Stress management

No, not us. We're fine; having a whale of a time, in fact.

But our grounds and our plants aren't. If they had blood pressure, it would be through the roof.

For the last couple of weeks we've had temperatures of 36 degrees or so most days (and for the last week they've not dropped below 22 at night); this month so far we've had just 2 hours of rain, all at once. And this year, our rainfall is running at between a half and two thirds of what was once considered 'normal'. Same thing last year. Compared to what friends in Spain have experienced so far this year, it may not be much to write home about.
But ...

... this is the Pyrenees. The ecosystems here have developed in response to a certain climate - if you look at detailed meteorological  maps, Grillou sits almost exactly on the borderline between Mediterranean and Atlantic climatic influences, giving us a healthy mixture of hot sun, clear unpolluted air, gentle breezes and enough rain to keep Ariège that amazing green colour that so struck us when we first came here one September many moons ago. When we started to look for the place to live, we discovered that once you went over the border into Aude the summer greens turned to browns and quickly found that our hearts were here, with the best of both worlds.

Now, as Bob Dylan, said, the times they are a'changin'. This is our lawn field today:

Trees are shedding their leaves as if it were November:

Lots of shrubs - the same shrubs that have struggled to re-establish themselves after the Big Freeze in February, when we had temperatures of minus 18 or lower for 2 weeks - are doing the same:

Who have thought that I'd have to spend half of yesterday raking up leaves?

The several-hundred-year old oaks that stand guard over our land are seriously stressed out, and we quite literally fear for their lives if we're now seeing the beginning of a new and very different pattern of extreme climatic conditions. And here's a sad sight: one of our wild cherry trees completely uprooted itself a couple of days ago and is now leaning at a precarious angle - the ground is so dry that the entire root ball has upended. The only question now is do we let it fall, or cut it down?

It's the same story in the woods around us, and we're acutely aware of how tinder-dry everything is - one stray spark could start a wildfire which would spread like - well, wildfire. We've not quite banned barbecues yet, but we do make sure that everyone who's using one has several buckets of water to hand ...

Our stocks of rainwater ran out a long time ago so we're having to resort to the hose to keep things alive, like the multitude of colourful pots that greet you on arrival:

And the roses, which by now should be preparing for their second flush:

The good news is that we're having a fantastic crop of tomatoes that taste as though they've been grown in a hot Provencal climate. And then there are these - would you believe that this vine is only 2 years old?

We and our guests have moved on to Spanish time - dinner has moved itself slowly forward to around 9.30 as it's just too hot to think about eating before then - and we're all making good use of the shady 'Zen' terrace:

The heat is considerably less intense today - only 27 degrees at the moment - and there are rumours - only rumours, mind - of a little light drizzle tomorrow. Then we're back up into those thirties again ...

And then we're into September and October, which traditionally are Ariège's most beautiful months - warm, golden, balmy. But who knows, this year?

The greenest greens

May at Grillou is always a special time, when the greens are at their very greenest ... at the end of last week the light was so perfect that I couldn't resist spending the afternoon outside with the camera ....

A December violet

Over the last month we've continued to enjoy extraordinary autumn weather here at Grillou: 160 hours of sunshine - over a third up on the average - and only three days where the sun didn't put in an appearance, along with balmy temperatures often in up the twenties. It's not unusual, at this time of year in particular, for the Pyrénées and their foothills to have much warmer and clearer weather than the rest of south west France, including the Med, and for Ariège to be leading the way temperature-wise. But looking at the weather stats for the last fifty years or so and talking to local people, it seems as though the pattern here is shifting quite noticeably towards warmer/dryer. Which if it continues (and the forecast is for just that: I've been looking at Metéo France's long term predictions for 2050 and 2090 and even the most conservative scenario gives us an increase in the average temperature of 3.5 degrees by 2070) is going to have huge repercussions on all sorts of aspects of life - and wildlife - here.

