Tag Archives: fruit trees

Thursday 24th April 2014 – 19.5MM …

… of rainfall we have had between 20:00 and 21:30 – and there’s much more forecast; No issues about watering the plants then, that’s for sure.

I was up before the alarm again this morning and after breakfast that gave me almost 3.5 hours on the website. I like being on summr hours!

First job outside was to sow the beetroot and spinach seeds that I had left to soak. That meant doing a little bit of hoeing of course. And then I finished off the solar shower. That is exactly how I want it now, but there are some kind of pressure issues that need to be resolved. We’ll have to see how it goes.

After lunch I did a little measuring up for my next trick, but while I was doing that, my eye was caught by some blossom down in the jungle that is the bottom of my garden.

Of the 20 or so fruit trees that I planted in 1999 and 2000, one is still there, but it seems that there’s another one too. Way down the slope a little, and this is what the blossom is.

It’s surrounded by a pile of these scrub trees and is getting no light at all and so I resolved to deal with this issue.

By the tile I had knocked off I reckon that I had cut down over 20 trees (one or two of them were significant too) and the tree concerned is now clear of oerhanging trees. That will bring more light to the tree, and also more light to the rest of the garden, includind the vegetable beds.

Not only that, I managed to make my way out the other side too into clear space for the first time for 11 years and that really is something to celebrate.

And then tonight we have the rain …

I’m not sure what to do tomorrow.

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Wednesday 3rd April 2014 – JUST FOR A CHANGE …

… I crashed out not once today but twice. Once at lunchtime and once at about 19:30 after I knocked off.

I’m clearly over-doing it, I reckon, and having late nights and disturbed sleep just recently isn’t helping.

I managed to wake up at some kind of realistic time however and after breakfast I had a productive morning on the website. By 12:00 (or thereabouts) I was back outside and I made a start on another raised bed.

After lunch (which finished rather later than planned, as you can imagine), I carried on with my raised bed and now that one is finished too. There’s a big raised bed, the last one that I installed, and that is destined for the soft fruit. I made a start on that and now that’s about one-third finished.

When that is done, there will be just one more raised bed and the two cloches (although at the moment I’ll only be clearing out the big one). Wouldn’t it be a pleasure if I could finish all of that? It depends of course on whatever interruptions I have and today, there were none at all, just for a change.

I’ve done some tidying up in the garden too, around the edges. The border between my land and the farmer’s field is a mess and so I cleared out a couple of metres of that. There are a couple of young trees growing there and so I trimmed them and wove the young branches around the barbed wire that forms the boundary. It’ll look so much nicer with tree branches and leaves all around it.

There’s a fruit tree too that’s giving me issues. If you remember back several incarnations of this blog, you’ll remember that I planted two dozen or so when I bought the place and for a while they were productive. But my absence for several years when I was ill led to most of them being lost.

One at least (and there may be more) is still there but as a sapling it was trampled down by a wild boar or something and it’s growing horizontally across the large raised bed. I’ve been trimming it back this last couple of years so that the growth will be concentrated in some branches that are growing vertically, and I had another go at that today. It’s looking much better.

We’ve also had tons of wind today. All three turbines going round like the clappers. Shame they can’t do this every day, isn’t it?

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Friday 19th March 2011 – I didn’t get my early night last night after all.

I was just on the point of going to bed when someone who I hadn’t spoken to for a while came on line. We had quite a bit to talk about and what with one thing and another it was almost 04:00 when I went to bed.

And so I crawled out of my pit at 08:00 feeling like death, and went to Montlucon. It was a big mistake to get my windows fron Lapeyre. I need an empty van for when I go back to Brussels, and while we got these windows in, getting them out on my own without breaking them – that will be something else.

It was gardening day at LIDL and so I have 6 more fruit trees for the Liz Ayers Memorial Orchard, a pile of seeds, and some onion sets, seed potatoes and seed shallots. I shan’t abandon the garden entirely this year. At Noz I spent a fortune, mostly on DVDs and I now have 5 or the 6 Don Camillo films, starring Fernandel. I really enjoyed the books when I was at school and I saw one of the films once and that was just as good.

At Brico Depot I set a new world record by buying nothing at all, but I was in tears nevertheless. Door Strips in Brico in Belgium €10.73 – same one in Brico Depot here €3:49. White Spirit there €3:89 – here €2:09. And it was all like that. I don’t know how they can get away with it in Belgium, I really don’t.

But I’ve made a conscious decision that now that I’m a little more financially sound, first thing that I’m going to be doing is to improve my diet. And to that end I bought a few things that I wouldn’t normally buy such as half a kilo of grapes (which I munched on the way home) and a little packet of sugar-free sweets.

I didn’t go swimming – I was too early and in any case I was whacked. So back here to crash out for a couple of hours. And it was a mistake to eat the grapes and the sugar-free sweets so quickly as I was in … errr … some discomfort for a while.

I went to the footy too this evening. Pionsat’s 3rd XI playing the league leaders so you would normally expect a hammering, but the 2nd XI have no game tomorrow and so there were several … errr … discrete changes to the team line-up, And although they had yet another makeshift goalkeeper (who did really well and I was surprised by that) they had a 2nd XI centre-half playing and it was amazing how much it stiffened the defence.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire bromont lamothe puy de dome ligue football league francePionsat actually won 2-1, with two disputed goals. One was scored by three players cantering off down the pitch while everyone else was waiting for the offside flag. I was in no position to judge but one of their spectators thought that the ref got it right.

