Sunday 17th March
I planted two patches of wild garlic in the woods during the first confinement. Ail des ours it’s called in France, bear’s garlic, probably because it’s often found in the woods. I ordered mine from a stranger on eBay, she had so much in her garden that she was digging it up and sending it off in the post. It arrived wrapped in damp newspaper, musty and garlicky with a hint of green. I dug two holes and popped a bundle of stems, with white onion-like bulbs on the end, in each. And then I left them.
For three years they have popped reliably back up in the same spots. But there hasn’t been the explosion I was expecting. The invasive overtaking of ground that everyone talks about. I was hoping to be over-run by now. I was complaining about this to my Dad last week, as we wandered through the woods with the dog, searching for those tell tale pointed green leaves and the hint of garlic on the air.
We found the first clump and then a second new one, just across the path. Then at the third, there were new shoots, a wide patch of small, bright green leaves, pushing their way through the ground ivy surrounding the mother clump. Finally more than enough for wild garlic pesto, scones or butter.
So today I harvest my first wild garlic of the year. Being careful to pick just a few leaves from each clump. I chop it finely and mash it through some butter. I make pizza dough; flour, yeast, salt, a little sugar, olive oil and warm water. Knead it until smooth and sit it by the warmth of the Rayburn to rise.
While the yeast works, I climb back up my ladder to tame more climbing roses, taking the stems higher and higher, hopefully covering the front of our side of the house in flowers. Scrambling over those red bricks that everyone else says we should paint, but we say will remain red because they are the house’s history.
We have no pizza oven, so I take the spare Rayburn fire bricks out of the warming oven and put them on the shelves of the normal oven. I preheat it to the highest temperature, a metal tray on each brick.
Pizzas topped with everyone’s favourite things slide one by one onto the hot trays on top of the hot stones. The dough bubbling up nicely. Crisp crusts but light and fluffy inside. The bricks working beautifully. I make dough balls too with wild garlic butter and a wild garlic bread pizza. A Sunday night feast.
Monday 18th March
It rained heavily over night. The puddles on the drive are full to brimming, the water clear and still. I can’t resist walking through them, sloshing the water with my wellies and stirring up the silty bottoms.
There have been discussions about drive repair. Tim, Alain and François plotting plans for tractors, trailers and gravel deliveries. And now we wait for everything to align, for everyone to have time, for the gravel to arrive and the weather to be right. Then there will be no potholes, no puddles and no grass down the middle of the drive for a while as it beds in. I won’t miss the potholes, but I will miss the grass.
I finally finish the roses today. The arches of my feet sore from balancing on the ladder all day for a week, my hands throbbing as I try to get to sleep. The skin covered in tiny thorn pricks, scratched and scabbed after hours of taming climbers.
Tuesday 19th March
Half of the teachers at Laurie’s school are on a ski trip, the other half are on strike. There is just one hour of maths left on his timetable, so I let him stay at home. France doesn’t really do substitute teachers.
I am busy in the garden, planting out sweetpeas and weeding and mulching the bed beside the polytunnel. The peonies are shooting, the sage is looking woody and the rosemary seems to have some kind of die-back. I cut the herbs back a little to see if they put on some healthy new growth before I consider replacing them.
Laurie is bored, so I give him my plant labels and a bottle of nail varnish. He sits on the kitchen step and wipes away the names on each label with a cotton pad. Each one clean enough to reuse for this year’s seeds.
The afternoon is spent in another accounts meeting. Fiddling with spreadsheets, trying to decide what to do to take the business forward. A decision made more complicated by the French government ministers, who are yet to decide on new rules and taxation for gîte income. A ridiculous decision which could have a serious impact on us and many other tiny businesses in France. There seems to be no concrete answers for us one way or another.
It’s one of those big decisions that you feel a grown up really ought to make on your behalf. There should be someone around to tell us which way to turn and what we should do. But somehow we are supposed to be the grown ups, the business is ours, we created it from nothing, with no experience and we find ourselves here almost by accident, wondering just what to do with it next. It all feels overwhelming and hard and terrifying. Making the wrong choice might leave us worse off, curtail the business and our future plans. But the right choice is far from clear, so we are stuck, at least until the government makes its mind up.
Wednesday 20th March
Ostara, the spring equinox, the day and the night sharing time equally for one turn of the earth. You can feel the shift, smell it in the soft spring air, hear it in the voices of the birds. I stand in the garden and let the sunlight shine through my closed eyelids. Soaking it up.
