Swallows and Americans

The swallows have enjoyed their weeks with us, raised their chicks, and flown the nest.

They make quite a racket, the whole family – shreiking to be fed, or skreeching a warning.

Diane Olivier’s Plein Air art group were equally noisy : full of enthusiasm and energy. The two-week course sped by in a daze of food and wine and hot sunny days. It’s a ‘high’ point in the year for us and for Diane, whose passion for Languedoc is abiding – this was her fifth summer with us, and her ninth in the region.

Her group was a delightful mix -  unfailingly helpful and generous.

This is a  ‘grillade‘  put on by Charles and Isabelle out in their vineyards at Lazagal.

The soundtrack is not a crazed maraccas-player, it’s just the cicadas.

Champagne and oysters on the terrace at the end of course party.

Gathering for supper.

Our kitchen garden came ‘on-stream’ during the course : good news for Judith who only eats raw food. She amazed us all by preparing an iced coconut/honey/fruit delicacy for pudding, one evening. No cooking for us!

And while we were away walking in the Pyrenees – our car was stolen.

This was a major tragedy, because we’d just bought a new battery, and filled the tank. We had just doubled the value of the car. We call it the Grey Rat – it’s a 24-year-old little Peugeot diesel runabout.

Crime is almost non-existant in these villages, so we felt particularly unlucky to have been singled out. It was probably a couple of lads who wanted some fun. They were smart enough to hot-wire it, and then take it cross-country and have a bit of a party. It was left neatly parked, a couple of villages away.

It took about 5 visits, to-and-from the Gendarmerie to sort out this major crime. The impossibly-young police couple who finally found me at the bottom of the garden watering the raspberries, were visibly having trouble matching this elderly little car with the huge house and pool. Meanwhile the criminals returned to re-steal the car for another little escapade.

The car is finally back – with its new battery, but minus half the tank of fuel. We’re glad about the battery – but sad they didn’t keep the car. It was splattered with mud and grass, like it had completed the Paris/Dakar Rally.

So while the Grey Rat was ‘on holiday’, we set ourselves to sprucing up The Blue Whale. This is an equally venerable machine – well known to previous visitors to Le Cerf Gris. It has taken many a group of artists out into the vines on painting courses, and before that, many a band of grape-pickers during the harvest weeks.

The Blue Whale getting some TLC, with seedlings and mosaic in the background.

You may be getting the picture now : our house is old, but comfortably so. Our vehicles are old, but serviceably so. We ourselves are . . . not so young. But are comfortable with that – and very much serviceable.

The bigger picture is this : we’d all like a nice cheap new car – but it’s costing the earth.

The Green Party’s national spokesperson on sustainable development, transport consultant Professor John Whitelegg, last week told Classic Car Weekly, a magazine which is running an online petition against scrappage:

“In the Green Party’s view, cars – like most things – should be quality-built to last. They should be capable of being upgraded and retrofitted as technology improves.

“Some years ago a study showed that if a car’s life was extended from ten years to twenty, there were significant benefits in terms of both pollution and employment. Specifically, doubling the car’s life reduced its lifetime energy-use by 42% compared with scrapping it and building a new one, because repair and maintenance were more energy-efficient than new manufacture. And at the same time it increased the labour involved by 56%, because repair and maintenance were more labour-intensive than new manufacture.

“This is a very important factor as we try to tackle both a recession and the climate crisis – we need jobs and we need reduced emissions – so we need to go with the processes that involve more labour and less energy use. And that ultimately means building cars to last, then looking after them.

“Scrapping a perfectly good car is an outrageous thing to do from a Green Party perspective. Some 15% of the total energy associated with the car is in its manufacture – what’s called the “embodied energy” – and when you scrap the car before its useful life has ended, that’s energy thrown away.”

That’s the theory. When it comes down to reliability and ease of maintenance, most women would opt for a new small car. They do not want to find themselves stranded by the road-side, at the mercy of cowboy-mechanics or worse.

Our finances puts us at the ‘green-but-risky’ edge of things. We have 20-year-old machinery that I can fix, but Mary can’t. The Green Dilemma.

up and away from the village

We’ve run a number of walking tours over the years – with the WalkingWomen.com groups based in England, and LeeValleyWalks.com in Ireland – and with those interested in dolmens and prehistory, and wine groups.

There’s a myriad of walks in our corner of the Corbieres – easy ones along the Canal du Midi, and short stiff ones up our own Alaric mountain, just out of the village – with its Bronze-age burial tomb and settlement.

