It’s all about the sheep!

Catching up with the season, the rains come and forget to leave, my sheep drive me bonkers

Welcome to you all, I’m delighted you’re back. Actually that sounds so much better in French; je suis ravie que vous êtes revenues, isn’t that better? I always love the way the syllables and repetition of consonants of these words sound…

Hello from hell my hill… It’s been a mighty few days here, I’ve been wet more frequently than I’ve been dry. Indisputably, it is November!

I thought, since I haven’t written of our haphazard day to day life here in this wild corner of France for a while and it’s far too wet to go outside unless I absolutely have to, I would send you a quick update… I hope you enjoy the ride, its been very bumpy at times but thank you so much for hopping on.

With love Susie x

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And the clouds looked like dust kicked up from the hooves of one hundred thousand horses as they galloped across the hills…

“But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.”
― L.M. Montgomer

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Half-term holidays arrive with the rain, the holidays end, the rain doesn’t!

I don’t think I have escaped a soaking since the rain began on the last day of classes. In my entry for October’s issue of colours of the month I wrote about the dry river at the bottom of the valley. My friend, who arrived exhausted having driven from Germany in howling wind and lashing rain in the second week of half-term, accompanied me on a walk through the Forêt de Bournazel. When we left the house after lunch my weather map predicted no rain for at least three hours… it was long enough to walk where I’d planned. It lied! We returned two hours later, drenched to the skin, shivering with cold and our shoes filled with water because foolishly I had forgotten that this particular walk includes crossing a brook eight times on the valley path. The brook is now a river, too deep to cross and too wide to jump, we had no choice but try.

It is two years since so much rain has fallen on so many consecutive days. Much as I curse the immensely annoying but unavoidable consequences, there is a certain peaceful feeling to hearing the sound of water running in ditches again, to see it coursing down the hill finding old, dried up gullies as it flows, once more, to a now very lively river with all life within returning.

Our barn roof repairs are still in the scaffold up but unfinished stage. I’m relieved to find the area that has been completed, roughly 100 m2, is holding well. We have ten buckets less to empty each day, depending on wind direction of course. It’s never that simple but Williams atelier is dry and he can work once more without risk of electrocution!

But good grief it’s been a monstrous fight to achieve anything else.

Garden work is at a standstill and my sheep go walkabout!

Every year I collect seeds for planting the following year from everything and anything possible. Lettuces, tomatoes, chilies, leeks, onions, brassicas, herbs and of course all the squash. It is one of the facets of gardening I love, actually find relaxing, apart from the eating of course, the rest is hard work I will never master quite as my green fingered father did. Despite not inheriting such brilliance I have a dream of creating heirloom seeds for my daughter Rosie; I still grow seeds my father saved so the loom is growing - when I remember to label them! This year I have because there are so few. Either the plants withered and died before the seeds were set or they have already been washed into the ground by the torrential rain. Next year will reveal all…

The ‘art’ in seed saving.

In a matter of days, the ground has turned from concrete to sludge. In a rare interlude from the constant downpours I nip down to see if there is anything at all I can profitably do to salvage the carnage that just a week ago was a vegetable garden still giving vegetables! What I see now is a mouldering, sodden mass of leaves and weeds, salads undecided in whether to continue their cycle or just give up the fight and join the soggy mess that is everything else. All that remains, looking admittedly healthier than last week, are the leeks and kale, and thank goodness for that because these are my winter staples!

With about as much enthusiasm as I have when visiting the dentist, I gather the few remaining squash and tomatoes from plants hanging limp and bedraggled from their sticks and launch a one man crusade in a half hearted attempt at tidying the rest. I choose one small, auspiciously manageable patch of what used to be roquette, beetroot and french beans. But, before I even begin I realise I don’t have an audience. I always have an audience! Eight black noses and eight pairs of eye’s are noticeably missing from their usual positions dotted around the fence in anticipation of a tasty morsel. (My vegetable patch sits in a fenced off area to one side of the sheep field, don’t ask! The reason has nothing to do with sheep and everything to do with rabbits which are long gone due to our two cats. To change position of the garden now would involve more work than I can even contemplate). I don’t know whether to feel relieved at the distraction or furious that hours of fence repairs have been a waste of time. Either way my sheep are not in their field. I have no choice but to down tools and go in search of them.

