Le Couvent Diary

Well that's it. I must have recovered from the season. I woke at 7am, raring to get on with the day. At the moment I'm doing all the garden maintenance. So far it's taken two whole afternoons to work my way along half the front of the house. The bignonia and jasmine had reached the roof and were threatening to start infiltrating the tiles. And so, after two trailer loads to the village dump we have completed 1% of the work.

I am aided by my 79 year old mother. Yesterday she went to our doctor for the first time since she moved to Roujan in August. She was running out of medication. I feared we may have a bit of a fight on our hands since she isn't yet registered with the french health system - we're awaiting papers from the UK. However, we had so much evidence, including an e-mailed list from her UK GP that it all went swimmingly. The french quack took her blood pressure and declared it excellent, so my sous-gardener is skipping round like a teenager.

At the moment we have bright blue skies, a gentle breeze and cooler nights. However last week it rained solidly for two whole days. I was thrilled. Not only was it good for the winter vegetables in our potager, our wood-gathering timing was excellent. Each year we use around 8 cubic metres of wood in the fire downstairs in the big kitchen and the wood-burner in our apartment. Our normal log-man said he couldn't deliver until the end of October when I tried to order during last August - by which time it would all have been wet - defeating the object of buying seasoned wood.

A swift schlep through leboncoin.fr led me to a couple of lads who are clearing the dead chestnut and oak from a forest above Pezenes les Mines, anbout a twenty minute drive from us in Roujan. They can't deliver (no lorry could get up the twisting, narrow road  into the forest), so Ali and I made repeated trips with our trusty trailer. Now we have a huge pile of luscious logs. We had just stacked the last one and hauled the giant tarpaulin over the top when the first drops of rain fell. I couldn't have been happier. It was much less expensive and far better quality than the stuff we used to have so I'm tickled pink.

Coupled with that, the drive from Le Couvent to Pezenes les Mines is just wonderful. Leaving the flat lands, passing north through Gabian, you climb through hilly chestnut forests behind Faugeres. The views are breathtaking, and as it's chestnut time and the roadsides are strewn with sweet chestnuts one has to stop to collect a bagful. We'd cook them on a roaring fire if only the sun wasn't still making that unthinkable.

I've been slow to get back to blogging after the summer season partly through tiredness but mostly because my two computers have had an attack of fragility. The cat sleeps on my laptop, so, unsurprisingly, it now only works if I put a vice on the left corner. That's not convenient. It's going to cause a riot taking my laptop through customs when we travel too. My main computer had an attack of the vapours too, freezing at will. Its will, not mine. So, fearful of having my computer die before transferring everything we splashed out on a new one.

My gorgeous new iMac has a two terabyte drive and 8 gig of memory so I'm very, very happy. I'm also in love with Mac Migration Assistant which just transferred everything while I got on with the gardening. How cool is that? So now I can wipe the old one and reinstall is afresh ready for our lovely guests to use next summer. I'm sure it will work fine when it has less to do. Like all of us.

 OK, onwards and upwards. Now where did I leave my secateurs?

It's been so hot that guests have been spending whole languorous days by the pool. I suspect that no-one wants me there gardening while they're trying to relax, so the garden is looking rather relaxed itself.

 

Recently lovely Kate-The-Human-Fish and her kind husband Darren came to stay. I was apologising for the fact that the garden looks a tad dishevelled. Today professional gardener Kate sent me this fab photo, with the reassuring words "I wanted to send this photo of the garden by the pool because you sounded so worried about how it looks. This is how it looks to guests - gorgeous! So stop worrying!"

You see what I mean? People who come to stay at Le Couvent are just So Very Lovely.

Thank you Kate.

 

Woah, we're doing too much. Well, that's what our lovely neighbour Maria thinks. But we have ten weeks' work to cover in three, so we end each day happy, but done for. Today Ali's painted  every door in the bedrooms - that's ten - and been to her tap-dancing class. I, on the other hand, have been dog-food shopping, weeded and cleared up a hidden area of the courtyard and picked up a 2m x 1m double glazed window unit, before mending the 30 year old Renault 4's leaking fuel pump with a tiny piece of tube, some wire and half a chopstick. Obviously.

Then this afternoon I made the window unit and a heap of tiles into a cold frame for our rare variety tomatoes, courgettes and peppers. Until now the seedlings have been in the house, but they've started to grow leggy so I wanted them to have more light. I like to sow seeds late because they always catch up and I have a much better success rate than the hare-out-of-a-trap method I used to use, sowing while my impatience got the better of me in January.

 

 

Fortunately the cold frame cost me nothing, nada, zilch. Everything was recycled. The frame came from our good pals Yvonne & Henny. They, wisely, have taken a bunch of PVC windows out of their home and passed one on to me. I got the tiles which make the walls from another pal, JdeP, via www.cestgratuit.org . I had been intending laying these lovely encaustic tiles up in the vineyard mazet, but haven't had time. So they are being put to pretty use here.

 

 

Earlier this week we had a day bottling our meagre vintage of Syrah. It was a lovely day and our very hand-made wine was bottled, Zorked, labelled, and packed into recycled boxes by Ali and I along with ma belle belle soeur Michelle and our pals Alex, Henny and Yvonne. So now we have just shy of 200 bottles of Cuvée Solèsio. We still have the Cuvée Chocolat to bottle. But another day. This brief video shows you just how artisanal the whole affair is.  Fortunately it is absolutely delicious, so worth the trouble!

