Tales from the pond bank

I've probably lured you in under false pretences; a more suitable title would be 'lack of life around the pond'! One thing I can say for sure - it's still full! I'm very happy about this, but I have come to realise that I actually see far more of what is going on when the level drops and I can see the rocky and muddy sides of the pond and under the overhanging trees.

Some proper blue sky would be nice so I didn't have this glare when taking photos!

I was hoping to swamp you all with pictures of baby moorhens by now, but the moorhens cleared off a while back after two failed nest attempts. I think they've gone up the stream as occasional 'mips' can be heard coming from that direction. I really hope they've been able to breed but wouldn't have thought they would have much protection against predators - plenty of thick bramble cover against flying predators but no deep water to swim off to against mammal attack.

Even the mallards seem to have stopped coming by and I haven't even seen a heron for a while! Never mind, Kenny the Kingfisher is still around occasionally. No muskrats here since 2010 (good, they're cute but they tunnel everywhere) and only one coypu. It exists no longer due to having a bit of a crack marksman as a husband, as they are less than cute, carry the same diseases as rats and also tunnel into the banks, and last year youngsters were even getting in my veg patch eating my produce! Both aquatic mammals are introduced 'escapees' from North and South America respectively, and considered as pests here in France. Having seen the damage they have caused to my lake bank I've become hardened to having to kill 'nuisibles' (so long as I don't have to do it myself - now there I'm a total wimp).

I'm sure the fish are happy and there must be more life than I can see going on. We let much of the pond bank be wild because when I've cleared the brambles beside it in places I found my own ducks just ate the banks! So apart from the lawn end (from where the photo above was taken) and the 'beach', a lot of the edges look like this.

Brambles and a rogue Ragwort growing beside the pond

There hasn't as yet been much in the way of dragonflies or damselflies. I saw my first dragonfly yesterday up by the veg patch but didn't have my camera with me, really annoying as it stopped on the ground in front of me! I did manage to capture two different little damselflies though recently. They are not good photos because they were there one second and gone the next, and they are tiny and I can't get close! Hopefully there'll be more opportunities as summer progresses.

Blue tailed damselfly

White legged damselfly

The rest of the life on the pond centres around the ducks! They seem quite happy but are still not very tame and I doubt they ever will be. They're pretty well behaved and go into their shed at night and just amble about doing their own ducky thing during the day. It's just nice having them around and I enjoy the eggs from the two younger girls who are laying.

Here's Doris having a wash and brush up.

This last photo is Rachel - pronounced the French way if you please, as she is a Rouen after all. If I caption this up with pretty girl again I'll have a load more hits from Thailand googling "nice pretty girls". I don't think she was what they had in mind!!!

Veg patch 2nd June

I keep on taking photos and never getting round to posting them, and then everything's gone and grown again! Right, so here are some pics of the veg patch taken during the last week!

First one is an overview, this was taken a couple of days ago as I'd just thinned out the lettuce. For Mr (Annony) Mouse who was asking about my wildflower bed - it's the strip in this first bed marked with pegs (you may have to click on the photo and look on your giant mac screen). I sowed the seed in diagonal lines so I could tell what was a wildflower rather than my usual weeds. It should be interesting as it's a mix especially for pollinators. This by the way is the space that would have been sweetcorn but I decided not to grow any this year as it's so hit and miss (explanation here).

Overview May 31st

I forgot I'd taken another photo of it! By the way the space above on the right (and below top right) is the frame for my cucumbers for when they are finally big enough to plant out! I grow them upwards which they do very well so they don't take up too much ground space.

'Wildflower meadow'

Spuds taken about a week ago, but I wanted a photo after earthing them up, when there were no weeds, so everyone would think what a neat and tidy gardener I am! The first two rows on the left are Belle de Fontenay which is a lovely early potato and the other smaller ones are Desiree, a red maincrop which stores really well. We were still eating last year's until about a month ago.

Beautiful weed free rows of spuds

Next one was taken about a week ago as the kale and PSB are still in place. My peas are flowering away merrily but I'm still waiting for the mange tout to start flowering and getting very impatient.

Sure enough blackfly has appeared on the broad beans but there are at least 4 red ladybirds and one of those tiny yellow and black ones on the plants. I have put down two saucers of old strawberry jam in the hope of enticing the ants to take more interest in that than protecting their aphids (blackfly), which they farm for the honeydew that the aphids secrete. If the ants are off the plants then the ladybirds can get in for the kill. That's the theory anyway; one year it worked and another I had a swarm of honeybees eating the jam so quickly I kept having to give them more!

Pea flowers, with broad beans in foreground

The peas are starting to swell up now and I have three successive sowings. I don't even really like peas very much, except raw! I am such a lovely wife, I am growing them for my OH, who adores them.

A pea pod

Just another view of peas, strawbs and spuds. My OH put a small bench in the veg patch for me so I can just sit and survey my domain! It's a bit hot sitting here though and there are stinging nettles right behind coming through the fence from the field!

Back of house from the potager

Little Gem lettuce which I sowed early into a pot protected in a cold frame then pricked out and later planted into this funny plasticky cold frame from Lidl. I'm so glad I did as this is miles ahead of the April sowing of various lettuces direct into the ground, so we have finally had our first harvest of something grown this year!