We're seeing that on a micro-scale here at Grillou. During the last month we've had great tits and blackbirds singing at full pelt; butterflies still swarming round the buddleia; marigolds, geraniums and nasturtiums still in flower; spring primulas bursting into flower too. At the end of October we planted several tiny bare root rose bushes: already, they've all put out huge numbers of shoots and leaves; some our established rose bushes have bloomed again in their fourth flush of the year. The yucca plant has flowered. We're still eating tomatoes and basil from the potager. Some of the birds that normally migrate - our blackcaps, for example - have stayed put. Our several-hundred-year old oak trees are showing signs of stress.

And ... the violets are coming out. Normally we'd expect them at the end of February. But yesterday - the first day of December - we had a small carpet of them. Hmm.

On the rocks

No, I haven't been taken to hospital having been run over by a mad monk in pyjamas (as my mother used to say with her cheeks sucked in when yet again I'd failed to make the Sunday evening duty phone call). I am still here. It's just that there don't seem to be enough hours in the day to work'n'eat'n'blog. How do other people do it, I wonder?

I notice that a month ago I was writing about our Indian summer. Well, it's still here. Admittedly the sun took a couple of days off last Friday and Saturday, but otherwise it's been shining from a cloudless sky almost constantly; if it weren't for the shortening days I swear you'd not know it was mid-October. Metéo France tells me that last month we had a total of 227 hours of sunshine, considerably up on the average (although the same thing happened last year too ...) and only two days with no sun at all; this month we've already had well over half our average monthly quotient, with not a single day without sun. We're still eating dinner outside, which is something of a record for mid October .... even the birds are singing: today I heard a blackbird, a blackcap and even a great tit. It's all just much too good to miss, so we've thrown much of the inside work to the winds for a while and removed ourselves lock stock and barrel outside, where we're doing our level (or, in the case of our garden, our non-level) best to catch up with some of the general clearing and cleaning work that we failed to do when we were flat out inside (aaaargh .......).

The focus at the moment is the rocky area in front of the house, which is in effect a natural rockery, albeit long since disappeared under tonnes of ivy and moss. It feels as though I've now spent at least half my life clearing the rocks: it's a long, long task, involving a complicated sequence of clippers, scrapers, wire brushes and plastic brushes, together with a mixture of elbow grease and painstakingly minute work in the endless folds and creases of the rocks (good mindfulness practice!). But it's just sooooo good to be working outside on the earth again, which after all is one of the things we came here for. And we've uncovered rocks we didn't know were there - our own mini-Pyrénées.

This is what we inherited when we moved in over 4 years ago:

And this morning ....

We're not finished yet (actually I'm not sure that 'finished' will ever be a word that can be applied to Grillou ....), but we've sure as hell come a long way. And when we finally get some rain, we can start planting.

The weather's set to continue unchanged until next Monday. Alas, I won't be in it. From Friday till Monday I shall be workshop-ing in London. Do I want to go? No. Much as I enjoy the work, I simply have no appetite for being in the UK. Ah so.

Tettigonia viridissima

Late this afternoon Grillou had a rather unusual visitor. Here she is:





Meet Tettigonia viridissima. She's a Great Green Bush Cricket: une grande sauterelle verte.

How do I know she's a female? Simple. That thing at her rear end is her ovipostor. She's laying eggs. In - um - the coir doormat in our hall :-D . She seemed remarkably unfazed by the presence of a large pinkish-brown animal crawling round her with a camera just a few centimetres away. Tetti (hope she doesn't mind me being familiar) stayed for nearly an hour, during which time she left us with (I'm told) over 300 eggs ...

Life's never dull, here.

Après le déluge ...

... les papillons.

Two days after my last post, the sun came out. Incontrovertible proof that anti-cyclones not only can read, but read this blog. (Delusions? Moi?).

