France's geographical center

Bruère-Allichamps is a village located at the geographical center of France. Several other villages claim that distinction, but Bruère-Allichamps (pop. 600 or so) was the first. The village is located about 40 km/25 mi. south of the city of Bourges, on the Cher River. It's nearly 100 miles upstream from Saint-Aignan.

Bruère-Allichamps, on the Cher River

[You can click the picture to see a larger view.]

It was a French geographer named Adolphe-Laurent Joanne who did the calculations to identify France's geographical center back in the 1860s and '70s. At the time, Alsace and Lorraine were French, as were the Nice and Savoie regions — in other words, France was the same size then as it is today.

The geographical center of France

The geographer took the latitude and longitude coordinates of continental France's easternmost, westernmost, northernmost, and southernmost points, and then he calculated the midpoint. A marker on that spot was installed at Bruère-Allichamps in 1909.

Noirlac Abbey, seen from the road

The second most important thing about Bruère-Allichamps is that the 12th-century Cistercian abbey of Noirlac is located within the town limits. Noirlac is said to be one of the most complete medieval religious complexes surviving today.

The cloister at Noirlac Abbey

Saint Bernard, the spiritual leader of the Cistercians, described an abbey as "a prison with open doors." Only the members of the religious order were allowed in the cloister, which was the heart of the abbey complex. The laymen who lived in the abbey and ensured the religious community's self-sufficiency — working the fields, processing the harvests, managing the storage buildings and mills — were not allowed to enter the cloister.

Thanks to CHM for this picture of me taking a photograph
from the scenic overlook at Bruère-Allichamps

Time passes so quickly. I still have quite a few pictures to post from that June 17 day trip to Noirlac, Ainay-le-Vieil, Culan, and other places in the Berry.

No rain in Saint-Aignan

We didn't get any rain at all in Saint-Aignan yesterday or last night, as the front went through. That means it has been three weeks since our last rainfall.

I ran into a former neighbor — the daughter of the neighbors two doors down — while I was out walking with Callie yesterday afternoon. "It hasn't rained at all here?" she asked. "In Blois there was a big thunderstorm and quite a downpour this afternoon." Béatrice (that's her name) works in Blois, which is 25 miles north of Saint-Aignan, and lives up in Contres now.

Deep shadows on what was supposed to be a stormy day

There was also rain in Lower Normandy and the Paris region. There was hail along the Atlantic Coast and up into Brittany, with heavy downpours of rain. We didn't get any of that. It's something about the Loire Valley. The weather systems often split in two as they come east off the ocean, making the areas north and south of us wetter than we are.

The grapes are enjoying this weather.

We were really hoping for rain. Walt is watering the garden this morning. The tomato plants were starting to droop. The greens look okay, but they and the beans and corn surely need some water.

Artichokes in the back yard

I spent yesterday morning making meatballs. Well, quenelles de viande hachée, really — they aren't shaped like meatballs but like little (American) footballs. I had a kilo of veal, a pound of beef, and a little less than half a pound of smoked pork lardons. Walt ran all that meat through the meat grinder. We flavored the mixture with onion, shallot, garlic, dried thyme and chervil, salt, and pepper. And we added some diced sun-dried tomatoes and little cubes of dry white bread, along with 5 eggwhites, to finish it.

Beef, pork, and veal for grinding

The little footballs are now frozen and we'll use them as filler for some folded chard leaves — it'll be little stuffed cabbage rolls, but made with Swiss chard. The veal was on sale at the supermarket this week, and the beef was some we had in the freezer.

Quenelles de viande hachée

Those are our summer activities. Harvesting from the supermarket, the freezer, and the garden, and trying to come up with interesting meals based on what we find or have on hand.

No rain, and the temperature didn't really go down (high 31ºC). But yesterday afternoon and evening, we had a good breeze, for a change. For most of the week, we were in what the weather reporters on France 2 called un marais météorologique — a meteorological swamp — characterized by very stagnant air. A dead calm.

Tomatoes, teasing us

I picked about a kilo of sweet cherries yesterday afternoon, off three different trees in the neighborhood. And I picked a few of those small red plums, but mostly those are not yet ripe.
The weekend weather is supposed to be nice, but a little cooler — 80º instead of 90º. Parfait. Ouf.

Lasagna gardening and lasagna cooking

Yesterday on Mother Earth News I read an article by Patricia Lanza about the "lasagna" method of preparing a vegetable garden. We are going to adopt some of Lanza's practices. She lays down layers of newspaper, peat moss, grass clippings, and "chipped" leaves on her garden plots in the fall and composting happens sur place over the winter. She says she can plant her garden in the spring without needing to till the soil first.

A gratin using Swiss chard ribs — côtes de blettes in French

There are two things in Lanza's scheme that we don't have at our disposal, however: newspapers and peat moss. We don't buy newspapers any more. And I'm not sure where I would find peat moss here, or how expensive it would be. Leaves and grass clippings we have, in abundance. We were already planning to put leaves over our garden plots this fall as a way to keep weeds down over the winter and early spring. But I'll till them into the soil in spring, as long as I can still handle the rotary cultivator.

Lanza's article is interesting and worth a read if you garden at all. (Thanks, Nadège.)

Layer tomato sauce, chard ribs, and grated cheese in a
baking dish. The chard ribs look like celery stalks.

