le bon potager avec soleil

My mini potager is now bearing some fruits, I have tomatoes showing, my chard is ready to pick and my courgettes male and female are blossoming. Marc says he has eaten the courgette flowers before, and i have told everyone over the last five years that you can eat them...but i never have, only because you have to more or less pick them and eat them (see link below) they open up in the morning and by the evening they are very much closed, so you need to pick them on the morning you are going to eat them and put them in a zip lock bag, and then put them in your salad box. I am going to stuff mine for lunch with herbs and mozzarella dip in batter and lightly fry.

I grew cosmos from seed which has taken a long time but has finally taken off.  I lost three cucumber plants from the market as baby plants but have grown four from seed. Coriander, lettuce, sweet peppers, sorrel and purple basil all did well to begin with, but the utility room is just to hot.

At the start of the week i was given an old french recipe, for maybe some insects but on further reading it is good for any fungus or parasites in the soil and so rich in minerals it's good for us to.

for further reading on the uses and benefits of the nettle

The old french recipe is simple, boil up lots of younger stingers, perhaps twenty tops and just cover in boiling water. Later when it has cooled down sieve the nettles to put in your spray.It can also be used as a feed slightly more diluted as it is rich in minerals.

one bucket with some nettles

nettle  concentrate (that's what i am calling it) for my sprayer

chard looking ok, have lost a few outer leaves to munchers

our very first coeur de boeuf

concumbre from seed

my first courgette in France!
delicious recipes for courgette flowers

small courgette flying saucers from seed...i do not know how well they will do in pots

Other things that are doing well in the garden despite early negligence, not being here or having the energy to prune, is the grapevine and the Mirabelle plum. The Mirabelle has had high winds late on to knock the fruit off and an obnoxious spring to slow down the whole process but is still looking good.

still laden with fruits, and this time we will be competing with the birds from the start

the utility room which happens to be wall to wall glass and a very easy way to germinate my seeds

la visite du père

Last week was the arrival of mon pere

We started a massive clear up for ourselves, added impetus that dad was coming to stay as well. Marc did a fantastic job downstairs and i cleared the upstairs half and made our tv room look like a bedroom, all looked very good.

Sometimes i find that you need the arrival of a visitor to kick start you into a mega cleaning action.

However things did not go to plan on Wednesday, dads train was delayed (the euro star part) so he missed his connection from Paris to Tarbes and will have to get the tgv down the following day. I spent the evening worrying although i had managed to contact him on his mobile and he seems tired but fairly unphased by it all, had to cancel Tony who was on his way to pick him up at late at night. He will arrive in the afternoon the following day, so we will go and pick him up. 

The next day i checked that dad was on the train and i was relieved to find that he is on his way but major floods in Lourdes and Pau further hampered his long journey turning the whole thing into a bit of a nightmare, he needed a bus from Pau to Tarbes because of the flooding and we picked him up around about two thirty at Tarbes. 

Three days before the whole of the Haute Pyrenees was on red alert ie severe weather conditions and when dad was travelling down, mid France was on orange alert, bad enough, so Paris was looking dodgy weather wise

So that afternoon we sat and talked and the day after we chilled also, because i think we were all a tad tired.

Pate and cheese for lunch and trout fillet (from our Wednesday fish van), with fried cucumber and a noilly prat cream sauce, taken from Rick's French odyssey and adapted on the fish front by me.

notre dame de garaison or mini Lourdes

Friday was a dull wet day, although bright with mountains in full beautiful view when i went for a walk with Shirley this morning and cycled over to Larroque at seven. Shirley and i went for a long walk, upwards from Larroque, we had amazing views, cycled back for breakfast with dad (m still coaching tennis) Then dad and i  went for some veg, bread and papers. Later I minced and cut up a 4 kilo pack of pork it has made 8 packs for 12c euros, 3 packs of mince, 4 packs of chops and some escalopes. One of my bargains from Ecomarche (small french supermarket chain) 

but today was party time and the the longest day June the 21st. signalling summertime and an invitation to Monleon to Marianne and Per's to celebrate Swedish style, with flowers in our hair. Marianne and Per had a very ingenious way of getting people to mingle and to sit with other people than their partners. At the beginning of the evening we were all given lines from a song, the guys had the lead line and they had to find the females with the second line and all the songs were different. So my line was "here we go again" and my male lead had on his card "mamma mia" and Mark had Elvis "are you lonesome tonight"

