Buried under apples

Anybody feeling sad or sorry about our not getting many tomatoes out of our vegetable garden this past "summer" should re-focus those feelings on our over-abundance of apples. Around Saint-Aignan, from July through October, we are buried under piles of them. There are apple trees all around. We have five. Our neighbors across the street have at least that many. The other neighbors out back have a small orchard with half a dozen or more apple trees in it. We all pick some, but mostly the apples just fall to the ground and rot away.

Apples under the tree, mostly hidden in
the grass, as well as on the gravel path

In our yard, the biggest apple tree produces a ton of apples one year, and then far fewer the next year. This was a banner year, and all the more so because the weather was cool and rainy. The apples had a chance to get big and fat, and you could just sit out back and listen to them fall to the ground with a loud thud all day long. Well, you could sit out back when it wasn't raining, which was just once in a while.

Callie offering, I thought, to help me pick
up the apples that had fallen on the path

I've said it before: Walt made quarts of applesauce last year, and I made quarts of apple jelly. We are still working on consuming all that. Walt has "requested" that I not make any more jelly, jam, or preserves. After the 10 kilos of peaches we turned into preserves in 2005, the 10 or more kilos of apples I made into jelly in 2006, and the 20 kilos or so of plums I made into jam in 2006 and 2007, our pantry runneth over. Oh, did I forget the six quarts of quince jelly I made in 2004?

Callie got bored pretty fast, so I had to do the work by myself.

I think I've discovered a good way to work on the stock of applesauce. It will be good to eat with the boudin noir antillais that Madame Doudouille sells at the Saint-Aignan market on Saturday mornings. Boudin noir is black pudding, or blood sausage, and Walt thought he didn't like it until he tried the antillais, or Caribbean, version. It's hot and spicy. And applesauce will be the ideal side dish to serve with it.

Callie shows up at the end and says: "What did you do with
all my apples?" She has been eating at least one apple a day.

And there are always applesauce cakes. Those are good too, especially during the winter when fresh fruit isn't that good.

I hope we have a good year for cherries and plums again next year, but not if it means having weeks rainy weather. We are due for a dry, hot summer. But first we have to get through the winter. Nobody knows whether this winter will be cold and snowy, like 2005-06, or mild and damp, like 2006-07. I'm kind of hoping for cold and snowy, because that might bring us a dry, hot summer in 2008. Cross your fingers.

These are the apples we picked up and dumped in a community
compost pile outside our back gate. The others we picked up are in
a second, private compost pile behind our garden shed.

I said yesterday that we had recently picked up between 15 and 20 wheelbarrow-loads of apples for composting. Well, I picked up and hauled away another five wheelbarrow-loads today. Those were just the ones that had fallen on the rocky allée that runs down the middle of the back yard. Not only do we have more apples than we can possible eat, but we have more than our own compost pile can accommodate.

A clean path, with just the garden hoses to
be brought in before the first freeze

Before yesterday, we had already picked all the apples that were hidden in the too-tall grass growing right under the apple trees. So Walt was finally able to mow the grass today. Any other apples that fall from here on out will just rot on the ground over the winter.

Wheelbarrow styles

Nice wheelbarrow colors

I wish we could get a new wheel or tire for this old wheelbarrow. We tried to find one when we got here in 2003, but without success. We could continue searching all the junkyards and gardening equipment stores around the region, but it might take forever.

We were forced to go out and buy a new wheelbarrow. It's made of unpainted galvanized steel, so it's just silver. How boring is that?

Boring

We needed a new wheelbarrow because we thought another old one we found in the garden shed when we moved here four years ago might not be sturdy enough to withstand much more abuse. It's a nice one, and instead of inflatable tires it has hard rubber wheels.

Green and red barrow

And here's one more picture of it, just to show you it still serves the purpose. We used it yesterday to gather up all the apples that had fallen from the trees out back and that had to be picked up before Walt could mow the grass.

The barrow with its load of red apples

Did you know barrow by itself was a word? I didn't. It means 1. A flat, rectangular tray or cart with handles at each end. 2. A wheelbarrow. The word is related to the verb to bear, meaning to carry; it's the bearer. All that is according to the American Heritage Dictionary.

