Happy Solstice

Accuweather predicts that our high temperature today, around 6:00 pm, will be 38ºC (that's 100.4ºF).
The weather guy on our Télématin morning show is predicting the same.

Here's a photo of the blackberry bramble that is taking over the pond out behind our back gate.
The village owns it, but nobody seems to be trying to keep it under control.

 
Meanwhile, our hydrangeas (hortensia) have enjoyed all the rain we've had for two years now.
They have doubled in height and are threatening to take over the front of our house.

 
Another invasive plant, though not as aggressive, is what we call "hens and chicks" (sempervivum or joubarbe). They are easier to contain than the millepertuis is. I've also been collecting rocks. For years. I found pots and pots of them in the greenhouse. As part of the "let's empty the greenhouse" project I hauled all the pots of rocks outdoors and then decided that rather than paint the window sill on the back side of the house, I'd just store rocks up there this summer. I think I'm fascinated by rocks because where I grew up on the North Carolina coast, we didn't have any rocks. The land was all sand.

Progrès ?

                                    Yesterday                                                             Today

I think you'll have to use your imagination because my photos don't reflect reality. We (Walt, really) made great progress on getting rid of the millepertuis yesterday. If you look closely at the top of the Today photo, you can see that the plants' stems there are taller than the ones toward the bottom and middle of the photo. Walt got out our electric hedge clipper and went at it. It's the clipper he used to use to trim our bay laurel hedge every autumn until 2012, when we engaged a lanscaping contractor to do that annual chore. Yesterday, we raked up millepertuis trimmings that filled a wheelbarrow to overflowing. More later.

Fruits and flowers

The pond outside our back gate — the pond is owned by the village — is quickly being taken over by blackberries (ronces in French). If the weather stays as hot as it is right now, maybe we'll soon be able to harvest some berries.

One of our neighbors has a plum tree that is loaded down with fruit. If they start falling to the ground, I'll go get some. They are the size of cherries and make a very good clafoutis.

Above left, a view of our red maple trees from the neigbors' yard. Above right, one of the roses in our yard. A lot of flowers are fading now because of the hot, dry days we're having.

Working on the millepertuis

This is one of the big projects (for me) that I'm working on right now. My goal is to get rid of the millepertuis (St. John's wort) that is spreading along the south-facing wall of our house. Walt is spraying it every few days with what we are calling "the recipe" — a mixture of highly acidic vinegar (vinaigre ménager), salt, and dishwashing liquid. The spraying seems to be working, as you can see in the photo on the right below. The photo on the left below shows what the millepertuis looked like in June 2015. Here's a link to some posts I've published about millepertuis over the years.

I went out a few days ago and bought a new hedge clipper, because the old one we had was too rusty and dull to cut the millepertuis plants' woody stems. The new clipper cuts better than the old one, but it's still not easy to use. Walt tried to dig up some of the plants using a shovel, but the ground that it's growing in is as hard as concrete. Then I decided that maybe I can let heat kill the plants by covering them with a black plastic tarp and letting the sun do the job. We are expecting a heat wave over the next few days, and that might help. The tarp is three meters wide and 15 meters long. I have a lot of big rocks, bricks, and cinderblocks we can use to hold it down and keep it from blowing away if the weather turns windy.

Grapes

The grape flowers we've been seeing out in the vineyard are now rapidly becoming actual grapes.

The weather this week is supposed to get hotter and hotter every day. Even today the high temperature is supposed to be around 85.

By Sunday we're predicted to experience caniculaire (dog-day) conditions. That means extreme, dangerous heat.

Since we still don't have any kind of air-conditioning, I'm not looking forward to the heat wave. We lived through the great canicule of 2003 when we arrived here 22 years ago. It was not fun.

Same day, more reds...

The day I stopped on the side of the road to take the photos of fields of poppies that I posted yesterday, I was headed toward the little town of Valençay, about 10 miles east of Saint-Aignan. I was going to do some shopping in the weekly market there. Above you see The market hall, where some of the vendors display and sell their products. Other vendors have stalls outdoors on the market square or along the nearby streets. The tomatoes at the market that day in June 2010 were beautiful, as you can see.