It feels like a day for spring cleaning, for sorting and organising. I need to make space for the dahlias. They are patiently waiting in their crates, but soon I will pot them on. Tucking them into the greenhouse until the risk of frost has passed in May and I can plant them out.
I pot on my snapdragons, freeing up seed trays for summer annuals. I clear the greenhouse shelves of junk and old bottles of tomato feed, making space for the trays of larkspur seedlings. I hope they’ll be safer on the shelves than they have been on the floor, harder pickings for the snails, who have been eating their fresh shoots. I decide to cover them with propagator lids overnight too, just to be safe.
The second ranunculus sowings have been in-and-out of the greenhouse for a few days, and now they can stay out, braving night time temperatures so I can plant them out later in the week. The floor is clear now and I can sweep. Space made for at least some of the dahlias.
With the warmth of the afternoon sun on my back I tackle the raspberries. Cutting out last year’s canes - which are easy to see because I tie them in, pulling out dead wood, thinning new growth and cutting the tops off wayward stems. My fingers are blistered from the secateurs, gloves getting in the way as I untwist the old season’s string.
I’m stiff from bending, so Monty and I walk along the drive, the sun slipping behind the trees. I can feel the heat from the earth. Warm pockets of air rising in the dusk, in sunny spots between the trees, long after the sun has stopped shining here. I think we might just have truly turned the corner into spring.
Thursday 21st March
I pick daffodils, the first ranunculus, anemones, tulips and spirea. My first garden flower harvest of the year. I find cherry blossom at the edge of the woods and some hornbeam just coming into leaf. I arrange them all in an old confit pot. A jar of spring for the kitchen island.
Now that the raspberries have been pruned, I spend the afternoon on my knees, tying in the new growth that will fruit this summer. I secure the string to the wooden cross post at the end of each row and pull it taught along the wire. I pass the small bundle of twine in my hand behind a raspberry cane, then over the wire to the front and back under to the back again. Back behind the cane it goes, then over and under the wire again and onto the next cane.
It takes time, each cane locked in place with string along the lower two sets of wires, growing upwards towards the sun, rather than lying onto its bed mates. An effort to prevent a tangle of raspberry laden canes come the summer. Everything we are doing now, the maintenance, the garden prep, the repairs, is in an effort to make life simpler in the summer, when there isn’t a moment spare in the day.
Friday 22nd March
When I spend a lot of time in the garden the house becomes chaos. My tolerance for this mess of far, far lower than that of any male in this house, so I spend the morning cleaning the kitchen. Finding the island again underneath the pile of post, the open school books, the stack of tools waiting to be re-homed.
The kitchen is where we congregate, the room where everything happens. And so it becomes the stop gap, the halfway house, the place the things get left on their journey between one room and the next.
I love the peace of a tidy kitchen. I sweep the floors, wipe the sides and enjoy the momentary order of it. Wondering to myself if it would be wrong to suggest that we eat out for the next week just to keep it this way.
But when I come in from the garden, after weeding and mulching the foxglove beds and planting out the ranunculus, there is already a tin of paint on the floor by the back door waiting to go somewhere else, the notebook of lists open on the island, pens scattered by its side, the school books piled on the table. The detritus of family life already gathering again.
Saturday 23rd March
Kirsty arrived late last evening. Tim collecting her from the station after her week of work in Paris. We sit around the kitchen island eating croissants and our favourite fruited randonneur bread from the baker, chatting and catching up. It’s been two years since Kirsty was last here.
We manage a brief walk in the woods after our lengthy breakfast and then rain starts. We decide a lazy afternoon is our only option; we light the log burner in the gîte, pick a sofa each and snuggle under blankets to catch up more.
Dale arrives late afternoon, and shortly after his car has rumbled up the pot-holed drive, Alain and Fred are knocking on the gîte door, come to say hello too. We open a bottle of champagne and have an impromptu apéro by the fire.
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Just want to tell you that you brighten my day (dull here in London) at the end of a busy NHS shift. We really hope that the decision re Gites etc comes soon. And thankyou for the videos of your daily walks. You deserve fantastic success in every way.
Thank you for your wonderful blog. I love all your details of your day. Lots of work but the end result will be so satisfying.
I loved to garden in my younger years but now I live in an apartment. But it quite pretty. The daffodils are in bloom,I love the beautiful yellow colours it reveals.
Looking forward to next week.🌼🌷💐