 

 

 

 

Our lovely friends Chris & Sue sent us this photo taken from their house in Brighton. Meanwhile, we have kind Frances & Alistair bringing our Christmas ham and crackers from Brighton in a van driving through snow-covered France. I do hope everyone's safe.

Meanwhile, 'though we have no snow, it is absolutely freezing here. The godawful Godin woodburner in our apartment has fallen to bits so we've moved downstairs into the main house (and away from the sickenly addictive English TV we had installed recently - phew). We are now revelling in underfloor central heating and no lugging half-metre logs upstairs. The only drawback is that we're heating all the house for just three of us, so we're going through oil by the tanker load. The dogs are comatose in the unaccustomed heat and we're wondering if a t-shirt is too many layers. It's really not very green, and as much as I reduce the temperature, the boiler (french, obviously) takes no notice and wallops out the heat anyway.  Without the TV we're back to books, iTunes and Scrabble. All very gentle.

 

 

Ali picked up a beautiful Christmas tree yesterday so we had a jolly evening tossing up between tasteful or plastered. We went the tasteful route, so the tree is decked out in silver and navy. My mum, who's staying with us for December, says she still has decorations from 50 years ago. Thank God she didn't cram them in her suitcase along with her hair rollers.

She hasn't needed the rollers of course, because, bravely, she went to make an appointment for a shampoo and set at the Roujan hairdresser's. Dredging up french learnt 70 years ago she managed to negotiate an appointment for yesterday afternoon. On arriving home afterwards she looked somewhat shocked. She described the experience thus: "Despite the place being rather ramshackle it was the best shampoo I've ever had; the hairdresser massaged my head for ages which was lovely. Odd though, because she and her pal spent half the time outside smoking, then rushing in to say they'd seen five flakes of snow, and would I like to look." The hairdresser has no English, 'though she'd like to learn, so each time she picked up an item Mum had to tell her what it was in English. So all very jolly. And Mum says she'd like to go back before she flies home again. A success.

In the annual round of awards I'd like to offer one to the fantastic technicians at Santa Maria in St Thibery . They are gardening machinery suppliers and repairers. Three weeks ago I took our 14 year old Husqvarna tractor-mower in for repair. We'd driven it into numerous tree and vine stumps and the blade had sliced a hole in the metal protective skirt. We don't need to use it right now, but I reckoned they'd be overwhelmed with business in the Spring, so best to take it in. They rang to give an estimate of 400 euros to repair it. As the machines are 4000 euros new we bit the bullet. A week later they rang to say it was ready. I arrived with the trailer ready to pick it up. Not only had they done a complete service, replaced the blades, welded and redesigned the skirt so it can't happen again, they'd done it all for 300 euros. I love these clever french boys. They love showing off their artisanal skill and ingenuity. Thank you.

 

 

I bought this riveter the other day, drawn by the name. Do you think it precedes Nike's 'Just do it'?

 

 

By the way, if you're planning a trip here to Languedoc-land, do take a look at our new Bookshop . We've listed books, maps and walks you might find useful, and yes, we earn commission on anything you buy through our site. We're going to use the dosh to buy trees, so with a bit of luck it'll be like paper-recycling.

And finally, the weight loss thing is going well and I put it all down to the help and motivation I'm receiving from the DailyBurn website. They even have an app for the iPhone, and as an iPhone addict, it's a double incentive. Christmas is going to be a test though. We're going to be 14 for lunch and I'm cooking in the big kitchen downstairs. It should all be great fun and I just have to avoid the naughty foods. But isn't that all of it?…...

Ali and I send you and yours our very best wishes for a spectacularly happy Christmas and a healthy, happy 2010.

 

The guests have all gone home, the rooms are cleaned for winter, the cooling fans await their winter home in the loft, but the pool's still swimmable. Yesterday was our first day without guests for five months and I felt truly ill after a rather-too-long lie-in. 

However, today has been magical. I woke at 6.19 am, just as I have all summer - one minute before the alarm, although it is now turned off. I felt fit as a fiddle and zipped off to the market in Clermont l'Herault. My basket crammed with plants, 20 Christmas cauliflower, 2 basil, 15 oak leaf lettuce, 3 celery, along with finely cut jambon sec, a paillasse loaf, tiny coffee meringues, yellow courgettes, five different types of tomatoes, leeks, french beans, pork loin and the crowning glory - huge cep mushrooms from the hills in Lozere, I was home again by 10am.

 

 

I'd be very happy to spend this winter gardening, so this afternoon found me planting all that I'd bought this morning. The potager has been easy to prepare this autumn, thanks to a fantastic attachment made by Wolf tools. It hoes and breaks up the soil to a fine tilth like nothing I've ever used before. God knows what it'd be like in wetter, heavier soils, but here, in the dry, fast draining bauxite of our vineyard it is brilliant. 

 

 

 

The potager is so packed with winter vegetables that I've started filling up the extra space with Australian everlasting flowers. I have no idea how they'll do, but we'll see.