Gardening with Kate

Sunday was to be a day in the garden with Kate....

In preparation we had bought leek and small white onion seedlings at Villereal market.

But Kate was staying here so first it was a breakfast of grilled tomato, with sautéed red kidney beans and mushrooms eaten with some of my homemade bread and a cup of good French café au lait.....or Flat White, as I gather it is called in Australia.

My vegetable plot is not large, so the first decision was where to plant about 100 leek and another 100 onion seedlings. The Chinese Cabbage leaves are still being eaten as fast as I can mix up and use my insecticide, the red Cabbages are now very nearly ready to be harvested, half a dozen frisée lettuce have been picked and picked and picked and now there are just a few leaves left growing and then there is the volunteer pumpkin which has grown to about 10metres long (35ft) and has only a couple of tiny fruits on it...

After a lot of discussion, a fair amount of poking and prodding and a good deal of giggling Kate decided to sacrifice the pumpkin and the lettuces...who am I to argue??? so we set about pulling out those plants that had lost the right to live.

After removing the plants and the weeds we set about breaking up the soil to prepare the bed before making trenches, laying the seedlings in and then simply pushing the earth back over the roots and firming.   The whole thing took us about 3 hours including the discussion on what to do!!!!  I think this is the most productive way of planting out seedlings I have ever come across!!  A big thanks Kate.

All this activity during the morning meant that Kate had worked up quite an appetite and as it was now something past 1 in the afternoon we stopped for lunch.   Kate had already decided to cook a risotto for dinner that evening so lunch was destined to be a light affair... fortunately, we had some chicken in the fridge so everything was ok.

After lunch, it was back out into the garden to plant out some broccoli and fennel seedlings which I had raised from seed...  Yes...from seed!!!!   I had sown the seed about a month ago and all 24 plants had been hardened off and were ready to be planted out.   All the spare space was filled wit the seedlings until there were just a few broccoli left.

Next we discussed the 25,000 other things I wanted to grow... and decided that we had better extend the bed.

My vegetable bed is slightly raised and is contained with some wooden border fences.    It was a relatively short job to define the new bed size by moving fences and once that had been done we soaked the grass that the bed was now going to cover for about an hour....Next we smothered the grass with newspaper using the thickness of about half a newspaper, and then soaked that for another hour.  While that was soaking we collected a trailerful of compost from the compost area at the bottom of the garden.

We then added about 150mm of compost and soaked it all again.  Finally we spread a bog of commercial compost across the top before leaving the new area of bed to settle.

At the end of a long day we decided to  relax in the new pool for a few minutes before I dispatched her to make supper....

I had a great day, wonderfully relaxing and topped off with the best risotto I have ever tasted..

 

Thanks Kate.. Come again next year....

Villereal, Kate and a day in Perigord.

Kate, of Hills and Plains Seedsavers, is spending a couple of days  here as part of her Vegetable Vagabond world tour.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to Villereal for the weekly market.   The market has quietened down a bit from the business of the height of the season and it was nice for Kate to meet and chat to some of the traders that I regularly visit.... I just had my usual weekly fruit and vegetable shop to complete but Kate had decided to cook dinner for us on Sunday evening and happily bought mussels, ginger, limes, lemons and other bits and pieces for her chosen recipe.

Before getting back to start some serious gardening, we paid a quick visit to my friend Bernard's vineyard where Kate was able to taste our local Monbazillac wine....   Kate doesn't drink that much wine but she certainly enjoyed the sweet dessert wine and tried two or three different vintages before deciding which year to purchase.

Later, we visited another friend with a large kitchen garden and Kate spent about an hour and half chatting happily about fruit and vegetables, taking in the way we do things here in the south west of France and passing on the differences and similarities to her own gardening experience in South Australia.

Our friends Michael and Mary met Kate on Friday evening and invited us all to go along on Saturday so that they could prepare a typical Perigordine dinner for us.  Kate's love of food meant that this opportunity could not be refused so we ended the day at their house enjoying a great meal.

When we arrived we spent about an hour looking around her potager and fruit trees before strolling over to the "chook" house.    In their household, Mary does the gardening and Michael looks after the chooks.  Before we had been their many minutes Kate was inside the fenced enclosure moving about trying to get photographs for her blog while the chickens, and in particular the large cock, rushed about trying to avoid her whilst herding his girls.

Dinner started with a cocktail and Michael produced his cocktail "menu" for Kate to choose from.... a selection of 101 cocktails!!!

After the cocktail, served with duck boudin, home grown cherry tomatoes, prunes and apricots wrapped in bacon we moved to the table for dinner.  