And with the sun came literally hundreds of butterflies, all making a - um - bee-line for the big buddleia bush next to our top terrace. I've never before seen so many in the same place at the same time. We have several buddleia bushes, some wild, some planted, and all attract scores of butterflies when the flowers are out; what we're seeing at the moment though is a first. (I wish I could take a decent photo but all you get to see are flying blobs ...). Scarce swallowtails, commas, painted ladies, peacocks, red admirals, white admirals, southern white admirals, tortoiseshells, small coppers, swallowtails, several different fritillaries, marbled whites, purple emperors, ringlets, various blues, large whites, small whites, plus a few unidentified little brown jobs are all jostling for position through most of the day. Wonderful.

And reason number 687 for planning a trip to Grillou next summer ..... :-)

On heat

It's hot. And that's official.

Like the rest of the country, we're in the midst of a heatwave: temperatures have hit 38 degrees in the shade over the last two days. A couple of cooler days forecast for Wednesday and Thursday, and then more hot and sunny weather; this will, we're told, be the pattern for the rest of the summer, with temperatures distinctly higher than average. Good news for the ratatouille bed in the potager which was planted so late: it's already showing signs of catching up.

A treat yesterday, when the sun was blazing down in the middle of the day and the thermometer was showing 52 degrees in the sun: quite by chance I watched our baby black redstart leave the nest. He (or she. Here we go again) fluttered down onto the grass, looked around, and then bowed several times. Redstarts, if you haven't seen them, bow all the time, like robins only more so; I just didn't expect them to start so young. They're also intensely curious birds: an hour or so later I found him sitting in the brico shed calling furiously for food.

You could say that the heat is slightly less good news for us as we continue to clear the rock garden, but hey - what's a bit of sweat when you're having fun? And it does mean that during the hottest part of the day we get to take refuge inside and get on with all the interminable finishing jobs, like framing pictures and hemming curtains and sorting out all the kitchen equipment for L'Atelier. (Never, dear renovator, ever underestimate just how long this stage will take you. Why is it that I could tile an entire shower in the time it takes to frame and hang just one picture? And that's without the arguments about whether there's a speck of dust under the glass or whether it's straight or not). But we are getting there (even if - sigh - the water still isn't connected: plumber has been, plumber has gone, plumber hasn't finished, plumber is coming back. Just don't ask when).

It's been a particularly frustrating couple of weeks in that I've been getting lots of contacts from some really interesting people - mostly readers of this blog, as it happens - who've wanted to come and stay this summer, and because of everything you already know about I'm still having to say no, which frankly is a bit upsetting. Not for the money, though that would indeed be quite nice, but because without exception they've all sounded like people I would enjoy having around, and because I just have a whole big feeling that Grillou is now ripe for people to be here. It's the first time I've felt that as an actuality rather than as a potential, which means I think that something has shifted on an energy level (look away now if you don't believe this stuff) and therefore that we're on course for all to be well.

Nature rules OK

It's that time of year.

Want to cut back the bay tree on the terrace? Can't. Blackbird still nesting in it - her third brood.

Want to clean the gutters? (All right, 'want' might be just a tiny bit of an exaggeration ...) Can't. Blue tit nest in hole just underneath.

Want to put new light up on L'Atelier's terrace? Can't. Black redstart feeding young in nest right next to the door, here:

Readers with a photographic memory (pun unintended) might recognise this niche as one rejected by The Most Persistent Wren On The Planet three years ago (oh my god!!!!! Three years!!!!!!!!!!) ....

Not that we're short of things to do. The gardens are in their Forth Bridge mode at the moment: just keeping the grass and the brush and the weeds down takes around 18 hours a week (a horrified friend recently declared that "nothing, but nothing, would induce your thoroughly unpleasant looking timetable on me. Tower block in Toulouse rather than that"). Not only that, but we've embarked on some mega-clearing of previously long-overgrown areas in the rock garden, discovering in the process some long lost natural rockery beds that were probably last tended by the family we've met who lived here in the fifties.