Most of the atelier, (our school class) and new people that we had not met turned up a nice mix, and a really enjoyable evening. Dad seemed to enjoy himself. Marianne and Per had put the most generous humongous effort over the food and all the trappings. Traditional Swedish food, lots of herring in different guises, right up my street, smoked salmon, and an array of desserts to choose from. In between Marianne was up and down the tables with mini bottles of ice cold schnapps of many different flavours alongside the beer. Topped off with generous cartons of wine for the English gang, who couldn't cope with beer and schnapps. All  was still well in swing when we left at 12.30.

I  learnt tonight that my post, re Gingembre actually made someone other than myself cry....someone that i had not even met.

Groggy start on weather front, and late start, after a late night,  I raced around our market with Marc, but not enough time. Marc went  back for our wine from the market and then  made me breakfast , left for Ali and Chris at 9.30

arrived to find Ells and Ali already stuck in. Left at one, Marc did what is becoming my fave scrambled eggs with Harissa and my fave salad. Also success because the farine de chiche pois that i had managed to order a few days ago, turned up

This afternoon we went to Notre dame de Garaison, http://fmaquaire.free.fr/Incontournables/garaison1.html

dad and i got picked up for the guided tour by a nun from Brazil. I was happy with myself that i understood lots that she was telling us. It is an interesting place and very attractive in the much needed sunshine

Tonight we had some nuts and snacks outside in the sun, which was great, as dad is not here for long and the weather had been pretty poor for his first couple of days.
Marc cooked pork chops with capers and a cider butter vinaigrette, spinach, tats for the boys and rocket yum.

finished with strawerries and the rest of the apple ice cream

Brighter this morning, Marc went off to coach tennis and I went to plant cosmos, as you do. This morning after brekkie we joined Hugo and Anthony for coffee in Joe's and watching the people walk by. I ended up doing an extended interview with Jessica Ennis???  (but that is another story for later)

This afternoon went to the garden in Thermes, la source which was brilliant, very nice guy …my french is definitely coming on, from the point that i was just trying not just to listen but communicate back and being understood.
Earlier this week a very big triumph as i had manged to communicate to the bank that i had a credit card but without a personal code, that is now sorted, big high five. It is slow but it 's coming.

Rebecca called and we went to see kittens that one of his cats has just had they need to be left with mum for a few more weeks and they are very pretty, more than that they are gorgeous and if they turn out anything like the three previous escapees, cute.
I cooked chicken stuffed with goats  cheese and thyme on a bed of toms and courgettes for supper,  then dad, Marc and I watched skyfall.

Tuesday a bit overcast , spent the morning trying to find out whether dad's train was running ok..it's not, so we will need to take him to Pau, the other part was trying to find a restaurant open for this evening.Four down we decided that maybe all was shut on a Tuesday evening and we should buy something, So dad bought duck confit and ham from our butcher, and melon and strawbs from our veg lady. 

Walked with dad in the afternoon and went to the Ecomarche with dad,  presents for cat sitters and friends.

This morning got up at the crack of  dawn, 4.30 to take dad to the train station, Marc drove and had researched the trip as we have never been to la gare in Pau before.  We got him on the train half an hour before he was due to go. I hope he had a good time ....he said that he had and despite mixed weather, it wasn't cold and we had a few hot ones as well

Nice evening, warm and sunny almost feels like summer!!!

i can lead her up the garden path anytime....purrfect

Before dad arrived, i did some garden weeding  with my little ginger helper. He is cute cuddly and adorable and very purry, he tried to hijack my weeding sac or tools, eat the grass in front of me or sit on my knee, lovely but difficult to carry out any gardening. After lunch collected dad who was already waiting for us but glad to have ended a long and protracted journey

just looking....

I'm going to be p's ginger stand in

I'm almost a big boy, i might be only nine months old

i like to play

i can do all the right poses

...and finally I'm too sexy for my purr!

Autour du lac du Magnoac or around the lake Magnoac

This blog entry is all to do with the fervent whispers and rumours that are circulating the towns coffee bar, or Joe's as we know it about our lac. Before we had the house seven years ago, we were looking at property or rather an old house with a tree growing through it in Larroque. The agent was talking about a reservoir for the cows and possibly a boating lake, beautiful views, it would have been difficult to manage from England, so we did not buy it. However we had always been interested in the town of Castelnau on the other side of the basin from almost the first year when we started looking in the area. Anyway the rest is histoire, we bought in Castelnau across from the basin and a year later things began to happen. 