The halle au blé (market hall) in Valençay was built about 100 years ago. The weekly market sets up on Tuesday mornings. Valençay is famous for its goat cheeses and wines (reds, whites rosés). The restaurant above right is one Walt and I first went to for a nice lunch in October 2000. We've returned several times over the years.

Poppies

Red poppies are called coquelicots in French. I saw these fields of poppies when I was on my way to Valençay,
near the town of Lye (lee), to go shopping in the weekly open-air market there.

These are photos that I took 15 years ago today, on June 15, 2010, using
a Panasonic DMC-ZS1 digital camera that I still have and still use once in a while.

Chinese money plant

Here's photo to show Evelyn how the plant she brought me from the U.S. four years ago is doing these days.
Those are Tasha's front paws in the background.

The moon this morning

The view from our guest bedroom window at 5:30 this morning. Photo taken with my Samsung smartphone's camera.

I've never been able to find out why there is a big B on this house's chimney. I don't know when the house was built, or by whom. The people who live there now moved in just 2 or 3 years ago.

A river walk

After mentioning walks along the Cher river near our house in yesterday's post, I decided on the spur of the moment to go down there for the morning walk with Tasha. I forgot how low in the sky and bright the sun shines early in the morning, making it difficult to take photos. Here are a couple, however. By the way, Tasha is at the vet's this morning having her teeth cleaned. Walt just got back from dropping her off. He or I will go pick her up this afternoon. She had to fast starting at 8:00 p.m. yesterday. She was very disoriented and subdued this morning when she didn't get her normal breakfast at the normal time.

These two pictures are of the lock keeper's house on the right bank of the Cher from different perspectives.

Local scenes and colors

Down the hill and through the woods into the river valley from our hamlet... We can take nice walks along the Cher river and around the port at the western end of the Canal de Berry, the region's two main water features.

These are photos I took within two or three miles of our house. I took them on June 11, 2005 — 20 years ago today. We're having the same kind of weather today. The area around Saint-Aignan is basically agricultural (grape-growing is agriculture too).

We live on high ground about half a mile from the river and two miles from the canal. There are often big fields of red poppies all around us at this time of year.

Our first heat wave

I mean our first heat wave of the year. Already. The temperature is supposed to hit 85F this afternoon, and 90F tomorrow afternoon. We'll be spending time on our terrace (photos below) which is just off the living room and the kitchen.

We spent Sunday afternoon out there, in fact. The temperature wasn't torrid, but it was pleasant. And the company was great. We had a glass or two of wine and some home-made hummus and eggplant caviar with British friends that we hadn't seen since the beginning of the Covid pandemic five or six years ago. They brought along another American friend of theirs who has lived in Texas, New York, and California. Now she has lived in France for three or four years, if I understood correctly. It's not often that we have friends in these days, and it was a lot of fun.

The plant with yellow flowers in the photo above is a memory of my mother, who passed away in 2018. In 1997, she and I went on a road trip from North Carolina to Illinois and back. That's where I spent five or six years in graduate school back in the 1980s, and my mother had never seen the place. We stayed with old friends of mine who live outside Urbana. Somewhere along the way, my mother acquired a cutting of the sedum plant above. Back in N.C., she planted it in her back yard. When she sold her house in 2005, I went over there to help her move out. I returned to Saint-Aignan with a cutting from the sedum and I've had it growing here ever since.

More Lavardin wall art

For centuries these paintings were themselves painted over and hidden from view. They were only rediscovered and uncovered about a hundred years ago, when a layer of plain gray paint was stripped off. Some have been restored.

Lavardin is also the site of a ruined medieval château-fort.

More church art for a Sunday

Just some photos today. Friends who live about an hour's drive from here are coming to visit this afternoon. They're British and they're bringing along an American friend of theirs. I'll be curious to know if the American woman lives in France or is just visiting. And it will be good to see our British friends, whom we haven't seen in a year or more, and maybe since the beginning of the Covid pandemic five years ago.