I’ve been saying all along that there isn’t much wrong with Pionsat’s 3rd XI that a real goalie and a couple of decent players in key positions can’t put right, and it was proved right tonight.

fcpsh fc pionsat st hilaire bromont lamothe puy de dome ligue football league francep>Pionsat’s second goal was a penalty – a clear foul, no mistake about that, but as to whether it was in the area, all I can say is that I was almost level with the area and the Bromont players had some of my sympathy. After that, the match became a little naughty and we had a running feud down each touchline for a while.

Still Bromont should have buried the game and they only have themselves to blame for losing it. Clean through on goal three or four times and one shot round the post, one off the bar, and two straight at Stephane (and didn’t he do well to hang on to them with forwards charging in and he’s never played a real match in goal before?)

But now I’ve had a doze this afternoon, it’s 04:00 and I can’t sleep at all. Crazy. 

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Wednesday 8th December 2010 – AND IN A MOST AMAZING PIECE OF NEWS …

… It’s just after 01:00, I’m about to go to bed, and I haven’t had the heating on all day.

When I came upstairs after knocking off work at 18:00 it was 13.8°C up here. What with me being in the room and the laptop on, it quickly rose to 14.4°C, reached a high of 15.5°C and now is down to 13.7°C.

I could have put the heating on, I suppose, but I was determined to stick a day in December without it because there probably won’t be another one. The weather has broken again – the south-westerly gales that have been keeping us warm these last few days collided with a north-easterly weather front this afternoon, we had a thunderstorm and it’s been a torrential downpour ever since.

It’s snowing in Paris and the temperature has dropped considerably outside and I reckon that winter might be coming back. That’s my forecast anyway.

So as it was so nice today, at least earlier on, I hung out my washing to dry it (and had to take it in at about 15:00) and dug up my potatoes. Not as many today as there were the other day. These beds that I have been digging up are the lowest in the run, they are fairly waterlogged and many of the potatoes have rotted with the damp.

I’m going to have to get some compost from St Eloy to raise up the level of the bed and I’ll also need to mix some sand in. That’ll help the drainage.

I’ve also made a start (well, sort-of) on pulling up the brambles and weeds and ground alder with the idea of letting more light into the bottom of the vegetable patch in the hope that any sun that we might have will dry things out a little.

I stopped the beds where they were because that was where the fruit trees began, but they gave me nothing at all this year and haven’t done for a while so I reckon I’ll pull them up too and put another row of raised beds in. Not that I want particularly to grow more crops – I just think that they can be spaced out a little more.

Tomorrow I’m going to have a go at getting my chicory to blanch. I’ll dig up a couple and crop the leaves, and then bury them in a large flower pot to see if they will push up some shoots. That’s something else I have never done before.

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Tuesday 13th April 2010 – Just for a change …

… I woke up early this morning. So after breakfast I came back up here and carried on with my website updating for a couple of hours until it was work time.

gardening raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome franceOnce I had done a couple of hours of that it was downstairs and working on this extra bed again. It’s finished now thank heavens for it wasn’t half a backbreaking task. I reckon I uprooted 12 trees and pulled up about a mile of root segments.

I also pulled up a load of exciting bits and pieces of which the most interesting was part of the brake mechanism for a racing bicycle. I wonder what that was doing there

And while I was at it I started to locate amongst all of the undergrowth the original fruit trees that I planted in 1999. So far, one apple tree and one pear tree and they are both budding.

The new bed will be about 3mx1m and just the job for sowing a load of spuds for this year. The earlies are not far off being ready and they will churn up this new bed quite nicely. But germination of seeds  in the greehouse is soooooooooooooooo sloooooooooooooow. Not very much has germinated so I reckon I need to sow another load.

And you know how they say that if something is too good to be true then it usually is? Well I have something simmering away on the back boiler that sounds a bit like that and I am waiting to see what the catch is.

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Monday 12th April 2010 – Well, we are all going to be famous now.

We were all filmed at our Anglo-French Conversation Group this evening – but there’s no need to get excited. It was just one guy with the camera and the microphone and that was that – all very low key. He asked me about 6 questions and then proceeded to film the attendees and ask them a couple of questions.

I was all on my own to do the organising though as Christiane had to work and Liz was busy rescuing Terry from the hospital where she had taken him yesterday. He had had a fight with his chopsaw and finished second.

home made cloche les guis virlet puy de dome franceToday I finished my megacloche and if I had have had time to photograph it I would have regaled you all with a photo yesterday. But anyway, here it is today. It’s 1m20 tall, 1m20 deep and 1m60 wide. The front slopes at 45 degrees and so is a veritable sun trap.

Or it will be when I put some glass in it. I don’t have enough old caravan windows to finish it but Simon reckons he has some old windows lying around and I can go and liberate them in due course.

Once I finished that I started moving the old pile of gravel that I had left when I was taken ill in 2003 and also digging over another raised bed. I know – I said that I wouldn’t dig any more but I have to fight my way in to where the fruit trees start, and there is a strip of about 3.5m x 1m looks so inviting for a bed of potatoes if I can get all the ground alder out.

Being on my own this evening I told Bill about Terry’s little contretemps and asked him to explain it to everyone, which he duly did.
“Not his whole finger? asked Mark incredulously.
“No” replied Bill. “The one next to it”.

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