Tag Archives: peppers

Wednesday 24th April 2014 – I’VE SPENT MOST OF THE …

… day in the garden today. And a long day it was too as I was awake and out of bed before the alarm clock went off – such are the benefits of an early night.

So after the customary few hours on the web site I went outside, and the first job was to sow some Witloof chicory seeds. Well – perhaps it wasn’t. First job was to hoe the raised bed in which they will be planted, put some potash in there and then hoe a few other raised beds while I was at it, and THEN sow the witloof chicory.

After that, I repaired a couple of bean frames, fixed them to a raised bed, and then sowed a pile of peas. We’ll see what happens to them.

After lunch I really got stuck in.

I sowed another row of parsnips and carrots, and put some beetroot and spinach seeds in to soak. I then went through the seed list and the little plastic greenhouse to see what there was, and now I’ve added some more

  • broccoli
  • aubergines
  • tomatoes
  • cayenne peppers
  • gherkins
  • peppers
  • cucumbers

Finally I gave everything a really good watering, but I needn’t have bothered as we have just had a torrential rainstorm.

Tomorrow i’ll sow the spinach and beetroot, and then I have other things to do.

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Monday 25th June 2012 – ROSEMARY CAME ROUND …

… this afternoon.

She owed me a couple of hours work from the other day and so she turned up at 14:30 armed with a few gardening tools and set to work.

By the time that we stopped for a coffee at 17:00 she had weeded 6 of the raised beds and done a far better job than I could ever do in that time. I was ever so impressed.

In the meantime I planted the aubergines that I had bought on Saturday and the pepper and chili plants that Liz gave me on Saturday night, and weeded a few more of the pathways.

All in all, it’s looking pretty impressive right now in the garden and I’ll tell you what – when there’s two of you working, somehow the work seems to be completed much more quickly than if there is just one person working twice as long, if you know what I mean.

And in some kind of indication of how much I was motivated, after Rosemary left, I weeded the path outside the front of the house, lifted up the two pallets that I was using as a kind-of terrace, put an old tarpaulin down to kill off the weeds, and then put the pallets back and set out the garden furniture.

And it was all of 19:45 when I finished – a long time after knocking-off time but at least I have my outside table and chairs in position for whenever the summer finally arrives – it was another miserable day today.

This morning though, I went off to the Post Office in Pionsat to post the … errr … 9 letters that I had written yesterday. I’m glad that they are all done and dealt with now.

Returning home, I finished off the web pages that I had recently written, to find that the one that I’ve just been doing, instead of being at my grand maximum size of 34kb and hopefully less than that, is all of 57kb.

That’s going to need dividing into two, but I’m not sure where the join would be.

Once I’d done something with that I moved a few more things downstairs and then went outside and started slinging stuff into the back of Caliburn. It was then that Rosemarie arrived.

So all in all, another pile of progress today. If I’m not very careful I might be starting to organise myself, and that would never do. 

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Wednesday 11th April 2012 – It’s been another …

… busy afternoon on the gardening front. First job was to make some potting compost to plant my seeds into. This ended up being 12 measures of sterile compost from a supermarket bagful, 4 measures of dry sand and 2 measures of dry wood ash. And if anyone has any better ideas about making a compost for sowing seeds I would be absolutely delighted to hear it.

So once I had done that I went and collected a load of those plastic pots that soya desserts come in. Already nicely washed, I piled them together in heaps of 10 or so, heated up a baked potato skewer until it was red-hot, and then poked it through the heaps of pots four or five times to make drain holes.

Once the drain holes were pierced, I washed the pots again and then filled them with my seed compost, and planted all the “fragile” seeds, like aubergines, peppers, chilis, cucumbers, courgettes, gherkins and a few other things too. And with what was left, I prepared a few seed trays and put leeks and lettuce in them.

There is a reason for all of this. For a start, why the soya dessert pots? The answer to that one is that they come in all varieties of shapes, sizes and colours. And I am heavily into colour coding. I can tell by the different colours, shapes and sizes of the pots that the seeds in them are all of the same type of plant.

The second reason is much more interesting. I’ve decided that I need a holiday, and so I’m planning to go away. And while I’m away Liz is going to babysit my plants in exchange for half the crop, which I think is a good deal in anyone’s terms. That’s why there’s the rush to do the potting up.

And so this morning I was planning my holiday, and the logistics of it are proving to be a nighmare – it’s nothing like as straightforward as it ought to be. But then this evening while I was tidying up, I had a brainwave about my trip and so I’ve spent most of the evening sitting here with an atlas. And I reckon that I can do this in another fashion.

So tomorrow I’ll be scrapping everything that I have done so far and starting again.

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Sunday 22nd May 2011 – My Postilion has been struck by lightning

Well, actually my Livebox has been hit by lightning and until I can get a new one sent to me I have no internet connection and so I can’t keep my blog up-to-date “Hooray” … ed. And so how come I’m on the internet now? Actually, I’m at Liz and Terry’s making very kind use of their internet here.

Today, after working on the topic for our radio programmes next week (we will be talking about the Post Office) I went to the plant fair at St Gervais. This is where people sell their surplus garden plants to those whose crops have been wiped out by intemperate weather, and I now have some peppers, chilis, tomatoes, oregano, all kinds of stuff like that. There was even some natural soap for deep-cleaning the skin (I’ll need that when I finally start on the old cars that I have to restore) and some natural soap for dealing with stains on clothing.

fc psh fc pionsat st hilaire cellule puy de dome ligue football league franceAfter that I went to Cellule, near Davayat to watch Pionsat’s 1st XI get soundly spanked. After that, we watched a football match and FC Pionsat St Hilaire’s 1st XI were beaten 5-2.

