Life, Death, and a French radical

Wednesday, July 2, 2008

It's finally dark at 10:45 pm. Chicks and ducklings are especially vulnerable to crows and foxes and hawks so as dusk falls we make sure everyone's under cover and warm. The 5 brand new ducklings come from the barn into the house, the 3 newish chicks go from the ark in the yard to the barn, the 10 teenage ducklings go into the ark, and the chickens and ducks tuck themselves in to their chicken house which is actually a stone cow shed with a tiled roof that must be 200 years old. I'm not sure if the floor is made of dirt or rock; I'm raking up the mixed chicken manure and straw on the floor and carting it to the garden and so far I haven't reached what I think is the bottom. Occasionally I uncover a rock which I toss into the corner and there is a small pile collecting there.

Yesterday was so hot and muggy we could hardly move; pulling thistles for an hour and a half was torture. Then what we thought would be a storm blew through last night and it cooled off and rained just a bit so that today was about 60 degrees and cloudy - it was heaven in the hayfield aside from my wet feet. I pulled thistles in the bottom of the field close to the stream, where the wet ground made it very easy to pull the thistles, the mint grows thickly so every step smells refreshing, the water is gurgling by, and the grass issn't as tall as on the upper field so it was easier to walk. I was quite happy down there by myself for a couple hours while everyone worked further up. We had two more WWOOFers arrive yesterday evening and they energetically pulled thistles too so we really feel we're finally making progress. The garden looks good as well since Walt has been planting potatoes and hoeing in his spare time and today Margherita (from Greece) weeded too. The weather today was also conducive to the sheep butchering that K and D had scheduled for 10 am. It all went pretty smoothly I guess; I stayed in the hayfield although I was somewhat curious. Reed watched and told me about it later, and we talked about how it was always sad when an animal has to die so we can eat, but wasn't it good the sheep was happy right up to just a few minutes before it died? Sadder than the butchering was the lamb that died from an unknown cause just the other night, and the chick that drowned in a shallow bucket of water in front of the house last week. Now the excellent mother hen only has 5 chicks to watch over instead of 6. Reed was relieved that the drowned one wasn't his favorite little black one, which he feeds out of his hand and lets sit on his arm.

Ella the goat started getting blood in her milk last week so I started milking her twice a day instead of once to try to keep her from getting mastitis, but she's also got some kind of sores on her udder in several places which seem to bug her when I'm milking. First I tried cleaning her udder with salt water and then I left it alone and now I'm putting olive oil on it to see if that helps heal it up. She's such a sweet girl most of the time, except when she's being an escape artist. Her horns were cut off by her previous owner and she's brown so she looks very much like a deer, and her bleat is very dainty. I'll be glad when her milk clears up completely so we can drink it again.

Walt and I got to walk into the village of XXX just a kilometer away on Sunday before lunch, on a tractor trail between fields and hedges and across the stream, the same one that runs at the bottom of the hayfield. Just outside town on the main road we walked past a large group of senior citizens who had parked their cars on a gravelly pullout under some large trees and who had set up long tables and were having a picnic lunch, right there between the road, the ditch, and the cow pasture. They all nodded at us and smiled in a friendly way when we wished them bonjour messieur-dames and bon appetit!

XXX is small enough not to have its own tiny grocery store, but at least big enough to have a small post office, a bar/restaurant, and a boulangerie/patisserie. We sat in front of the 12th century Romanesque church and ate our pain au chocolat, and then headed back home, only to be hailed by a scruffy looking guy that we'd seen on our way into town on his bike. He had sussed us out as not the average foreigners, somehow, and when he discovered that we were American and not English he invited us in for a drink, in his modest apartment in a large old house in dire need of repair. He didn't apologize for the clutter, simply said we can't expect a man living alone to do the housekeeping. I have a feeling he's one of those tenants that the landlord would like to get rid of but can't, in this land of strong tenant laws.

We sat at the two chairs at the kitchen table while he prepared me a glass of sweet lemonade and Walt a cold alcohol-free beer. His walls were covered with posters and photos, one of him much younger with an accordion, another of his communist father, others of the Greenpeace and 70s hippie variety. First he explained that he didn't have coca cola, and when we said that's okay, we don't drink coca cola, he said, of course, you are normal, yes?; then we basically provided a receptive audience for his views on the ubiquitous English settlers in France, the ubiquitous American culture, the idiocy of the French farmers who spray poison on their fields and who grow GMO crops, the d--khead across the road with remote controlled gates and a video security camera that our new friend likes to moon occasionally etc. etc. He gave us a tour of his lovely organic garden, a mix of flowers and vegetables, let us smell the disgusting smell of fermenting nettle tea that he puts on his crops and he gave us two huge heads of lettuce that we accepted gratefully and ate for lunch and dinner on Monday. We finally said goodbye after admiring his pink and green painted motorcycle, amazed at the interesting people you'll meet when you're not in a hurry on a Sunday afternoon.

Sheep aren't smart but they can jump!