Zucchini you can count on

The good news from Saint-Aignan is that the weather has turned nice. The bad news is that the vegetable garden is still pretty sad. We are getting good handfuls of green beans every other day (though many of the beans Walt planted never came up), but a lot of the little tomatoes on the vines are rotting before they even have a chance to turn red or yellow. If this spell of good weather lasts, there is still hope.

When all else fails in a garden, however, you can always count on zucchini. They're called courgettes in France and in England, and we have both green and yellow summer squash growing out back. They hide under the big leaves of the plants they grow on and before you know it they get gigantic.

Barquettes

It's the perennial summertime gardening problem — how do you possibly use up all the squash that just a couple of plants can produce? Well, the best way is to make stuffed zucchini, or boats.

Yesterday when I told the bread lady that I was making boats out of my courgettes, she just looked at me with a perplexed expression and said she didn't understand. Then I remembered that the French word for that is barquettes. When I told the bread lady that in English we called those bateaux, or boats, she just chuckled.

Ready for the oven

I went to SuperU yesterday morning and bought about three pounds of beef for stew (bœuf pour bourguignon). Back at home, while I scooped out the zucchinis, Walt ran the beef through the meat grinder a couple of times. We think the beef we buy and grind ourselves is better than the already-ground beef sold at the supermarket, and when we grind it we at least know exactly what it has in it.

I cut the squash in half and scooped out the raw pulp and seeds. I chopped and cooked some onion and garlic, added some herbs and spices, and then mixed all that up with the ground meat, a half a cup of heavy cream, two eggs, and two chopped fresh tomatoes. Then I stuff the zucchini halves with the mixture.

And now ready for the table

To make sure the squash boats cook along with their meat filling, I put some liquid in the bottom of the two pans I was using. In this case, I had some tomato sauce and diluted it with water so that it was really thin. Then I covered the pans with aluminum foil and put them in a fairly hot oven for about an hour. At the end, it's good to remove the foil and let the meat brown on top.

This is not gourmet food, but it is good, especially with some grated parmesan and a dribble of olive oil. Simple food is often the best. I made ten boats; we ate two and then wrapped the rest in foil and put them in the freezer in plastic bags. It's food for the fall and winter.

Power cuts

We got a letter last week from EDF (Electricité de France) informing us that the power lines in our village are being upgraded this summer and that our neighborhood or hameau could expect power outages today between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. Those are my prime blogging hours — especially today, since I took Callie out for a walk in the vineyard early this morning. It's almost 8:00 now.

Sunrise over La Renaudière, 25 July 2007

I have two blog topics milling around in my head: the walk with Callie and how she is afraid of shadows, and my experience as an expatriate trying to purchase a new digital camera from an American Internet vendor. Maybe I'll get one of them done later today.

We have an artichoke! Two of them, actually.
The other three plants are good-for-nothings.

Tomorrow we are liable to have power outages any time between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., according to the EDF letter. I'm sure they will have the power turned on around noon so that we can all cook lunch — that's sacred. Otherwise, I guess I'll have to leave my computer turned off all during the day to avoid crashes.

A year for fruit

The weather was cool and rainy all through May and June, and even into July. We still haven't had a stretch of really warm weather. The vegetable garden is a disaster zone, though it is just starting to look a little better now, since we've had a few sunny days.

There are big yellow flowers on the zucchini and summer squash plants (courgettes vertes et jaunes). There are some small green tomatoes now, and some green bell peppers too. The eggplants and green beans have blossoms — Walt actually picked a few haricots verts yesterday.

It's a great year for mirabelle plums in the Cher Valley.

While it's not a great year for the jardin potager, it looks like we are having a fantastic year for fruit. I blogged in June about the local cherries, with many pictures of the ones we picked on our property and on untended land nearby. We enjoyed cherry clafoutis and duck with cherry sauce, and I made several jars of confiture de cerises.

A few weeks ago, I picked a big batch of little red plums over in my neighbors' yard. They didn't mind, especially since 95% of the plums I gathered were ones I picked up off the ground. I hardly touched the tree. A couple of weeks later, my neighbors' brother-in-law came over from Noyers-sur-Cher, across the river where he lives, and picked a lot more plums. I saw him that day. And then the neighbors told us he made 15 jars of preserves with the plums he picked.