First a thick creamy garlic soup....  Then a plate of local cold meats including sliced dried breast of duck, Foie Gras, duck saucisson and various other local delicacies.... Next a "confit de canard" served with local potatoes sautéed in duck fat.... A cheese board with 5 different cheese from the south of France was then followed by Kate's apple pie and cream, made to her own special recipe.

It was a great traditional French evening with lots of good food, lots of good wine and most importantly, lots of good conversation and humour.

Kate, Sarah and Michael

Kate has arrived for her few days in the Perigord and yesterday we spent a busy day, getting to know each other, visiting a friend, Sarah's, "potager" and having dinner with our friends, Michael and Mary.

Sarah grows enough vegetables to be able to operate a small "Vegetable Box Scheme" in the the Charente, and it was fascinating to tour her garden with her and feel her passion for the things she grows.

We then drove back through the Bordeaux rush hour traffic for a dinner the dinner with Michael and Mary.   Conversation over dinner was wide ranging but at one point Michael reminded me of his latest "catch"... a young deer in an area just outside our garden.   He let me have these two photos which I am happy to pass on.

This morning, we're off to Villereal after a quick tour of my garden.

 

 

Villereal 20/9/2008

Saturday has come round again and so, this morning we went off to the market at Villereal....

Local village markets in France, like the one at Villereal, are a trading post for all sorts of businesses...

There is a lot of food, stall after stall of delicious looking fresh fruit and vegetables, often being sold by the producer themselves, several fishmongers with their refrigerated display trailers and lots of very appetising looking fish and seafood....  This morning, one fishmonger was cooking moules marinière at one end of his stall and I stopped to watch as he poured a couple of bottles of Bergerac sec, the local dry white wine over a mountain of mussels and then liberally added hand fulls of roughly chopped flat leaf parsley.

The skillet was about 600mm (2ft) diameter and by the look of the sack and the pile of mussels I would guess he had about 5 kgs (11lbs) of cleaned mussels.. 

The word marinière in French simply refers to the method of cooking in dry white wine with garlic and some herbs....

There are also a lot of cheese stalls and today we bought some delicious goats cheese from a small producer who's farm is just outside Villereal and whose cheese we particularly like..

But as well as food, there are also lots and lots of other traders present.... During the week, working in garden I broke my watch strap, so part of today's visit was to see if the watch man could repair it for me....  Sadly, he couldn't as I had lost some pieces when it broke and he didn't have anything that would fit...  But he had a whole range of similar watches for very little money so in the end I settled for a rather nice large faced watch to replace the broken one...

One of the restaurant/bars which are in the market place was closed for annual holidays today so all the other bars were very busy but we managed to get coffee and some croissants at one of our favourite restaurants.....

Then I had to pay a quick visit to my bank before returning to the car to drive home...

Lots of people talk about excellent Farmers Markets where you can buy good fresh produce but here in France I believe we have the best of both worlds.  The farmers' stalls are excellent but a weekly visit to the market can encompass so much more than just buying fruit and vegetables

A day at the beach

I've written a lot about Autumn arriving just lately...  Temperatures dropping into single figures.... early morning mist casting a softness across the garden etc....

My sister in law is staying with us for a few days and yesterday expressed a desire to go to the beach....it's about a 2 hour run in the car....

So we packed up a pic-nic and set off yesterday morning to one of my favourite local beaches near Lacanau on the Atlantic Ocean

As I have said recently, Autumn is fairly swooping in to this part of France, which is why at about midday I was able take this picture of a beautiful abandoned beach....  In fact the temperature was very pleasant and my sister in law managed a good couple of hours sunbathing and swimming.

This is not actually the Atlantic Ocean but is a beach on the largest lake  in France which lies just a few kilometres behind the dunes bordering the Atlantic and nestles in amongst the great pine forest of the Medoc region...famous for it's wine

Villereal - 13/9/08

Last Saturday we visited Villereal market "comme d'habitude".    It was a beautiful day, not too hot but not too cold either.... I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt....

It was a relief after the crush of the summer tourist traffic to have a moment to chat to the traders.... I fully understand that our economy, including my personal economy, relies so very heavily on the tourists arriving and spending some of their money here.... I don't begrudge them anything, as without them, the very things I enjoy wouldn't exist..... but it's nice when the time comes for them to go home again and we can return to a less frenetic existence.... 

We spent a very pleasant couple of hours wandering around and this week I visited the cheese man, who had some beautiful Cantal regional cheese as well as these intriguing looking Torteau Fromage.