Note: the above clip was filmed on the last dry day of October one morning just before leaving for classes, Rambeau was in bad humour and knocked the entire contents of the bucket over the desiccated grass along with me… this has been repeated countless times since!

It becomes almost a daily ritual, I feed them barley and hay in the morning, they waffle down the grain, play in the hay and then sleep until after lunch, after which it’s time for a wander - anywhere and everywhere they like, the hill becomes their playground. The neighbours garden is always a good starting point. Mercifully, Thierry, a kindly bachelor with one uncontrollable eye and a penchant for extended chitchat, is rarely present. He uses the house as a stopover point when he has a long journey and more frequently during harvest to gather fruit from the orchard. Hence the garden is unkempt for most of the year and permanently filled with a variety of wild flowers and grasses, a veritable paradise for my little flock which he is more than happy for them to eat their way through. On condition they don’t ring bark his fruit trees, which of course they do and I am forever apologising! His garden is not fenced with anything other than two strands of barbed wire however, all the surrounding land is farmland. Roughly 300 hectares of steep fields and woodland running from the top of the South facing side of the hill to the valley. For eight hungry sheep it is a case of the grass is always greener! By the end of the first week I have walked and run more than fifty kilometres in recovery exercises!

We order logs because I lose the lighting stove dispute, but only just!

I give in to my shivering husband just a few days before the beginning of November. Not feeling too defeated because it is actually cold in the house I still feel slightly miffed as I call Pierre, our log man. He says he will deliver in three days time. I picture my husbands face when he hears the news, not without due reason as it happens, we really were cold for those three days!

Pierre arrives in his brand new and immense Lamborghini tractor, I wonder briefly if Clarksons Farm was translated into French, glides it through the gap between two buildings built barely wide enough to allow an ox and cart through, I watched through half closed fingers it was such a tight squeeze. He leaps down from his ridiculously high seat like a sprightly twenty year old (he’s as old as I am, which is not young) and kisses us both theatrically three times, before skipping around to the back of the trailer and unhooking the clips holding the tailgate. He skips back again, arms gesticulating wildly, leaps almost angelically into the cab and expertly reverses the Italian beast up to the barn doors and tips five¹stère of logs, missing the electric wires and the telecom lines, exactly where we want them. Just as I pay him, trying not to show my surprise at the price rise while feeling somewhat less surprised now by his flashy machine, eight sheep wander up the road - I pretend they aren’t mine!

I won’t be winning any medals for shepherdess of the year this year! Sheep truly are as smart and mischievous as goats, despite their reputation for being stupid animals, or almost… we were given a goat in Ireland, her name was Nanny Ogg after the witch in Terry Pratchetts Discworld series, I lost count of the number of times I found her standing on the kitchen table eating our sandwiches, she was a horror to milk too. In fact I’ll leave that at she was a horror… Never ever again!

Constant rain has benefits…

We order a second delivery of logs which are stacked in the barn in record time, needs must when the devil sends rain on dry wood! By the time Rosie arrives for a brief but much longed for stay, the house is toasty warm and we have two days free to spend as we please, albeit torrential rain days. We ignore it, collect mushrooms which are popping up in forest and field alike from finally damp earth and gather walnuts by the bucket because their husks are at last softening letting them fall from the trees. We pick up at least 25 kg, far more than we thought we would this year, lay them all in trays to dry ready for making oil in spring. When the rain is simply too heavy to leave the warmth of the kitchen we three, Rosie, Seth and I, amuse ourselves by attempting ‘La dictée de Mérimée’, make a perfectly hideous amount of mistakes but are mildly appeased when we read that Napoléon III and the Empress Eugénie made plenty more!

À très bientôt.

Cep - Boletus edulis or Penny bun mushroom, we found only one but left it in the hope of more from its spores next year!

1. One stère of logs in France is equivalent, more or less, depending on the generosity of the seller, to 1 m3.