WWOOFer Kate arranges the onions, garlic, and shallots to cure
Wednesday, June 25, 2008


The second day of thistle removal has made a real visible difference in the hayfield and since 1) young thistles will pull straight up out of the ground root and all and 2) a nice breeze kept us somewhat cooler today I thought, maybe I could handle having a 5 acre hayfield. All it would take is one spring and summer of walking regularly through the field every other day and hand pulling thistle until you’d eradicated it, and then checking carefully once every spring after that.

We’ve also learned about fencing for goats and sheep. These are all things we could read in a book or ask my dad about, I’m sure, but there’s nothing like hands-on experience, right? You’d think sheep would be more docile but no – they’ll push over or jump over or trample a wire fence to get to the grass that’s greener on the other side, so the only way to keep them from doing that is to make the fence posts very strong, the fence fairly tall, and with a wooden rail on the top AND a couple lines of barbed wire to keep them from pushing on it or climbing up on it.

I got up early this morning by this house’s standards – 7:30 – and got the animals fed and watered and weeded some more onions before breakfast. The five adolescent chickens have taken to following me when I’m weeding because they can find lots of tasty bugs where I’ve pulled up weeds. They’re starting to feel like my little pals and I certainly enjoy their company and their soft little clucks. There is also a mother hen with 6 young chicks in the yard; she is the model of a mother hen, too. The other day the old cat – not a threat to the chickens at all – was sitting too close to something the hen wanted her brood to be able to eat and she puffed herself up and flew at the cat like a fire breathing dragon. And who would have guessed that baby ducks will eat mice? One of the ten young ducks in the yard is quite a hunter, the other day he had a mouse, a slug, and a snail, not to mention all the bugs and grass normally on offer at the lawn buffet.

Thistles in the Hay

Walt and Rosie after the weeding
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

We both worked on the thistles this morning in the heat and humidity, some of the hardest work I’ve done for a while. Slogging through an uncut hayfield and then gingerly trying to gather – wearing two pairs of gloves - the thistles that Walt has cut with his loppers and put them onto a tarp to drag up the long slope back to the goat and sheep fold… there’s still quite a lot to do, it feels like we hardly made a dent in almost 3 hours. An important lesson learned here, that at Chateau Lasalle was just theoretical knowledge: don’t buy more land than you need. Walt asked me how I would handle this thistles in the hay problem and my first reaction was, sell the field! My next reaction was, mow it for a whole year multiple times without harvesting the hay, and then, get some donkeys to add to the sheep and goats and let them keep it trimmed after the haying.

At the bottom of the field is a fairly big stream, with lots of trees keeping it in the shade. Right now because of all the rain it’s a little muddy and a little too big for Reed to putter around in, making dams and such. But maybe it’ll come down later in the week.

I’ve started several projects and haven’t finished any of them but I guess that’s par for the course here. The onions are partially weeded, the thistles have been started, the chicken house cleaning out project has started, and we mowed some of the lawn this afternoon with the small mower since the riding one is still out of commission. The grass catcher fills up after just a couple minutes so it really takes two of us to mow, one to mow and the other to fill up the wheelbarrow with clippings and take them to the compost and the various animals.

Our lovely meals continue here, lots of fresh tomatoes with balsamic vinegar and olive oil, homemade mayonnaise and hummus, Kate’s seed bread and lemon bread and macaroons and jam tarts, lamb ribs, roast new potatoes, roast duck, etc. etc! Our hosts were in town today and I got dinner and managed to overcook the roast duck but it was still edible, fortunately.

I’m going to try to get up early to weed, since I usually wake up at 6:30 anyway and then just lay in bed for a couple hours, not wanting to disturb Reed. Tomorrow I’ll just sneak out quietly and hope he sleeps late. It’s hard to get him to bed before 10 or even 11 with the light lasting so long.

Deux Sevres

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Happy Birthday to my brother Doug and also to my friend Gretchen in Sitka!

Summer heat arrived here yesterday after a long, cool, wet spring. Now it’s hot and humid, with the grass and weeds gone crazy and everywhere the nettles and brambles trying to claim back this farm. It is a 15 acre place just a few kilometers from the nearest villages, with a medium sized old stone farmhouse and several stone outbuildings. We’re just about an hour east of the Atlantic ocean, and the weather here is relatively temperate, as evidenced by the artichokes in the garden.

The owners have made a nice sized potager/kitchen garden, and have quite a few chickens and ducks. Right now there are 10 young ducks, 5 half-grown chickens, and a mother hen and her 6 chicks who have free range of the yard, plus another couple dozen adults in the poultry house and fenced in area. There are also 3 goats, some sheep – one ewe has triplet lambs - , and 2 young pigs who are eating and growing fast, destined for bacon. We give everybody some grain in the morning and stale bread from the boulangerie. They don’t really need it, since there is plenty of grass, but K explained that it’s nice to keep them in the habit of coming when you call, in the event they break the fence yet again. The mother hen comes into the kitchen when she thinks it’s time for her and the family to get their grain ration. Altogether with the two dogs and 3 cats there are 60 some animals here.