Little Gem lettuce

The best thing that's happening right now though are the strawberries. I have tons of Gariguette, which are an early non remontant variety. That means they only flower and fruit once. I also have a remontant called Charlotte (not to be confused with the spud of the same name!) which is incredibly sweet and that's already ripening up too and will continue to produce fruit until the autumn. I've just planted out a new row of Charlottes so between these two varieties I have 6 rows of strawbs! Maybe a bit OTT but they are on rotation and one row of Gariguette is on year 3 and will be taken out after fruiting.

Gariguette strawberries, netted against the birds

First strawberry harvest about a week ago. Since then they have gone bananas (haha) with the warm weather we've been having and last night I picked two plastic tubs worth and the fruit is bigger now. I guess I'll be making jam again (to feed to the ants!) and I really need to remember to get that darn ice cream maker bowl into the freezer!!!

YUM!

What I haven't bothered to show yet is the onion plot as it's got some pink Roscoff onions doing nicely in it and some very small leeks and spring onions, so not a lot to show really. I'm currently in the process of planting out my pathetically small chillies into the space where the winter brassicas were. Cross fingers they will start to grow now they are in the soil!

Swallows zooming over the veg patch and perching on the cane tops

One last piccy which won't win any awards but just to show another use for cane tops. I noticed the swallows as I was taking buggy pics so shot (that sounds so wrong!) them from afar with the macro lens, which effectively zooms in on them. One was perching on the tomato canes. I love these birds!

Buzz off!

It's sadly ironic that someone who champions bees and pollinating insects has to call out a pest controller to destroy a nest of honey bees. But, as we have discovered, there's a huge difference between the gentle humming of bees out in the garden and the very irritating drone of bees inside your living room. We really weren't meant to live side by side with them so unfortunately when a swarm of bees decides that your chimney is a good place to build a nest something has to be done about it.

At first we thought they were swarming inside the large stone chimney stack, so after several days of bees appearing in the living room and getting a bit fed up with catching them on the windowsills and window panes with a glass and putting them inside, we thought that if we lit the wood burner and just made a small fire, maybe the warmth would discourage them and they'd go elsewhere. However! Result - no fire, a lot of smoke pouring out of every crack in the wood burner filling the living room to choking point. Hmmm think they've build their nest inside the stainless steel flue! After that we had bees both inside the wood burner and still coming out of the chimney itself (which has fireproof plasterboard and insulation around the flue to keep the drafts out and the heat in).  Muggins here was letting unhappy bees out of the wood burner and putting them outside, whereupon those that were not half dead promptly flew back up to the top of the roof and probably came back down the chimney again. As well as the noise and the by then continual sweeping up of half dead bees off the floor they were secreting sticky stuff (honey?) all over the windowsills and it was beginning to get beyond a joke.

Obviously it had to stop, so after a call to the Mairie we were given a few phone numbers to try. One company didn't do heights. Errr, that's no good when we're talking chimney stacks here on a tall house! The other guy said he didn't normally get down our way and to leave it for several days to see if they went away of their own accord; if not, call him again. Well they didn't go so he was called again and thank goodness he was able to come out on Monday to deal with the problem.

I should point out that Mr 'Sam Pic' is not a wanton destroyer of bees - he works with apiarists if there is a way to collect the swarm and move them on. Not possible inside an 8 metre tall stainless steel pipe however.

He also didn't have the right kind of ladder with him to deal with our Nantaise gutters, so plan B had to be put into action. I watched him sit on the roof outside this window and put the roof ladder which hooks over the ridge together, section by section. I get vertigo just watching people on roofs so after that I left him to it and my OH took the rest of the photos!

It looks so bare without the Mimosa tree now

All suited up

Rather him than me!!!

Putting poison powder down the flue

You can just make out a few dark blobs in the photo which are bees

Mr Sam Pic said that it was very unusual to have a nest actually inside a chimney flue as it's difficult to get it to stick to the soot on the sides. He said the treatment may take up to a week to work and he'd come out again if we still had a problem, included in the charge. Thankfully (for the bees as well as us) it seems to have been instantaneous as we've not had a bee since and the living room seems oddly quiet and still. We have to leave the nest to dry out for several months before getting the chimney sweeps back to clean it out before we can use the wood burner again in the autumn. Thank god it's May and thank god we have back up central heating! Cost: €120 plus the cost of the chimney sweeps again - they were only here in March!

So if you are reading this and you live in northern dept 35 or dept 22 and ever have a problem, he is your man for dealing with wasps, hornets, bees, rats and processionary caterpillars/moths (Tel: 0800 10 10 26). Now apparently is the time to put out pheromone traps for the pine processionary moth and he'll charge you €160 to do so. It might be cheaper to look online for the traps yourself! We have them in our pine trees but as they haven't taken up residence inside the house I'll leave them to it, but I am well aware of the problems they can cause and know exactly what they look like, having encountered gazillions of them crawling in procession up in the Pyrenees mountains.

Overall a sad tale but here's something he said that was interesting. "You could get a hive" he said. "Oh no, we've thought about that and decided that beekeeping would be just too time consuming and like having another kind of livestock to look after" replied my OH. Ah but apparently no, you can install a hive and just leave them to it - you don't need to collect the honey or DO anything. It's just a dry shelter for them to use and they'll get on and do their own thing and it will discourage them from looking inside your house walls or chimney for a place to make a nest! Food for thought and something I am going to look into.