But these are just hills. Their older sisters and brothers lie just 50 miles south – Les Pyrenées. This is real mountain territory – with Le Pic du Canigou for us as its centrepiece. It’s a mountain-peak that is sacred to all Catalans, and at midsummer a fire is lit on its summit : Le Feu de Saint Jean. It is the signal for bonfires to be lit on hilltops throughout the Catalan region.

We’ve been up it, twice. It’s 2,785 m./9,137 ft. The actual summit is a tiny pinnacle with space for a few people, a handful of choughs, and one or two bees. The second attempt was denied us – wild wind and rain sent us all scrambling down a few thousand feet – to the hostel, and its bar . . .

But up there, when life is like an oven in our valley-plains, there is a permanent glacier.

Our first trek inspired Mary, co-director and painting teacher at Le Cerf Gris : a series of acrylics resulting from her drawings and photos.

This week we visited friends in the Pyrenees – and were able to revisit spring-time. The abundance of snow up in the high mountains this winter means that the rivers of our region are full – good news for all vignerons and gardeners. We walked up above 7000 ft. – where the streams begin their lives.

This is half-way up the Rialb valley – we’ve seen this valley in three seasons now : the last time we were here it was all snow, and but for one cross-country skier we had it all to ourselves.

Now with treacherous ice-shelfs to traverse, the walk has become serious.

At the pass, Port Vell , the view was breathtaking : Andorra to the south, and the frozen Blue Lakes to the north, in France. Trains of young choughs wheeled and keened overhead. Butterflies and bees pirhouhetted over alpine flowers.

The descent was through a mine-field  : day-glo gentians, massive yellow and purple orchids, eggyolk marsh marigolds – how not to crush this astonishing carpet of flowers.

Safe down at the valley floor, there were other surprises -

- a thistle we have yet to identify.

An hour’s drive will take you to the foothills of the Pyrenees, two hours and you’re up out of the summer heat. Three hours drive, and you’re in the tax-free shopping haven of Andorra, Europe’s richest region for wildflowers and wildlife.

undesirable americans in our vineyards

The wine we drink at home and you drink on one of our mosaic courses or painting holidays, comes from Domaine Isabelle in the village. Charles and Isabelle have become our best friends in France – but in all the years we’ve known them I’ve never worked in their vines.

Mid-morning breakfast: Isabelle, her bread, their pâté, their wine – and Miga.

They have always practiced ‘ agriculture raisonnée’ – paying due respect to wildlife and conservation methods, and using the minimum of chemicals necessary.  Now they are going 100% ‘ biologique’ or organic – which involves even more work. And which involves me this week.

The rows between the vines – les sillons, as in Roussillon - get regular harrowing,  to keep down weeds and aerate the heavy clay. But the gaps (les billons or cavaillons) between the vine-plants themselves pose a different problem : how to deal with the weeds without damaging ‘ les souches’ .

Up to the ’50’s, the work was done by hand – with the hoe and the horse-drawn décavailloneuse. The tractor speeded up the process – but the work remained the same : careful ploughing around every vine. It was the advent of powerful chemicals in the ’70’s that changed the  ‘nature of the game’.

One man with a sprayer and a 5 euro bottle of glyphosate (initially patented and sold by Monsanto in the 1970s as Roundup) could do the work it took two men a day to do – in an hour. The double-bladed décavailloneuse above was brought out of retirement this week.

Below is a video of Isabelle and me, guiding the handles – with Charles at the wheel.

The trick is to help the curved bars in front of the ploughshare to strike – or stroke – the base of the vine. These guide-bars -  les tâteurs, literally tasters or feelers – are linked by lever and spring so that the shares are retracted – just in time . . . But a ridge of earth with tough old weeds has formed at either side which frequently spoils the neat movement in and out. That’s where you see Isabelle battling to push the blade back out, or me yanking the lever back in before it rips out a vine. It’s quite physical – and you really shouldn’t take your eye off the ground for an instant . . .

The trick for Charles was to keep a steady line precisely down the middle of le sillon – the slightest deviation of the little front wheels makes a big difference 4 metres back at the blades – quite nerve-racking.