Laurent had his usual excellent range of fruit and vegetables..  .. the sign offers a 10kg sac of haricot grain for €25  (for the non metric readers.. 10kg is about 22lbs and €25 is about 35USD)

Autumn mornings

Autumn is rushing in to this part of south west France now that September has arrived and we are regularly seeing overnight temperatures drop to single figures (C  32 - 50F).  Last night it was 9C (48F) again.

The cooler weather is also bringing early morning fog to the garden...  I do love these light autumnal mists though.  They cover the garden in a delicious softening haze which makes everything look much gentler.  Photographers will often use a haze lens to soften the features when they are trying to capture a photograph of a beautiful young model, and that is an attempt to reproduce what nature does when it casts one of the autumnal mists across the garden.

Autumn is also bringing a change in the leaf colours around the garden and, in the photo, you can see our horsechestnut tree, taken on that same misty morning, with the leaves already turned brown and falling.

In the vegetable garden, the tomatoes are coming to an end although there is still a lot of fruit which may or may not ripen on the vines.    I shall pick it soon and pull up the plants to make way for raising my winter vegetable seedlings.  I shall try and ripen any green tomatoes in a window and then will make green tomato chutney with the ones that don't turn red...I love that chutney and we eat it right through the winter bringing a flavour of summer in the depth of winter.

Starting to think about winter crops for the garden has got me to thinking about what I should do about increasing the size of the plot.   I started out earlier this year... the first time I had created a vegetable garden here and I set up two beds, one 8ft x 8ft (2.4m x 2.4m) and a second bed of 8ft x 4 ft (2.4m x 1.2m).  The second bed is now full of strawberries and will stay that way for a few years

The first bed has both red and Chinese cabbage  along with a large pumpkin vine and a few dregs of the summer crops which will be pulled out shortly.... There are some pumpkins forming on the vine....

I recently extended this bed to 10' x 8' (3m x 2.4m) to allow a path down the middle.   I'm not sure whether to create a new 10' x 8' bed or whether to simply extend this one so that it becomes 16' x 10' (4.8m x 3m)   I'm inclining towards extending it.

For my winter crops, I have some broccoli and fennel seedlings already on the go although I'm going to start a few more fennel, maybe today....  I'll sow some more cabbage, maybe the Chinese cabbage or maybe another variety and I would like to try some Brussels sprouts. 

I read Kate's piece on broad beans yesterday and have decided to grow those as well....  Kate's article reminded me how much I enjoyed broad beans and what better reason is there for choosing a crop....

While I'm mentioning her I'd just like to wish Kate "Bon Voyage" as she sets off on her tour and to remind her that I'll be at the station waiting for her....with lots of people to see and places to go.   The first place I am intending to take her is a couple of hours drive north of here, to Sarah, in Charente-Maritime.   

I had better get back out in the garden... I still have a construction project to finish and now have less than two weeks before Kate arrives on her "inspection tour"!!!  I'm really looking forward to Kate's visit and am hoping to have a lot of fun showing her things and learning from her.

September's here

September has brought with it an autumn feel to South West France.... It's 9:30 pm and I'm sitting at my laptop writing this wearing a sweater for the first time for several months.  Overnight temperatures dropped to 9 C (49F) last night, the first time we have seen temperatures in single figures since April.

In my garden, the horse chestnut tree is always the first thing to announce the impending arrival of autumn as it starts to drop it's leaves quite early.    Today there is hardy a leaf left on it...

So it's time to start to think about what to grow over autumn and winter and as this is my first year I'm a bit stuck where to start.

I already have some Chinese Cabbages growing which look like they are going to recover from the caterpillar attack.  Also the red cabbages which have been in since the spring are looking nice and will be ready to harvest soon.

I'm going to try and grow some broccoli and some fennel.   Fennel is a wonderful herb which is native to the Mediterranean region although can now be found all around the globe.  I have become a convert to it since moving here to France.   In the last week, I have sown seed for both fennel and broccoli, although, I am still very new to growing food and my success with seeds is not brilliant, but I will persevere.  The fennel has peeped through the surface with a spindly little shoot which I believe is normal...  I have half a dozen broccoli, from a  sowing a couple of weeks ago and I have just sown a few more...