I can't tell if these are exactly the same variety as
the mirabelles pictured above, but they are good.

Now the little rosy-tinged yellow plums called mirabelles are ripening. For the first time since we came here — this is our fifth summer already — the plum trees out in our back yard are covered in fruit. This is also the first year we've had enough plump cherries from our own cherry tree to be able to do anything with them.

I don't know whether to attribute the sudden increase in the productivity of our fruit trees to the mild winter we had or to the great amount of rain that has fallen since May 1. Maybe it was just too dry for the trees to set fruit in 2003-06. Or for the fruit to plump up.

There is obviously a balance in nature. For three years, we had a sumptuous harvest of vegetables from the garden. This year, the garden is producing less, but the fruit harvest is exceptionally nice.

It looks like it's going to be a good year for blackberries too.

Whatever the cause, we picked and picked up about 2.5 kg (6 lbs.) of plums earlier this week in our own yard, and there are two trees on the untended land next to ours that are heavy with little yellow plums. I just went out and tasted a couple — they seem to be a slightly different variety from the mirabelles we have (they are rounder and yellower) and they aren't quite ripe yet. They're sweet enough to eat, but they will be better by mid-week.

I can wait, since I just picked another kilo or so off our own trees and the ground under them.

Pommes rouges...

The other fruits we are going to have this year, in abundance, are apples and blackberries. This is an "on" year for our biggest green apple tree, so there are literally thousands of apples on it. We will have to discard most of them because we just can't use them all. Another of our apple trees is covered in bright red apples, and we will try to use as many of those as possible.

...et beaucoup de pommes vertes

Out in the vineyard and along both the gravel and paved roads out back, there are numerous blackberry brambles. One summer, a few years a go, I picked some blackberries and we made a pie. This year, from the looks of things, there will be many more blackberries than ever before (since 2003, anyway). I foresee blackberry pies and blackberry jelly in August.

The 2006 vegetable garden vs. now

A year ago, July 12, 2006, I took some pictures of the vegetable garden. As you can see, it was pretty far along. Big fat tomatoes, while still green, hung in large bunches off the tomato plants. The green and yellow summer squash plants were full of flowers, and we had already harvested some squashes of both colors. And the green bean plants were big, bushy, and covered in red blossoms.

12 July 2006 — lots o' tomatoes...

...and big healthy squash and bean plants

This July 12, in 2007, we have almost nothing, save weeds. The bean plants mostly didn't come up. I think the snails, slugs, and other pests ate the shoots as soon at they poked up out of the soil (mud would be a better term). The squash plants are still small and they are just getting ready to produce a couple of flowers. The tomato plants look good, and there are flowers and even some tiny little green tomatoes, but it will be weeks and weeks before we might be able, weather permitting, to eat a fresh garden tomato.

Yesterday it didn't rain. Let me repeat:

IT DID NOT RAIN! Il N'A PAS PLU !

How about that! I had a really nice walk with Callie out in the vineyard between four and five o'clock.

The road in the vineyard winding its way toward the house

We do have daisies (with bugs on them) in the garden...

...and some nasturtiums (called capucines in French).

Weather reports are saying that we should have a hot weekend. Le temps changera avec le changement de lune is the conventional wisdom around Saint-Aignan. There's a new moon on Saturday (which happens to be July 14th, Bastille Day) and the weather will change then. This is not the first time I've heard this talk of the weather changing on a full or new moon.

Walt and Callie working in the garden, 11 July 2007

If the weather does turn sunny and warm, we won't know how to act.

Callie on our walk: "You mean there's a car out here too?
You know I hate cars. I refuse to go near the ugly thing!"

If I don't post anything over the next few days, you'll know it's because I'm in shock. Heatstroke. Sunstroke. Out riding around in the car with the AC on. You get the picture.

Finally getting the garden in

The weather has decided to start cooperating with the gardeners of Saint-Aignan. We are late planting this year. We probably should have planted in April, when the weather was warm. I can say that now, because we know that we didn't have a cold snap in May, as often happens. According to local custom, we aren't supposed to set plants out before mid-May.

