22 October 2015

10 years ago in the garden

It's raining this morning, and dark. Very dark. Oh well. C'est la saison qui veut ça. Not only is it the end of the growing season here in Saint-Aignan, but it's also the end of l'heure d'été — "summer time" or what we call daylight savings time in the U.S. Sunday morning we turn the clocks back an hour. The sun will come up an hour earlier starting that day.


We still haven't done the final cleanup out in the vegetable garden. Walt wants to leave the winter squashes — acorn, butternut, and potimarron (red kuri) — out in the garden as long as possible. Since I don't have much to blog about today, I've been looking at some photos of produce from one of our best vegetable gardens of the past.


That was in 2005, which I remember as one of the most consistently sunny and warm summers we've had here out of the 13 we've spent in Saint-Aignan. Only 2015 has rivaled it in long stretches of pleasant weather. The summer of 2003 was much too hot to be put in the same league. The 2005 garden was only our second gardening effort.


In 2005, as this year, we had great crops of collard greens and tomatoes. We also had good eggplant (aubergines), which have been a flop in 2015. And in 2005, we especially had a bumper crop of winter squash and pumpkins, as you can see in the photos here. A friend who lives on the other side of the village had given us a handful of squash seeds that year. She had saved them to share. They were for a butternut-like squash called the sucrine du Berry, a local variety. I don't remember what we did with all those squashes and pumpkins...

13 comments:

  1. Oooh, I'll bet that Rosemary smelled wonderful (that's what that is, right?). Great garden story :)

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    1. We have two big rosemary bushes -- two kinds. Yes, smells and tastes great.

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  2. Is the mug in your last picture intended to give some guidance as to how to get such good results?!

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    1. RTFM — Read the "Fine" Manual. It's what we used to tell software engineers and tech support reps at work in Silicon Valley. It can be sung to the tune of YMCA.

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  3. RTFM lol
    That squash looks like it could be a weapon or a bat to play ball !
    I had all sorts of good intentions this past Spring, with this huge property, I would make a small garden.
    I had great luck with the flowers but apparently my little chipmunk friends enjoyed the vegetable seeds .. oh well, someone got fed anyway .

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    1. A small garden is better than no garden at all.

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  4. Funny seeing the mug on the blog post, as I sit drinking my coffee from my identical RTFM mug!

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    1. Simon, that photo is 10 years old but I still have the RTFM mug. Makes me think of Susan, you, Barb, Ginny, ... everybody.

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  5. Lewis and I got a laugh from the mug! I'm upset with my tech support for my mail program coincidently, but not ready to give up on computers.

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    1. Give up on computers!?!? Quelle idée! Bises...

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  6. With the rosemary and mug in the last pic for scale, that squash is huge! I had to Google RTFM, mdr.

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    1. There aren't really any FMs these days. C'était une autre époque.

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