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!
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
Show/hide comments