The herb garden in front, and behind it the three
vegetable garden plots all tilled up and ready to go

The piece of equipment that makes all this possible is the rototiller. It's gas powered and makes fairly short work of a project that would require many hours of back-breaking labor if we tried to do it with a shovel and a hoe.

The Staub rototiller that we bought in 2004

This year we'll have tomatoes (Walt set out 15 plants yesterday) of all kinds: big yellow tomatoes (thanks to Harriett and Tom in Urbana, Illinois, for the seeds), plum tomatoes, two kinds of beefsteak tomatoes, and tomatillos. I see salsa and salads and tomato sauce in our future.

Another view of the garden, framed by two apple trees

We'll also have zucchini, yellow squash, okra (if the seeds germinate), green beans, eggplants, and red bell peppers. Oh, and some blettes (aka bettes) or chard, because our friend Gisèle is going to give us some seedlings this afternoon.

The tomato plants are all staked out. The pumpkin patch is
in the far corner, backed by a piece of corrugated sheet metal.

And a couple of days ago, I tilled up a new plot out in the far corner of the yard, where the previous owners had their compost pile. That should be very rich soil. Walt went out and planted two kinds of pumpkins and some butternut squash back there. We'll just let those take over our new pumpkin patch.

Gardening tools leaning up against the trunk of an apple tree

The gendarmes (firebugs) under the linden tree seem to have produced a new generation this month. There are millions of them. They are harmless and even beneficial, since they live on plant detritus and process it into the soil as poop.

Baby firebugs (called gendarmes in French) devouring a rose petal.
Notice the adult firebug on the right. Guarding the babies?

After all the gardening work, I like to stretch out on a chaise longue in the shade, read newspaper articles printed off the 'net, and listen to my favorite afternoon radio program (Les Grosses Têtes on Radio Luxembourg). Callie likes to sit nearby and chew on things — grass, a rawhide bone, a cleaning rag... whatever.

Callie's latest toy: a cleaning rag.

Growing season begins Monday

Today, tomorrow, and Sunday, May 11-13, are the days known in France as the Ice Saints' days. On the Catholic calendar, as you probably know, nearly every day is dedicated to a saint. People named after a saint get congratulations and maybe a toast or even a present on their saint's day.

The peonie flowers are starting to drop their petals.

The three saints called the "ice saints" are Mamert (died in 474), Pancrace (d. 304), and Servais (d. 384). All of them have now been replaced on the Catholic calendar by more recent saints, so the tradition of honoring them as the ice saints goes far back in time.

Tomato plants in little pots waiting to be set out in the garden

Why are they called the ice saints? Well, it has nothing to do with them, actually. It's just that according to popular wisdom these dates, May 11-13, are often the last days of spring on which cold weather with frost and even a freeze will occur. After les Saints de Glace, it is safe to plant your garden.

Roses are in full bloom right now, three weeks early

So the growing season "officially" begins on May 14 — that's next Monday. We've had a very warm spring, and we could probably have planted our garden on April 1 this year. But better safe than sorry. In past years we have planted our garden as late as June 1 and had spectacular results.

Yesterday I set out geraniums in the planter boxes
under the new kitchen window

The days are so long now that the plants get a lot of sunlight. Dawn breaks at 6:00 a.m. and night falls now at about 9:30 p.m. In a month, it will stay light until about 11:00 p.m. The long hours of daylight last through July and into August.

Walt's getting the herb garden cleaned up
and planted for the year

Yesterday I finally got the fourth vegetable garden plot tilled up. I had done the other two back in April, before we got Callie. We have a gas-powered rototiller, and the job would be impossible without it. The ground is hard — it's mostly clay — and rocky. And then last fall I let the grass and weeds take the plots over, and the weeds have had time to grow thick, long roots that I now have to break up by running the tiller through the plots over and over again.

The plot in the front of the vegetable garden
is the one I tilled up yesterday.

It took more than an hour to till up a plot that is a square 15 feet by 15 feet. And that rototiller is a heavy piece of equipment to work with. I requires a lot of pushing a pulling, and you have to haul it around when you reach the edge of the plot. It's back-breaking, especially at my age. But it's worth it for the results we get in July, August, September, and October.

