Happy Christmas, and home made Xmas decorations

It's that time of year again! I don't get excited about Christmas until at least halfway through December, that's when I start thinking, I suppose I had better put up a few decorations. I have to admit there have been a few years when I couldn't be bothered, as I am very bah humbug about the 'silly season'. But this year, my brother was supposed to be joining us, so I felt like making an effort. 

Sadly, having company for Christmas was not meant to be, as the French Government, scared about the amount of Omicron ravaging the UK, closed down its borders with the UK a few days before my brother was due to come here, so he is now home alone for Xmas, like last year *rolling eyes emoticon*. I don't blame them one bit; France has been very sensible all this year - we have had to wear masks indoors and we have our Covid Passes for entering places like cinemas, theatres, sporting venues and even bars and restaurants. However, I do feel that letting life get back to completely normal this summer (like in the UK) was just asking for trouble. That's not to say that there isn't Omicron in France, there is, it's just that we are used to wearing masks and being sensible, so it's not such a problem for us to go back to semi lockdown or curfew (apart from the usual minority who love to riot and complain for any reason whatsoever).

So where was I, yes I was in the mood for doing a bit of decoration and having found a bit of inspiration on Pinterest I started preparing turning some Le Parfait preserving jars into seasonal candle holders with decorated pine cones which I had collected back in the summer. Isn't it funny, I spent 15 years living at a property which had conifer trees galore and their cones in the garden, yet not once did I decorate with those cones for Christmas! 😀 Keith managed to take off the lids which are wired onto the jars and after painting my cones a mix of white, old gold and copper, I wired them around the neck of the jars. Unfortunately we only had green wire so I covered the wire as best I could with hessian ribbon and sisal string, then filled the inside with coarse salt to look like snow. I tied a little bunch of greenery to some berries and glued them to the string with a hot glue gun. I hope it comes off easily as I need to change my greenery as bay leaves don't last more than a few days, nor do my Pyracantha berries from my hedge!

Luckily I went for a little walk to a nearby track, armed with a tall man with a long pole, to see what kind of greenery I could find. I have come back with some branches which I wanted for another decoration (below), and some red berries from a Cotoneaster (I think) and black berries from Viburnum tinus, which grows wild all over the place here, plus a bit of someone's conifer hedge. 😁 I needed the tall things to help because this track is kept well maintained and cleared, so the greenery is hard to reach as it's either up a bank or down one. The track itself is part of the French network of the Grande Randonée paths and is in fact one going to Saint Jacques de Compostelle/Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Here are my branches decorated with baubles and fairy lights. It took about 5 minutes to decorate. My kind of tree!! 😂

I did actually buy a little tree from Lidl - I have bought one like this before and as it's in a pot with roots, you can put it outside after Xmas and keep it going for the next year! It was even decorated with the same blue decoration on elastic as the last one I bought years ago! I added some fairy lights and a few baubles as it was a bit bare.

Back to the Le Parfait jars, here they are, looking a little droopy as the bay leaves didn't stay fresh for very long! I kind of guessed that would happen, and I expect to have to keep changing the greenery so I have a load of vases filled with the stuff I brought back from the hedgerows clogging up my laundry room!

I'm using battery operated tea lights this time but I could get my hand in to put a real candle in, you just have to be a bit careful about any greenery inside the pot if you use a real candle.

I put the rest of the cones that I decorated, larger ones, in a blue glass bowl and they look really nice. Great that I can reuse them for years to come and it really didn't take any time painting them. I just painted the edges; with the white paint it is supposed to look like snow, and the metallic ones only need the edges painting as well, saves on paint and saves on having to go outside and make a huge mess with a spray can! 

By the way the oak table, six chairs and the huge dresser came with the house - we were absolutely delighted, and in turn left our old table and chairs at our last place for our young buyers who were happy too! 

