Le Couvent Diary

We'd full to the rafters, which means that we have nine guests in the house. Having had a tidal wave of Aussies, Kiwis and Americans, we're now full up with lovely English. Two have gone off to Sete and the coast, two are taking a walk in the National Park of the Haut Languedoc, two exhausted new arrivals are basking by the pool and two more are strolling round Pezenas having been to the market this morning. There's another guest lolling somewhere reading a book. All in all it's very peaceful, so I'm off to Pezenas this afternoon for a very long-awaited haircut. Oh, the cut and thrust of it all.

Yesterday evening the guests and I went up to the goat farm at Mas Rolland to stroke the young goats and to buy lots of wonderful cheeses. So this morning, at breakfast, along with all the usual fruit, ham, eggs and croissants, we had fig and chestnut bread slathered with two-day-old goats cheese, drizzled with acacia honey and topped with tiny garriguette strawberries. Too yummy for words.

On the subject of food, the new watering system in the vineyard vegetable garden is working out a treat. So for the first time we actually have vegetables this summer. In the past it's always been way too difficult to keep them watered, so we've just filled up the garden in the winter and abandoned it each summer. Not any more. I have fine spuds, courgettes, chillies and onions a-plenty. The yellow banana and red and black cherry tomatoes and peppers are almost ready and I have recently planted haricot and stripey red and white beans which are doing famously. Only the aubergines look pretty feeble. God knows why. We've been scoffing so many lettuces that Ali can barely face another. Three types of basil keep us endlessly entertained at lunchtime with experiments to find the best tomatoes and mozzarella for a tricoloré salad. It's a hard life.

We have a garden full of landscape gardeners today, along with a plethora of tools and chainsaws. It's that day in the year when the team from La Griffe Verte come in to prune the trees, rake away all the leaves and chop back the Banksia rose that irritates the fuel delivery man. (It scratches the top of his ancient petrol lorry)

By the time they leave the mico-coulier will have had a haircut of at least a third. That should please guests booked into the Orange bedroom who will find their mornings heralded by glorious sunshine and slightly less birdsong, we hope. The sparrows took up residence in it last year and produced a deafening dawn chorus all summer. Mercifully no one complained.

As a bonus of having the gardeners in, I get to have my lovely nephew, Josh, working here. He's now a fully qualified paysagiste and is studying for his Professional Baccalaureat.

I love it when the garden has a real tidy-up. It feels as though summer is not so very far away. Today it is clear and sunny and not at all cold. Tomorrow I have to go to Suffolk in the UK where I fear it will be as cold, wet and windy as forecast. Thankfully I'll be back by next weekend.

So what are the odds on taking three bulbs at random from a bag of 50 in order to produce the French tricolor?

The other hyacinths aren't in flower yet, so I have yet to find how often this feat is replicated.

I'm thrilled to pieces to have a new neighbour who makes these wonderful trugs .

Having lived in Sussex for the whole of my early student/teaching life, I hankered after these traditional works of art, but couldn't afford them. Now they seem very good value and will last for years. I have the large and small version but Hugh also makes one in between the two.

I'm so sorry. It's been ages since I blogged, but I didn't think you'd want to hear about my Mum staying for six weeks while she had her cottage renovated. Nor about how tired we still both were after the season end. Nor about how the wine is still just vouting away in its tanks. Nor that the hens have stopped laying because the days have drawn in. So I didn't write.

However, now we're back in the pink.  Mum's thrilled with her new home and all's well with our world. Today Ali and I finished the latest task of putting up a new greenhouse where the unused table by the pool in the top garden used to be.

Our lovely neighbour, Henny, snapped us while we were just beginning to put the glass in. Now, some five hours later, it is finished, save for the internal bits like shelves and the like.

I'm thrilled with it as it was a complete bargain from eBay - 350 euros with free delivery as it was the end of a line.  Sure, three pieces of wood were missing and there were nowhere near enough screws, but by complete fluke, we had exactly the necessary stuff in my 'don't-throw-that-out corner'. Oh, and the door doesn't fit by a mile. But we can solve all that with a bit of boxing and coxing.

So now I can start to think of all those wonderful Spring seeds. Bring on the catalogues.