I learned that it is possible to milk a goat that hasn’t had a kid. Maid milking, K called it. Ella the goat is giving a couple of cups a day now and I’m sure her production would increase rapidly if Kate started milking her twice a day instead of once. Reed had her milk on his cereal for breakfast and I’ll start having it too unless she wants me to try to make cheese.

We have been enjoying our sunny room upstairs in the farmhouse and fabulous cooking by both K and K. She makes pies and cakes and cookies and bread and he makes everything else and so far we’ve enjoyed fresh tomato soup, quiche, potato salad, tomato salad, artichokes with butter, lamb stew, jam tarts, macaroons, ginger cake, and lots of good bread and cheese. We were offered the whole weekend off work but I feel funny about eating meals and not doing any work so on Friday I did a little weeding in the strawberries and yesterday I weeded most of the day, getting through the artichokes and asparagus and starting in on the onions, and also picking strawberries. Last night was a huge thunderstorm but today is sunny again – I’m taking Sunday off while Walt works on cutting down the thistles out in the hayfield before it’s time to make hay this week or next.

Petanque

Our favorite chat de la brousse
Eric taught us how to play petanque, or boules, while we were at Hameau de la Brousse. The balls are made of metal and heavy, and about the size of a baseball. There is a smaller wooden ball called the cochon, or something like that, something to do with a little pig. There is some minimum and maximum distance that the wooden ball has to be thrown from the playing line, and then you try to get the metal balls as close to the wooden ball as possible. There are several kinds of throws, one just to get the ball in there, one to knock another player’s ball away and replace it with your own, and another to drop your ball in to a specific place without hitting someone else in front closer to the pig. Generally you hold the ball in the curve of your palm with the ball facing the ground and throw by lifting your arm and flicking your wrist and hand upward. Whoever has the ball farthest away has to go next, so whoever is winning gets the last play. Whoever gets the closest metal ball to the pig wins a point, and if that person or team has another 1 or 2 or however many balls close to the pig without someone from the opposite team having one closer, they’ll get another point for each ball. But if the 2nd closest ball is someone else or another team, the winner just gets the 1 point. The perfect ground is a little sandy but not too soft; we played on the gravel driveway fairly well although it was tricky because of the varying amounts of gravel and the slope too. Petanque turned out to be the perfect game to play while we were waiting for dinner to be ready – you can drink a little wine, take your turn, talk. No wonder we see retired people playing petanque in the early evenings in so many places. I guess we learned it just in time, now that both of us are above the age of 40.

We had some pretty wonderful meals our last few days at la Brousse: stewed chicken in tomato herb sauce with polenta; cabbage gratin; Normandy style crepes (by Eric) with sautéed mushrooms, ham, grated gruyere, sautéed leeks, and eggs; lots and lots of leftover borscht; couscous with a Moroccan style vegetable stew and merguez sausages on the side; pre-cooked quinoa sautéed with olive oil and diced onions. The strawberries ran out – kaput – so we ate Helene’s cheesecake for dessert for a while, and then I made a North Douglas Chocolate Cake, my favorite from the Fiddlehead cookbook, which was well received but it could have been better because the tournesol oil I used instead of canola was too strong, I should have used melted butter instead. So when the subject of gateau des carrottes came up and I offered to make one, I used melted butter and was not sorry. The recipe came from Sheila Lukin’s international cookbook, and the cake was called Berthe’s creole carrot cake or something like that. I left out the coconut and the pineapple, since I prefer a simpler carrot cake, but Walt and Eric saw the walnuts in the ingredient list and quickly measured them out and chopped them up for me quite finely. I also had to substitute the light brown sugar that we had at la Brousse with the white sugar called for in the recipe, and I didn’t precook the carrots, as Helene recommended just using fresh grated carrot instead.

You might think with all the changes a disaster was in store, but the result was absolutely spectacularly good – we served it without frosting with a crème fraiche and mascarpone mixture on the side. Eric could hardly stand it; he applauded and was almost moaning in pleasure as he scarfed down two big pieces, and Amandine gave me a hug and said MERCI!! When I get ahold of the cookbook I will definitely put the recipe into my favorites file, and post it in this blog. North Douglas chocolate cake too, it’s wonderful when made correctly. Of course, it always helps when you have Brittany butter at your disposal, there’s nothing better.

We said our sad goodbyes yesterday morning to the other WWOOFers who remained (Ragi, Phi Lee, Amandine, and Eric), Iva and Yuki having left the day before already, making a hole in our la Brousse lives. We left the last pieces of carrot cake for Eric to eat, and waved goodbye to Helene as Michel drove us down the driveway and on to Angouleme to the station. It was a short train ride, just two hours in total on two trains, and happily, our new situation in Deux Sevres is very very pleasant, and the bed more comfortable. Reed is thrilled because there are baby chickens and ducks everywhere, plus goats and sheep, and two little pigs, and he has a bunk bed in which to sleep, that he’s already turned into a tent using extra blankets.