Years later the shallow basin bowl has been totally transformed, this is what has set the local tongues wagging. What it says apart from the fact that they have now built a boating pontoon, is that they are waiting for final water tests to say it is ok for sailing, I guess that's if you fall in and swallow the water??!

the article causing all the new whispers

Five years later having bought our house in Castelnau, we are looking at a beautiful lake with the backdrop of the mountains, a place to walk, fish and exercise and now perhaps swim and sail around as well. They have worked so hard to landscape it with miles of native hedges and young trees, this has bought a variety of birds and wildlife into and around the lac. There has been a drying process over the three years to harden the bottom where we have worried about the already thriving habitat mainly the fish and where are they going to go. There is plenty of evidence of the occupants as from April they are surfacing in hot weather to catch the surface insects. Then there is the fishermen (with permit) and long before them the fishing birds (without permit) such as the heron and the egret, whom eat frogs, fish insects alike. Also copyu in the lake and roe deer and wild boar who come to drink at the waters edges

the year of the new lac

august 2009 looking empty and dry

This is so lovely to be able to roll out of bed and have the luxury and freedom to walk around morning,

midday or afternoon ...truly amazing. you are never alone if you are not accompanied by red admirals, 

painted ladies, peacocks, lots of different varieties also bird life on the lac such as herons, egrets, wagtails to name a few.... you may also be accompanied by the local farm collie

full and positively glowing

last night there was an amazing sunset, today we are on red alert and very stormy weather

i like this one, as they were making shapes of the mountains in their drift!

Common Spotted orchid

view halfway round on the other side of the lac, they are still letting it empty,
which is why the outskirts still look a little baron

egrets, I've had a few;
but then again, too few to mention....

gingembre

This has been a difficult week because of an upsetting experience at the beginning, and i was not sure whether i was going to do this post...however perhaps for me it will be therapeutic for me to share it with you.

Three weeks ago Marc saw, posted by someone we knew, a feral ginger kitten that needed a home. When he showed me the picture (yes nearly all kittens have an ahhh factor) but this one had an ohh and an ahhh factor coupled with emotional shoestrings. Marc's mum had a ginger kitten and the fact that my mother had always wanted one, and then the strongest pull he was just impossibly cute. Marc rang up the face book contact and said yes please, it was a friend of hers that she then put us in contact with.  Next came the big catch, i do not know how long he would have survived in the wild. He was a wily little kitten full of energy and having left mum he was already trying to look after himself, although Liz was still feeding him. Liz already has quite a menagerie of her own so therefore she wanted to find a home for him, meanwhile he was in and out of her barn taking bits of food but not letting anyone get to close. We were like expecting grandparents, every time the phone rang i would leap a mile or ask Marc to answer it. Liz rang early on a Thursday morning to tell us she had got him and could we come to pick him up. I was so excited, i thought the call was going to be bad news as we had had the most terrible weather for the last three days, and it would have been easy for a small kitten to have perished.
She explained where she was and we jumped into the car, when we arrived at the house it was to find Liz and her mum flooded out. We stayed for a cup of tea and promised to come back and help shift the water having released our little ginger captive in the utility room back at home.

marc preparing the ladder for rescue

Liz took us next door to the barn where the kitten was captured in a cage. Marc climbed up into the barn and lowered the kitten and cage to the floor with the aid of a rope and Liz and i guiding the cage. It was then that we discovered the poor little mite had lost the tip of his tail when the trap door fell on him. Although there were a few drops of blood on closer examination it was just a little skin and fur not the bone thank god. I was eager to get him home and release him, so with the promise to help with Liz's flooded house we jumped back in and drove home. I filled his containers with kitten biscuits, food and water and we let him out, he promptly shot behind the washing machine. We thought at this point he had had enough traumas in his little ginger life and should be left alone to find his food. I had put a cardboard box with a fleece inside very suiting for our furry vagrant.