We've put up various fairy lights since then and I think that's more than enough. We have enough food to feed the 5,000 but I have to make mince pies again, as my first batch, the pastry was really weird and soggy when I was rolling it/cutting out my shapes, and now cooked it is soggy and not very nice. I did it in my processor up to the adding water stage, which I did by hand. I then found out that the flour I was using was T45, rather than the T55 plain flour that I normally use for just about everything. Keith had bought it from the supermarket thinking it was general purpose T55. Having looking up the difference, T45 is the most processed/least strong flour and is used for brioche, T55 is stronger and can be used for bread, croissants, pastries, cakes etc but for bread better to use T65 which is the strongest white flour. So I'm going to try again with my normal flour. What a pain!

Right that's it, Merry Christmas to you all and to my blogger friends, I will come round your blogs and see what you are all up to! I hope you have a great time over the festive period. Take care everyone and stay safe. xx

Minerve and its amazing river gorge Part 2

This is a continuation from Part 1 here.

Here we are looking where the River Briant - where I am standing on the left of the photo - meets the River Cesse coming in from the right side of the photo and it flows off towards where K is taking the photo behind me.

Photo credit: Keith Allen

We then went back down into the river bed to go and explore the tunnel where the water normally flows. I liked the view below where you can see the different architecture - old concrete blocks for the lower path with an interesting (!!) concrete block to hold it up, and a much more aesthetically pleasing dry stone wall for the upper path/top of village. As well as this you can see where the river has worn away at the rocks over time and the streaks where different minerals have stained the rocks are interesting too (unless it's all lichen, or both?) - in some parts of the path above (photo with K) there is water constantly dripping through the rocks - I hope that's not from someone's drains leaking! 😀 It must be a very old path as the stone floor is worn really smooth and shiny, like marble.  

The Candela tower seen through the viaduct bridge.

The tunnel known as the 'Pont Naturel'

Photo credit: Keith Allen

This stone stacking seems to be very popular everywhere we go, and in fact in Google Maps for this place there are tons of photos of stacked stones all over the dry river bed! Seems like nobody did that this year except for here on the bank.

Light at the end of the tunnel! We didn't walk all the way to the end as it was pretty rough under foot, but now I wish that we had done so, as I discovered from a footpath map that the river flows into another shorter tunnel, before it comes out and continues on as the Cesse gorge. There was a little bat flying around, though whether we had disturbed it or not, I don't know. 

Some people were walking into the tunnel just at the right time, for scale!

Looking back at the entrance to the Pont Naturel from the footpath.

It's worth looking up occasionally too, as I spotted these Prickly Pear cacti growing wild out of the rocks.

Another view of the Candela tower and the entrance to the village from the main car park.

We walked past this fun little garden full of interesting things, including the lovely 'driftwood' log and the colourful planted up teapot.

Back in the village at the War Memorial where the wilting flowers must be left from Remembrance Day. The sign on the left says, 'Please don't cut the flowers'. Bit of a shame to need to have a sign telling people that, as presumably some horrible people do.

Last photo! I don't think Minerve village itself is particularly attractive although it is one of the "Plus Belles Villages de France" (Most Beautiful Villages in France). I think that's because the whole place, scenery too, is so stunning. There are a few restaurants and cafes here but in winter it is generally very quiet, though good to know that this bookshop/cafe is open all year round. La Terrasse restaurant was open a couple of years ago when we visited before Xmas with my brother, but who knows what is still open after Covid has hit so hard?

This is a fabulous short aerial video of Minerve and the surrounding gorges which puts my walk into perspective - and as I haven't got any photos from further away up the gorges I can't show you it in all its magnificence that way. I don't seem to be able to make the video embed larger though so I hope you can view it bigger on your computer/phone/whatever. If not, this is the link on Youtube, although that seems to be a 26 min video, which must have been a TV programme. Enjoy. 😀

Minerve and its amazing river gorge Part 1

We had a few days recently when the weather was forecast to be wall to wall sunshine with no wind, so we immediately planned to go out. Even better, we took Mary Moho out for a long overdue spin. Although we have been here several times before, Minerve is well worth visiting again and again, and we know that we can park a motorhome in the large public parking at any time of the year. 