But then again, playing with a back four of Lord Lucan, Martin Bormann and a couple of Easter Island statues it was hardly surprising. They were employing what I call the “Lego defence” – they all go to pieces in the box.

And now we have been rehearsing our radio programme for Tuesday – the morning it’s Radio Tartasse and in the afternoon it’s Radio Arverne.

Anyway, Liz wants her computer back and so I have to go. I don’t know when it might be that I’ll be on line again, but I’ll be back as soon as I can.

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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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Thursday 31st March 2011 – I’m making loads of progress …

in the garden right now. Today the first task was to tidy the greenhouse seeing as I can’t even get in there, let alone find anything. A load of plastic pots and yogurt container thingies went into the bin – and that’s another thing – I now have 4 bins. One for plastics, one for metal, one for glass and one for rubbish (the paper of course is used as fire-lighters). That was something else that I did too.

And so with a tidy greenhouse I made myself some potting soil – 4 parts garden soil, 3 parts sand, 2 parts LIDL compost and one part wood ash. And when it was all mixed I planted some seed in pots – 2 types of tomato, aubergine, peppers. cucumber and leeks. I colour-code my pots as you know and I’m lucky in that my soya desserts come in so many varieties with different shapes and colours of pots. I keep the same plants together in the same colour pots.

“But isn’t drainage a problem with plastic yoghurt-type pots?” I hear you ask.
The answer is “not at all” because if you put 10 or so together one inside another and then heat up a baked potato skewer until it’s quite hot, it will go through the bottoms of 10 pots three or four times with ease 

And so now I have my March seeds sown, this afternoon I tackled a few more raised beds. I’ve cleaned a few more out and there’s only 3.5 to go. Mind you, there’s not much hurry for those just now.

Tomorrow evening I’m going back to Brussels to rescue the Minerva and bring it back. And when I return I’ll be making a start on building the new greenhouse and the garden shed. High time I organised that as well.

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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 …..

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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.

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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.

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Sunday 23rd May 2010 – It was the Garden Fair in St Gervais d’Auvergne today.

plant fair st gervais d'auvergne puy de dome franceThis is probably the most important day in the calendar out here in the Combrailles. The weather is, as you know, unpredictable and it can play havoc with your gardening as it has done this year with my plants. I’ve no leeks, no peppers, no chilis and so on.

But this area is the home of many people with a close affinity with the soil and so gardening, especially vegetable gardening, is quite a pastime.

And so at the Garden fair what happens is that everyone brings along their surplus plants and those of us who have been devastated by the late snows and frosts can buy them to replace those that we lost.

And so I duly bought a tray of 50 leeks, some peppers, some chilis, some mint and some decent-sized tomatoes. There was also a stall there manned (“personned” – ed) by a couple of kids full of insipid tomato plants and the like (the stall, not the kids) and they were quite intelligent and interesting (the kids, not the plants). We had quite a chat and some banter and I bought a handful of plants from them for no good reason at all except that I liked the kids. I reckon I get on much better with kids rather than adults. They don’t have any preconceptions and have the same kind of weird sense of humour that I have.

folk dance st gervais d'auvergne puy de dome franceThat wasn’t all of the entertainment either. We had some folk-dancing too – a little team of locals giving some kind of demonstration of their art and grabbing hold of passing locals and pulling them onto the stage.

And it’s good to see all of these younger people taking part too. There’s a huge amount of local culture that has been lost due to no-one following on in the footsteps of the older generation and that’s a tragedy.

But that was all in mid-afternoon.

It was Sunday today of course so that meant a lie-in for the morning. And after breakfast I had to write the script for the radio programmes for the month of June.

Yes, we start with the information for the week commencing 4th June and so I am bewildered as to why the person who gives us the stuff to broadcast (which I have to translate into English and work into a script) and who was b*ll*ck*d by me the other week for giving me stuff too late to include in the relevant programmes back then, has sent me all the information (“which we MUST broadcast”) about submitting your income tax returns – final date for submission being … errrr …. 31st May!

All I can say is that it’s no wonder that the French Civil Service is in total chaos.

After St Gervais d’Auvergne I went round to Liz and Terry’s to discuss the programmes and for a chat, and then I came home early to plant my vegetables. After all, tomorrow is yet another Bank Holiday and so it’s a lie-in in the morning and in the afternoon I’m going for a guided walk around some old quarries.

Yes, I really ought to get out more often, don’t I?

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Friday April 2nd 2010 – I thought you might appreciate …

ford cortina mark 5 gardening raised beds les guis virlet puy de dome france… an aerial photograph of the new vegetable garden, such as it is right now.

You can see that I’ve now installed the 8th and final (for the time being) raised bed, but I’ve had to cover it with corrugated iron sheeting as I have run out of black plastic. I’m going to have to buy some more of that.

You’ll also see the nest part of the exercise. I’ve put a board up about 50cms from the edge of the raised beds (just to the right of centre behind the old-pallet duckboarding) and I’ve started to fill the gap with rubble. This will also be covered with old slates in due course and become part of the main path. It will also serve as a slug trap as two beds will be surrounded completely by old slate and these will be the brassica beds. I hope that this anti-slug idea works.

Next part of the plan is to dig out to the left of the new raised bed (the one covered in corrugated iron sheeting) as that is where this new large cloche is to go. I reckon about 1m20 or so at the back sloping down too maybe 35cms at the front and it will make a great place to grow melons, chilis, peppers and the like. I need to experiment with some hot beds in the autumn to see if it will work and provide the heat that I need to force some produce.

Once the cloche is made, that will be the heavy manual work ended in the garden for this year. Ultimately there will be another few raised beds to the right of the new path but I need to move the old van for that and that won’t be happening any time soon. And when I move the two cars I can set down a lawn there but that’s a long time hence.

And I noticed today that the onions have started to rear their ugly heads.

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