Two regional expressions of this work: tirer le régou, from the provenςal rega, a furrow; and tirer le crépis, a wavy line. Where the weeds are thin and le billon not too humped,  le tâteur can be left to work on its own. But our second parcelle were merlot vines – fragile plants compared to the cabernet, which is tough and supple ‘comme le chewing-gum‘ says Isabelle. She hates this particular parcel of vines. It was badly planted from the outset by the neighbour they bought it from : too closely spaced, and not trained to grow straight when young. So now we are pushing and pulling, swearing and swerving around these bent stems – and occasionally ripping them out. Our score was even at the very end – 3 all – when she lobbed her last victim onto the bonnet.

And the undesirable américains? Here’s one we we uprooted -

It’s a stump of the late-19th. century root-stock that all French vines were grafted on to, to protect them from phylloxera. Its advantage was the thick bark that the insect couldn’t penetrate – its disadvantage the fact that its grape-buds never develope. Its a hardy root with a love of life – but also just another weed that has to go.

By coincidence we both own identical ’80’s-style shades : les Blues Brothers says Charles, or the Gondoliers (from Planet Gondo . . .)

Here’s a link to a short video of a horse-drawn décavailloneuse, from 2006 near Nimes, as part of a demonstration  by Jean Clopes, au Mas de Theyron à Boisseron (Hérault) – and to the blog of Stephan Pz writing about the same work,  up-country en Pays de Layon, Anjou.

monday, monday

Mondays are blue-days. Gray-days. Non-days. Un-days.

Not here! If it’s a Monday on one of our mosaic courses or painting weeks, it’s when the fun gets serious : the saturday-night meet-up is over and people have begun to get to know eachother. On Sunday the course week is mapped out and there’s been plenty of questions asked and answered. The village has been explored for the first time, and the jet-lag has been smoothed-over, with good food and wine.

So come Monday morning, painters and mosaic-makers are hard at work, having fun.

But what are we doing – when you’re not here?

We are following our guiding precept of ELP : Economise, Localise and, uhmm . . . Productivise. Mary has left me at the stables – she’s doing the shopping. I’m mucking out a couple of  boxes, and this ton of horse-feathers is going back to fill our new triple compost bins. The fruit of this monday-morning’s work won’t be appreciated until next year, when all kinds of good stuff will blossom from our new kitchen gardens.

The rain has stopped – the sun is out – the birds are singing and the horses are whinneying to eachother : all’s well with this little corner of the world.

You’re looking at a ton of manure, and half a ton of grass-scytheings, judiciously layered and watered.  What you don’t see is the workman with sweat-streaked face and straw in his tangled gray locks.

I’m fit – but in a few weeks I’ll be 59 : where’s my slippers and my pipe and my pension? I’ll take a couple of hours off to post this up – then help my son Daniel cement in the west-terrace balustrade – it’s only something I’ve been putting off for six years . . .

hat trick

The wind came in the night, the clouds flew away, and we had a a rare day of hot sun and still air. It seemed to have thrown us all off course: for in the space of a few hours we managed to save or snap these three -

It’s a black redstart (that’s red-arse, but in old english) that got trapped in the barn studio where we run our mosaic courses and painting weeks. It was exhausted and confused, and thus allowed me the chance to get a snap.

Then this little creature turned up in the swimming pool – with no way out. It’s un couleuvre , an ordinary grass snake or water snake (thus its latin name, Natrix natrix). We don’t use many chemicals in the pool – the chlorine level is so low that swifts and swallows swoop to drink from it . . . but I put it back out by the stream that runs through the village anyway. Some holiday visitors might not want to share the pool with this harmless little fellow.

This time it’s the female yellow dragonfly. Mary found one that was so dazed by the sun that it sat on her finger – this one however, was found in the pool, beyond help this time.

We’ve never had weather like this, and have never had visitors like these come so close. They are not rare, but we’ve never had the opportunity to examine them so closely.

9

hoopoe lane

The arrival of the hoopoes in April means that spring has really arrived. They are inelegant flyers:  more flap-and-swoop, and very shy. They like the lane below our house that leads out of the village. And that’s where I ‘filmed’ one calling – buty the time I turned the bend, it had gone ( so that’s why I had to borrow a photo from the web . . . ) The recording is on the Birds of Moux page, right >

Its name derives from the latin upupa, origin onomatopoeic after its call « houp-oup-oup », seen in many languages and dialects -  in Britain hoopoe, in Italy upupa, in Holland (weide-)hop etc. Its formal name  in France is la huppe, but in the centre of France it’s called « bout bout »  and « pue pue » in certain regions – an allusion to the bad smell of its nest.

Then the swallows return – looking for a good nesting spot. It takes them a while to get used to us coming and going below them in the garage (built high to accommodate waggons of hay, and coaches.)