The only thing that disappointed me about the day is that I was hoping to get lots of photos of lovely autumn leaves, only to realise as we got closer that the green hills that we were heading towards were in fact covered in evergreen flora! It's all garrigue type of vegetation around here, with just a few deciduous trees here and there, particularly growing down at river level.

You can't drive into the village but the walk from the parking is not far and is very scenic so expect it to take twice as long as you would have thought!

May I suggest that you view all these photos larger by clicking on them as they don't show as sharply like this as when you see them full size.

Minerve from the car park, where we had lunch first.

Minerve is perched up on a cliff above two rivers which meet here, the Briant and the Cesse. Over the millennia they have carved their way through the rocks leaving some amazing shapes where the rock has been worn away, and on one side of the village, the Cesse river disappears into a cave/tunnel called the 'Pont Naturel' ('Natural Bridge'); it comes out into the open for a short distance before disappearing into another shorter tunnel.

This next photo is very zoomed in, looking towards the left down the above gorge, where you can see the old Roman Bridge. Funnily enough, there is some water here (the Briant river), yet further along where we went down to the river bed, it was dry.

There's some interesting bird life around here, and in winter it is well known as a place where Wallcreepers can be found. There are also Rock Sparrows, which perch up on the roofs of the buildings, and Crag Martins, which swoop around over the village and perch on the sides of the bridge. Whilst we were scanning with our binocs Keith suddenly spotted a Wallcreeper! This is only the second one we have ever seen, but unfortunately it too was the other side of a gorge, so not exactly easy to watch or photograph! We didn't have the spotting scope with us as we planned on a nice walk around, and K didn't bring his new long lens (on his new Canon dslr), and I had my Lumix bridge as I thought I was going to be taking photos of scenery, not distant birds! 

So, can you spot the Wallcreeper in the following zoomed in to the max 400mm optical lens of my Lumix? 😀😂😀

I can just see it, but then I know where it was. 😀 The following photo is zoomed in to max digitally, which is of course dreadful, but it's a record shot. If you look in the middle of the image on the vertical grey patch, the bird is a grey bird looking upwards with a black stripe down its side (along the wing edge). If you should ever get to see them closer up, or preferably in flight, they have amazing red feathers under their wings, but like this you can't see the colour. One good thing about Wallcreepers is that they flit about a lot on the rock face, so the movement helps to find them.

This tower is called La Candela and is the remains of an ancient chateau which was reconstructed in the 13th century. So, a new building then. 😀

The walking tour which I'm taking you on goes to the left of the village around the ramparts and down into the dry river bed, then we come back up into the village around where the viaduct bridge is.

There's been a new footpath under construction the last two years but it is finally finished, so we enjoyed seeing this side of the town from a different angle. The first thing which stood out was this building, sitting on a very interesting 'foundation'! 😀 I think from the street side it just looks like any other old stone village house, but I wouldn't fancy going in it! They have cut back the vines but the upstairs window looks like it needs a bit of work doing to it. Or maybe that IS the work? 😂

I would also find this pillar a bit worrying, as I assume it's there to help hold up the buildings....😱

Looking back to the start of the new footpath, the house with the dodgy foundations and the new planting, which I like very much (very similar to my new Pollinator Bed). I love the wild grass here - at least it looks wild to me, rather than something which has been planted, unless they have specifically sown it for the rippling effect of the grass flowers.

I don't have a wide enough angle lens to fit it all in, so here's the gorge again above the river Briant (also known as Brian, but pronounced the same in French anyway).

Now we turn around and look forward again. This is a replica of one of the four Trebuchets which attacked the village; this one in particular called la Malvoisine, was aiming for the town well. A trebuchet is a giant catapault and was a medieval weapon. There is a huge amount of history to Minerve, much relating to the Cathars who were a weirdo offshoot of Catholicism, persecuted by the Catholic Church during what became known as the Albigensian Crusade. Cathars are the people who built all the defensive castles perched up on rocks dotted about through much of our department, Aude. In a nutshell, Simon de Montfort beseiged Minerve back in 1210 and when he eventually destroyed the town's well, they had no choice but to surrender. Negotiations ensued to save the townsfolk, but the 140 Cathars refused to renounce their faith so were burned at the stake in the village square. Nice one, Simon.