I also recently put some peppermint in which is just beginning to show and hopefully will be a nice addition to my mint pot.   In the herb pots, the mint is doing extremely well, the basil is also doing well now after a couple of false starts and the flat leaf parsley that was sown back in July is now developing well

I have a volunteer pumpkin whose vine has grown to about 8m (26ft).  It is in a 2.4m (8ft) bed and I am winding it up and down the bed trying to contain it.  I didn't know whether it was pumpkin or melon or quite what, but on Kitchen Garden day, one of our guests assured me it was pumpkin and as he is a commercial pumpkin grower, I guessed I should listen....

I am also in the process of deciding about extending the garden.  This year I have had a lot of successes but have really had too many varieties with not enough of any one thing.    I'm thinking of doubling the size of the plot, as I don't want to overwhelm myself and I am also going to grow next year's tomatoes in the ground rather than in pots, so that will need some more space...

I still have to make a decision on lifting, splitting and moving my rhubarb as well...  At the moment it is in a rose bed.. but is producing nice rhubarb and I hear stories of people losing the whole lot once they try and move them....The other problem is that the space I had earmarked for it has now been taken over by Strawberries....

I also picked up the first walnut today....so before long, the annual race between me and the squirrels will start in earnest..

I think it's a good thing that I have got the swimming pool construction out of the way now as it seems I'm going to be busy in the garden for a while........

The Pool in September 08

At a huge cost in the way of chinese cabbages (chou chinois), I'm pleased to announce that the swimming pool is now  finished....

Construction work can now move on to building a timber deck which will serve the pool....

I'm thinking of calling it "Cabbage's Pool" in memory of events....

This is a picture of the first person to swim in it, one of our holiday guests.  The little yellow duck was actually the first to swim in it, so I included it in this picture

Melon anyone?

It's common in this part of France for small farmers to increase the size of their farm by reaching an agreement with someone, who owns, maybe just one or two fields locally, to use their piece of land.   Usually, on it's own the land is not viable for farming, but by being rolled into a slightly larger operation it becomes useful.

We have just such an arrangement with a local farmer for one of our fields.   The farmer in question, who is in his mid eighties, uses the field for "kitchen garden" crops, growing quite an assortment of things....  He is often to be seen out in the heat of the day, working away with his hoe, shunning the more aggressive use of tractors and their paraphernalia...

One crop he has grown every year since we arrived here is melons...the small Charentais melon which is so delicious and juicy when eaten very fresh.   I personally think this is the very best melon to use either as dessert, or for aperitifs, when it is delicious wrapped in something like ham or smoked salmon.

Just look how inviting that deep orange coloured flesh is....

This morning, whilst I was in the middle of a long distance crisis, my door bell rang and I reluctantly put the crisis on hold whilst I answered it...  My farmer, who speaks a local dialect of French which I find very difficult to understand, was there, proffering a couple of these delicious melons...still warm from the field.

The familiar scent was irresistibly persistent and by lunch time all my resistance had evaporated and I cut one in half to eat, on it's own, as a starter.

Don't turn your back.....

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece, Back in the Garden where I mentioned that for a couple of weeks, my focus had been on constructing a swimming pool for our guest accommodation rather than gardening and indeed, the construction of the pool has progressed quite well but at a significant cost to garden progress.....

I keep fitting a few hours work into the garden around the time taken by the construction work and also the other things I do.... chores, like cleaning and maintenance of the property and pleasantries like emailing and chatting with friends... and of course, in this part of the world, attending parties....

On Sunday it was KGDay, which you can read about below or at Kitchen Garden  Day 2008 France, then on Thursday, it was my birthday and some neighbours invited me for a surprise birthday party, where we ate a fabulous meal based around a Paella.  On Friday some friends from the UK arrived and we had arranged to go to a local restaurant for a meal, also to celebrate my birthday... so you can see, it's actually hard fitting in all these things and getting any work at all done....In fact, at the party on Thursday I was discussing this very problem with Michael, the guy who gives so many photos for me to use here on the blog, and he said hat he agreed and that life in Perigord was truly difficult these days................

So yesterday, I managed, for the first time for several days to get back out into the garden mainly to pull weeds and to lift my onions....

 

However....

 

Before a single weed had succumbed to my fingers, I discovered that I had a serious problem with my Chinese leaves.... actually, the situation is so bad that maybe the problem is that I no longer have Chinese leaves.....

Whilst I had been busy building my swimming pool, caterpillars had been busy eating their way through  my Chinese leaves....

Some quick research turned up a product "Insectobiol J" which is designed for just this problem so I am about to prepare the insecticide and spray them to see if any of the plants can survive.   This is a photo of the worst plant affected......  Very sad....

However, I did also manage to lift some small but very sweet onions.

My lesson for August seems to have been, just because I am busy, don't assume everything in the garden is good....