Volunteer nasturtiums have come up in a plot I tilled earlier.
Now I have to plow them under when I till the plot
one more time before we start planting the garden.

The noise of the rototiller freaked Callie out, but Walt sat with her for a while not too far from where I was working so that she could get the idea it was OK. Earlier, he taught Callie how to play with the frisbee. Here's the video.

Callie learned the game very fast, but after three or four fetches she was exhausted. She went back into the house and slept for an hour or two. Nice!

Sun and shadow

It's early spring, and while the weather is exceptionally warm, the sun is still fairly low in the sky. The trees are just starting to grow some leaves. The shadows are long and deep.

The tilleul, or linden tree, also called a lime tree,
casts a long shadow right now.

It's the kind of weather that encourages you to put outdoors all the potted plants you brought in last fall to protect them from frost and freeze. You have to be ready to bring them back in, though, because we could still have a good cold snap. Neighbors tell me they remember having a couple of inches of snow on the ground one year in early May.

Putting the potted plants back outdoors

It's also the kind of weather that makes you put the patio and yard furniture back outside. Our living space expands significantly when the warm weather comes back in the spring.

The deck railing also casts a long shadow these days.

I'm taking the day off today. Yesterday I dug up a section of hard rocky ground that weeds had completely taken over. I had to do it with a shovel and pitchfork, because it was a narrow strip bordered with rocks. Using the rototiller wasn't an option.

The fence along the street

Later in the morning, I did use the rototiller to plow up the second garden plot, which was also completely covered in tough, thick-rooted plants and weeds. The tiller is heavy and you have to pull and push hard on it to really dig up the ground, not to mention to turn it around corners. Sometimes I think I'm too old for this kind of work, but then I tell myself I'll be a better person for having done it.

Sun and deep shadows in the side yard

When the grass is well trimmed, the yard on the north side of the house looks like a park. It gets shade from a couple of big fir trees, so it's a good place to sit and read on hot afternoons like the ones we've been having.

Setting up a chaise in the shade of the bay laurel hedge

Another nice spot for reading is in the shade of the hedge on the south side of the yard. That's where I sat and read, listening to the radio, for three or four hours yesterday afternoon after that hard morning of digging and tilling.

A shadow of my former self? No, not really.

We're trying to take advantage of these nice days to get the garden ready for planting. The growing season, when all danger of frost has past, starts on May 15 in Saint-Aignan. By then we will have the new puppy to take care of and train, as well as the garden to put it. May is going to be a hectic month.

It's definitely springtime

It's April 11 (Happy Birthday, Sue!) and the weather has been spring-like for several days now. In fact, in the afternoon it feels like summer. The air is still cool — as they say in French, le fond de l'air est frais — but if you get out in the sun, or if you exercise just a little, you'd think it was June or July.

Flowering prunus tree and the garden shed

We were so lucky when we found this place in 2002. We can't take any credit for landscaping — it was all here before we arrived. We just try to keep it cleaned up.

Springtime flowers

Just keeping it cleaned up — raked, trimmed, and mowed — is plenty of work. Last weekend, Walt mowed the grass for the first time this year.

Early morning sunlight and shadow

Right now I need to go out and do some digging to prepare a new bed for flowers. It's hard work but it will be worth it when the flowers bloom in a few weeks.

Plum trees in flower out by the back gate

The tree with pink flowers is strictly ornamental, but the ones with white flowers actually produce plums. The wasps and birds get most of them, but we enjoy the flowering stage this time of year. Following are a couple of closeups of the white flowers.

April 8, 2007, at La Renaudière

Our biggest project in the garden by far has been the vegetable plots. They didn't exist before we tilled them up. Now is the time of year when the ground needs to be worked again. The rototiller makes that possible. I tilled the first of three plots yesterday (the fourth one is a year-round herb garden).

One plot down and two to go — thanks to the rototiller

Last fall we harvested the last of the vegetable crops at the end of September and then flew off to the U.S. for a month of traveling around and visiting family and friends. When we got back home in November, the weather turned cool and rainy. So the garden plots didn't get tilled, and grass and weeds really took over during our unusually mild winter. Now it's like starting all over again from scratch (appropriate expression...). Never again will I let autumn pass and winter arrive without working the soil out there.