Happy New Year and all the very best for 2025.
Having just posted on my other blog after being absent for several years, although active with other things, I thought I should also put something here and try and be a bit more creative in 2025, amazingly a quarter century since the millennium!
Here's something about our two French gardens, both rescued from wildness, an article I submitted for a competition in the Connexions newspaper, which won - although I never received the prize!!
Potager tales
When we first escaped to France, leaving behind busy lives
in a school and a hospital, we decided to rent a house and bind our time. It didn’t prove initially very easy to find
something in our chosen triangle, in the South Vendée, until one fateful day. We had had to persuade the immoblier to take
us to see the property, as he kept telling us it was in the middle of nowhere,
he was even reluctant to get out of the car when we got there. But to cut a long story short it ticked most
of the boxes, and when he opened the back shutters the view of the chateau
convinced us that this, a largish, fairly primitive, farmworkers / managers
house, was where our French dream would start.
One of the unticked boxes was a vegetable plot, and as we
were leaving, we asked Pierre the immoblier, if he thought we could dig up some
of the large rough front courtyard, only part of which was gravelled. Somewhat puzzled he asked us why? When we said to grow some veg, he said
somewhat surprised “You want a garden?”
When we answered in the affirmative, he turned swiftly around and
marched off out of the front of the courtyard and down the road. Some fifty metres down the road he
disappeared into the overgrown hedgerow, opened a large rustic gate that hung
on its supports at a jaunty angle, and pointed inside – “Here is your garden
for you to enjoy and do with what you wish!”
Well, the position was superb, behind a large hedge bordering
the road, it was a long thin triangle cut out of the cow field, with another
hedge at the bottom, and the other side demarcated by a single strand electric
fence, over which the view was rural, calm and wonderful, despite it seeming a
little flimsy to hold back the extremely large and inquisitive Charolais cattle
in the field beyond. The garden however,
was somewhere beneath the metre high matted grass and weeds, and showed little
evidence of any recent cultivation other than a tumble-down shed housing some
old pots, stakes, twine and other gardening detritus. There were four spindly fruit trees, which as
it was spring time added some colour with their blossom to an otherwise rather
bleak scene, but it ticked the garden box!
So soon after we moved in, the garden became a priority to
make the most of the growing season. The
first problem was that we only had an electric strimmer, and finances at the
time were a little tight, so we had to find a way to run a power cable, or more
precisely four (but we had left health and safety behind with our jobs in the
UK!), into the garden. The task was
daunting and I imagine even more so for the rather underpowered strimmer that
was more used to the edges of a suburban lawn. But, both the strimmer and
ourselves rose to the occasion and with plenty of cooling off periods for both ourselves
and the inadequate strimmer, and with the help in places of some sturdy hand
tools we found the ground! It was also
at this time that we found it was rather prudent to wear both long-sleeved
tops, long trousers and stout wellies, as some of the accumulated growth was
far from friendly and we realised that snakes were rather more common here than
in the suburban garden we had left behind in England! Other nasties came later with the fruit in
the form of wasps and large fearsome hornets, by which stage we were beginning
to wonder if we had done the right thing, but a glass of wine sitting outside
as the sun went down soon sorted that one out.
We then sorted out the layout of the beds, leaving a fair
amount of lawn, much to the disgust of our long-suffering strimmer, and
commenced the back breaking task of turning the soil and turfs over, raking the
soil into a fine tilth and getting some plants in. Fortunately, the underlying soil remembered a
time when it had previously been cultivated and this made it a little easier.
We produced plenty of fine tasty food, as well as too many
courgettes, and had many an adventure in that tamed wilderness, including a
pair of leverets that went to ground amongst the onions and conversations over
the fence with our bovine neighbours, during the two and a half years that we
lived there, and just occasionally had time to sit and admire the view, before
buying our own place and moving on to pastures new. Well actually a garden fifty metres down the
road from our new abode, and about 350 square metres of chicken sheds, rabbit
hutches, rusty metal, random thick concrete areas, all ham-built and buried
under two metre high brambles and other assorted mal herbes. It was all surrounded by a multi-layered
fence containing several layers of chicken wire, green wire fencing and sheets
of thick plastic. It might have all been
somewhat ham built, but the previous owner was a little eccentric, and liked to
add strands of wire and a plethora of nails, screws, fencing staples and
bolts. On one fence post alone, at an
idle moment I counted well over 100 fastening holding on the various layers –
did I say eccentric, mad might have been a better description, which is why it
took us nearly three months to raze everything to the ground, before starting
on the house renovations!
All that remains now is the question we are often asked,
bearing in mind the house somewhat reflected the garden – “Would we do it all
again?”, to which we give a resounding …. NO!, twice is sufficient! And, still we rarely have time to sit and
appreciate our newly tamed garden, but the produce is worth the effort, as well
as giving us the energy for the next weeding session!
Garden 1
The neighbours come for a chat
Garden
2