It's still hot here and there are still big thunderstorms with heavy rain, hail, and strong winds along the Atlantic Coast of France, 100 miles west of here. We are expecting the rain to move through Saint-Aignan tonight and tomorrow. The garden needs rain right now. Maybe I'll be able to get out and do some more weeding over the weekend. Temperatures are supposed to moderate.

Spoon some ricotta cheese over the top layer.

This week we made a gratin of Swiss chard ribs with tomato sauce and grated cheese. It's really good. What you do is cut the wide flat central ribs out of a batch of big chard leaves and (optionally) de-string them the way you would remove the strings from stalks of celery. Cut the ribs into 2-inch pieces and cook them in boiling water for 10 minutes, until they are tender.

Instead of Italian ricotta, I used this "Brussels Cheese" that
Martine brought us from Belgium last month. Delicious.

Save the green parts of the chard leaves and cook them as you would fresh spinach. You can add them to the gratin if you want to by cooking them, chopping them, and mixing them into the tomato sauce. Or you can freeze them, cooked, for later use.

Put more tomato sauce on top...

Layer the chard ribs loosely in a baking dish, adding some tomato sauce and grated cheese as you go. Bread crumbs are a good addition in small quantities. On top put a layer of grated cheese and bake the dish in a hot oven until the sauce is bubbling and the cheese on top is golden brown.

... and then cover it all with grated cheeses —
Swiss cheese and parmesan are good.

You end up with something that resembles a lasagna but contains chard ribs instead of pasta. And that makes me think that cooked pasta would be a good addition to this gratin.

About bugs, soil, and fruit

Here in the Loire Valley, we don't really have very many bugs at all -- we don't have window screens, for example, and don't need them, even when the weather is hot. The biggest problem with the lack of window screens is that birds and bats sometimes fly into the house, especially in the evening.

Here, the bugs exist in nothing like the numbers you get on the U.S. East Coast. I grew up in coastal North Carolina, so I know what I'm talking about. Here in Saint-Aignan we don't have much more of an "insect problem" than the SF Bay Area does. That's one of the nice things about living here.

The little red plums are ripening now.

However, there is some little gnat or fly or mite out in the garden that bites you and gives you a nasty welt. The welt is slow to develop but lasts for days, really itches, and finally forms kind kind of crust or scab on its surface. That's Too Much Information, I guess, but it really is a nuisance. I think the bug must live in the soil, because it's only when you scratch around in the dirt that you get bitten. I'm not sure it is even a flying insect. The bite is definitely not the work of a mosquito.

Pictures from this morning's walk with Callie

About soil-free gardening, I'm not convinced such a scheme would work here in Saint-Aignan. It sounds to me like a method designed for climates where basically no rain falls during the gardening and growing season — California, in other words. Maybe I'm wrong. We aren't having any rain right now, but we know full well that the rain can return any day and turn our summer into another very wet one. They had violent downpours and flash floods yesterday in Angers and Rennes, not far west of Saint-Aignan. The stormy weather is moving our way.

Tomatoes

The fact that we have heavy clay soil in our yard — what a friend calls « de la terre à vigne », or "grape-growing soil," as opposed to the sandy or loamy river-bottom soil in which it's easy to grow vegetables — is a major problem in rainy years. Our clay and limestone dirt gets saturated with moisture and drainage is poor. Fungi, molds, and mildew take hold fast in wet conditions and cause plant diseases. That's what happened to our gardens in 2007 and 2008.

Pears

One man we know — he lives a couple of miles from us, at about the same distance from the river and at about the same "altitude" as our house — has a fantastic vegetable garden every year. The soil in his garden is gray and loose, while ours is brown and compact. At first I thought he was very lucky to have such rich soil for growing vegetables, including root vegetables like carrots and beets.

More tomatoes

Well, it turns out luck had nothing to do with it. When he had his house built 20 years ago, he had many truckloads of river-bottom soil hauled in and dumped on the ground to create a thick layer of topsoil that is ideal for gardening. Maybe that's what we should do. But given our basically flat piece of land, we'd probably also have to have major excavation work done and then have the poor grape-growing soil trucked out. It would make somebody some good concrete, I'm sure.

Apples

Meanwhile, the temperature yesterday hit 31ºC and the low this morning is just above 20ºC. That's impossibly warm for this climate. At 6:45, I noticed that Bruno the grape-grower is already out there on his tractor, tending the vines. He worked until about 9:30 last night — we saw him go by, on his way home, and we waved. He tooted his horn. He must be taking advantage of the hours when it isn't so hot.

Bruno on his tractor out in the vines at 7:00 a.m. on July 1

We had guests last night, and we sat out on the terrace with them until 11:30. It was very agreeable, as we say in French. By that time, the temperature had moderated. There were a few annoying flying insects around as it got later, but nothing dramatic. There are a lot of moths here. Then bats came out and swooped around, feeding. Callie found a hedgehog — at least we think it was a hedghog — and raised a ruckus for a few minutes down below, in the... hedge. Thank goodness we don't have skunks here.

Our guests were two American women, one of whom is a blogger. She lives in the Washington DC area. The other woman is her mother, who lives near Portland, Oregon. One was enjoying our pleasant summer weather, and the other thought it was almost unbearably hot. I'll let you guess which one thought what. They are in the middle of their second week of a Loire Valley vacation. We enjoyed getting to know them.