Mark prepared a good game for us and we had some fun. We were somewhat divided into two groups though – some of us working upstairs and the others talking and smoking downstairs.

So tomorrow now that the garden is done for this week I’ll carry on moving stuff from the side of the barn. I want to get all of that stuff moved as soon as possible.

Monday 31st May 2010 – First of the year

home grown lettuce radish les guis virlet puy de dome franceLunch 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.

mini digger les guis virlet puy de dome franceI 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.

Wednesday 26th May 2010 – It occurs to me …

… that we haven’t had a pic of the vegetable plots for ages. And so I remedied this this afternoon.

abandoned ford cortina mark 5 garlic leeks onions raised bed gardening les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd don’t they look absolutely grand?

The bed on the left that is half-covered with a plastic sheet has some chicory seeds underneath it. I planted some of them this afternoon and under the plastic sheet (that keeps the weeds down) it’s damp, warm and humid, ideal conditions for germination.

Next to it are the leeks that I planted on Sunday and the weather has started to bring them along but in the next bed are 5 rows of garlic and about 15 rows of onions and don’t they look impressive? The garlic was actually last year’s and I dug it up to replant once I’d finished the beds whereas the onions were sets that I bought.

But clearly the plot and the weather are suiting them because I’ve never seen such luscious crops growing anywhere near where I might be in charge of a garden.

plums growing on tree oerhanging raised bed gardening les guis virlet puy de dome franceIn the photograph above, you’ll notice the tree branch hanging over the onions. That wasn’t there a few weeks ago – it was up in the air but the weight of the foliage has brought it down.

At the moment it has some small green berries the size of large peas, just like the one in this photo here but they’ll probably develop into something impressive sooner or later.

At least I hope so – and I hope that I’ll be able to make some decent jam out of whatever the tree produces.

ant nest raised bed gardening les guis virlet puy de dome franceThat’s not all the excitement either.

I went to have a look underneath one or two of the other plastic sheets covering the raised beds, and in the potato beds I noticed that the plants were sprouting and doing really well.

There was also a huge ants’ nest there too. The ants had somehow managed to bank up the soil a little against the underside of the plastic sheet and honeycombed it with burrows

So my question yesterday was to the effect of wondering what the weather might do. Basically we had 11mm of rain interspersed with a few sunny spells. I moved 200 litres of water as the water butts up at the top were overflowing and the ones down here were empty and it was a shame to waste the water.

Once that was completed I caught up with a load of succession sowing. The beans and the peas aren’t happening at all – neither are the peppers and chili but the cabbage and so on seem to be doing well. I hope everything will catch up.

polystyrene insulation bedroom wardrobe les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou might think that that would be enough for one day, but I’ve even managed to find time to work inside the house.

Here in the bedroom on the first floor I found the time to finish lining the wall with polystyrene where I’ll be putting the built-in wardrobe. I’m falling behind with this so I need to get a wiggle on and do my best to finish it.

I must find some focus from somewhere and press on, or I’ll be finished before the bedroom is.

Thursday 6th May 2010 – I boarded up the fireplace today.

boarding up bedroom fireplace les guis virlet puy de dome franceI knew the offcuts from the tongue-and-grooving would come in handy sooner or later.

There’s a heavy-duty plastic sack at the back of this, and then a framework around the inside of the fireplace. Then the offcuts of tongue-and-grooving were cut to size and shaped to fill in the hole and finally I bunged up everywhere with filler.

Next step will be to screw some insulated plasterboard to the boarding and seal that all round and it should be a nice draught-proof seal.

This morning I woke up at 08:20 to the sound of the rain driving down on the roof. “Badger that for a game of soldiers” – and stayed in bed til 10:00. And after doing some work on my website I dodged the rain to plant out some more peas and beans and then to catch up with sowing some more succession seeds. I’ve a full greenhouse now and it looks impressive but nothing seems to be germinating. This year might be something of a washout in the garden in more ways than one.

But it stopped raining at about 15:00. Some blue bits appeared in the sky and by late evening there was even a sighting of that golden object that hangs around up there some time. But it’s still cold though and I had the fire on again up here tonight.