All in all, between that and the day job, there's not a huge amount of time left just at the moment to spend working indoors, though slowly slowly curtains are being hung, light fittings and pictures are going up, furniture is being waxed and polished and patina'd, and by the end of this week (I have everything crossed here. And I mean everything) we should finally have water connected to our guest accommodation. I have a feeling that the first time one of us takes a shower in either of the new shower rooms an awful lot of wine is going to be drunk to celebrate ....


Our latest visitor to the garden arrived this week in the shape of an arctia villica: a Cream Spot Tiger Moth. I first spied him (her?) on the night of the eclipse, sitting placidly on top of the terrace lights watching all the other moths going bananas as usual. I swear s/he had a superior look in his/her eye ...

The next day, amazingly it (I give up on gender) was sitting on a blade of grass not very far away; it remained unphased even when I clambered round close by in an ungainly fashion to take pictures. 

It even tilted itself at an angle so I could photograph its belly. Now how vain is that?

Pretty though.

New fangled thingies

I've always been a bit of a use-what's-around freak when it comes to vegetable growing: collecting leaf mould from the woods to lighten up our clay soil; schlepping down the hill with a trug and a wheelbarrow to pick up Benjamin-the-donkey's fumier, making benders from hazel and polythene to use as cloches, saving lengths of wood to make plant supports and frames ... and so on. All of which is actually very 'Ariège'; few people here would dream of going out and buying such things when the wherewithal for creating them is all around.

But over the last few years a phenomenon has been appearing in our area. More and more of what I (warning: non-PC language approaching) term the 'old boys' have started using metal spirals to support their tomatoes. And it's spreading like a virus. And this year the old boyiest of them all, he with the beret, huge potager and hand-knitted chicken sheds just outside the village, has installed a couple of dozen of the things too.

A few days ago when I was buying tomato plants (yes, I know we're late. M. Vieuxgarçon already has big green tomatoes on his plants ... but a little thing called a holiday got in the way) I stumbled upon a huge pile of these lethal looking 2 metre high metal spirals. They were only a euro each, which sounded like a bargain (and probably explains why people here buy them ...). So I bought some. Quite whether we'll get better, or more hassle-free, tomatoes because of it only time will tell. But the plants seem to have taken to them and are already wrapping themselves around the spirals like young lovers.

(Yes, I know there's a wooden frame there too. Blame John-the-sceptic).

Since last weekend's cherry marathon we've been dodging the rain to try and get the whole garden area into some kind of order so that we can sit in it without constantly thinking "Aaargh - I should have done that bit" or leaping up and pulling out a ton of weeds in between dinner courses. I'm now at the point where I can stare out of the bathroom window without wincing. Watch this space.

The grapevines we planted three years ago have their first fruit:

These will take a bit longer though: they went in this year, after the felling of the maple trees gave us a sunny south-west facing wall at the front of the house:

Sorry - another rose  ... but it was so pretty I couldn't resist:

Colours

Lazy(?) Sunday afternoon

After nearly a week of the kind of damp cold that gets into your bones and won't let go, a very pleasant anti-cyclone has decided to hang out with us and the last couple of days (along with the next four or five, if Metéo France are to be believed) have been cloudless, windless and warm. And after two weeks or so of intensive cement therapy (aka tiling two showers and associated floors), this afternoon I decided it was time to leave the house before my gold slipper turned into a dwarf's pumpkin. Or something.

I sometimes think that when we get the kind of weather we're having at the moment - dawn to dusk sun, with shade temperatures of around 19 degrees and sun temperatures approaching 30 - Imbolc time is possibly the splendid-est time of year here at Grillou. The signs of spring seem to me to be almost more unbearably exciting than the arrival of spring-proper: the sudden lengthening of the days; the buds on the forsythia and japonica growing and beginning to burst almost as I watch; the birds taking their first steps towards proper song; the first yellow crocuses appearing from nowhere in the middle of the day and daffodils seemingly growing centimetres in a matter of hours; the first sighting of a Yellow Brimstone butterfly. And there are no leaves on the trees to obscure our view of Mont Valier and the Pyrénéen chain.