Then we hurried back to Liz, who had another helper, her mother's part time carer Tina had arrived. It took three hours to get rid of the water from the lounge, and dining room. During that time there was much discussion of kitten names, he was found in a woodpile so woody was the favourite one. On the way home Marc said that woody from toy story was quite a hero and that it would not be such a bad name. I was stuck on Gingembre (meaning simply ginger in french) something we had both come up with the week before when we first saw his pic.

hardly a squeak out of him all the way home

When we got home, he was nowhere to be seen, back behind the washing machine again but every scrap of food has gone. I filled his bowl and looked behind the washing machine, were a couple of small grey green eyes looked balefully back at me. There was still a bit of blood on the floor, but as earlier he had tried to climb the glass doors to get away from me, i figured it was going to scare him more to try and catch and clean him up. So just cleaned the odd blood spots off the floor and left him. He emptied another three bowls of food and eventually by the afternoon was sussing out the box. I also noticed he was licking his tail and bless his little white socks had used the litter tray?? how did he know to do that. By the evening he was curled up and licking his tummy. When cats stop washing themselves unless very old it is a sign that something is wrong with the cat. On the following morning he shot behind the washing machine again, so we just repeated the process of the previous day and each time we went in we would sit in the room without moving and talk to him. 

I'm very cute am i not

By Saturday, three days later he would not shoot behind the washing machine to hide and we would hear a little purring noise emanating from his box. We are still not sure whether we have a little boy or a little girl, he/she has quite a lot of white which could indicate a female. Genetically most ginger cats are boys.

the first day i proved how clever i was.....

and how hungry i was!!!!

...and how sleepy

it is Sunday today I'm still purring, but i am not eating today

on Sunday, Gingembre stopped eating, we thought maybe he has got post trauma. He was still purring and not running away, but we though whether he was eating or not on Monday we would get him to the vets. I rehearsed a script for the vet and translated it through Google translate.

Monday came and had not touched his food or water for a day and a bit. So when we went to our french class at the end of it Marc asked Chris and Barbara if they had a cat carrier, he thought they looked like cat people. They said yes and said come over in an hour and we could borrow it, they had also gone to the trouble to find the opening time at the vets in Castelnau at the bottom of our hill, which was very kind of them. We discussed how we should get him in the cage bearing in mind that he had never been handled before. I went in to put him in the carrier, he was maybe weak then or he trusted me either way he made no attempt to struggle and i held him to my chest for a few minutes before depositing him in the pet carrier. He had also got a major scratch to his ear, fleas perhaps. We took him to the vets and as before he did not seem to mind the car, all our previous cats would have let you know that they did not like car journeys.

Thankfully we got there just as the vet opened greeted by a rather unbending french receptionist without any English telling us we could not turn up without a rendevous (appointment) When there is a very obvious language barrier it is hard to get your point across, i just kept holding him up and saying tres malade (very ill) Just as we were on the verge of giving up, the vet hearing all came out and beckoned us in. I got out my kitten script, it happened that the vet had quite a bit of english. He was very gentle with Gingembre, told us that he was a little boy, looked at his teeth and his injured tail, he seemed quite confident and said that if the tail was infected they might have to shorten it slightly. I just wanted him to be racing around again...manx cats have short tails, anyway he was only talking about the tip. He asked if he could keep him in overnight and of course we said yes.

I felt that he was in very capable hands and we left promising to call in next day. The morning went quite slowly, the feedback had been fairly positive so only with slight apprehension did we approach another receptionist the next afternoon. She looked up our notes and proceeded to tell us in french that they had tried to ring us and then came the fatal words 'il est mort'

meaning he is dead. She guestured that we should sit in the waiting room and wait for the vet and told us she was very sorry as she could see how visibly upset i had become. I know it was only five days 

and maybe to some people completely irrational, but for the next twenty four hours i was totally inconsolable. I could not even face the vet who had been so kind and so confident and in the end ran out of the waiting room distraught. Marc having chatted to the vet came to find me, partly because i had the company cheque book (ours). They would only let us pay a consultation fee which looking back on it was a generous guesture, would they do that in England? He had suffered a massive heart attack on the operating table the vet said, it was nothing to do with his tail. in fact he head been quite bewildered and had asked Marc whether he could do an autopsy.  I think i cried all afternoon and half of the next day. He actually died on the same day as Marc's mother last year, a ginger kitten was not to be. 

JUIN 4/6 2013 Gingembre RIP