Tag Archives: potager

Monday 18th November 2013 – IT’S MONDAY AGAIN …

… and so it was “back to work”. But not straight away as I had a few important things to do first.

It seems that my bank is at it again. The credit card expired at the end of September as you know, and I finally received the replacement. That meant that I had to contact everyone to update the card details. But I’ve now received another one, with a new number, a new expiry date and a new security cide. I’ve now had to ring everyone again to update everything that I updated just a week or 10 days ago.

I finally did manage to go outside today to work, braving the rain that has restarted. I’ve spent all of the time outside clearing the nettles and weeds that have sprung up in front of the barn where I had my very first potager. It’s astonishing how quickly and how thickly it’s overgrown. It wasn’t looking too bad at all in the early Spring and I never expected it to become as bad as it did over a period of just 8 months.

You can see how good the soil is, though. I suppose that that is some consolation.

Anyway, I’ve made some progress, but not enough. There’s tons to do and I need it to be gone so that I can build my woodshed there. Once I’ve done that, I can crack on with other things that are holding me back.

After it went dark, I spent half an hour in the barn carrying on with my project of tidying up, not that I’m making much progess. But I’ve been thinking, which is of course a very dangerous occupation. It’s about high time that I sorted out the electrical system in the barn. I’m moving the batteries and the control panel down to where “bank two” is – at the southern end of the barn next to the walls to which the solar panels are fastened.

And so I ought to make a start on building the control panel and fitting the wiring. Maybe I’ll sit down tomorrow and draw up a few plans.

And pizza tonight followed by left-over apple crumble and custard from yesterday. What a way to end the day.

Monday 8th October 2012 – I HAD A LATE …

… start going outside to work today. In fact, it wasn’t until 16:00 that I set foot into the drizzle.

What I had been doing was much more exciting than that. I sat down and wrote out the web page for yesterday’s match between FC Pionsat St Hilaire and AS Cellule.

With it being a highly controversial match with two extremely controversial incidents, both of which called for a fair amount of comment from Yours Truly, I needed to be pretty careful about what I wrote.

Even more so as these days you can receive 12 weeks in prison for telling a joke on Facebook (I’m glad I no longer live in the UK) and I sometimes have a tendency to let my flow of enthusiasm overwhelm my discretion.

Back in Ye Olde Days, I always used to let Liz see anything controversial as she had the ability to read things objectively rather than emotionally – something that surprisingly few people have the ability to do these days – but of course that is no longer possible.

Luckily, Krys was on line and so after I finished it, she had a read and then we had something of a chat about it – hence the late start outside.

With the rain showers holding up work outside, it gave me time to reflect and I made a decision about the hard-standing.

As you know, I was planning to clean up the waste land where I had been working and dump onto there the stuff from the hard-standing, but I will need quite a few days of good weather to do the work justice.

It looks like we’ve had that now – the forecast isn’t too good – and so I’ve made a decision to put a large tarpaulin onto the land where I had my first vegetable garden, just in front of the house, and move the stuff onto that.

This is easier said than done too as I have tons of stuff to move and I forgot just how heavy some of it was. It’s going to take a while to sort out all of this.

At the Anglo-French group tonight we were rather thin on the ground and I ended up having a good chat with Cécile – so much so that we stood outside the bar afterwards chatting for a good hour or so.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a decent gossip. I spend far too much time on my own, I reckon.