This was the first time we have seen the riverbeds completely dry, as we have visited before in February and in December, I think another time too, and each time there has been water running into the tunnel. Of course, we had to go down and walk on the riverbed to experience it!

I know this is a bit of a small image of a butterfly, but for the record, it was so lovely to see some butterflies again! This Clouded Yellow stopped near me very briefly, and we also saw some Whites, a few Red Admirals and a Small Copper. Down in the gorge and in the village there were still plenty of flowers, so I imagine it is very mild and sheltered here during winter.

I will continue in Part 2 as I have a lot more photos!

P.S. We had a sprinkling of snow yesterday morning!!!


Part 2 is here.

This is so sad! (and other happier things)

Back in the spring, a Black Redstart started making a nest in our covered patio area, up on a beam above our window/glass wall, and as close to the back door as possible! A really crazy place to build a nest, we thought, with us and the three cats in and out of the back door all the time. Even when some of the nest fell off and got all caught up with the blinds beneath, it didn't deter her and we would see her flying to and from the nest from inside the kitchen. Well the nest got bigger and better but then we didn't see her anymore. We didn't know if she was nestled down inside the nest sitting on eggs or if she had sensibly decided to leave it and go and build another nest elsewhere.

We decided to wait 3 or 4 weeks before we cleared up underneath (as there was a lot of nesting material all over the floor and the blinds) and before closing the blinds which we do when the weather gets warm and the sun shines in there.

Nothing happened, no sign of any Black Redstarts hanging around so that was it we thought. An abandoned nest. 

The other day we were clearing up out there and I wondered what to do about the nest. K said to knock it down with the broom that was in my hand, which I duly did. Crunch! Oh no! There were eggs in it! 😢😢😢 The smashed eggs were a bit smelly and I didn't want to look too closely but in one of my photos it looks like possibly a bird head and beak shape.... well I think there were things 'happening' in some of those eggs.

So what does that mean? It means she was happy with her nest site, had laid her eggs, and started sitting on them. Obviously hidden inside as the nest is quite deep. But then, she disappeared and the eggs would have got cold and the embryos died. I just hope that it wasn't one of our cats that killed her. 😢

Here's where the nest was located!

A close look at the nest:

The materials in this nest are the same as in a nest I found in Brittany, but I don't know where the long wiry black and white hairs would have come from - at our last place they must have come from our neighbour's horses (as they were chestnut and black), plus there were also sheep across the road. Here, we have hens next door so that would account for some of the feathers, especially the orangey/brown bigger ones. But there are no horses around, and the only sheep are way over the other side of the village,  so what are all the long hairs from? It also never fails to amaze me how birds can manage to make these works of art with just clawed feet and beaks! 💜

I just recently discovered that there was a motorhome show going on in Toulouse that very weekend, but as we prefer to avoid weekend crowds we shot off that very afternoon on the Friday! The exhibition centre is just north of the airport which is the north west side of the city, the wrong side from us but still only about an hour from home as it's mostly motorway and dual carriageway.

We had a most enjoyable drive there, as the colours along the way were spectacular, due to the amount of Smoke Bushes which had been planted. I could see that they had self seeded with gay abandon, as they were growing low all down the central reservation too, and had obviously been strimmed back occasionally, to stop them from growing into shrubs/blocking the view of drivers. They don't grow wild on this side of southern France (as far as I am aware), but were growing all over the place when we were at the Verdon Gorges in Provence one October. Long time readers of my blog will remember I had a number of them in my garden in Brittany, ranging from purple to lime green in colour, but all turning magnificent orangey colours in autumn.

By the way, in case you don't know France, most of our motorways are only two lanes each side, yet far less busy than a British motorway with three lanes! That's because we have to pay tolls, but they are definitely worth paying for.

We had assumed the show would be indoors like the one we used to visit in Rennes, but it was in fact held in the car parking at the exhibition centre. Even so, we still had to show our Covid passes to get in (good!). There weren't too many people there but we still chose to wear our masks and gloves because we knew we would be touching things that many other people had touched.