There’s a short video of them fluttering about, over on the Birds of Moux Page.

Some years it’s been the redstarts that get the nesting place first – but for the past two years it’s been swallows – and possibly the same pair.

Every week in April and May brings a new arrival. Last week it was the little scops owl, happy to flit about our dilapidated barns or perch in the daytime in our little parc, or woodland area.

One day I may catch one on camera . . . but in the meantime I can record them at night, briefly calling – for a mate? over territory? You can hear it on the Birds of Moux page – plus nightingales by day and night.

Last week also saw the swifts back – swooping and shrieking round the houses like so many giddy kids. Occasionally there are mishaps.

This one crashed into a window. They rarely perch, and find it hard to take off. Mary found this one exhausted on the west terrace, and guessed correctly that it needed water.

I scooped it up and relaunched it off the terrace.

wildflower bank

With all this rain and a fair bit of warm April sun, the wildflowers are suddenly everywhere. Rising taller than most of the others on a bank were these  Goatsbeards. They are Salsifies – of the genus Tragopogon, within the family Asteraceae.

The wild ones I found are called ‘barbe-de-bouc’ or ’salsifis du pré’. Olivier de Serres, Superintendant Général des Jardins de France under ‘good king’ Henri IV, was the first to promote cultivating it, in his 16th c. work  Le Théâtre de l’Agriculture, though it has been used since antiquity, for its medicinal qualities and as food.

They are forbs, or grass-like biennial or perennial plants, and have a strong taproot and milky sap.  Flower colour varies, with some yellow species, and some bronze or purple. Seeds are borne in a globe like that of a dandelion but larger.

It’s been a game of cat and mouse to catch them opened out – they need full sun, and even then only stay open for a few hours – by midday they’re closed again.

The vegetable called salsify is usually the root of Purple Salsify, Tragopogon porrifolius, and has the mild taste of oysters (hence the alternative common name ‘Oyster Plant’ ), but more insipid with a touch of sweetness. The roots contain significant amounts of vitamins B and E. It is also very rich in potassium, calcium, magnesium and manganese.

Both le salsifis and la scorzonère [similar in shape and use, but not related] are grown around here for the local markets. Salsify should be treated like asparagus – but take much longer to cook [steamed/grilled or gently roasted] and served with a mild béchamel sauce, melted butter – or simply crême fraîche aux herbes. The young shoots of Purple Salsify can be grated and mixed in a salad, together with the young leaves and flowers – and the sprouted seeds, too.

It was interesting to find such a talented little weed by the roadside – but I think I shall leave it there to flower – and go look for its fatter cultivated cousins, like ‘White French’, ‘Mammoth Sandwich Island’ and ‘Improved Mammoth Sandwich Island’  in the seed catalogues.

comeback artists

I try to warn people that our village is rather plain and ordinary, and certainly not ‘un des plus beaux villages de France’ – but visitors and course participants still fall in love with the place. One couple came two years running, for Mary’s landscape painting week, and for our mosaic course – and then bought a house in the street. The following year they were  married at  la Mairie, and had the reception at Le Cerf Gris!

Today we’re welcoming back two amateur Californian artists, Nancy and Rowan, who had come twice before on Diane Olivier’s painting and drawing fortnight. Nancy has fallen in love with the wilder Hautes Corbières, and has returned twice more now, with her little dog Mishka, to stay in the genuinely pretty little village of St. Pierre des Champs – and look for a little house to buy.

So this afternoon we went off together to see the mediaeval bridge in Monze, at the other end of La Montagne d’Alaric and walk to a Bronze Age dolmen. Then it was back home for aperitifs and confit de canard, with  greengage crumble for pudding. This is after-sales service – sans pareil, non?

Rowan brought us this as a present -

She had recently completed a book-making course and this one told the story of the iris bulb that she picked on the banks of the Canal du Midi and smuggled back to California.

the village flower show

A suprise find today was this crown anemone – a solitary example in a scruffy ex-vineyard.

Its flowers open wide in bright sunshine, closing up at dusk or in dull weather. The French have two names for it:  l’anémone couronnée and l’anémone coronaire – of which there are two sub-divisions – l’anémone de Caen – with one flower and  l’anémone ‘St. Brigid’ – with double flowers. This one has a young off-shoot – but it’s probably from Caen.

As the Dorling Kindersly book of  Wildflowers of the Mediterranean puts it : ‘Small but exceptionally showy, it’s one of the highlights of early spring in the Mediterranean region’.