This time round Grillou's garden is a bit more open and welcoming than it has been before: three days ago the six maple trees that shaded and obscured the whole of the front of the house and whose dense foliage gave a clear message to 'keep out' , along with one tall ash tree that was beginning to threaten our main power cable, were expertly dispatched by two lovely grimpeurs-elageurs from Moulis. Not only were they lovely, they were also incredibly tidy: they cut all the wood into 50cm lengths, and piled all the branches up ever-so-neatly into - er - piles. Today we started shifting it to a new wood pile where it will season for two years or so before we burn it.

So far we've shifted and stacked some 4 steres (cubic metres), with maybe another 3 or more left to go. And with good hardwood for burning selling at around 60 euros a stere, we're hugely in profit even after paying for the work. In fact looking at the garden and our bits of woodland today and how we might manage it over the years to come, we realised that we're unlikely to have to ever buy in wood. How good is that?

So what last year looked like this

... now looks like this

While all this was going on our dog Noodles was nowhere to be seen - unusually, because any garden activity involving both of us is sheer bliss for him, because he can indulge his sheepdog nature by continually rounding us up. We eventually tracked him down outside L'Atelier d'Artiste where he was watching over a male bullfinch that was sitting on the grass, presumably stunned after flying into the (still un-curtained) window:

He stayed there, in the same position, for two hours until the bullfinch recovered enough to fly off. I've said it before and I shall no doubt say it again: dogs really are strange and wonderful creatures ...

Rakes and pains

For the last five days now we've had amazing weather - clear, cloudless blue skies and genuinely warm, spring-like air. At lunchtimes our thermometer has looked like this:

Pretty good for January, huh? Reminds me why we came to live here and not one of the many places I've fallen in love with over the years that are farther north .....

For the first couple of days I huffed and puffed around inside, carrying on doing things that were on the jobs list like finishing the staircase, plastering a wall and cutting the tiles for the bathroom floor, while gazing longingly at the bright yellow thing in the sky outside. By Sunday morning I could take it no more. Reluctantly I decided that Leaving The Premises was, given the length of the jobs list, just a step too far, but a couple of days working in the garden ... well, it's still work (and therefore okay), no? So on went the shorts (yes, really) and wellies, and we set to on the mammoth task of clearing up the garden ready for spring. Here, that means first and foremost raking leaves: living in the middle of several hectares of woodland is a wonderful thing, but trees have leaves, and leaves fall off. Most of them head Grillou-wards, or at least that's what it feels like, and every year we fill seven or eight huge leaf containers that we've made from chicken wire and hidden in strategic places in the woods (where else?).

Although I wouldn't swap it for anything, there are times (usually when I'm mowing ...) when I wish we had a nice, flat grassy garden instead of half a hectare of of rocky nooks and crannies on various degrees of slope, but a day of raking and barrowing and green has reappeared: always a wonderful moment. Next, we started pruning and shaping hundreds of shrubs, and beginning the task of clearing rocks and head-height brambles from the area around one of our ancient oak trees so that you can get near enough to hug it, and generally cleaning out some of winter's debris. Yesterday evening, the forecast end of the good weather, felt like the end of a holiday; I couldn't bear to come in and was still on the end of my rake, in bright moonlight, at 7.30.

At 8pm I realised that I was a bit stiff. By 9pm, I ached all over. By 10pm I could hardly move. It was great. Much of what I'm working on at the moment requires standing for long periods in one place, usually in a silly position, doing things that need anally perfect measurements, and my body had been crying out for some stretching and some physical effort. It got it.

This morning the sun came out again. But just to make you feel better if you're shivering in colder climes, winter is apparently returning on Thursday, with a 'high' of just 1 degree forecast for Friday ......

Potager art