I should mention that we have both just recently had our boosters! My doctor considers me as one of the vulnerable people who need their jabs before the healthy, and because K was with me, this time luckily she had some spare vaccine, so he got his jab too! 👍😀

There weren't a huge amount of mohos in the luxury range, which are always the first ones I want to look at, but I did find the two which had piqued my interest recently.

One of them was this Rapido, the 854F, which is a 2022 model. It doesn't have a fixed bed but has up to two that can drop down. What I loved was the huge rear lounge and the much larger than average kitchen. The bathroom is a two in one, like ours, with a panel with the basin attached to it, which swings over the toilet and turns the space into an instant shower stall. Much simpler than ours which requires a lot of fiddling around with a panel which folds in three. It also has a huge cupboard/wardrobe behind the sofa and a final benefit, it's only 6.70m length! K was less than enamoured with the smaller garage though. There was also the slight matter of price as this one is about 20,000+ Euros more than ours cost in 2016. 😂

I also was interested in this one, which has a walk in garage (Challenger 240, 6.99m length). There is room to store clothes in there as well as the usual garagey things, and although the garage was quite narrow, it was full height. It has a large front lounge, also with no fixed bed, and the price is at the lower end of the scale. This moho is also a new style with a narrow cupboard opposite the L shaped sofa where the TV pops up out of. There are a couple of stools which can be fitted together to make a U shaped sofa, thus allowing two places to put your feet up to watch movies, or you can even split the stools up as extra seating if you have a group of people socialising around the table. I thought this was a very clever innovative idea. Not so keen on the weird angular shaped cushions though ???!!! 😂😂😂😂

I am itching to get away in the moho for more than just a day trip and we are hoping to get away twice next year! We will see.

OK remember those plants I bought in late summer to put in my planned Pollinator Bed? They are finally in their new place! K's brother Kevin helped him to deturf and semi dig over the soil. We then had to dig a lot deeper in order to plant out but we made larger holes and added lots of bought compost. This time the soil was much better than we've found elsewhere with far less clay, hooray!

I do expect there will be more petals blown into the pool next year, as the soil is higher up on this side than the patio on the pool side!

I'm amazed at how well the Perovskia is still doing in November; it has been flowering like this since I bought it in August! Some of the other plants had another burst of flowering as well, just before planting them out, and one of the lavenders is still in full flower. Strange but I am not complaining!

The terracotta pot below broke when it was knocked over by wind and a top heavy plant inside it, but it broke in a perfect place for me to place it in the bed, maybe as a shelter for toads or other critters. It's east facing so should provide a shaded place during the heat of the summer, although maybe too warm, I don't know. Hopefully when the plants have grown more it should provide a dry sheltered spot, and it's a bit of decoration anyway.

All of these plants will flower for a long period and are all pollinator friendly. I have also added a spare rosemary for early season nectar - in the wild here on the garrigue rosemary flowers all through the winter, and my prostrate rosemary in the herb bed is already flowering, but even if this rosemary doesn't flower until the usual Feb/March, it will be something for early honey and other bees to feed on. I also have a pot of garlic chives to divide up and plant out in the spring. I hope very much to encourage the butterflies that come into the garden but spend most of their time on the wildflowers in the ditch and bank, to come to the pollinator bed!

I still have bulbs to plant out but being a fairweather gardener I am waiting for a dry and at least not windy, even if not sunny, day. Our weather has been awful for weeks, much colder at this time of year than I would expect for the south of France. Lots of wind, rain, drizzle, low cloud. Yuk.

The geraniums out the front of the house are still looking good compared with the ones by the pool - I suppose they are more sheltered from rain here, and we haven't had any frosty weather yet. These are ones that overwintered in the covered patio last year, so I will be doing the same this year.

I had the usual being crowded out by cats whilst trying to take all these photos, yet when I want to get a pic of them, they either come too close to the camera (these are all phone photos, by the way) or won't look at me when I want them to. So no decent photo of Bertie, but I did manage to get one of Harry looking up at me!