An Ill Wind....

It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good....

Back on the 23rd January a storm hit this part of France.  It came in overnight and lasted for about 24 hours.  There had already been a lot of torrential rain and some flooding, and then, when winds of almost 200kph (125mph) hit, the whole area was devastated.

Several million homes lost power and the house at the Kitchen Garden in France didn't escape.    We lost power for almost 6 days!!!!  No electricity in the immediate vicinity also meant no phones...no mobiles...  no ATM's..the list goes on.

This is a photo of our small "pool house" where we keep the pool filtration equipment and chemicals, and yes, that is a concrete base that it was torn away from....

Now, you are all probably saying that now, at the end of April, this is hardly news any longer, and that is true....

But a sequence of events has brought the memory back to me and I thought I'd share it with you.

As I said,  we lost power for nearly 6 days and that prompted me to decide to buy a generator....  In the 4 years I have lived here, we have lost power for 4 days on one occasion and then 6 days this time...

So after the storm had abated I went off to select and buy a generator, and as luck would have it my local "Brico" had an offer on a suitable model with 15 % discount, off a reasonable price.

I ordered the machine and eventually, some weeks later took delivery and, as is so often the way in France, the 15% discount was credited to my loyalty card and I took my generator away to await the next time power disappears....

All this happened back in January/February and to be honest I had forgotten all about it until the other day when I popped into the local "Brico" again to buy some tomato stakes....

Spiral stakes for tomatoes are all the rage in this part of France this year and as I tend to grow indeterminate tomatoes and take out all the interstices, just leaving the main stem to fruit, they seemed to be a good option.   and I needed stakes as I don't yet have any bamboo growing...

I picked up 20 of the steel stakes and when I came to pay, I suddenly remembered the credit and sure enough, there was enough on the card to pay for all the stakes with still some left over....  Nice to get something I had been wondering whether to buy or not for free.....

I'll be planting out the tomatoes just as soon as I get some dry weather and I'll let you all know whether these things work.

I started with the quote "It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good" and it appears that the winter storm in January that devastated more than 300,000 hectares (750,000 acres) of forest, taking out between 60 and 70% of timber, and in France alone causing an estimated 1 billion euros worth of damage, excluding forestry losses,  was not an ill wind....